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Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc.
Hey HN,
Over the past two years, I've been building Upbase, an all-in-one PM tool.
I've tried so many project management tools over the years (Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Teamwork, Wrike, Monday, etc.) but they've all fallen short. Most of them are overly complicated and painful to use. Some others, like Trello, are too limited for my needs.
Most importantly, most of these tools tend to be focused on team collaboration and completely ignore personal productivity.
They are useful for organizing my work, but not great at helping me stay focused to get things done.
That's why I decided to build Upbase.
I try to make it clean and simple, without all the bells and whistles. Apart from team collaboration, I added many personal productivity features, including Weekly/Daily planner, Time blocking, Pomodoro Timer, Daily Journal, etc. so I don't need another to-do list app.
Now I can use Upbase to collaborate with my team AND manage your personal stuff at the same time, without all the bloat.
If these resonate with you, then give Upbase a try. It has a Free Forever plan though.
Let me know if you have any feedback or questions!
- barbazoo 4y agoLooks great! I might have missed it but does it support flexible recurrence for tasks? E.g. "change furnace filters every 3 months" but not on a fixed schedule but 3 months from when I last completed the task?
- tonypham 4y agoYes, it does support custom repeat.
- rashidae 4y agoWhen I saw “a project management suite for solos and small teams”, it made me go back and re-consider it under a new perspective. Loved it. I will try it out soon! Good luck!
- tonypham 4y agoThanks. And yes, we don't plan to make it for enterprises.
- vladstudio 4y agoTo me personally, your product description here at HN (on top of this page) is more to the point than the copy on the homepage!
- rglover 4y agoI agree. That should be the "pitch" in the marketing copy. Something like "I got frustrated with Trello, Asana, etc. so I decided to fix it" and build the narrative from there. To the OP: this is extremely well done. Congrats on launching. Love the design and the packaging.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for sharing your thoughts and feedback. I must admit that we're not good at copywriting. I'm so happy that I received a lot of great ideas from the comments here.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your feedback. Probably on our website, we're trying to sound "smart" with fancy words. We'll work on the copy to make it more clear.
- EugeneOZ 4y agoAnd for me it's quite the contrary - the description on HN says nothing about how it actually works, it looks just like whining and flaming and bragging.
- martini333 4y agoReminds me of Tasks by Planner and To Do by Microsoft
- farmin 4y agoDid you build this all by yourself? Looks like a great tool.
- jdthedisciple 4y agoLooks like it's a team of 6 people according to their "Our Story" page. The "I built" in the title seems misleading, what's up there @OP ?
- Raed667 4y agoLike CEOs who say they build datacenters and international branches. I always read those as "I lead the team that built it"
- laurent123456 4y agoDoes it support Markdown? That's what I find lacking in many of these PM tools - they either use some custom, complicated markup, or wysiwyg, which makes it hard to format text properly and copy and paste text.
- tonypham 4y agoCurrently, only the Chat tool supports Markdown. But we do plan to have Markdown all over the place.
- agd 4y agoI'm a solo founder working on a project management tool which supports markdown. Take a look. :) https://macroapp.io https://macroapp.io
- ARandomerDude 4y ago^ Spam
- hmcamp 4y agoI like the idea behind this tool. All the best with the development.
- agd 4y agoThanks!
- return_to_monke 4y agoLooks nice. do you have a mobile app?
- agd 4y agoNo mobile app right now. (Too much todo already ). The site is responsive, however the mobile UX could be improved for sure.
- esskay 4y agoImmediately turned off by the AppSumo lifetime deal. Seems to be where projects go to draw in a bit of cash before they fail or get sold off. Lifetime deals on products that have a real recurring lifetime cost rarely work out, and are an immediate red flag, especially for a new project.
- tonypham 4y agoBeing on AppSumo helps us gain initial traction and feedback to improve the product at a faster pace, since we're not VC-backed.
- 6stringmerc 4y agoFair trade off, I think perfect world best practices are nice, and so is finding free money on the ground. Both pretty infrequent day to day.
- algo_trader 4y agoAs a seller, how does AppSumo work? Is it just a notice board (like product hunt) where you get some exposure? Or do you pay for it (other than offering a bargain discount..)?
- tonypham 4y agoListing on AppSumo is free. They have two options: - Select: You have to apply to be chosen, they do all the marketing for you and cut 70% of revenue); - Marketplace listing: You do everything yourself and keep 70% of the revenue.
- omnimus 4y agoBetter uptime https://betterstack.com/better-uptime https://betterstack.com/better-uptime has done it and built amazing product using this initial money. It makes sense for small bootstrapped teams.
- tonypham 4y ago
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoUpbase looks great! “most of these tools tend to be focused on team collaboration and completely ignore personal productivity.” - did you consider tools like Todoist and Nirvana which are more individual-focused? (Yet Todoist has project sharing and collaboration for teams as well). Also remember the best to-do list app will fall flat if you don’t pair it with a good method and a lot of discipline - kudos for including some links to relevant materials in your web page.
- tonypham 4y agoYes, Todoist and Nirvana work great for personal task management, but not for teams. We want to build a tool for teams that empowers personal productivity.
- r2p2 4y agoAaand it's in the cloud.
- easyorgmode 4y ago[dead]
- vcool07 4y agoLooks very good and really impressive if it was built all by your lonesome !! Not trying to be pessimistic, but doesn't notion give you all these already ? Or did I miss something here ?
- tonypham 4y agoUpbase has a completely different way of structuring all the tools it has to offer. Each tool has its own place, separated from the others. And that creates clarity. In a nutshell, it's more organized and way easier to get started with than Notion.
- 6stringmerc 4y agoGreat to hear! I know a very meticulous person about to start an EV auto company and this looks like the perfect fit, and I’m 100 percent serious. It’s a one man idea show with a web of potential add in SMEs on a limited basis but a large volume of subcontracting evaluation and go forward structures for supply chain. Hope he gets his head around this and finds it a fit. Thank you for sharing. Every tool in its right place helps the shop work efficiently!
- tonypham 4y agoThanks so much.
- rrgok 4y agoWould be great to have a self-hosted version for the lifetime plan
- tonypham 4y agoSorry, we don't have a self-hosted version now.
- zoover2020 4y agoWrong answer
- s3p 4y agoOP knows, that's why he is suggesting it
- lopkeny12ko 4y agoEvery non-FOSS piece of software I've ever deployed slowly degrades over time as founders get greedy or need to recoup costs from investors. Plex is the canonical example. Linux is the canonical counterexample. Sorry, I've been burned enough times by this now that if your software is not FOSS, I'm not deploying it. Your take is not a good look. For an open source alternative, check out Focalboard [0]. Note however it is backed by a for-profit company, but the code is open and can be compiled from source (so you can thus remove all telemetry and paid upsell nonsense). [0] https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard
- remram 4y agoTheir licensing terms are actually very confusing. I think it's just AGPL, just with extra language tacked on that changes nothing compared to AGPL, but I am really unsure. https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/issues/1507 https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard/issues/1507
- dsr_ 4y agoWe'll pay once, we'll pay yearly, we'll pay by the seat... but it has to be self-hosted, because we can't trust you not to spill our secrets.
- MoSattler 4y agoReally love the look and feel. Did you use tailwindUI by any chance?
- tonypham 4y agoThanks. We did use tailwindUI for the app.
- ionwake 4y agoI was trying this and looks good, but I can not edit what time a task is done, when on week view, which makes it impossible to setup the time a task could be done at at a future date. Also if I create a task on a weekly planner view, it should I believe show up as a task which "needs to be done" . It seems to not exist, unless I am in weekly view. Because of this missing functionality or my ability to figure it out I cant use it - I think its a simple expectation my end though. Just offering feedback, looks great tho.
- tonypham 4y agoYou can open the due date picker to set the time, or go to the Daily Planner page and then drag and drop a task onto the right sidebar Calendar to set the start and end time. Weekly Planner and Daily Planner are the two main views, so you need to go to these pages to check for due tasks.
- thegagne 4y agoInterested because it has all the basic features I want, and like the lifetime membership thing, but the mobile experience is unusable, and for that reason, I’m out. /sharktank
- tonypham 4y agoOn mobile, you should download the app, instead of logging in on the web browser, as it's not responsive on the browser yet.
- whatwherewhy 4y agoDo you provide a downloadable APK? My phone doesn't have Google Play.
- tonypham 4y agoNo, it's not possible at the moment.
- hestefisk 4y agoIt’s a cool tool, but you are in a highly commoditised market with intense competition. Your product has to be more than good to win people over. I use Jira in a project right now and it’s a sea of tickets with no order or structure. So there may be a problem to solve if you can find a great workflow.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your feedback. We're aware that we're in a very saturated and competitive market, and the product needs to be GREAT, not just good.
- heliostatic 4y agoI just bought the lifetime license, because it looks useful and I hope you're successful. Reminds me a lot of the self hosted https://duetapp.com https://duetapp.com
- tonypham 4y agoThanks so much for your support! We'll try our best to make the app great!
- XCSme 4y agoI like your self-hosted pricing model, I ended up with the same for my analytics platform[0] (Lifetime license + 12 months updates and support) after many attempts. [0]: https://uxwizz.com/ https://uxwizz.com/
- XCSme 4y agoOh wait, you are the creator of https://upbase.io https://upbase.io, not https://duetapp.com https://duetapp.com, sorry for the confusion!
- charmitro 4y agoIf I may ask, do your have significant customer numbers? I'm asking this because I think all of the PM tools you mentioned are very popular.
- tonypham 4y agoWe're still very early days, and we're working hard on growing our customer base.
- redhale 4y agoLooks great! There seems to be a bug with dates (maybe timezones)? I'm in the central US, and just created a task with a date of today (Nov 13) -- it shows up as "Yesterday".
- tonypham 4y agoThanks so much for your feedback. We'll check the timezone issue.
- Keyframe 4y agoKudos to your effort! I think I will be next in line, over time, with similar post. Everything I’ve tried is just not working (in full). From now great experience, it seems team sizes need definitely different approaches and also it seems people building those tools don’t really have much experience in what works and what doesn’t across orgs and team sizes. To be honest, I strongly believe it’s not possible to build one size fits all solution anyways for project management, and on the other hand I also believe a tool for project management should have ultra strong vision and less flexibility.. with a space then for different tools/methodologies for people to choose from instead of trying to have one tool that fits (not) all.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks a lot for your feedback. Upbase is specifically designed for solos and small businesses, which don't need a lot of fancy features. I have a sense that most PM tools are built for large teams and enterprises, with too much bells and whistles.
- s3000 4y agoDo you see a way to make migration easy? If the scope of a project changes, or to try various tools with an 'ultra strong vision' with real life data, it would be very helpful if the project data could be easily transferred. Is there a standard that most tools could support?
- tonypham 4y agoWe'll need to take a closer look to be able to answer your question, since we're not working on the migration yet.
- Terretta 4y ago> it seems people building those tools don’t really have much experience in what works and what doesn’t across orgs and team sizes... Try Linear. https://linear.app/method https://linear.app/method Opinionated, in a good way, and willing to slay sacred cows, such as replacing estimated sprints with you get done what you prioritized cycles, or milestones with roadmaps. (Now if I could just get them to replace "Projects" with something evergreen teams can work on, like "Capabilities". Fortunately all that has to change is the label.)
- hliyan 4y agoUses the same folder-list paradigm as ClickUp, which, as a long time JIRA user recently converted to ClickUp, I find to be a plus. The simplicity and responsiveness of the interface appears to be an improvement over ClickUp. However, one thing I love about ClickUp is its ability to quickly configure task statuses (which in JIRA, is the equivalent of programming a VCR). So if this product could add flexible task statuses, and also task tags, it might be a low cost contender to ClickUp. Edit: also, rather than folders > lists > sections, it might be worthwhile to introduce nested folders, which is a very popular feature request in ClickUp but that team never actually got around to adding it. Another thing: subtasks.
- hliyan 4y agoJust figured out that sections map to statuses. Not a bad idea.
- tonypham 4y agoYes, you can use sections for task statuses.
- hliyan 4y agoChat/message feature is great -- can avoid project-related slack messages.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks so much for your feedback. We do plan to add custom fields in the upcoming months, and you can create custom task statuses from there. Tags in on our roadmap as well. We'll consider nested folders if there are enough demands. You can create subtasks now, but not nested subtasks yet.
- Multiplayer 4y agoCongratulations on shipping and getting to revenue! This is terrific looking and you and your team have done some really nice work here. Just purchased.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks so much! It's still the early days, and we have a lot of things to do to make the app better.
- tommica 4y agoLooks exciting, sent a link to my boss for his consideration.
- tonypham 4y agoThank you so much!
- cliffwarden 4y agoVery polished, I'm impressed! It seems like everyone ends up recreating a PM or todo tool at some point. It makes me wonder if there could be a world where we have a standard protocol/api and then anyone can bring their own preferred interface?
- tonypham 4y agoThen it would be awesome :)
- duckmysick 4y agoI feel it would be like SQL with multiple dialects. Some small set would be interoperable, but eventually things end up diverging.
- texasbigdata 4y agoNote taking has this behavior, see Obsidian, Roam, Notion etc and markup import/export. It sort of works but not really. We need ANSI pomodoros clearly :)
- palata 4y ago> if there could be a world where we have a standard... Probably not.
- bityard 4y agoThat's the great thing about standards, there's so many to choose from!
- clintonb 4y agoCSV
- pagekicker 4y agoMarkdown in git
- 4y ago
- alberth 4y agoWould you mind sharing what the tech stacks is. (Granted it doesn’t matter, use what you know best)
- osigurdson 4y agoOne thing I've always wanted in a tool like this is the ability to map out probabilities, i.e., we do A, then B but after that we do either C,D or E. Each one on these has an associated probability (C: 0.4, D: 0.5, E: 0.1) and an associated estimate (C: 10 +- 5 normal, D: 12 +- 3 uniform, E: 3 +-1 normal). The UI would look like a graph and like ms project it could include resource levelling in order to show bottlenecks. I know this probably sounds complicated but I think it maps to reality fairly well and thus actually simple (fighting reality is hard).
- tonypham 4y agoYeah, it does sound a bit complicated :)) Powerful functionality always comes with the cost of UI/UX. We'll try to make our app simple and easy to use, so we try to avoid any complex features. Anyway, thanks so much for your feedback and ideas. I appreciate it.
- westurner 4y agoGantt charts can be made in MS Project, Google Sheets,: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart Critical path method > Basic techniques: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_path_method#Basic_techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_path_method#Basic_tec... : > Components: The essential technique for using CPM [8][9] is to construct a model of the project that includes the following: > (1) A list of all activities required to complete the project (typically categorized within a work breakdown structure), (2) The time (duration) that each activity will take to complete, (3) The dependencies between the activities and, (4) Logical end points such as milestones or deliverable items. > Using these values, CPM calculates the *longest path* of planned activities to logical end points or to the end of the project, and *the earliest and latest that each activity can start and finish without making the project longer.* This process determines which activities are "critical" (i.e., on the longest path) and which have "total float" (i.e., can be delayed without making the project longer). In project management, a critical path is the sequence of project network activities which add up to the longest overall duration, regardless if that longest duration has float or not. This determines the *shortest time possible to complete the project.\ "* Re: [Hilbert curve, Pyschedule, CSP,] Scheduling of [OS, Conference Room,] and other Resources https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31777451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31777451 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-31777451 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-31777451 Complexity and/or Time estimates can be stuffed into nonexclusive namespaced label names on GitHub/GitLab/Gitea: #ComplexityEstimate: C:1 C: Fibonacci[n] C: (A), J, Q, K, (A) #TimeEstimate: T:2d T:5m #Good First Issue GitLab EE and Gitea have time tracking on Issues and Pull Requests. Gitea has untyped Issue dependency edges, but there could probably easily be another column in the is-it-a through table for the many-to-many Issue edges table to support typed edges with URIs i.e. JSONLD RDF. GitLab Free supports the "relates to" Linked Issue relation; EE also supports "blocks"/"is blocked by". Planning poker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker Agile estimation: https://www.google.com/search?q=agile+estimation https://www.google.com/search?q=agile+estimation "Agile Estimating and Planning" (2005) https://g.co/kgs/kDScM7 https://g.co/kgs/kDScM7
- 7174n6 4y agoWhat calendars can you integrate? It's a no-go if it doesn't have Outlook calendar integration. App developers always assume everyone is OK using Google calendar. Functionality for only Google calendar alienates a large portion of the your prospective user pool who are "Google-Free".
- tonypham 4y agoDue to popular demand, Google Calendar will be our first integration. After that, we'll consider adding more Calendars, like Outlook.
- chrisacky 4y agoCan you consider the improtance of also integrating with Color Coding too when you do these? You seriously don't want to see my calendar each week. (Or maybe you do for understanding this pain point).. but having a personal planning tool understand the colors of my calendar events would be an immediate killer for me. I've tested abotu 15 different tools, and in the end found that there wans't any personal tools available. The closest I found was Sunsama. I currently use "Sortd" though for the email integration.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your feedback and suggestions. I do not fully understand your point on "Color Coding" yet. Please get in touch via help@upbase.io and give me a bit more detail (plus some screenshots, if possible).
- priyadarshy 4y agoFounder at Sunsama here. What would close the gap between "closest" and "perfect for you"?
- chrisacky 4y agoHere's my calendar for the week. Red = External (Very Likely, I need preparation + Notes). Blue = Internal Green = 121 Session etc. Black = Self-Blocked to Stop People trying to Add me to Calls Basically, I have 40+ events a week. If I have to go through each one and self-organise when I already organise in my Gmail calendar via Color Coding, it would be huge barrier for me. https://imgur.com/qXfg5PC https://imgur.com/qXfg5PC I ended up loving the interface, but the extra work I was creating for myself to "filter" and prioritise which activities needed Tasks was a deal breaker for me.
- thenerdhead 4y agoPretty impressive to have built this in two years! I'm a high-level PM and I'm not so sure why the tool is trying to do everything. I use a messaging app to talk to people. I use a todo app to track my personal and business commitments, and I use physical paper and timers to track my personal productivity (weekly plans, journals, timers, etc). The beauty of PM work is that you can mix and match the tools that make you more effective over time. Maybe that's software, maybe that's more analog tools. I think this is an excellent solution for teams that aren't established and small in nature though. I especially feel it will be extremely difficult to compete with the likes of where Notion and GitHub are headed with project management tooling.
- tonypham 4y agoYeah, the tool is specifically designed for solos and small teams with basic needs and simple workflows. Big teams will find it not powerful or flexible enough. Thanks for your feedback. I appreciate it.
- systemicdanna 4y agoThis positioning is confusing as most of the features are an overkill for a solo engineer/entrepreneur/etc. The free tier is not a perfect fit a solo person for the same reason. Wonder if it could be worth trying offering tiers based on your vision for different size teams. Eg a solo person gets a single user (no user management features), no chat, no any multi-user features.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your interesting suggestions. We did think of having an Individual plan to make it easier for people to choose, and they'll have a better experience.
- philippz 4y agoDoes it have offline support? This is the one thing I'm missing the most about Notion, Miro, Google Calendar, and all of this - offline support. In German trains, I'm offline, on flights, I'm often offline; while traveling, I'm often offline. Offline capabilities are often neglected.
- tonypham 4y agoOffline support is costly, and we do not have the resources for it yet. For businesses that have a lot of small customers, offline support is challenging.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoReally appreciated this no-no sense, straightforward reply. I agree, the reason offline support is often not that great is that the customers who are most likely to pay for your product are the least likely to have issues with online connectivity or to care about offline support, OP's edge cases notwithstanding. I even travel fairly often in the US and it's rare when I'm on a plane that doesn't have wifi.
- klabb3 4y agoTo add why: the ecosystem is immature. I am building a decentralized app (the old way) but with an event sourced architecture (append-only list of JSON events/commands). The storage itself is trivial but for everything else (queries, syncing, conflicts, validation, permissions, schema changes) there's little support and I had to make my own stuff. It works for me, because because I only have 2-3 entities but your app is much more complex, so I wouldn't recommend it even if you started from scratch. I will say that there's nothing that really stops offline aside from ecosystem support and maturity. All it really takes is a medium-big well maintained project that solves 80-90% of use cases. I think CRDTs are promising for the data layer because it simplifies the API surface (at the expense of complex implementation).
- curious_cat_163 4y agoHave you tried Obsidian with its Kanban plug-in? If so, I’d love to learn what you make of options like that?
- natovan 4y agoAh yes, the glorious Atom character input delay. Still, pretty interesting. I also found that Trello lacks some features and became too bloated over the years. NightReader plugin works well for darkmode, that's a plus. I will give your thing a try
- tonypham 4y agoThanks. The dark mode is in progress now. It will be available in about 2 weeks.
- TimMeade 4y agoInteresting. We are very much in need of something like this. BUT; I setup both mobile and and desktop web. Seems like they are not syncing. Certainly not real time. Added to desktop and still not on mobile 3 minutes later even if i refresh. I logged into both with my goggle account. Are they even the same board? Deal breaker on the lack of realtime sync.
- clarkmcc 4y agoFYI, ClickUp does have real-time chat which is I think the only feature you note on the compare page that Upbase has that ClickUp does not. Also, this might not be a popular opinion but this sales pitch just doesn’t do it for me, “At first, it might seem great that you can do everything with [ClickUp], but after a while, you realize you don’t need that many features.” It would be nice to see a comparison with Linear.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your feedback. At the moment, ClickUp does have real-time chat in lists, not global chat, so you can't send one-on-one messages to someone yet. For some people that love simplicity and don't need the many features ClickUp has to offer, it's overwhelming. We have a lot of users switching from ClickUp for simplicity alone.
- digitalengineer 4y agoIt's look very good and just what I need. I'm using a trial version right now, but can't seem to invite guests? (If I purchase a license I would like to invite clients). Edit: Below the 'read more' I found the answer "Invite guests/clients into lists to collaborate (upcoming)"
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for trying the app. Yes, the guests/clients feature is in progress now, and will be available in the upcoming weeks.
- dmje 4y agoI'm excited to try this. I've done the same dance with PM tools over the years and had similar experiences to OP. I've always ended up back on Teamwork which is amazing but they do a hard sell and the price per head is prohibitive for people in my situation (2 person agency, no interest in "10 seat pricing"). Will be good to check it out!
- tonypham 4y agoThat's why a lot of these tools don't have a Solo plan. Because they are built for teams, not for individuals.
- omathum2 4y agoHi there, I work on product and pricing for teamwork. I’m looking at how we can make plans better suited to smaller agencies. I’d love to chat if you’d be open to it.
- dmje 4y agoSure. You used to get it right back when you first started! Email me at flipchart_unreferenced [ at ] simplelogin.com
- nelsonic 4y agoIs this open source?
- tonypham 4y agoNo, it's not.
- prismatix 4y agoSmall note: on the clickup comparison item 4 you have a grammatical error. "Upbase have..." Rather than "Upbase has..."
- tambourine_man 4y agoI think it’s a US vs British English thing. Company names are plural in one and singular in the other.
- unsafecast 4y agoThis is more about the product though
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your feedback. Yes, it's an error.
- curious_cat_163 4y agoI like checklists. That works for me. :)
- tonypham 4y agoThanks
- wyclif 4y agoHeads up, under "What makes Upbase different", #1: No more switching back and forth between a dozens of apps. There's a typo there; you just need to delete the "of" and edit "dozens" to the singular "dozen."
- twobitshifter 4y agoI would think about your positioning some. You’re marketing this as having “less complexity” which first of all, isn’t going to appeal to people unless they’ve already used the other tools. But, if they had tried Trello, that’s far from complex, as you say it doesn’t have the features you think are needed, so you are more complex than that. It might be that you’re excellent at UX but that needs some comparative examples to see how you have differentiated things. Instead, it might make sense to go more with all the features you need, nothing you don’t angle. Note that I don’t think this really differentiates too much from clickup which has personal productivity options, and as you get bigger you know customers are going to ask for more and more features, because that’s what they do, and we also know that business accounts are the money makers in this market. It also runs counter to building an “all in one” tool. If you hope to replace chat, docs, collaboration, calendar, and journaling, that’s a big change for people who stepped in just looking for task management. I did see that your prices are lower so you might try positioning based on lower prices than your competition, if you have carefully chosen those price points.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks so much for your suggestions. And yes, you're right. Positioning is what we're trying to figure out at the moment. We'll consider your feedback very seriously. Thanks again for taking the time to give us some ideas. Cheers,
- jacurtis 4y agoI really like the positioning of "a project management suite for solos and small teams". That to me is very appealing because these don't really exist very well. Most project management tools are designed for tons of people. You might be able to make them work for a solo or small team, but they tend to be focused on larger teams, because as mentioned previously, those tend to be the customers spending the most money and they ask for features and they get made. Before long every project management tool becomes a large team project management tool because of this. Positioning yourself as specifically designed for solo and small team project management to me is an underserved market. When I looked at your landing page, I scrolled down quickly thinking "cool another PM tool... just what the world needs". Then when I saw the line 3/4 of the way down that said "Specifically designed for solos, small teams and businesses" that caused me to perk up and go back to the top and look at the page from a different perspective that I was much more interested in. I see now looking at it again that you mention "personal productivity" which I now understand is your way of saying small and solos. But I just interpreted it as a PM tool that made you productive amongst your team. So it didn't really resonate to me. Anyway, the product is actually interesting. I'm going to check it out. I've been wanting a PM tool for solos. There are a couple out there, but they all suck. The best solution up to this point for solo project management that I have found is just using a generic solution like Notion or Trello and adapting it to my needs. So this is worth a shot IMHO.
- mtgx 4y ago
- ijidak 4y agoDo you have an affiliate program? I would like to resell.
- tonypham 4y agoNot yet at the moment. But we do plan to have one in the near future.
- muttantt 4y ago"I built my own" -- makes it sound indie and hip. Turns out a team built this.
- FpUser 4y agoI am looking at decent PM tool myself. To the point that I am entertaining the idea to do it myself as a side project. Reason I am not using any of available offering is simple: unless someone puts a gun to my head I never buy software that does not have perpetual license and that can not be hosted on my own premises. I found some piece of software that I can host and it gets me limping along but not very happy with it. I am more than willing to pay for license and for upgrades (when I feel I need those) but as much as possible I absolutely refuse to become a hostage of multiple different companies holding my data and extracting monthly rent.
- tonypham 4y agoI understood your concerns. But finding great self-host apps might be challenging though, since they're rare.
- johnchristopher 4y agoWill you open source it if it unfortunately fails, so users have an escape hatch ?
- tonypham 4y agoAt the moment, we don't have a plan for it yet.
- anilshanbhag 4y agoCurious why are you selling your lifetime plan on AppSumo instead of on the website? Doesn't AppSumo take a fat cut.
- tonypham 4y agoYes, AppSumo does take a 30% cut. We'd like to tap into its large customer base, so we decided to run on AppSumo only.
- d_burfoot 4y ago> Most of them are overly complicated and painful to use. Some others, like Trello, are too limited for my needs. I would argue this just means that, in this space, one size does not fit all. There are many productivity features, and everyone has a different set of features they want. If you're using a tool that is missing some features you want, you perceive it as limited. If you're using a tool that has a lot of features you don't care about, you perceive it as overly complex.
- tonypham 4y agoYeah, your point makes perfect sense, since people have different needs from each other.
- pcurve 4y agounlimited storage for $49 one time fee? I'm guessing you'll be introducing new plans in the future?
- tonypham 4y agoI can guarantee that there's no upsell whatsoever. Yeah, some users will use a lot of storage, and we'll end up losing money on them, but not all users - I guess.
- pcurve 4y agoI mean, I think it's perfectly fine to charge recurring fee for saas products. Unlike desktop based app, you are providing value to your client by making it cloud based.
- oDot 4y agoI am the author of https://Nestful.app https://Nestful.app (there's some overlap, but we do not seem to compete). I have built it after being through the same ordeal, and have come to the conclusion that the tool is not the main hurdle, especially at the level of Trello or Asana, which are very high quality tools. The lack of productivity comes from the methodology those tools implement. Their methodologies contributed a whole lot but by now we are used to that contribution, and so we must advance it. Nestful implements a methodology I call "spontaneous productivity". In which there is no planning. Nestful will tell you what is the next thing you need to do, and that is it. Currently you have to know the methodology very well and "do it by hand", but I am very close for a smooth UX. Either way, my point is that improving upon Trello or Asana is like honing a sharp sword. At some point, we need to switch to a gun.
- xcambar 4y agoVery interesting approach. Unfortunately, the landing page does not give (me) enough that I want to sign up. Some features, differentiators and screenshots would be a nice addition to the otherwise quite dry homepage.
- oDot 4y agoUnfortunately, Nestful is not quite there yet. It's a product for extreme early adopters that think they can manage the methodology by hand. I hope in the coming few months to release the "ready-made" solution for that, at which point there will be what to show on the home page.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your feedback. Your methodology of "spontaneous productivity" is pretty interesting to me. Will take some time to check out your app. BTW, love your minimalist landing page.
- oDot 4y agoI am positive it can be implement in a business oriented app to the same extent I am trying to implement it in a personal environment. And if it doesn't fit -- surely there are other methodologies that both advance the field and fit the product.
- brhsagain 4y agoIs migration from Linear supported? Looks awesome but I don’t want to manually copy over dozens of open tickets.
- tonypham 4y agoIt's still early days at the moment. So there is no import from other tools yet.
- boomskats 4y agoFinally, a tool that isn't Plan[0] with a daily planner that lets me schedule my TODO list into my calendar. I've been waiting for years. Will definitely check this out OP. [0]: https://getplan.co https://getplan.co
- tonypham 4y agoThanks
- zulban 4y agoGreat approach - build first for yourself but with others in mind. Don't listen to the flood of critics online. Instead find trusted friends and colleagues who have your best interests at heart when they give feedback. Best of luck.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks a lot for your suggestions. I appreciate it.
- dejan7e 4y agoLooks cool, good luck!
- tonypham 4y agoThank you so much!
- _trackno5 4y agoThis looks great! I'm definitely trying it out. My only feedback for you is this: Charge more. You're undercutting yourself a lot by just charging $6 per user. At the very least double that to $12 and it would still be a great price for the value you're offering.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your suggestions. We're still early days, and the app needs a lot of improvement though. We'll definitely consider charging more in the future. Cheers,
- e-clinton 4y agoDisagree with this. Companies like Microsoft, and Zoho provide these types of tools as part of a broader subscription. For $5/user, I can get email, MS Teams, cloud storage, a tool similar to this, plus tons more. Why would I pay $12/user just for this tool?
- IAmGraydon 4y agoWhat MS product in 365 Business Basic does what this does?
- rejectfinite 4y agoMS Teams with the Planner and ToDo integrations. Planner: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-planner-in-microsoft-teams-62798a9f-e8f7-4722-a700-27dd28a06ee0 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-planner-in-mi... ToDo/Tasks: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-the-tasks-app-in-teams-e32639f3-2e07-4b62-9a8c-fd706c12c070 https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-the-tasks-app... https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/microsoft-to-do-lists-tasks-reminders/ https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/microsoft-to-do-list... Teams already has chat, meetings, calendar, wiki (but a very shitty one), file storage, docs via a OneNote document. I kind of agree with OP, it looks nice for my personal stuff. But if you are a company, why? And why trust their cloud with your data over a company like Google or MS?
- bluepuma77 4y agoDo you provide an automatic file sync tool? We still need to work on some documents (Word, Excel) on our local Macs, but want the latest version automatically synced to the cloud, to share with our colleagues.
- thenoblesunfish 4y agoThere is another competitor, perhaps, which is any simple, agreed-upon way to share data. For example, a Google doc and a calendar. That also has downsides, but that's probably what I would try before Trello etc. Are you trying to attract those types of people?
- tonypham 4y agoYes, and I think these types of users will find our app useful.
- chaosbutters314 4y agoexcel is all you need
- mmmbaconnn 4y agoDragging tasks from the board to the calendar and pomodoro are great features. I've been looking for an app like this for a long time. I will go for lifetime access. Congrats on a great idea executed well, and thanks.
- tonypham 4y agoGlad that you like it. And thanks so much for your support. There are still a lot of exciting features coming in the upcoming months.
- wiseowise 4y agoTech stack?
- Havelock 4y agoLooks good. What would be the difference from e.g. Basecamp?
- tonypham 4y agoBasecamp is great for team collaboration, but not so great for task planning/management. It's mainly a team communication platform.
- acqbu 4y agoVery nice, I'm impressed! Seriously considering purchasing lifetime access. Any plans to add dark mode? And why does it default to 'list view' every time I click on 'my tasks'? I want to see the board by default.
- Void_ 4y agoAm I late to the party? www.focustask.app Unlike OP, this is meant as purely personal tool, kinda like Things. I made it for myself, and love using it.
- tonypham 4y agoIt looks cool
- nickbauman 4y agoI'm sure this has some amazing features that really help with project and personal productivity mgmt compared to other systems. But let me ask you a question. If I want to get your attention, which one of the following techniques will work best: 1) Write you a snailmail letter 2) Send you an email 3) Send you a text 4) Write it on a yellow post-it note on your refrigerator The answer is 4. Because it's the most difficult to ignore and leverages our ancient human physiology. It's not an accident that Kent Beck (Author of "Extreme Programming: Embrace Change") used post-it notes stuck to a wall that had every story written on it that mattered to the team within eyesight of every developer. The problem is that when we get together to put information into a Jira or a Trello or whatever, we're making THE TOOL happy. What matters is the state of the tool, not the state of the system you're working on.
- tonypham 4y agoI think it depends. For simple notes/reminders/to-do lists, paper and pen are enough. But for bigger projects, you might need a tool. Choosing the right tool for your needs can make a significant impact on your progress. That's why there are so many PM tools on the market. Cheers,
- beckingz 4y agoAll tools are indistinguishable from a sufficiently advanced set of post it notes.
- ArlenBales 4y agoNice design! Your features do resonate to me as a contractor because a lot of my clients know very little about computers and sharing them links to Trello, Slack, etc. often confounds them with technical debt. Having everything in one place for collaboration is ideal for those kind of customers. It's also a double-edged sword, because decentralization is safer for me if your company ever goes belly-up or you are acquired by a company that decides to change the product for the worst. On that note, I'm not seeing any options to download or export all my upbase data. Will that be on the roadmap? I don't think I can really commit to upbase until that safety net is at least on the roadmap.
- tonypham 4y agoI got your point! Exporting data is on our roadmap, and it's one of the top priorities since a lot of users are asking for it. So you're not alone here.
- jeremycarter 4y agoNot to derail this conversation but I would love to hear more about this use case. If you don't mind could you contact me? https://github.com/jeremylcarter https://github.com/jeremylcarter
- corytheboyd 4y agoMy goodness there are so so SO many of these productivity apps. Even in the comments here, there are multiple people saying they too are building their own productivity tools. Someone should keep track them all on a kanban board so we know which ones are developing/released/acquired/abandoned :P
- caseysoftware 4y agoI ran an open source project management system for years and I'll say: Good luck. In short, everyone has their own dreams, preferences, (perceived)needs, and workflows and they are usually unwilling to tweak their own approach and would rather have a tool that fits them. They may be right that their "needs" are truly needs instead of just preferences but either way, you end up with a swarm of nasty little variations that are meaningless for vast swathes of the space. That's why any list of "project management tools" has 100+ entries and is still incomplete. ~10 years back, I realized that most of the people who are open minded enough tweaked their own processes to flip to something like Trello (as I did a few years later). They're still unsatisfied - I wish Trello had intercard dependencies and per-checklist item due dates - but making due. Happy to offer more info and advice, feel free to ping me.
- ar_lan 4y agoSo far paper and pen is still effectively the most malleable productivity environment that conforms to all my needs.
- ilyt 4y agoMy writing is far too ugly for that. Also no grep. But I thought about one of those e-paper notepads thingies...
- tonypham 4y agoI did use paper and pen before but finally ended up with digital apps.
- jansan 4y agoThis stops working if you are in a team. I have one project that I work on by myself, and another that involves a small team. The first one is only pen and paper and some github issues, the other is using Github's project management features extensively and it would not work without something like this.
- systemicdanna 4y agoOnly for personal use though. Any team of 2+ people will struggle to keep track of paper notes.
- agsamek 4y agoCongratulations for your contribution to PM, creating and sharing your toolbox. I wish I will be able to accomplish releasing such work for my process as well at some point in time. Building a team is always a turn-key project. Tools are a part of it. Time will tell if this is going to be a widely adopted framework or you are able to inspire several people with your ideas and some of them get adopted in other tools. Even if it only allowed you to better understand your ideas it is worth it. Once again - congratulations and continue inspiring others!
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for sharing your thoughts. I learned a lot along the way. I think the hardest part is having the courage to take the first step.
- didip 4y agoIf there is 1 feature that all of these tools neglected, it's speed. They are way too slow loading huge Javascript libraries unnecessarily. By the way, what you are building looked almost exactly like Wrike.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for sharing your thoughts. Agree with you that speed is super important to have a great experience. If you test it out for some time, you'll see that it's much different from Wrike.
- system2 4y agoPer user per month = no thanks.
- KingOfCoders 4y agoNearly bought the lifetime license, but a calendar without Google calendar integration? How is this supposed to work? (not asking to be mean but perhaps I'm missing something)
- tonypham 4y agoSince we're still early days, the Google Calendar integration is still on our roadmap and not available yet. It's the most requested feature, so we will try to ship it as soon as we can.
- KingOfCoders 4y agoAs an update, bought the life time package and will check it out for my work.
- KingOfCoders 4y agoGreat!
- anonymous344 4y agoI dunno.. looks complicated, very much so. few years ago i made a big review of all trello alternatives and they were all too complicated to use and were lacking the copy of board & list (as an actually working method and not just copy the 1%) and also lacking of share a board with customer via secret link, but only with limited visibility not to see all the cards and their details.. made trello still the best and most clean
- tonypham 4y agoYou can try it out yourself. Probably you'll find that it looks complicated but is actually very simple and easy to use :)
- anonymous344 4y ago
- tonypham 4y agoIt's just a quick overview of the app though. Making a great tutorial video takes time, and we don't have the resources to do that at the moment. But we definitely will. Thanks for your feedback.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pvg 4y agoBe kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- cloudking 4y ago"Our story" page doesn't tell us anything about you, the founders, team etc. Before I give you access to my Google data, it would be nice to know who you are and your backgrounds.
- tonypham 4y agoI assume that people want to hear about our story and why we decided to build "just-another-PM-tool", rather than who I am, since it's boring and makes no difference unless I'm a well-known founder.
- yawnxyz 4y agoI want to hear specifically who you are! I think that builds a connection between me and your product, its origins, and philosophy. Some restaurants do this pretty well, from small around-the-corner Italian places, to even places like Five Guys where they use their underdog story as a way to build connection. Of course they're not an underdog anymore though.
- cloudking 4y agoIt makes a difference in establishing trust with your potential customers, you're asking people to connect their Google account and give you money. Who are you? What is your background? Are you VC backed or bootstrapped? I know nothing about your company, why should I give you money? Please don't take this the wrong way, your product looks great! Just helping you with some constructive feedback.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for sharing your thoughts. We'll consider this.
- SoftTalker 4y agoI'll say this. Without being critical of this tool, over 30 years of involvement with software projects, I have found that good project management is a result of a good project manager, not the software tools he or she uses. A good project manager will do a good job even with index cards taped to the wall. A bad project manager will do a poor job even with the best software tools. People who have the aptitude and desire and organizational skills to be good project managers are rare. You need to seek them out, not keep looking for magic in software tools. If it's personal productivity you are after, you need to work on the skills that support that. I can't tell you how, because I'm pretty bad at it myself. Maybe look at some of the best-sellers such as Getting Things Done. But it won't be easy if you don't naturally have the necessary organized mind and self motivation. Software won't give you that.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tonypham 4y agoAgree with you on this: Skills first, tools later. Nevertheless, great tools do help. Great PM skills and the RIGHT tools would be the best combination.
- karmakaze 4y agoI haven't tried the app yet and wanted to make sure it had one deal breaker feature: does it integrate with Github issues/PRs? When something goes wrong, I look at the code, recent changes to it, and the discussion that happened in writing that code. I'm not interested in anything that washes its hands of scope when the item is marked done. I want easy ways of getting back to all that data long after it's marked done.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tonypham 4y agoGithub integration is not available at the moment, but we do plan to add it. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
- kodah 4y agoPretty cool! Congratulations on launching a useful product. As a side conversation, this project and how you described it made me think about why I have such issues with Jira. Jira is actually fucking useless to me. To the business, it's indispensible because it captures the larger tasks that roll up to a larger business objective. However, for each of those larger tasks I have a series of conversations and cross-functional dependencies that must be negotiated. More basically, my minutiae is much more than the larger tasks can ever describe, and that minutiae is much too noisy for the business to track - which is why we cover it informally in stand ups. What I need is something offline that tracks my minutiae like stories where the larger tasks (that are currently stories to the business) get tracked like epics on my end. I say this from the perspective of working at a very large, top-level engineering firm.
- chrisweekly 4y agoSimilar take re: Jira at work. But for me personally, Jira is valuable in that it at least provides shorthand for a body of work. I manage my own deliverables (and my small team's, to a lesser extent) in Obsidian, in a work-dedicated private vault. Referencing Jira tickets ("WF-1234" or "CICD-9999") in my per-project devnotes is helpful for organization and providing centers of gravity for related | interdependent notes. YMMV but it's been working fairly well for me.
- jonwest 4y agoThis is a huge ask, but would you mind elaborating on your workflow a bit? I really struggled with Jira at work, and I _think_ it was for similar reasons that you described. Are you saying that what is a story at work, and captured within a single “unit” within Jira (I don’t want to use “task”, because that’s a separate thing in Jira) is more broad, but you benefit from having that story broken down further, and that’s where you would use something like Upbase?
- kodah 4y agoYes. Most organizations I've worked in have an OKR, several epics from that OKR, and several stories from each epic. I tend to work on stories all across those epics, but even broken down stories can never be broken down enough for a single programmer. They're still broad because I'll need to gather requirements from external teams, get a permission here, or dive into a deployment workflow there in order to fully close the story. To the business, a story is the smallest unit of work, but to a human we have many steps in that unit of work. In a contrived example, if my OKR is to reduce the engineer attention in a given support process by 50%, my epic might be to create a framework for automating tasks via Slack. My stories then might be: - Spike: Investigate Slack API - Spike: Investigate programattic interfaces of Jenkins - Build bot framework - Build pluggable Jenkins module - Spike: determine deployment patterns for framework + modules To a business, these are bite-size as the chunks can be, but to me that may involve tracking threads in channels, doing POCs, and doing a lot of reading. All of those things may fall under a single story. In a laymen's sense, I need a Jira for my Jiras that the business doesn't need to track because those things largely don't matter to the whole.
- chrisweekly 4y agoObsidian meets all my (personal productivity / PKM / Tools for Thought) needs for this kind of thing for now and the forseeable future. But I'm happy to share my thoughts as someone who's been fairly deep in this space for several years. If you're looking for broad adoption, I'd focus heavily on your interop and portability story: import and export. If it's easy to try with "bring your own extant content", and mitigated risk of lockin via robust export, the PKM / TFT community will be much more likely to engage. And the community per se is a huge factor in such tools' appeal and viabilty. Thanks for sharing, good on you for actually shipping, and good luck!
- tonypham 4y agoThanks so much for sharing your thoughts. And yes, you're right. Not being able to import/export is a deal breaker for many people who are really interested in Upbase. We'll need to prioritize that.
- hemantv 4y agoHave you looked at Sunsama? I have few ideas on how you can improve this with lots of integrations. I can be reached at fameoflight@gmail.com if you want to chat.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your support. I'll reach out to you in a few days to learn more about them.
- makach 4y agoWow! I love your work! You need to add 2FA to you authentication, security is a big deal. How do will I know that my project information is safe on your site? It has almost all the features would need for doing pm. I will definitively try it out!
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your kind words. We're still early days, and there is big room for improvement. I'm aware that security is a big deal, and we'll take it very seriously.
- stephencoyner 4y agoFound a typo on your website on the ClickUp competitive page. “Upbase have global chat. ClickUp doesn’t” should be “Upbase has global chat…”
- tonypham 4y agoNoted. Thanks so much for your feedback.
- Sateeshm 4y agoThis is really nice. What is the tech stack? One quick thing i noticed, When i enter new section name and press tab, it is ignored unlike if you press enter, at least in board view. I'd imagine pressing tab after input is typical user behaviour.
- tonypham 4y agoWe mainly use Golang for BE, Vuejs for FE. I got your point on section naming behavior. We'll optimize it in the upcoming days.
- vsri 4y agoRecovering marketer from the productivity space here. Your product looks great. Here's my two cents on the "positioning" dicussion happening: the copy on your "Our story" page reads like most other productivity apps out there. Sorry to be so blunt, but it's generic, buzzwordy, and you can swap your company name out for any other company. > That's why we decided to build XXXXX — an all-in-one work management software that is simple to learn and easy to use. What's missing IMHO is this: why did you undertake the drudge of building this? All software creation is motivated by a disatisfaction with what's already out there, so what is the unique point of view that motivated you and... it is hoped, will motivate an audience who shares that point of view. It's not why you are better, cheaper, faster (those are terrible vectors for positioning btw) it's what makes you different. Are you anal-retentive about detail and hyper-connectedness (JIRA)? Are you psychedelic burners who want to bend a spartan UX into infinite directions (Asana)? Are you cutesy but robust (Trello)? Are you so hyper-opinionated about product management to the point of pedantry (Basecamp)? All these are perfectly cromulent points of view by the way. Marketing positioning is about articulating YOUR point of view, in order to activate the tribe that shares it. For more on this see Simon Sinek or Chris Lochead. This is my favorite topic in the world. Good luck with your product!
- tonypham 4y agoThanks so much for your invaluable feedback and suggestions. We're tech guys, not marketers, so we find positioning really challenging at the moment. Thanks again for taking the time to give us some GREAT advice.
- swyx 4y agoas a founder, you are no longer allowed to say "we're tech guys, not marketers" anymore :) this is now your job. hope you take this great advice and stand out. vsri said it faster and better than i could so will just endorse - please dont say what you think you're supposed to say (leads to generic corporate bs) and say what you really think and give examples to "show, don't tell".
- tonypham 4y ago
- SeriousM 4y agoIt looks very helpful! I tried other tools before and the best so far was azure devops - but It's not for PMs. Jira is, well... jira (driven by a pm team that doesn't stop adding useless changes). Trello is just to simple for complex things. I guess upbase is exactly what it needs to have a small and good pm management. I will buy a lifetime license. A question thoug: will it support jottacloud for document storage? I don't like google drive because of google and my documents are better stored in norway.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your feedback and support. Upbase doesn't support Jottacloud at the moment since there are very few requests for it.
- SeriousM 4y agoAnother question for you: is there any demand for contact management? I mean not a full fledged CRM but somehow note with whom a correspondence has happened or which external person I need to contact for a specific task. It would be important to tag/find person related interactions. Thanks!
- tonypham 4y agoAt the moment, there are not many requests on contact management yet. Cheers,
- jonwest 4y agoIs it possible to create links between documents? It doesn't seem to be a slash command or markdown syntax.
- tonypham 4y agoNot yet, at the moment. The Docs feature is still pretty basic, and we plan to make a lot of improvements to it.
- herpderperator 4y agoFound a typo on the landing page: "No more switching back and forth between a dozens of apps." Either drop the 'a' or put 'a dozen apps.'
- tonypham 4y agoGot it. Thanks for your feedback.
- yawnxyz 4y agoThis is maybe shallow, but on the about page, could you put you and your co-founders pictures w/ a short description and maybe your twitter handles? For some reason I'm a sucker to pay for an indie service like this when I see who the people behind it are. I feel like me $6 to those founders goes a much farther way than to something like Trello.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your suggestion. I'll take it into consideration.
- coupdejarnac 4y agoLooks nice, well done.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your kind words.
- trentnix 4y agoAs someone whose team just got bitten - again - by Jira descriptions being overwritten by an unwitting user with unsaved changes, I feel you. I just can’t imagine why it isn’t easy to recover a previous description and its formatting. Jira solves the larger collaboration problems, but blows it on the small stuff. I spent the next hour fuming and imagining how it would work if it was done right (i.e. the way I thought it should work). Necessity is the mother of invention, after all. I soon sobered up, realizing I had neither time nor patience (or talent, maybe) to build it right. Respect to you for rolling your own.
- bigtones 4y agoIt is very easy to recover a previous version of the description field in Jira. Jira keeps a full change log / audit log of every change to the description field and other fields. You can definitely roll back to an old version of the description field or see what changes were made and when by whom. https://www.tutorialspoint.com/jira/jira_view_change_history.htm https://www.tutorialspoint.com/jira/jira_view_change_history...
- systemicdanna 4y agoThis is one of those cases when Jira is suffering from its UI/IA mess. It has lots of good feature but the discoverability is horrendous, which leads to so much user (my) confusion.
- trentnix 4y agoI have a history tab on the Jira issue, so I can see my previous description, stripped of formatting. I should be able to cut and paste or press a button to restore the description, but no.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks so much for sharing your experiences.
- KyeRussell 4y agoThe central issue with “simple” productivity tools is that everyone wants a different 10-40% of what Jira does. There’s a reason most of us end up begrudgingly giving money to Atlassian.
- tonypham 4y agoYes, functional simplicity is tough.
- I_am_tiberius 4y agoCan you share pages using a public link and can you use your own domain for it?
- tonypham 4y agoYes, you can share a page with a public link. White labeling is not available yet.
- mikeg8 4y agoThis looks very cool, I will be signing up and testing it out! Quick question, how many hours per week would you say it took over the two years to reach this point? Full time or part time? Thanks.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks, mikeg8. About 40-50 hours per week. Fulltime. It takes a lot of time to build the infrastructure.
- drc500free 4y agoFirstly, congratulations on your launch! My personal opinion as a Product Manager is that there is no all-in-one tool, there never will be an all-in-one tool, and anyone promising an all-in-one tool has some significant blinders on around the job functions they have been exposed to. Sales will use Salesforce. Engineering will use JIRA. And Product will use some generic roadmap-first tool like Asana, Trello, Miro, Monday, or MS Project. Product will beg everyone to use their tool, but no one will because it's for looking at work, not executing on it. Product will not understand because we Product Managers don't actually DO things, we talk to people, organize ideas at a coarse level - and we have a simple tool that articulates the vision perfectly! Except it doesn't automatically integrate with the CI/CD pipeline, it doesn't automatically log the last touch with a high-priority prospect, it doesn't pass designs from the designer to the UX engineer. It doesn't actually DO anything. It becomes just another SaaS platform in our Okta stack that only the PMs look at - and it gets out of sync with the actual reality reflected in the other SaaS offerings. And the reason it doesn't do those things is because the people who built it thought that THEY were the ones who could build the all-in-one project management tool and all those sales people, engineers, designers, lawyers, and marketing writers would log in to theirs. Insert relevant XKCD about standards here. The truth is no PM tool will ever be the system of record for the actual work, but everyone is afraid that the complexity of integrating with others will turn them into JIRA. So we get these vaguely opinionated ways of moving around and arranging candy-colored cards, and those cards never quite show us the state of the project we are managing, so we have to bug people to "update their status in <Monday/Asana/Trello>" before the weekly meeting. Which they don't want to do because it delivers no value to THEM. Which is all a long-winded way of saying - please think about how a piece of work from each of those functions might be represented in your view, and how that integration would happen automatically.
- ChikkaChiChi 4y agoThis tracks closely to my experiences as well. Managers need to understand that managing upwards and laterally is equally as important as managing downwards. If your peers and bosses aren't fluent in your team's tool of choice, it is your responsibility to be the translation layer to a tool that works for them. This is the only way to truly achieve the type of transparency we're all searching for.
- mbrodersen 4y agoYears ago I found the perfect tool for managing anything from small personal projects to large complex software development teams: A prioritised to-do list. It’s simple. It works.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for sharing your thoughts. Yeah, everything should be simple.
- d2049 4y ago>> I try to make it clean and simple, without all the bells and whistles. >> Apart from team collaboration, I added many personal productivity features, including Weekly/Daily planner, Time blocking, Pomodoro Timer, Daily Journal, etc. I'm having a hard time understanding how both statements can be compatible together. Open-minded to an explanation.
- tonypham 4y agoHere are my points: - I want to build a simple, easy-to-use tool. No fancy, complicated features. - Upbase is built for teams, but it should work well for Solos/Individuals. So you can use it for both team collaboration and for managing personal stuff. In the future, you'll have the option to turn off all team features, so that you can use Upbase as a powerful task management system, without all the distractions. (At the moment, you can turn off Chat if you don't use it) They're two separate points, though.
- swyx 4y agoi think most founders who have done the appsumo deal agree its a scam that only benefits appsumo. their banner is distracting. would drop them asap
- mattfrommars 4y agoWhat is the front end stack for this app? Is it based in React?
- tonypham 4y agoIt's Vuejs
- exotree 4y agoYou write that this is more focused on personal productivity, yet everything from your copy to the features seems to be focused on teams. There’s nothing wrong with that, but what I am taking away as someone who wants a personal PM tool from your positioning is that most future updates will be team productivity focus rather than individual productivity. Therefore, I shouldn’t invest in it as an individual. Really cool PM tool overall tho!
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your feedback. We'll work on the website copy to make it more clear. There are many upcoming features that solos will find helpful, like tags, custom fields, Google Calendar sync, etc. Furthermore, we plan to have the option to turn off all team features so that you won't find the app cluttered if you use Upbase as your personal PM tool.
- HeavyStorm 4y agoWhere is the mandatory xkcd of too many standards?
- guillegette 4y agoAnother productivity founder joining the discussion. Congratulations on your launch! I built https://www.workast.com https://www.workast.com with similar motivations, but our go-to-market strategy was to focus on teams that use Slack to communicate, and we still do today. While there is tons of competition out there, the market is big enough for all of us to share. It is a bumpy ride but today we are a profitable business. All the best!
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for sharing. Yes, the Slack community is huge, and I can see a demand for your product. Cheers,
- sashk 4y agoWhen I tried to sign up, I've run into issue where your password prompt[1] would require uppercase character, a number and a special symbol... While in my opinion my password satisfied that requirement, your app didn't accept it. If you don't consider period and underscore as a special symbol -- you should mention list of special symbols you accept. [1]: https://imgur.com/a/JvsXVIN https://imgur.com/a/JvsXVIN
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your feedback. We'll make it more clear to users.
- fire 4y agoI would strongly suggest not having password complexity or length requirements except for perhaps a minimum length of 16+. Anything else is additional user frustration and serves no real purpose given that you're presumably not storing passwords in plaintext in the year 2022.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your feedback. We'll consider making it a bit easier for users.
- fire 4y agocool; just to expand - since hashed passwords are all the same length in a db, there's no benefit for max length requirements, and providing character limitations gives attackers a blueprint for brute force attacks since they now know what characters they don't need to try. When your requirements are too strict, this can make hashes orders of magnitude faster to reverse. my personal stance is: if they can type it, it can be in a password
- tonypham 4y agoThe purpose of this is to prevent people from entering too simple passwords, like "theirname123". People still do it.
- fire 4y agoyeah, I find that it helps to have a password complexity gauge that shows the user their password is weak, but I still wouldn't stop them from using it ( except for minimum length )
- ThisIsMineToo 4y agoInteresting! Would you consider offering an API so third parties can create extensions? I’ve developed an extension that I’m trying to make compatible with as many product(ivity) tools as possible and would love to add yours to the list.
- tonypham 4y agoWe do consider offering APIs, but probably not very soon, since there are a lot of essential features we need to add first.
- stanislavb 4y agoCongrats on the successful "Show HN". I'm sure you are getting some quality visits out of it. Apart from the feedback here which also very important. I'm wondering, would you bother verify Upbase.io on SaaSHub? Pls ping me if you do so, and I will get it featured on the newsletter there. Cheers!
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your support. It would be awesome. I definitely will ping you. Cheers,
- tr3ntg 4y agoI was skeptical until I saw that you’ve included messages, a separate chat, and file hosting. It’d be hard to migrate an existing team over to this, but for new teams, this would be cool to adopt. One single “work space.” I
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for sharing your thoughts. Yes, migrating data from one app to another is not always easy.
- rg111 4y agoI love this and would love to try this out. My question is, you say, there are 2 lists for the free users. What exactly are "lists" in your app? ____ On a different note, I always long for an app that is designed for the solo user for personal needs only. Most people, including myself, have to use for work what their org uses for task management. But an app designed specifically for solo users would be great. No need for collab tools or messaging, just simple one-user workflow across multiple devices with free sync. I would pay $10/$20/$30 one-time for it. It would be so great. I would like to track here what languages/libraries I am going to learn next, to what movie I want to watch to books that I would want to read.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for sharing your thoughts. Lists in Upbase are like projects in other apps. We plan to have an option for you to turn off all team collaboration features, so it'd be clutter-free.
- tonypham 4y agoI manage all of my personal stuff inside Upbase: Books to read, Places to visit, Movies to watch, etc. so I think you can use it to manage yours.
- tobase 4y agoLooks awesome! Is it possible to sync the calendar with iCloud and Google? If yes, both ways? We have shared calendars in our family and don't want to use an external app to see whats up but happy to the planning in upbase ofc.
- tonypham 4y agoGoogle Calendar is our top priority on the roadmap. And we aim for 2-way sync.
- harryjadon 4y ago[dead]
- red_admiral 4y agoJust signed up. Feedback so far: - Specify what counts as "symbols" in a password (a = sign apparently does not). - When you click rename on a "section" (a column in the kanban board), I suggest focus the text box in the modal so the user can start typing immediately). Apart from this, it looks great and I'm going to try it out a bit.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your helpful feedback. We'll work on these issues shortly.
- red_admiral 4y agoAfter a bit more trying out, can I just say this looks like a really well made tool! I'm going to use it for real for keeping track of a couple of private projects.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your kind words. I'm glad you like it.
- butterNaN 4y agoThe Privacy Policy [1] only covers what is defined as "Personal Data". What about the data created by users themselves? E.g. Tasks/cards created by users. Is user-generated data private enough? I know Trello, Asana, etc. are widely used by businesses, but that is after many b2b guarantees about privacy, defined through legal agreements. For everyone else, it's what you say in Privacy policy document. Bonus: If the data is end-to-end encrypted, you won't even need to get legal involved. It is a big feature in itself, but it's worth considering in the interest of future opportunities. [1]: https://upbase.io/privacy-policy/ https://upbase.io/privacy-policy/
- otabdeveloper4 4y agoWelcome to the club.
- lionel_ZA 4y agoThis looks really impressive even more so with the small team. For how long have you been marketing/getting word out there? I started trying to get word out on an app of mine last week, things are moving sloooowly.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your feedback. We started focusing on marketing a few months ago. Yeah, it's tough to get the word out about the product since there's too much noise out there.
- tonypham 4y agoHey everyone, I'm thinking of introducing an Individual pricing plan (one user only) in which we strip away all team features. This would help bring much better user experiences since there was no unnecessary clutter or noise. I'd like to hear your thoughts about it.
- TimTheTinker 4y agoI would love that. This tool looks like the perfect productivity tool for me - as a staff engineer with accountability for the deliverables of 2 teams (might become 3 soon). As I can no longer simply track my work in a team's JIRA board, I need some way to keep track of what I'm planning to do, what's in progress, and what's done -- and separately for each team; also including journal entries so I can log research I've done or conversations I've had. The Pomodoro timer and other personal productivity features just make it all the more attractive - a perfect fit. Upbase looks perfect for this -- minus the team features.
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for sharing your thoughts. On this Individual plan, should we allow team features to be turned on and new members to be invited afterward?
- TimTheTinker 4y agoI think that could likely be helpful for some people, but probably not in my case. I don't expect anyone else to be working alongside me. But I imagine a solo founder wanting to start on a low-cost individual plan, and expects to eventually add new members when he/she gets a co-founder and/or more team members. In any case, people like the feeling of there being an easy "on-ramp" to what they imagine they'll do in the future. GitHub in particular has achieved mastery of easy on-ramps to more (paid) features. I'd be curious to find out how many Trello boards start out with 1 person and others join weeks or months later.
- nashashmi 4y agoIndividual plan works great. Since these tools are in an infancy, the user culture has yet to catch on. Launch individual plan (no limits). Launch a friends feature with tracking/comments. Launch teams feature under paid plan that has a management system built in, with a manager. Btw, i bought a lifetime plan (sucker?) but it is not activating.
- b-lee 4y agoPlease consider Basecamp’s pricing model instead of $/user/mo.
- gdevenyi 4y agoWhile all these tools are impressive, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to actually use these in a methodology sense, where do I look for a comprehensive howto for actually setting up and managing things?
- tonypham 4y agoThe tools are pretty generic, so you can use them in whatever way works best for you. In the future, we'll publish some tutorials/use cases so you can better set up your workflow.
- rejectfinite 4y agoMaybe I don't get it, but why use this over Microsoft Teams with the To-Do app and/or Planner? Even with a personal Microsof account you can use Onenote, Teams (for chat I would use maybe Discord) and ToDo for lists. or Google Workspace ofc. Or even Proton.me But I have been interested in Notion or Wordpress to get my own Wiki going, but this does look good.
- tonypham 4y agoSwitching back and forth between multiple apps is not very efficient, and you might have a hard time managing all your information when stuff's all over the place. You can check it out to see if it's a good fit. Cheers,
- pqs 4y agoThe Time Blocking feature is very sexy. It is exactly what I need. Currently, Evernote allows linking notes and calendar events, but it is cumbersome. Your solution is absolutely great.
- tonypham 4y agoI'm glad you like it. Let me know if have any feedback.
- nashashmi 4y agoI am encountering a few bugs: On Board -> Task opens in sidepanel -> Drag and drop task from section to sidepanel ##Fails Bought subscription -> appsumo returns key code -> used it in promo code. Still don't have full version. Very frustrating.
- tonypham 4y agoHi nashashmi, Appologize for the issues. Please send me a message via help@upbase.io.
- quickthrower2 4y agoWell done on the launch! There are a lot of these Trello/JIRA alternatives. I am sure they are better in one or more dimensions, but I sort of need some kind of evidence breadcrumb to make me believe it is worth the 5-10 hours of time to work out if your product is worth spending another lots of hours transitioning from JIRA to. In some sense then, for people using X already, the price doesn't matter, as long as it is not ridiculously high. I imagine it is better to target more. Your story says "our team of six people was working on a small content marketing project.". Maybe if you target content marketing teams, you can talk directly to their pain? You might need a landing page per customer profile. Obviously with HN you can only submit one link, so the one for Engineering teams would make sense I guess. I think start by selling to content marketing teams, as your mouths are full of that dog food already, and it tastes good presumably!
- tonypham 4y agoThanks for your feedback. Upbase is a generic tool and people can use it in whatever way works best for them. I might need to create pages highlighting use cases of how to use Upbase for Product teams, marketing teams, etc.
- paintballboi07 4y agoHhhjw2hûawan eñ.2
- Narretz 4y agoHi, I couldn't find this in the feature list, does Upbase have the ability to add private comments / subtasks to tasks / other entities? That's something I really like in project management tools when I want to track my progress but not create noise for the rest of the team.