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Show HN: Ambra – Task Management Reinvented
hey hackers ,
Me and the team are super excited to launch Ambra - https://ambra.app https://ambra.app – a collaboration tool enabling teams to organize tasks in a natural way by using only tags and mentions, all in a single box.
Ambra removes the necessity of having multiple fields for creating a task – there is one single box to rule them all. We empower writing tasks naturally.
Defining a fully descriptive task in traditional tools is not a simple process. You’ve to start writing the task title, description, and additional form fields for task status, priority, assignee, etc. It means there are some ceremonies to be followed.
Working for many years with different remote and office teams, I saw that every team develops its own ubiquitous language. This is more emphasized especially when it comes to daily tasks description language. This level of understanding helps the project team to communicate quickly while eliminating inaccuracies and contradictions; and that’s an attribute of a – smart team.
Describing a task in a natural way using one single box, without the need for multiple form fields, makes the task data entry process trivial and helps the team focus on delivering – what’s most important for an agile team – values.
A flat team is responsible enough to focus on productivity and move the tasks to #done. However, they should have a proper tool to achieve that – that’s where Ambra comes.
An example: Hey @ troy we need #todo a #presentation of the website to the customer #urgent. You immediately know the status of the task, who's in charge for and when it's needed.
Ambra is offered as freemium, you can go now and create your first project, invite your teammates, or just start assigning tasks to yourself and feel the simplicity.
We love to hear your feedback.
- flutras 6y agoAn easy to use task management, a facilitator you need for team work, a great organizer and manager of collaboration.
- geoelectric 6y agoHow is this differentiated from, say, Todoist Premium or Business? That also lets you do a one-field quick task entry that includes +collaborators or an arbitrary number of @tags, Those appear to be the two pieces of data you capture beyond the descriptive text. You get a few more than ten projects too, which is the max number you support for the most expensive plan. The big obvious difference is the pricing model. You're $80 a month for unlimited users on the annual startup plan, vs. $5/mo/user for Todoist Business. For an org of any size, Todoist would get more expensive for sure. But under that 16 team member break even point, it sure looks like you're implementing a pretty sharp subset of standard features. And when you consider Todoist Premium is $3/mo/user (so now a 27 person break even) and can be used for simple workgroup collaboration as long as you don't need centralized billing or a team admin interface--which seems squarely like your target based on the simplicity pitch--you're very much on the high side of pricing, but with a minimum of features. I'm not saying there's no advantage here, but I certainly can't tell what it is from your landing page. Once you're at enough users where the pricing makes sense, I'd think you'd really miss a lot of other standard functionality. Unless there are queries, due dates, the ability to attach a comment chain (or at least a notes field!) to the task, etc, I wouldn't think this would cut it. If those features do exist, they're too well-hidden before signing up.
- nwj 6y agoYour landing page has a typo: "Be more productive by organizing your work in a fun, transparent, and unceremoniously." I think that's intended to be: "Be more productive by organizing your work in a fun, transparent, and unceremonious way."
- betimd 6y agoThanks a lot for catching these @nwj. We appreciate it.
- pedalpete 6y agoNice looking tool. We've been using Github's projects, but aren't loving it. I'll be honest, your approach doesn't speak to me personally, but I'm willing to give it a try. However, I'm confused by the language on pricing. It says Free has 3 projects for first 15 days...but what happens after that. Also, I think you are missing the asterisk in the free panel, cause there is nothing linking it to the message on the left.
- betimd 6y agoWe will enable payments. You will keep 3 projects but if you want to add more you need to upgrade.
- ctvo 6y agoSome feedback: Respect your potential user's time. Speed up the animations across the board. There's no way to disable it, and I have to sit there and wait continuously for content to fade in as I scroll. This applies to your abstract demo animation too. It's slow. "Featured on ProductHunt" and "Used by these teams!" both don't convey what you think they do to me: what I see is it's used by teams I've never heard of and is featured on a site that I no longer give much credibility to. Those bits are above the fold and add to my annoyance that I have to scroll further down to understand your value proposition. I may not be your target demographic. I loathe experimenting with new, unproven products, especially with something as important as task / project management, and I'm very tired of CRUD start-ups competing solely on UX with buzzwords. If I am your demographic, give A/Bing my suggestions a shot: - Reduce drastically (or remove the animations) the delay in your animations - Move your signaling to below the fold into its own section further down the page (both featured on Product Hunt and who's using you) - Quickly give me an idea of what the tool does and how it's different above the fold both in text and via a demo
- geoah 6y agoI personally really enjoy trying new productivity tools and will often move between services just to try them out; but I will have to agree with everything else. In addition to ctvo's points: - there is a lack of good and real examples on how to use the product. "@joe please start working on the #design #todo", "@ed admin training", and "@someone write a report on last project #research" are not good task examples in my mind. - the tags are not explained well, are they grouping the tasks? if so why is #todo and #ongoing tags? these are not groups, they are states. - the process is also not explained. what do I see when I open the app? how do I mark something as done? does that remove the #todo tag the author added? what are other statuses I can add? - "They are fully encrypted using asymmetric algorithms connected that depend on your data (like a password, for example) - this really doesn't make much sense to me. You are holding the keys and the encrypted data, so what's the point?
- betimd 6y ago@goah thanks for the feedback. As I wrote a bit earlier on this thread, we’re going to invest in landing, copy and graphics more in coming days. As per encryption, gdpr is becoming a norm, at least in europe and we wanted to highlight that because we have users in many european countries.
- betimd 6y agoGuys we’re also featured on PH -> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ambra-2 https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ambra-2. We’d really appreciate your support there as well.
- ta988 6y agoNot only guys here.
- betimd 6y agoWanted to be inclusive. Sorry if you felt bad about my phrasing.
- phist_mcgee 6y agoWhat's the alternative? Y'all?
- nvrspyx 6y agoIt would have made perfect sense if it was just omitted, so no alternative necessary. I still think the parent comment was a bit too sensitive over nothing. The original poster didn't seem to mean anything by it.
- cercatrova 6y agoOther apps have one field to enter todos, with @people, and #tags for example. How is yours different?
- betimd 6y agoAs per our research there are just few tools, not saying none, that can manage entire task management in a single textbox, using a fluent - natural language. We took the approach of twitter in social media and bringing it in task management. Our goal is to reduce the time you spent on task management tool.
- Applethief 6y agoYou spelt Analytics wrong. Otherwise, not a bad site.
- betimd 6y agoThanks for the feedback. We already fixed it.
- gitgud 6y agoI like the idea of tags and a single list. It's one of the reasons I love github issues. Just wondering if you can have comments on tasks? As once it's assinnged to someone, how do they post updates etc...
- betimd 6y agoActually in Ambra you communicate with tags. Task progress or status might have a tag that team agrees to use. That's it. No more, no less. We do have support for sub-tasks that are actually tasks itselves, by having just task-number as a tag :) (inception huh :D).
- mleonhard 6y agoCongratulations on launching! If I mention a tag on an item, how can I later remove that tag? The blog link in the footer is broken. The page was empty for about 2 seconds while it loaded the animations. I almost clicked away. Could you make the static content load right away and show a spinner in place of animations that haven't yet loaded? I looked for an About Us page and didn't find one. How about making comparison pages, "Ambra vs Trello", "Ambra vs Jira", etc?
- betimd 6y agoRemoving a tag is a simple operation. You can either change from #todo to #inprogress (or whatever tag you want) in list or drag from a lane to another if you're in kanban and Ambra will change it automatically. As per animations on landing, we're working to smooth them and more friendlier - while we're fully concentrated on product by leaving that part a bit behind. Yes, a static page would work way better. We're working on about us page as well - we're a team of ~10 working on Ambra for a year almost. Maybe in near future we will do the comparison with other players, but we have completely different philosophy on task management - we want to make a task manager completely trivial by invoking natural language and remove all dropdowns and lists and pre-configuration other (almost all) current tools asks. Thanks for the feedback! Really appreciate the support.