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You're selling yourself as a fast alternative to Jira. There's already an established company doing that (https://clubhouse.io/ https://clubhouse.io/). They als

You're selling yourself as a fast alternative to Jira. There's already an established company doing that (https://clubhouse.io/ https://clubhouse.io/). They also offer a free plan for teams of up to 10 users. You're obviously in business to make money, so good that you're focused on selling your product, but why would someone pay for Kitemaker rather than use Clubhouse for free? Edit: Yes, Kitemaker has a free plan, but it looks quite limited for real usage.

kevsim 6y ago
Great question! Our pricing is definitely something we think about a lot, so feedback like this is super helpful. The free plan usually gives a small team more than a month to try it out since teams tend to larger (and thus fewer) work items than they might in another tool. We definitely think it’s a huge market and it’s undeniable that products like clubhouse will keep having success. But for us, we’ve set out to build something that changes how teams think about these types of tools. That’s why we’re pushing to get the whole team engaged and really make use of the document-like aspect of Kitemaker (which teams tend to use a bit differently than stories in clubhouse). It’s early days still, but initial feedback has been really positive and quite a few teams are paying us already.
- bachmeier 6y ago
  One suggestion in that case - many apps have comparisons on their landing page. Clubhouse has "vs Trello" and "vs Jira" on theirs. I found your discussion here on HN to be much more informative than your website. You might consider adding more information for the prospective customer wondering why to give you their money and data rather than going with the competition.
  - kevsim 6y ago
    That's actually a great suggestion. We'll add that!
emayljames 6y ago
Clubhouse use letsencrypt (not professional for a business to do that, seriously), and why do they have a picture that pretends to be a clickable video. Not a good start.
- rocmcd 6y ago
  Why shouldn't a professional business use Let's Encrypt?
- dahican 6y ago
  What's wrong with letsencrypt?
- kevsim 6y ago
  We use the certs automatically issued by GCP, which are also letsencrypt issued.
vz8 6y ago
I tried clubhouse.io after seeing your note, and a few minutes into the demo (which was impressive) the site died (which was less impressive). And now "Unable to log in. We were unable to parse the server response. This could be a networking issue, so please try again later." Trying Kitemaker now and hoping the HN hug of death isn't approaching. First impressions: I appreciate the keyboard-shortcut-first UI.
- kevsim 6y ago
  Thanks! Just so I'm clear - it is Kitemaker or Clubhouse you're having networking problems with?
  - vz8 6y ago
    It was Clubhouse, and it was down for a while yesterday (I stopped checking after an hour or so)
- atombender 6y ago
  Clubhouse seems to be having some issues today. That's rare, and I suspect you were unusually unlucky. I've used it for 3-4 years at two different companies, and never experienced any downtime before.
rjmunro 6y ago
Google "alternatives to Jira" and there are hundreds of articles with titles like "33 Best Jira Alternatives". It's a massively crowded market. I thought clubhouse was that audio chat thing, but it seems they don't own an actual domain name for their company.
- kevsim 6y ago
  It is also that and there was quite the rumble on Twitter a while back where the CEO of Clubhouse the issue tracker was getting hatred targeted at the CEO of Clubhouse the audio chat thing.
- cloverich 6y ago
  It is crowded but most aren't actually different in the way people need (ex: Asana). I think its still worthwhile to compare to Jira, because for many teams JIRA is either all they know or the de facto standard. Clubhouse is a better JIRA for many teams (simplified, good at multi-team project management) but Kitemaker is (IMHO) targeting more of a simplified JIRA + Confluence, which is (again, IMHO) ripe for exploration.
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  > I thought clubhouse was that audio chat thing It is, but project management Clubhouse [0] has been around far longer than audio chat Clubhouse. [0] https://clubhouse.io/ https://clubhouse.io/
brightball 6y ago
There are plenty of companies doing that though. ClickUp is the best one I’ve tried to this point, but I’m interested to explore Kitemaker.
- smt88 6y ago
  ClickUp is astonishingly good. Our whole team (devs, sales, CEO, everyone) absolutely loves it. I have had two truly delightful, joyous SaaS experiences in the last few years: ClickUp and Retool.
  - wellthisisgreat 6y ago
    ClickUp is so good it feels like an endgame for this kind of products
    - smt88 6y ago
      I have been building web software for 20 years and honestly don't understand how they could built something so complex (under the hood), flexible, configurable, and still fast. For example, you can flip major features on and off without even a hiccup (like Sprints or Subtasks). I just can't begin to imagine the architecture behind that capability.
      - wellthisisgreat 6y ago
        Yeah, honestly it feels like it’s something that shouldn’t exist. They just put together features that make sense and just should be there naturally and you don’t have to come up with some crazy schemes to use it or learn 20 PM patterns or get into the heads of their designers. It seems as simple as a Todo list that you’d use for convenience but has everything you would need for crazy PM work. It’s the first PM app I am actually recommending to people, and we tried so many. Every single one has been just a “lesser evil”. I am in no way affiliated with ClickUp. I just hope they don’t overmonetize or something like that.
cloverich 6y ago
Comparing Kitemaker to Clubhouse write may may get a bit further. I found Kitemaker after I realized the tight relationship between epics and documentation, and was stunned at how difficult it was to find a PM tool focused on fusing them. Clubhouse write seemed to be headed that direction, but was in beta forever and details were sparse. I began researching on my own to see if it would be worth building myself, stumbled upon Kitemaker (impressive) and ultimately used Notion instead (which is so-so for the purpose). A bit tangential, but I was surprised at how similar Kitemakers offering _sounded_ to Linear (https://linear.app/ https://linear.app/).
- eterps 6y ago
  > after I realized the tight relationship between epics and documentation Could you elaborate a bit on that? I'm curious what you discovered in that regard.
  - btown 6y ago
    Not the parent poster but: Imagine you have an elaborate user flow diagram for a complex workflow. Every state/page a user could find themselves in, the outbound transitions perfectly match all cases of what someone might want to do. Now, these transitions end up quickly becoming stories: "A user in state X should be able to do Y." And you can bundle those together like "A user should be able to cancel and return to the project screen from any step of the wizard." Alternately, you can separate things by teams like "An API exists to cancel the reservation in progress, releasing the underlying inventory" vs. "A user can cancel the reservation in progress using the API" vs. "Factor out cancel buttons into a UI abstraction" if you want people to be able to pick those up and show progress independently. But fundamentally all this stems from an underlying plan, that flow chart from which all these stories flow. That plan is the epic. But that plan can't just be a frozen flow chart; it needs to be a living central repository of documentation, ideas, and mockups. Ideally, you have few enough of these epics that you can maintain things in the tools they're meant to be in: a Clubhouse epic, for instance, could simply link to the top-level Notion table of contents for the planning process for that epic. But if you're pulled in a billion different directions and have a massive feature surface, having this all in one place, alongside the chat related to that feature, with live references to the ongoing action items, would be incredible. Whether Kitemaker solves it or someone else, there's amazing work still ahead here.
tootie 6y ago
There's like 80 alternatives and none of them are as useful as JIRA. Notion, Asana, TFS, LeanKit, Pivotal, agile central, version one, wrike
- danielscrubs 6y ago
  IMHO they are probably all way more efficient for developers and team leads (Jira has the worst UX I’ve ever worked with) but managers who barely use it will complain it lacks some features.

kevsim 6y ago

Great question! Our pricing is definitely something we think about a lot, so feedback like this is super helpful. The free plan usually gives a small team more than a month to try it out since teams tend to larger (and thus fewer) work items than they might in another tool. We definitely think it’s a huge market and it’s undeniable that products like clubhouse will keep having success. But for us, we’ve set out to build something that changes how teams think about these types of tools. That’s why we’re pushing to get the whole team engaged and really make use of the document-like aspect of Kitemaker (which teams tend to use a bit differently than stories in clubhouse). It’s early days still, but initial feedback has been really positive and quite a few teams are paying us already.

bachmeier 6y ago
One suggestion in that case - many apps have comparisons on their landing page. Clubhouse has "vs Trello" and "vs Jira" on theirs. I found your discussion here on HN to be much more informative than your website. You might consider adding more information for the prospective customer wondering why to give you their money and data rather than going with the competition.
- kevsim 6y ago
  That's actually a great suggestion. We'll add that!

emayljames 6y ago

Clubhouse use letsencrypt (not professional for a business to do that, seriously), and why do they have a picture that pretends to be a clickable video. Not a good start.

rocmcd 6y ago
Why shouldn't a professional business use Let's Encrypt?
dahican 6y ago
What's wrong with letsencrypt?
kevsim 6y ago
We use the certs automatically issued by GCP, which are also letsencrypt issued.

vz8 6y ago

I tried clubhouse.io after seeing your note, and a few minutes into the demo (which was impressive) the site died (which was less impressive). And now "Unable to log in. We were unable to parse the server response. This could be a networking issue, so please try again later." Trying Kitemaker now and hoping the HN hug of death isn't approaching. First impressions: I appreciate the keyboard-shortcut-first UI.

kevsim 6y ago
Thanks! Just so I'm clear - it is Kitemaker or Clubhouse you're having networking problems with?
- vz8 6y ago
  It was Clubhouse, and it was down for a while yesterday (I stopped checking after an hour or so)
atombender 6y ago
Clubhouse seems to be having some issues today. That's rare, and I suspect you were unusually unlucky. I've used it for 3-4 years at two different companies, and never experienced any downtime before.

rjmunro 6y ago

Google "alternatives to Jira" and there are hundreds of articles with titles like "33 Best Jira Alternatives". It's a massively crowded market. I thought clubhouse was that audio chat thing, but it seems they don't own an actual domain name for their company.

kevsim 6y ago
It is also that and there was quite the rumble on Twitter a while back where the CEO of Clubhouse the issue tracker was getting hatred targeted at the CEO of Clubhouse the audio chat thing.
cloverich 6y ago
It is crowded but most aren't actually different in the way people need (ex: Asana). I think its still worthwhile to compare to Jira, because for many teams JIRA is either all they know or the de facto standard. Clubhouse is a better JIRA for many teams (simplified, good at multi-team project management) but Kitemaker is (IMHO) targeting more of a simplified JIRA + Confluence, which is (again, IMHO) ripe for exploration.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
> I thought clubhouse was that audio chat thing It is, but project management Clubhouse [0] has been around far longer than audio chat Clubhouse. [0] https://clubhouse.io/ https://clubhouse.io/

brightball 6y ago

There are plenty of companies doing that though. ClickUp is the best one I’ve tried to this point, but I’m interested to explore Kitemaker.

smt88 6y ago
ClickUp is astonishingly good. Our whole team (devs, sales, CEO, everyone) absolutely loves it. I have had two truly delightful, joyous SaaS experiences in the last few years: ClickUp and Retool.
- wellthisisgreat 6y ago
  ClickUp is so good it feels like an endgame for this kind of products
  - smt88 6y ago
    I have been building web software for 20 years and honestly don't understand how they could built something so complex (under the hood), flexible, configurable, and still fast. For example, you can flip major features on and off without even a hiccup (like Sprints or Subtasks). I just can't begin to imagine the architecture behind that capability.
    - wellthisisgreat 6y ago
      Yeah, honestly it feels like it’s something that shouldn’t exist. They just put together features that make sense and just should be there naturally and you don’t have to come up with some crazy schemes to use it or learn 20 PM patterns or get into the heads of their designers. It seems as simple as a Todo list that you’d use for convenience but has everything you would need for crazy PM work. It’s the first PM app I am actually recommending to people, and we tried so many. Every single one has been just a “lesser evil”. I am in no way affiliated with ClickUp. I just hope they don’t overmonetize or something like that.

cloverich 6y ago

Comparing Kitemaker to Clubhouse write may may get a bit further. I found Kitemaker after I realized the tight relationship between epics and documentation, and was stunned at how difficult it was to find a PM tool focused on fusing them. Clubhouse write seemed to be headed that direction, but was in beta forever and details were sparse. I began researching on my own to see if it would be worth building myself, stumbled upon Kitemaker (impressive) and ultimately used Notion instead (which is so-so for the purpose). A bit tangential, but I was surprised at how similar Kitemakers offering _sounded_ to Linear (https://linear.app/ https://linear.app/).

eterps 6y ago
> after I realized the tight relationship between epics and documentation Could you elaborate a bit on that? I'm curious what you discovered in that regard.
- btown 6y ago
  Not the parent poster but: Imagine you have an elaborate user flow diagram for a complex workflow. Every state/page a user could find themselves in, the outbound transitions perfectly match all cases of what someone might want to do. Now, these transitions end up quickly becoming stories: "A user in state X should be able to do Y." And you can bundle those together like "A user should be able to cancel and return to the project screen from any step of the wizard." Alternately, you can separate things by teams like "An API exists to cancel the reservation in progress, releasing the underlying inventory" vs. "A user can cancel the reservation in progress using the API" vs. "Factor out cancel buttons into a UI abstraction" if you want people to be able to pick those up and show progress independently. But fundamentally all this stems from an underlying plan, that flow chart from which all these stories flow. That plan is the epic. But that plan can't just be a frozen flow chart; it needs to be a living central repository of documentation, ideas, and mockups. Ideally, you have few enough of these epics that you can maintain things in the tools they're meant to be in: a Clubhouse epic, for instance, could simply link to the top-level Notion table of contents for the planning process for that epic. But if you're pulled in a billion different directions and have a massive feature surface, having this all in one place, alongside the chat related to that feature, with live references to the ongoing action items, would be incredible. Whether Kitemaker solves it or someone else, there's amazing work still ahead here.

tootie 6y ago

There's like 80 alternatives and none of them are as useful as JIRA. Notion, Asana, TFS, LeanKit, Pivotal, agile central, version one, wrike

danielscrubs 6y ago
IMHO they are probably all way more efficient for developers and team leads (Jira has the worst UX I’ve ever worked with) but managers who barely use it will complain it lacks some features.