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Startup tooling: our product management, sales, and marketing stack
- hbcondo714 5y agoOP, always enjoy seeing these lists but your shameless plug link for Observe goes to a 404: https://rosslazer.com/posts/startup-tooling/observeinc.com https://rosslazer.com/posts/startup-tooling/observeinc.com
- rosslazer 5y agoJust fixed this. Thank you! I just got my first ever hugo blog spun up last night and am still ironing out some kinks.
- henning 5y ago
- rfrey 5y agoHarshly put, but the point is a good one. It feels incongruous for an upstart startup to say using upstart startup software is too risky - especially for something as fungible as project management software. Seems more like a lack of imagination than prudence.
- marcinzm 5y agoStartups are risky. Adding more risk on top of that without specific expected gains in an area that doesn’t incur much ongoing cost is a bad business decision.
- henning 5y ago
- marcinzm 5y agoHonestly most bad startup organizational or engineering decisions I've seen were due to focusing on personal pet peeves and hatreds rather than logic or risk understanding. So I try to not do that.
- rosslazer 5y agoYeah personally I hate JIRA. I have no idea why their cloud is so slow for SELECT statements with 10 items, field config incomprehensible, or features randomly churn on weekly basis. That being said we evaluated other options as a team and were not convinced that the newer tooling was worth it. Our plan B was to spin up Bugzilla since we leave the project/task management process up to each team. If anyone has seriously found something better we'd love to try it out.
- _jordan 5y agohttps://linear.app/ https://linear.app/ this one looks pretty good. I used https://www.broadcom.com/products/software/value-stream-management/rally https://www.broadcom.com/products/software/value-stream-mana... at a previous gig and really liked it
- henning 5y agoYour startup will probably fail because the product sucks and the founders suck. Whether you use JIRA or Trello or a sticky note on your monitor is utterly irrelevant.
- mrtrollmaster69 5y ago
- jasfi 5y agoI agree, you need to de-risk your startup, not the opposite. After all, lots of startups fail because of the risk involved.
- jayparth 5y agoI agree with your point generally, but this is project management software we are talking here. It’s not like this is a year old product you’re betting on. Dude even Asana has been out for like 10 years. I will state this plainly. It’s laziness. He knows how to use Jira and doesn’t want to spend time learning a new tool. There is no risk involved with these anymore. It’s not a risk, it’s effort. Using Jira is a form of organizational debt. He didn’t want to put in the work up front to set up something better because he knew Jira already, which is fine. But everyone on the engineering team pays the price every day now because Jira is awful. You have to decide, is it worth spending 10 hours on the weekend learning Linear or do I make my whole organization suffer? He chose the former. But it’s not a risk mitigation thing. It’s a time trade-off thing.
- maccard 5y agoI've used "big" Jira, notion, small Jira, Trello and linear - Jira is still my choice out of all of the above. Usually the problem with Jira is that an organisation enforces everyone to use one Jira instance, but teams in the org want to use different workflows. One wants story points, one wants t shirt sizes, both want them to be "requirements" and you end up with a badly configured Jira instance that requires you to fill in a bunch of fields. JQL is great, albeit slow on large instances but show me the equivalent filter on youtrack for "show me all of the tasks user X had completed that are still pending review in the last 12 months" in an instance with 100k+ issues that is any faster.
- marcinzm 5y agoI’ve used a lot of project management tools. They all suck once you get beyond GitHub project management scale. Jira is at least customizable and generally well supported so it can mostly fit engineering needs. Last thing you want is your engineers begging you to please switch to Jira instead which I have seen.
- danbmil99 5y agoWe have a nickname for products like JIRA: MLPOS ML stands for Market Leading... POS speaks for itself
- lifeisstillgood 5y agoI have a theory on JIRA - or rather on Project Management. So PM is supposed to be three things in one - planning, monitoring and adjusting. Now "true (scotsman) leadership" constantly keeps adjusting plans to meet changes in the environment. But usually this is too complex In addition do not co-ordinate future development. that's not like military planning - soldiers do not say "we are going to invent a new rifle then be at the rooftop at 6pm ready to fire it" only co-ordinate with what you have
- dang 5y agoWhoa. You've been breaking the site guidelines egregiously lately. We ban accounts that do that. I don't want to ban a long-established account like yours, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it. We've had to ask you this sort of thing more than once before. This kind of thing is not ok on HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and respectfully. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29777845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29777845 (Jan 2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25900942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25900942 (Jan 2021)
- tibiahurried 5y agoWhy Zoom when you have already got GSuite? Google Meeting is great, it works in the browser and does not need any additional software.
- rosslazer 5y agoA few reasons (caveat: this was all in early 2020): 1) We kinda got forced into it since most of our customers were using it. 2) GSuite kept annoying changing what was in our plan for Google Meet. 3) The video/application audio sharing and quality felt superior than zoom at the time.
- fowkswe 5y agoI agree on the GSuite experience, but you can use Zoom in the browser FWIW. You have to not click 'open zoom app' to get the option to do so.
- tracyhenry 5y agoAm I the only one who thinks Google Meet is no where near Zoom (stability, resolution, etc)? I doubt it works on Safari (it won't let me talk). If you ask why I'm on Safari, it's because I couldn't grant it microphone access on Chrome (for unknown reason).
- seanhunter 5y agoYou are not the only one. In my experience Google Meet is significantly worse than Zoom, especially under pressure. Even slight degradation in bandwidth that zoom scarcely notices causes dramatic sync and audio issues, and it almost always seems to have worse video resolution than zoom under similar network conditionns. I used to think it was only like that because I didn't have very beefy hardware but having upgraded my laptop to a very high end processor spec and lots of memory it hasn't improved at all.
- tibiahurried 5y agoI don't know where you guys work but I have worked in very big co with meeting attended by entire organization > 50 and much more. Google Meeting, in chrome, worked just fine. I am not sure about other browsers. But I prefer chrome to having to install a client. Also, I find Google Meeting interface much cleaner and easy to use than Zoom. In addition, you can record meetings; they are stored in GDrive and you can share them. Plus, you get captions and transcriptions. All in all, is a much superior product.
- xvilka 5y agoWhat about accounting and bookkeeping? At least apart from bills management. There's open source Akaunting [1][2] but it has poor support of banking feeds outside of US and UK. [1] https://github.com/akaunting/akaunting https://github.com/akaunting/akaunting [2] https://akaunting.com/ https://akaunting.com/
- twarge 5y agoERPNext is a really excellent but mysteriously unknown system for accounting, CRM, and project management.
- pevey 5y agoQuickbooks for a startup makes a lot of sense. Pretty much any accountant you would hire has basic familiarity with it. Invoicing is built in, with a payments option you can turn on. Easy to set up and decent API and starter apps. I would also add Carta if you have or want investors. Keeping good records of the cap structure from the start is so much easier than trying to fix it later.
- batkenobi 5y agoFor simple accounting stuff, you can also checkout Frappebooks: https://frappebooks.com/ https://frappebooks.com/ It's from the same folks behind ERPNext.
- dustinmoris 5y agoI am the first one to dislike all these product management tools, but if I had to pick one then I'd use https://shortcut.com https://shortcut.com (previously known as Clubhouse before the shitty Clubhouse came along). I used it at a startup for two years and was so much better than anything else I used before.
- spacemonkey92 5y agoWe were also using notion for our project management and slowly outgrew it. We switched to http://linear.app http://linear.app and are very happy with it.
- michaelsalim 5y agoWhat's better about shortcut? Is it a matter of being the least bad among others?
- geenat 5y agoGood list if it were 2019. Notion is always good
- _gmnw 5y agoThis is really unhelpful, can you recommend a better list for 2022?
- Asafp 5y agoWhy do you need Ordway Labs for usage based pricing?
- higeorge13 5y agoJira and Salesforce are probably too complex and too expensive for a startup. Shortcut is great for project and ticket management. On the CRM side, Zendesk sell (ex Base CRM), Pipedrive, Hubspot are way more appropriate for a small sales team. Also if you are interested for mrr and other subscription metrics i recommend Chartmogul.
- maccard 5y agoJira and shortcut both have similar starter free tiers, and for small companies Jira is cheaper than shortcut ($7.50/user/month Vs 8.50/user/month)
- sdze 5y agoPages, Numbers, Keynote and iCloud for collab. 0€ No maintenance.
- sdoering 5y agoExcept necessitating everyone uses a Mac ant not something else. Personally I would say something reasonable. But I know this is not the audience to state that one turned their back on the Apple and never once looked back. So if you are fully a Mac shop your solution actually works. In my experience not as good as it could, but given the price tag quite a great way to save the money. Office 365 is OK but collaborative working together still feels a bit clunky coming from Gsuite. But on the other hand as stand alone tools all MS Office Tools blow Google out of the water in terms of features. Esp. Excel. But Teams - well better than Hangouts. That's for sure. But compared to slack abysmal. I would love to like it. Because I like the idea of keeping documentation/documents and communication aligned in the same place with project management tied in the mix. But it is slow, has strange user experience behavior and PM with Ms Planner is limited to say the least. The problem for me is not having a good alternative. Imho this is something a startup should worry least about in the early stages. Use what is there and only optimize if the pain becomes (financially) unbearable.
- sdze 5y agoyou don't need macOS to attend Facetime meetings. Browser is sufficient. Ok. All the coworkers have Macs so that is the smaller problem. But you can also edit / view / comment iWorks files in iCloud Web (Browser). If your team embraces agile mindset, you don't need to formalize processes that much. Product Backlog is in Numbers (no Jira etc). Shared workspace is basically a Pages document (as Confluence alternative). Only sad thing is, that iCloud drive does not support shared folders where people can dump some files in it.
- sdoering 5y agoI agree. My main job is in a mainly Mac environment with only around 18% other OS users (mostly Windows). I switched after 3 MacBook Pros died on me in as so much years (after Touch Bar but before M1). I often have to colab on a Keynote and that in the browser when everything is designed with custom fonts and what not is not quite a great experience. These are the moments that I get a temp Mac from user helpdesk do the keynote stuff without a compliant device and keep on working with Win on my other machine for everything else. If I need to incorporate stuff from existing presentations into mine I upload to iCloud and export to PowerPoint. I actually told everyone when I switched that I am sure I will miss Keynote. But in the end I learned how far PowerPoint has come. But as said. I just do what is necessary. I think one can work with most tools. And I don't care that much if my hammer is *nix, Mac or Windows. I use what I have and be done with it.
- _gmnw 5y agoHalf of these tools are behind a demo and don't show pricing, yours included. Usually that is because it's too costly, and it becomes a non-starter for me.
- horsawlarway 5y agoEven outside of pricing issues - demo only or "contact sales to get started" type marketing pages are an immediate (IMMEDIATE) turn off. I'll usually just close the tab. If I have to talk to sales to understand your product and pricing - your product/pricing are bad. And I'm saying that from lived work experience - the products we integrate with that don't provide open signups are sitting in the first, second, and fourth spots for outages and downtimes across the 80 some products we integrate with (and those 3 are the only ones not open to signup).
- notfromhere 5y agoEh, kinda depends. Some software tools are complex, and a trial won't really show you the functionality. Free trial users aren't exactly going to spend time configuring a complex piece of technology, so you'll just get a lot of useless signups instead of actual users.
- FL410 5y agoSo what. Let them in to play around, they’ll see why they need to talk to a sales engineer (a TECHNICAL person, not the guy who sets appointments with the technical person). If you’re selling a SaaS product and you can’t let me go in and play with it without talking to sales about my budget, timeline, and favorite color first, I’m not buying your product. Full stop.
- altdataseller 5y agoWhat does Snowflake offer you that you can’t get from Postgres or even an analytics engine like Elasticsearch? (I understand the general differences but curious about your specific situation) Also what “upstarts” did you not consider over JIRA?
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoSo, snowflake is incredibly expensive but I'm slowly coming around to it. Good things: - it's pretty fast (it does automatic partitioning of your data based on usage patterns, which is sweet) - it integrates with your cloud storage pretty transparently - the SQL dialect is pretty full-featured (it even has about half of PostGIS, which was useful to me recently) - it's pretty fast, without custom tuning (which is annoying) - the docs are pretty comprehensive, and they have a set of tutorials which are great (even if I only found them by accident). Problems: - No SparkSQL. Spark is super, super annoying, but the notion of PySpark and sparkr were pure genius. Why yes, of course I want to write my ETL in a real programming language (can define a function to remove 100+ case when statements. - It's very, very expensive, and their purchasing model seems designed to prevent people from realising this. - It's proprietary. Not the OP, but this is why I like Snowflake (and I've been using solutions in the distributed SQL space for almost a decade at this point).
- frgtpsswrdlame 5y agoCan you expand on this point? >It's very, very expensive, and their purchasing model seems designed to prevent people from realising this. How is it expensive in a way that's not transparent?
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoSo, snowflake charges you for "credits", which don't have a 1-1 mapping with dollars (because sales, volume discounts etc). The real trouble is that they don't show the credits used anywhere in their SQL interface (there's a table, but you need to go looking for it). If they wanted to help you keep costs down, they'd show you how many you'd used without needing to jump through hoops. As I said, great product, but pricing could be a lot more transparent.