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Great read! You mentioned various services that have equivalents in china. Can you share a URL for tower? (trello clone). Have you found a good replacement fo

by dcsan 11y ago

Great read! You mentioned various services that have equivalents in china. Can you share a URL for tower? (trello clone). Have you found a good replacement for google spreadsheets? I like Airtable, but its worrying what might get blocked, when. With the GFC in the middle often accessing those from outside china is very slow, so having a global team someone has a problem. I guess there also self-hosted OSS options for services. Good luck with KBStreet! Hopefully Tencent won't rewrite the rules on KOLs.

hunvreus 11y ago
1. I think he meant https://tower.im https://tower.im. There's also https://www.teambition.com/ https://www.teambition.com/ for project management. They're respectively clones of Trello and Basecamp (haven't used either of them). 2. Honestly, rather than looking for alternatives, I'd invest in a good VPN. We've tried a lot of different setups and services (individual VPN, smart routing in and out of our office...), but Astrill (https://www.astrill.com/ https://www.astrill.com/) has been consistently good (save for a couple times when the internet was simply slow in all of China regardless). We pay for individual "VIP" accounts for our employees and use everything we need (Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter, ...). 3. We are however considering running an npm proxy at the office to speed things up a little.
- obicho 11y ago
  You brought up a good point about VPN. We considered in the beginning but at the end we decided not to. We feel since our market and our customers are mainly in China, it will be best to use what's available within China. From a technical infrastructure stand point, that'd be better also since we won't have to deal with so many potential point-of-failures. We did sign up for a few VPN accounts so we can reference things from time to time.
obicho 11y ago
We haven't found a replacement for Google spreadsheet. We however found a great replacement for Google Doc. https://shimo.im/ https://shimo.im/

by dcsan 11y ago

hunvreus 11y ago

1. I think he meant https://tower.im https://tower.im. There's also https://www.teambition.com/ https://www.teambition.com/ for project management. They're respectively clones of Trello and Basecamp (haven't used either of them). 2. Honestly, rather than looking for alternatives, I'd invest in a good VPN. We've tried a lot of different setups and services (individual VPN, smart routing in and out of our office...), but Astrill (https://www.astrill.com/ https://www.astrill.com/) has been consistently good (save for a couple times when the internet was simply slow in all of China regardless). We pay for individual "VIP" accounts for our employees and use everything we need (Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter, ...). 3. We are however considering running an npm proxy at the office to speed things up a little.

obicho 11y ago
You brought up a good point about VPN. We considered in the beginning but at the end we decided not to. We feel since our market and our customers are mainly in China, it will be best to use what's available within China. From a technical infrastructure stand point, that'd be better also since we won't have to deal with so many potential point-of-failures. We did sign up for a few VPN accounts so we can reference things from time to time.

obicho 11y ago

We haven't found a replacement for Google spreadsheet. We however found a great replacement for Google Doc. https://shimo.im/ https://shimo.im/