7 ms·

New productivity software startups

200 points by notlukesky 7y ago

MentallyRetired 7y ago
Nice article. Sad to see Timelinr not mentioned, though.
golover721 7y ago
Is there anything in the backend arena that a small business couldn’t do with an excel spreadsheet?
- 1123581321 7y ago
  Yes, 1) be irresistibly fun to use, 2) prevent users from doing the wrong thing, 3) be an aspirational purchase. That might sound like I’m making fun of productivity software, but I’m not—-now that instant communication is a commodity, organizational/productivity software has value mostly because it’s a self-limiting tool that shapes how we think and interact so we can do what we were already capable of doing.
  - LifeIsBio 7y ago
    #2, and this comment in general, is a great point. I recently wrote my first piece of productivity software, which I use everyday. The main benefit I get out of it is reminding myself, “This structure is how I want to think about things.” The unlimited freedom of a spreadsheet comes with downsides, at least for me.
    - npo9 7y ago
      I keep a few emacs tables and template files for doing creative workflows. It’s easy to learn (once you bought into the eco system), fast to create (measured in minutes instead of hours or days), easy to use, and easy to modify. The big downside to emacs for productivity is that it’s less easy to share.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    I think with Retool + simple wrapper API around Sheets you could get this, if anyone wants to build it for themselves.
- JesseAldridge 7y ago
  Process 100,000 rows?
- SkyPuncher 7y ago
  IMO, make it realtime (i.e. Google Docs) and you have a great collaboration work flow. ---- My wife applied to residency last year. Each specialty has these giant spreadsheets (just like a database) they maintain collectively. which places are giving out interviews, how experiences were, what to look for, chat, questions, etc? These are 20+ page spreadsheets. I briefly worked on an app for helping put this in a better format (spreadsheets suck on mobile). It's a ton of work just to match the basic functionality of this document.
- mamcx 7y ago
  Yes. This was (partially) foxpro. I'm building a relational lang (http://tablam.org http://tablam.org - looking for help!) with the dream of turn it into an excel + access kind of thing. Excel is great for ad-hoc exploration (is kind of a different repl!) but is best AT THE END of the data pipeline. To make it well rounded, you need a good storage (rdbms), data language (sql, or hopefully my lang someday!), good way to do entry (CRUD form builder). And at the end, put a spreadsheet and/or interactive repl like Jupiter. More fancy stuff is welcome but this is the definition of a well rounded tool useful for small business.
  - simplify 7y ago
    Sounds interesting! Would love to chat about it but I don't have skype. Check my profile if you'd like to connect.
starpilot 7y ago
I've been using Onshape and it's INCREDIBLE. It is a fully featured CAD package with assemblies, revision control, constraints etc. It makes Google SketchUp look like Notepad. I'm just using the free version (requires your files be public) but it's VERY much like SolidWorks. It's really an achievement in web app development.
- benedictevans 7y ago
  The founders also created Solidworks ;)
- greggman2 7y ago
  Google no longer owns SketchUp. They bought and then a few years later sold it. I have not used OnShape but Sketchups's win at the time was ease of use not features.
greggh 7y ago
I don't know how I got anything done before Monday.com. I am dead serious to. I failed to even keep to do lists up to date in anything else.
- theflyinghorse 7y ago
  Do you use it as an individual? As in just for organizing your own personal tasks and todos?
  - joshspankit 7y ago
    Also my question
- turc1656 7y ago
  Had to look up Monday.com. Watched the 5 minute overview on YouTube. Is it fair to say it's more or less like AirTable? Because that's what it looks like to an outsider. But Monday.com might have more integrations with other things that are common in the workplace.
- artur_makly 7y ago
  years before Monday.. i was using https://podio.com/ https://podio.com/ which has more depth and flexibility.
- MPiccinato 7y ago
  We were evaluating Monday to replace Asana or Basecamp. It does a lot but the rough edges in the UI/UX really start to show once a team of size building a product starts to use it.
rolleiflex 7y ago
I worry this is going to end up with a Cambrian explosion of tools that don’t interoperate with each other. This is the main side effect - anything that can be made into a business productivity app will be made into a business productivity app whether it makes sense or not. For example - Facebook made itself into a productivity app, called Facebook at Work. It’s not great, but they use it. Notepad, Excel, literally anything that is a good ‘single-player’ experience will eventually end up one, either built by a third party, or if they’re smart and act fast, their own. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just probably better to let things shake down on their own for a while. We’re just now getting the social aspect of work right, after a decade of Google Plus grade attempts. (Disclosure being, with some irony, is that I make a Reddit as an engineer productivity app at https://aether.app https://aether.app, so I have some personal experience with this proliferation.)
- ken 7y ago
  Yes, the problem is that all of these are not just programs but filesystems/databases. Nobody can be compatible with anybody else, except by drinking through the straw of an API, when you're allowed to. That means we're never going to settle on even bad ad-hoc standards like XLS.
  - rolleiflex 7y ago
    The only standard that’s going to survive, I think, is email. Anything accepts email - almost anything can send email. So for example in Aether Pro we’re building email pipelines so you can tie your CI to a ‘subreddit’ and all messages coming from that CI would appear under, without polluting everyone’s inboxes. It can also trigger further actions based on parsing those emails as well. It’s messy, but it’s the only thing that kind of works with anything. We’d love to be able to rely on APIs of other tools, but those are just never there, or too fragile, or the API owners think the data they are ‘leaking’ is too valuable to let go, so email it is.
    - abhiyerra 7y ago
      Funny you mention this. My friend runs a jewelry business and one of the things he needed to do was move something from Etsy to asana. There was no API so we used Zapier’s email parser to parse the order emails to send into Asana. Works pretty well. https://parser.zapier.com/ https://parser.zapier.com/
hunterloftis 7y ago
I'm curious how the author's definition of "presentation software" might differ from mine: > from a stand-alone PC application that saves files to a file share into a new collaboration-first web application. (I would really like someone to do this for presentations) I consider that market fairly saturated: Google Slides, Prezi, slides.com...
- robertkrahn01 7y ago
  https://pitch.com/ https://pitch.com/
- benedictevans 7y ago
  I would like version control, tracking and sign-off per side, common central library (change this slide and it changes everywhere - good luck doing that with OLE)... I want workflow. Using Slides etc is like moving from Excel to Sheets instead of moving to Everlaw or Salesforce - there's no change in the workflow. Slides is just a light-weight copy of Powerpoint, 'but on the web!'.
  - shreyshrey 7y ago
    Not necessarily for presentations. We are working on a new work-sharing and communication platform for professionals that offers document versioning , tracking, workflow and e-signature (https://airsend.io/ https://airsend.io/). From our customer development interviews we have found out that the "work context" is the most important thing.
  - thrav 7y ago
    Quip, used widely at many of the Bay Area's big tech companies, is working on achieving what you're after.
echelon 7y ago
Frame.io looks fantastic for collaborative video editing. I've been waiting for a lot of this to move into the browser so the workhorse server machines can do all the heavy lifting. I want to build a similar product for speedy, automated editing, and a head's up for dailies and on-set editing.
jedberg 7y ago
> There’s an old joke that every Unix function became an internet company Yes! I remember that. I worked at Sendmail at the time (a unix function that became an internet company) and we joked about starting a sister company called Syslog. Given how many logging companies have sprung up since, maybe that wasn't such a bad idea!
lkrubner 7y ago
Slightly off topic, but there is some overlap between productivity and usability so some of you might be interested in my write up 10 important usability tools: http://smashcompany.com/top_10_usability_testing_tools/ http://smashcompany.com/top_10_usability_testing_tools/
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
tucros 7y ago
I've worked in ediscovery software for years. Everlaw is definitely an up and coming player with an attractive interface, but no serious law firms/in house counsel have been using spreadsheets to conduct reviews for, oh, two decades at least
welanes 7y ago
> There’s clearly a point in the life of any company where you should move from the list you made in a spreadsheet to the richer tools you can make in coolproductivityapp.io Now there's a snazzy domain name (that, alas, was already taken). But I was able to yoink the almost as catchy http://coolproductivityapp.com http://coolproductivityapp.com. Hey VCs, where you at? ;)
radva42 7y ago
I think one of the reasons for this explosion in new productivity tools we are seeing is the remarkable progress the web platform has made in recent years. I know web developers complain about the rapid speed web technologies are moving, but I personally am amazed by what's possible today. True, it's hard to keep up with everything, but I can't wait to see what will come out of WebComponents and WebAssembly. Also putting all software in the browser doesn't necessary mean that the users have to give up control over their software and data. Maybe there's a middle ground by making it easy for the end users to run their own software in the browser. At least this is an idea I've been working on for quite some time - a self-hosted visual (no-code) software builder called FormBeaver[0] that let's users build and host their own custom database software without any code. Currently the users need to download it and run the App Builder on their own machine for it to work, but I'm hopeful that in the near future it would be possible to put it entirely in the browser thanks to WebAssembly. The one thing that's missing in the browser right now is an SQL database. I haven't found a way to run SQL in the browser. [0] https://www.formbeaver.com https://www.formbeaver.com
- BjoernKW 7y ago
  > The one thing that's missing in the browser right now is an SQL database. I haven't found a way to run SQL in the browser. Actually, there's a way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database (see https://caniuse.com/#search=websql https://caniuse.com/#search=websql for browser support) You can see a live example with SheetJS here: https://sheetjs.com/sexql/ https://sheetjs.com/sexql/ Unfortunately, Web SQL Database has been deprecated in favour of IndexedDB, which in my opinion is no real replacement because it's a NoSQL database that's nowhere near as powerful in terms of the queries you can run with it. However, the deprecation is understandable from a browser vendor's point of view. Maintaining and developing a browser is difficult enough as it is. Having to maintain an RDBMS adds a lot of complexity on top of that for what's probably a marginal use case for most users. That said, it might be possible to integrate SQLite by using browser extensions. That of course depends on the users' willingness to install a browser extension in order to run your software builder.
matchagaucho 7y ago
How many people prefer the desktop Slack app over the web interface? I suspect many people are going to "rediscover" native desktop clients that are connected. Microsoft is the dark horse here. Office is more than a bunch of productivity apps. It's an established platform.
- hvidgaard 7y ago
  Let's not get ahead of our self. The Slack desktop "app" is a repackaged browser running an SPA. That is the antithesis of a native desktop app.

200 points by notlukesky 7y ago

MentallyRetired 7y ago

Nice article. Sad to see Timelinr not mentioned, though.

golover721 7y ago

Is there anything in the backend arena that a small business couldn’t do with an excel spreadsheet?

1123581321 7y ago
Yes, 1) be irresistibly fun to use, 2) prevent users from doing the wrong thing, 3) be an aspirational purchase. That might sound like I’m making fun of productivity software, but I’m not—-now that instant communication is a commodity, organizational/productivity software has value mostly because it’s a self-limiting tool that shapes how we think and interact so we can do what we were already capable of doing.
- LifeIsBio 7y ago
  #2, and this comment in general, is a great point. I recently wrote my first piece of productivity software, which I use everyday. The main benefit I get out of it is reminding myself, “This structure is how I want to think about things.” The unlimited freedom of a spreadsheet comes with downsides, at least for me.
  - npo9 7y ago
    I keep a few emacs tables and template files for doing creative workflows. It’s easy to learn (once you bought into the eco system), fast to create (measured in minutes instead of hours or days), easy to use, and easy to modify. The big downside to emacs for productivity is that it’s less easy to share.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  I think with Retool + simple wrapper API around Sheets you could get this, if anyone wants to build it for themselves.
JesseAldridge 7y ago
Process 100,000 rows?
SkyPuncher 7y ago
IMO, make it realtime (i.e. Google Docs) and you have a great collaboration work flow. ---- My wife applied to residency last year. Each specialty has these giant spreadsheets (just like a database) they maintain collectively. which places are giving out interviews, how experiences were, what to look for, chat, questions, etc? These are 20+ page spreadsheets. I briefly worked on an app for helping put this in a better format (spreadsheets suck on mobile). It's a ton of work just to match the basic functionality of this document.
mamcx 7y ago
Yes. This was (partially) foxpro. I'm building a relational lang (http://tablam.org http://tablam.org - looking for help!) with the dream of turn it into an excel + access kind of thing. Excel is great for ad-hoc exploration (is kind of a different repl!) but is best AT THE END of the data pipeline. To make it well rounded, you need a good storage (rdbms), data language (sql, or hopefully my lang someday!), good way to do entry (CRUD form builder). And at the end, put a spreadsheet and/or interactive repl like Jupiter. More fancy stuff is welcome but this is the definition of a well rounded tool useful for small business.
- simplify 7y ago
  Sounds interesting! Would love to chat about it but I don't have skype. Check my profile if you'd like to connect.

starpilot 7y ago

I've been using Onshape and it's INCREDIBLE. It is a fully featured CAD package with assemblies, revision control, constraints etc. It makes Google SketchUp look like Notepad. I'm just using the free version (requires your files be public) but it's VERY much like SolidWorks. It's really an achievement in web app development.

benedictevans 7y ago
The founders also created Solidworks ;)
greggman2 7y ago
Google no longer owns SketchUp. They bought and then a few years later sold it. I have not used OnShape but Sketchups's win at the time was ease of use not features.

greggh 7y ago

I don't know how I got anything done before Monday.com. I am dead serious to. I failed to even keep to do lists up to date in anything else.

theflyinghorse 7y ago
Do you use it as an individual? As in just for organizing your own personal tasks and todos?
- joshspankit 7y ago
  Also my question
turc1656 7y ago
Had to look up Monday.com. Watched the 5 minute overview on YouTube. Is it fair to say it's more or less like AirTable? Because that's what it looks like to an outsider. But Monday.com might have more integrations with other things that are common in the workplace.
artur_makly 7y ago
years before Monday.. i was using https://podio.com/ https://podio.com/ which has more depth and flexibility.
MPiccinato 7y ago
We were evaluating Monday to replace Asana or Basecamp. It does a lot but the rough edges in the UI/UX really start to show once a team of size building a product starts to use it.

rolleiflex 7y ago

I worry this is going to end up with a Cambrian explosion of tools that don’t interoperate with each other. This is the main side effect - anything that can be made into a business productivity app will be made into a business productivity app whether it makes sense or not. For example - Facebook made itself into a productivity app, called Facebook at Work. It’s not great, but they use it. Notepad, Excel, literally anything that is a good ‘single-player’ experience will eventually end up one, either built by a third party, or if they’re smart and act fast, their own. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just probably better to let things shake down on their own for a while. We’re just now getting the social aspect of work right, after a decade of Google Plus grade attempts. (Disclosure being, with some irony, is that I make a Reddit as an engineer productivity app at https://aether.app https://aether.app, so I have some personal experience with this proliferation.)

ken 7y ago
Yes, the problem is that all of these are not just programs but filesystems/databases. Nobody can be compatible with anybody else, except by drinking through the straw of an API, when you're allowed to. That means we're never going to settle on even bad ad-hoc standards like XLS.
- rolleiflex 7y ago
  The only standard that’s going to survive, I think, is email. Anything accepts email - almost anything can send email. So for example in Aether Pro we’re building email pipelines so you can tie your CI to a ‘subreddit’ and all messages coming from that CI would appear under, without polluting everyone’s inboxes. It can also trigger further actions based on parsing those emails as well. It’s messy, but it’s the only thing that kind of works with anything. We’d love to be able to rely on APIs of other tools, but those are just never there, or too fragile, or the API owners think the data they are ‘leaking’ is too valuable to let go, so email it is.
  - abhiyerra 7y ago
    Funny you mention this. My friend runs a jewelry business and one of the things he needed to do was move something from Etsy to asana. There was no API so we used Zapier’s email parser to parse the order emails to send into Asana. Works pretty well. https://parser.zapier.com/ https://parser.zapier.com/

hunterloftis 7y ago

I'm curious how the author's definition of "presentation software" might differ from mine: > from a stand-alone PC application that saves files to a file share into a new collaboration-first web application. (I would really like someone to do this for presentations) I consider that market fairly saturated: Google Slides, Prezi, slides.com...

robertkrahn01 7y ago
https://pitch.com/ https://pitch.com/
benedictevans 7y ago
I would like version control, tracking and sign-off per side, common central library (change this slide and it changes everywhere - good luck doing that with OLE)... I want workflow. Using Slides etc is like moving from Excel to Sheets instead of moving to Everlaw or Salesforce - there's no change in the workflow. Slides is just a light-weight copy of Powerpoint, 'but on the web!'.
- shreyshrey 7y ago
  Not necessarily for presentations. We are working on a new work-sharing and communication platform for professionals that offers document versioning , tracking, workflow and e-signature (https://airsend.io/ https://airsend.io/). From our customer development interviews we have found out that the "work context" is the most important thing.
- thrav 7y ago
  Quip, used widely at many of the Bay Area's big tech companies, is working on achieving what you're after.

echelon 7y ago

Frame.io looks fantastic for collaborative video editing. I've been waiting for a lot of this to move into the browser so the workhorse server machines can do all the heavy lifting. I want to build a similar product for speedy, automated editing, and a head's up for dailies and on-set editing.

jedberg 7y ago

> There’s an old joke that every Unix function became an internet company Yes! I remember that. I worked at Sendmail at the time (a unix function that became an internet company) and we joked about starting a sister company called Syslog. Given how many logging companies have sprung up since, maybe that wasn't such a bad idea!

lkrubner 7y ago

Slightly off topic, but there is some overlap between productivity and usability so some of you might be interested in my write up 10 important usability tools: http://smashcompany.com/top_10_usability_testing_tools/ http://smashcompany.com/top_10_usability_testing_tools/

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

tucros 7y ago

I've worked in ediscovery software for years. Everlaw is definitely an up and coming player with an attractive interface, but no serious law firms/in house counsel have been using spreadsheets to conduct reviews for, oh, two decades at least

welanes 7y ago

> There’s clearly a point in the life of any company where you should move from the list you made in a spreadsheet to the richer tools you can make in coolproductivityapp.io Now there's a snazzy domain name (that, alas, was already taken). But I was able to yoink the almost as catchy http://coolproductivityapp.com http://coolproductivityapp.com. Hey VCs, where you at? ;)

radva42 7y ago

I think one of the reasons for this explosion in new productivity tools we are seeing is the remarkable progress the web platform has made in recent years. I know web developers complain about the rapid speed web technologies are moving, but I personally am amazed by what's possible today. True, it's hard to keep up with everything, but I can't wait to see what will come out of WebComponents and WebAssembly. Also putting all software in the browser doesn't necessary mean that the users have to give up control over their software and data. Maybe there's a middle ground by making it easy for the end users to run their own software in the browser. At least this is an idea I've been working on for quite some time - a self-hosted visual (no-code) software builder called FormBeaver[0] that let's users build and host their own custom database software without any code. Currently the users need to download it and run the App Builder on their own machine for it to work, but I'm hopeful that in the near future it would be possible to put it entirely in the browser thanks to WebAssembly. The one thing that's missing in the browser right now is an SQL database. I haven't found a way to run SQL in the browser. [0] https://www.formbeaver.com https://www.formbeaver.com

BjoernKW 7y ago
> The one thing that's missing in the browser right now is an SQL database. I haven't found a way to run SQL in the browser. Actually, there's a way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database (see https://caniuse.com/#search=websql https://caniuse.com/#search=websql for browser support) You can see a live example with SheetJS here: https://sheetjs.com/sexql/ https://sheetjs.com/sexql/ Unfortunately, Web SQL Database has been deprecated in favour of IndexedDB, which in my opinion is no real replacement because it's a NoSQL database that's nowhere near as powerful in terms of the queries you can run with it. However, the deprecation is understandable from a browser vendor's point of view. Maintaining and developing a browser is difficult enough as it is. Having to maintain an RDBMS adds a lot of complexity on top of that for what's probably a marginal use case for most users. That said, it might be possible to integrate SQLite by using browser extensions. That of course depends on the users' willingness to install a browser extension in order to run your software builder.

matchagaucho 7y ago

How many people prefer the desktop Slack app over the web interface? I suspect many people are going to "rediscover" native desktop clients that are connected. Microsoft is the dark horse here. Office is more than a bunch of productivity apps. It's an established platform.

hvidgaard 7y ago
Let's not get ahead of our self. The Slack desktop "app" is a repackaged browser running an SPA. That is the antithesis of a native desktop app.