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Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

• skenbobo 3y ago
  Can I have formula (the Excel kind of formula that do computation) from everywhere in doc, slide, notebook, form, site, etc.? It's similar to the demo in the home page of https://patera.io/ https://patera.io/
• dabedee 3y ago
  Congratulations on releasing your product! It looks super interesting. Some questions from the top of my head: - Where is the data stored geographically? (US, EU, or a specific country) - Do you plan on having multiple options for the web version (cloud vs self-hosted) I find that data sovereignty is very important to me (it might not be for everyone), which is why I ask about those points specifically ;)
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    Thanks! Data sovereignty is also top of my mind, but I think we should approach it not with the physical location of the servers/databases, but with the ability to encrypt, thus own, your data. Currently it uses GCP with data centers in the US, but when E2EE is rolled out, I don't think it would matter where it's located? There might be legal complications so I'm also thinking of moving the physical databases to jurisdictions like Switzerland, if it comes to that. Given the complexity of the backend, I think a self-hosted version might not be possible in the short term. However, single tenant versions (like GitLab dedicated) is definitely doable.
    • Vermyndax 3y ago
      Unfortunately, it always matters. There's always someone who wants to know where the data is physically located and they will always want an answer for it.
• weakwire 3y ago
  Very interesting. what is your tech stack?
• redcobra762 3y ago
  Security & privacy are tough selling points; fewer people care about either than you may think, and the existing platforms provide a lot more than most who do care are willing to admit. Also the “too many tools” pitch sounds like an unhinged rant. There’s almost certainly a better way to phrase that, because otherwise the idea that the mere existence of a wide variety of tools bothers you doesn’t stand up to the “so don’t use them all” rebuttal. Maybe focus in the convenience factor, and the integration within your platform instead, as that is a genuine value-add. Good luck!
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    On your first point: I think the trend is more will start to care. I agree many platforms provide a lot of security features, but few allow you to encrypt with custom keys though. On your second point: That's a good point, bad phrasing on my part. Thanks for the feedback.
    • swells34 3y ago
      Something to keep in mind about all this (and something that my wife reminds me of when I get annoyed trying to write product descriptions) is that the description and the product are separate. In that, if I struggle to write a description that is attractive to everyone, it doesn't necessarily mean that the unattracted ones won't like the product. And some that are attracted to the description will dislike the product. This is just part of the difficulty of marketing; you can't please everyone. You have to figure out what problems the bulk of your possible user market are trying to solve that your app solves, and present that plainly and concisely. Flowery language tends to obfuscate; just plain simple "If you have problems XYZ, this will solve those", then link to greater detail about how each of X, Y, and Z, are solved. It's hard to do this because we are so used to seeing mid level manager bullshit PR speak on every product page we look at; it seems like a requirement. I've had very refreshing experiences with product descriptions written by a technical writer who just did not give a fuck. Just wrote it up like he was sending an email about a bug report, published it, and it was fantastic.
• mstngl 3y ago
  Congrats for such an profound launch of kind an Army knife for office needs. I like this approach of "modules" very much, especially compared to MS365 cosmos where you've got the great four apps very prominent and new apps / functions hiding their potential power behind a lot of new names and rather confusing menues. What is your vision about email? I know, it's not an advanced nor modern technology but still the established backbone of office communication, especially if you want to conquer the given field. Despite MS365 has Outlook as default app working with emails in other contexts is still a pain.
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    I've thought about email - it'll likely be a module that syncs with your outlook or gmail. This is one area that is very hard to replace, because the cost of switching email is huge. Once the emails are synced to nino, they become blocks and can interoperate with other modules i.e. crm type of use cases
• airstrike 3y ago
  This is really cool -- congrats on the launch! The productivity worker's "app chaos problem" as you called it is a real problem and a solvable one. I'm building something similar after spending 10+ years working with those numerous different apps day in and day out in quote-unquote "high stakes" white-collar roles. It's early days and I'm approaching it from a slightly different angle, but there's a certain amount of overlap between the two visions. I'm focusing on a smaller set of apps but more fleshed out set of features, aiming for feature parity with incumbents + my own features (which incidentally is why this is taking a while to build well...) Curious to see how Nino progresses and we should connect later on when I have something tangible to show, if you're up for it
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    We should! Just sent an email to the address on your profile
• Closi 3y ago
  Super impressive app by the look of things, but as you asked for feedback, it is (to me) very confusing on the product side of things (i.e. what is it and why does it matter to me). As a business user it's not clear how I would use it, and why I would care. Your front page reads as: > Nino is a collection of apps that can interoperate with each other on the block-level from one uniform interface. It has interoperable pages and blocks. It is flexible, extensible, and adapting to your needs as you grow, as Nino helps you consolidate tools and reduce costs. It has page sourcing so you can view pages in a different way. It has page embed, so you can sync page to another page. It has sync block to another page, but you can also block mirror and sync block on the same page. A good comparison against your front page would be against monday.com or Asana who start with use-cases and practical application. See Monday: > Monday - A platform built for a new way of working. What would you like to manage? > * Work Management - Run all aspects of work > * Sales CRM - Streamline sales processes > * Dev - Manage product lifecycles Then if I click any of those categories, it goes into the exact ways it can help me.
  • farley13 3y ago
    +1 to this. Focusing on usecases would be great. ex: I wanted to see what features were available for your sheets module. Was willing to spend 5 minutes on a walk. Tried the web app - ios safari is not supported :( downloaded the ios app and registered. Got a totally blank app - no onboarding, no template / samples, no obvious way to import from my existing google sheets to see how things scaled. I added a datasource and a few fields (which felt confusing) and my walk was over.
    • samstave 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • urbandw311er 3y ago
        Eh what? Mobile safari on iOS is surely something like 20-30% of the market.
• siva7 3y ago
  Ok, so now we got 19 apps competing for our attention?
  • airstrike 3y ago
    One app to rule them all
• chalst 3y ago
  Congratulations on the launch of your app! Have you thought about what sort of developers would develop modules? Have you made any efforts to engage the free software community?
• siamese_puff 3y ago
  Can this be self-hosted? Is it opensource?
• analog31 3y ago
  I always ask this of new apps: To include code cells in the editors via ipython.
• macspoofing 3y ago
  >Nino is a radical approach to solve the app chaos problem for today's knowledge worker ... I'm building all these apps from scratch in one place, using the same database and UI, with the flexibility to support the majority of work from one "superapp eventually." Maybe I can see some use-case for personal use (big maybe), but right off the bat, you can't use this at any company (small startup or enterprise), for several reasons: Lack of functionality, lack of organization-based group and access control workflows, auditing, user provisioning/de-provisioning, lack of cross-organization document sharing and collaboration and compatibility, plugin support, email integration, domain hosting, etc. etc. I'm not even sure a motivated individual contractor could use this professionally due to the need to collaborate with their customers. I'm not even sure you could dog-food this while managing Nino Inc. >Nino is one (super)app that supports 18 modules, saving you time from switching and integrating between different providers. Is that even a real problem? Most places will use either Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace - those platforms are very well integrated internally. MS365 has all the apps you built except they are feature-rich and some are industry standards (like the Office suite), plus much more - and everything is very well integrated. But that isn't enough. Sometimes users may prefer, for example, Confluence as a wiki instead of the MS365 Sharepoint wiki - the reason why is because they want to choose a 'best of breed' solution for their use case .. or it may just be a subjective preference. In that case, yes, the integration isn't as great but it is workable (there are plugins to allow deeper integration of external applications). Your solution won't be able to get away from that either. Even if I like your Todo and Notebook apps, I may prefer using Zoom for conference calls and Slack for chat .. what happens then?
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    A lot of features you mentioned are actually implemented (role-based permission, cross workspace sharing, domain hosting...) and some that will come (audit logs and other enterprise things). I get the best-of-breed argument. Nino's thesis is that people will find more value if enough tools are bundled in one place.
• wazzaps 3y ago
  What's your business model? Everything seems "free" so far.
• samwillis 3y ago
  I would love to know a little more about your tech stack and architecture? You say "Everything is saved locally by default", with full office support. Essentially you have built a "local-first" app, or about 10 of them! I would definitely play on that for marketing, the local-first place is getting quite a bit of buzz. (I'm biased, but I think 2024 if the year local-first is going to go mainstream) What tech are you using for conflict resolution for offline edits, I'm guessing you have generalised this in some way? Are you using CRDTs? And any particular local-first database tech? Have you considered adding any real-time multiplayer features? If you've solved the offline edit problems, you are 95% of the way to real-time.
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    It's on GCP and 99% "serverless" with TypeScript + React frontend. Flutter for mobile apps and Electron for desktop apps (planning to switch the desktop apps to Flutter too once their desktop frameworks are more stable) Noted on the "local-first" term, thanks! I thought about doing CRDT in the beginning, but because not every block type is text, I simplified the implementation to last write wins. Note that every paragraph is a block, so it's not like the entire page is overwritten. CRDT is still doable though. There are real-time text cursors and block selections, but I intentionally did not implement Figma-style floating cursors that people may expect in certain modules. I thought it looks cool but doesn't offer much value, especially when you can already see what other people selected.
    • prismatix 3y ago
      Interesting you say that because I've always felt like a big drawback of Google Docs is the inability to see the floating cursor. It doesn't feel as immersive as, say, Figma editing. However, I'm just one person and my opinion doesn't speak for them all! It'd be interesting to see an A/B test with this sort of functionality.
    • yangcheng 3y ago
      Have you thought about use flutter for web as well? It seems a lot of effort to maintain 2 codebase for web and desktop
• rtcoms 3y ago
  What is the tech stack you've used this for ?
• stareatgoats 3y ago
  Some thoughts while installing this in order to test (and trying to find the pricing page): I believe putting interoperability first is the right idea, and we have barely begun to scratch the surface of opportunities in this area. The browser based technologies can gain an upper hand here because of the platform independence and reusability of technologies across functionalities. That said, there is an enormous amount of work required to match the functionalities of legacy programs: interoperability itself is probably not enough to compete with these. I believe the most viable route is some sort of open source solution. The amount of VC financing would likely need to be staggering for a solution like this to gain any major traction. (That is, unless an LLM can be made to produce the whole thing over a weekend at some point in the near future ...)
  • macspoofing 3y ago
    >I believe putting interoperability first is the right idea, and we have barely begun to scratch the surface of opportunities in this area. Is it really 'interoperability' if it cannot integrate with any external applications?
    • stareatgoats 3y ago
      I'm sure programs like this can achieve the same interoperability with external programs as other applications that already do this. That's a fairly primitive level of integration though, compared to the possibilities that would seem to open once you control both sides of the API.
• cabalamat 3y ago
  > In Nino, pages and blocks are interoperable with each other what does a "block" mean in this context?
• YPPH 3y ago
  Gee whiz, the scope of features is super impressive at such an early stage. It's a very unusual experience to be able to integrate pretty much any object in one module into another module - a big conceptual shift. Can I suggest you include a dummy workspace in each user's account demonstrating the product to its full potential? Or at least give me an option when creating a workspace to make it into a demo. This might not only benefit the user, but you too, as you'll have to think about the purpose of the product and how it can be leveraged in a business context. Good luck.
• localhost 3y ago
  For sure this is a super-impressive (solo?) effort and I'm certain a ton of work went into this. Some feedback: Who is the customer for this? Can you describe what their day looks like and how Nino helps them get their work done better/faster/cheaper? What are the top 5 problems that they face that Nino is clearly better than the competition? Be specific and show the workflows. Where do they work? Who do they collaborate with? What are they collaborating on? Do the same exercise - SxS comparison with how they do things in existing tools and show how Nino is clearly better than their existing solution. Finally, don't ever underestimate how difficult it is to get people to change from whatever they are doing today. Today is not 1990 - people have been using solutions to the general information worker problem for decades now. Why will they switch?
• pintxo 3y ago
  As no one has asked so far, I’ll have to do it, how does this differentiate itself from Lotus Notes?
  • rblatz 3y ago
    That was my exact thought. Sounds like a very similar idea. Would love to know what they are thinking would be the differentiator between Notes and their offering? Specifically the hat advantages they have that would lead them to think their offering would gain traction were as Notes has been on a long slow decline.
    • pintxo 3y ago
      Maybe NOT using F5 to lock the user session?
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    You brought up great history! Shout out to the first ever (popular) integrated software Lotus 1-2-3/Symphony/Notes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_software)
  • refset 3y ago
    It runs on L̶o̶t̶u̶s̶S̶c̶r̶i̶p̶t̶ JavaScript. Speaking of, Mitch Kapor's 1984 memo is turning 40 this year: > With the formal commencement of the "Notes" project upon us, it seemed appropriate to set down a few brief notions about the project, its scope, and its strategic importance to Lotus. This material should be regarded as more than highly confidential. https://web.archive.org/web/20180225100127/http://www.kapor.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Notes-Project.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20180225100127/http://www.kapor.... Also discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13168969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13168969
  • toyg 3y ago
    I hope, for OP's sake, that it's not a bloated, corruption-prone, garbage-pile of junk. That would already differentiate it quite well from Notes.
• xyst 3y ago
  The problem here is that people are not trained on YOUR implementation. Everything you have listed here is very nice to have (offline mode, interoperability, …) , but MS (with O365) or G (with G Suite) are often available for free to students, teachers, and professors at critical stages in life. Just look at Apple with their productivity suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote). The market penetration is probably worse than LibreOffice. The academic setting often carries over to the professional setting. Changing workflows is one of the pain points I would see in migrating to this. I do think it looks nice and I do hope you succeed though! Good luck.
  • blehn 3y ago
    You could've said the same about Notion and its current valuation is at least 10B. Don't let this kind of feedback deter you, OP.
    • ozim 3y ago
      Valuation cool, but are they profitable or still burning money. As a solopreneur you don’t have piles of cash to burn to make people use it.
      • lupire 3y ago
        They burned money but 2024 will show if they can maintain or grow revenue without more cash infusion.
  • andai 3y ago
    I heard that if you want to convince people to switch from what they're used to, you can't just be 10% better, you need to be 10x better.
  • herewego 3y ago
    How is this different than what any new market entrant encounters? This is what sales and marketing is for; business as usual. I’ve never launched a product that the world was familiar with before I launched it.
• samstave 3y ago
  (I know this is out of scope, but I LOVE this - and just some other-think: So - crazy LLM idea for you: Rather than NEW - give me a prompt box: "make me a sheet of all my movies and grab the IMDB ratings and sort my library amd then give me a publishable page to my blog" Such comments make your app more powerful. HOWEVER - Making a new sheet is really FN confusing, https://i.imgur.com/Pd64RUk.png https://i.imgur.com/Pd64RUk.png Am I supposed to create each FN cell? What the F am I doing: https://i.imgur.com/U6Gx1nU.png https://i.imgur.com/U6Gx1nU.png
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    Awesome idea. Thanks! For the Sheet module, when you create a new field in the modal view, it'll be available to all other records too within the page, as you probably found out.
• keerthiko 3y ago
  Since I haven't seen it mentioned here, our small team adopted coda[0] in 2020 which has a similar thesis, as our organization's central information hub, and have not looked back. It has the simplicity of falling back to plaintext, but whenever we want to structure data better gives us tables, charts, publishable forms, sites, etc. It's exciting to have more tools in this space, as I think it addresses a major use case across workplaces in today's world of remote-centric work: Asynchronous knowledge transfer and documentation, especially amongst non-technical workers and organizations. Extremely poor documentation of process and practices, largely because of poor documentation tools (just word docs and the like) is the biggest knowledge-hole I have observed within non-tech workplaces. [0]: https://coda.io https://coda.io
• xbar 3y ago
  Great start!
• chime 3y ago
  Great job on the launch. Your pricing is reasonable for small biz, but I'm unclear on what "Email" in https://nino.app/pricing https://nino.app/pricing means. Does that mean you offer email hosting like Outlook/Gmail or email support? For anyone not in the 365 corporate world looking for office apps, you're unfortunately competing with https://workspace.google.com/pricing https://workspace.google.com/pricing, regardless of the unique feature set you offer. For anyone looking for a no-code solution, your pricing is very low for one person startup when compared to https://www.softr.io/pricing https://www.softr.io/pricing but would get pricey for a team of 5-10. I am someone you should target because I help startups get started, with low/no code solutions. I also use many paid solutions personally like Cozi.com, Zoom, and ProtonMail for managing my life. I can see your tech is great and what you need is to figure out your place in the market. Where are you positioned in comparison to Zoho, HubSpot, and Zapier? How can I integrate you with Shopify? Also, you need a LOT of templates for https://about.nino.app/en/site https://about.nino.app/en/site I applaud you for building what you've already built in such a competitive and demanding market. You need a hook - the one thing I cannot get easily from any of your competitors, which would make it easy for me to suggest you to a founder. I don't think offline mode or security cut it.
  • lenova 3y ago
    > Your pricing is reasonable for small biz, but I'm unclear on what "Email" in https://nino.app/pricing https://nino.app/pricing means. Does that mean you offer email hosting like Outlook/Gmail or email support? That's under their `Support` section (as in, they're offering support via email).
  • rnotaro 3y ago
    Unrelated but I didn't knew Google AppSheet[1] existed before seeing it on that pricing page. Interesting. >The fastest way to build apps and automate work >With Google AppSheet, you can build powerful solutions that simplify work. No coding required. [1] https://about.appsheet.com/home/ https://about.appsheet.com/home/
• bitzun 3y ago
  This is very impressive, but if I'm going to go through the pain of not using gsuite/O365, I'm not going to consider something I can't self host or export to one of those quickly if your saas fails.
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    You can export everything in 1-click! It only supports JSON, HTML, CSV for now tho. PDF support will come at one point.
    • YPPH 3y ago
      I don't mean any disrespect, but I made an incredibly basic doc - the JSON export is unlikely to be helpful, and the HTML export is essentially broken for a lot of features, such as an equation. I think that getting perfect PDF exports should definitely be up there on the priorities. Might help you hone the document model too.
      • bitzun 3y ago
        This is the sort of question I would ask of the export route (vs the much preferable self-host route), thanks for testing it out. If one could export office formats, e.g. docx for docs that'd probably be the best. The more I look at this app the more I'm impressed, though.
      • harrisonlo 3y ago
        Noted. You're definitely not the only one asking this, so it's top on the list. Side note: I did start implementing PDF exports, but for anyone curious, it's actually a lot more complex than imagined. There is no easy way to turn HTML to PDF (if anyone knows otherwise, please share) and there are font and language complications.
        • pbronez 3y ago
          Perhaps you could target the PanDoc AST for export (and import!). That’s probably the single most robust document conversion tool available. Plus it’s open source so you can get some force multiplication on all the edge cases. Personally, I’d love to do contract management with a system like this. Each clause could be a block with its own version control history. Easy to query a subset of them into a spreadsheet or slide deck. Main challenge is that all the lawyers will want it in MSFT Word for tracking changes during negotiations, so need to seamlessly interoperate with .docx https://pandoc.org/ https://pandoc.org/
• ramijames 3y ago
  I'm not really sure that I see an "app chaos problem". For each company/job workflow that I've encountered, there are a set of apps that solve for the specific use-case. For example as the head of devrel at the last company that I worked for, we used Atlassian products for internal documentation and work tracking, we used Google's docs and sheets for collaborative writing with external teams, and we used github and markdown for external docs building. It's all text, but the work flows were different, had different needs (like permissions), and ultimately we found the right tools for the job. I wish you luck with this endeavor, but I hope that your looking for a specific problem. To solve that isn't "app chaos".
  • d3w4s9 3y ago
    Exactly, my company have a similar setup and I don't think people have trouble figuring out which tool to use or how they work with each other. Nino seems to try to solve a problem that hardly exist.
• rkagerer 3y ago
  Word, Excel, Google Sheets, Access, etc. All of these are substantial software titles with massive feature sets. How do you propose to offer even a fraction of the capability and at a high caliber of quality when your focus is spread so thin across so many of them? I acknowledge I'm coming across as a naysayer, but I almost didn't click the link because my common sense insisted it must be a toy, and you might need to overcome a similar initial reaction from other prospective users.
  • nine_k 3y ago
    I'd say that most people don't use the massive feature sets, they use the basics. For them, this offering may suffice, given the other upsides it may have, like self-hosting. With time, more features will be added, as revenue grows and the demands become more sophisticated. If you remember, at launch Google Sheets were relatively bare-bones, as were Google Docs.
    • macspoofing 3y ago
      >I'd say that most people don't use the massive feature sets, they use the basics. That's true .. but the problem is that there is a long tail of more advanced features than are needed. That is, for any given advanced feature only a small number of users care about those, but if you aggregate all the 'small number of users' that need some advanced feature, that number can be quite substantial. >If you remember, at launch Google Sheets were relatively bare-bones, as were Google Docs. Right, and Google Docs did not make any meaningful traction in the enterprise - and it still has issues outside of education. What Google Docs did do well when they came out was 1) Have great live/collaborative document editing, 2) 100% web-based - so it worked great on Macs, PCs and Linux systems and 3) even though they were feature-poor, they still had a base level of features that was much greater than what Nino has today .. So Google Docs was able to find a nice niche - I was finishing up University that around that time, and it was great to use that for projects. Keep in mind, Google Docs was released mid-2000s - it could get away with being feature-poor compared to Office and rely on its 'secret sauce' of being free and 100% web-based. This isn't enough today.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• JCharante 3y ago
  It looks like Nino Sheet doesn't have the ability for chained functions, just applying 1 function to the column. I don't think it's a good replacement for Excel / Google Sheets. Can it get to that point given enough dev time? Absolutely.
• ska-dev 3y ago
  Looks like a mammoth undertaking with endless avenues for improvement, how do you decide what is worthy and what to leave on the backlog?
• tiffanyh 3y ago
  1st, Congrats on shipping. This is a major milestone 99% of us don’t accomplish but you have. 2nd, Unsolicited feedback, the copy needs major editing: - It’s focused on the “how”, when it should be about the “who & what” (who should buy this and what problem does it solve for them). I literally don’t know what this is for or if I’m a target buyer of needed solution. (Even your intro of the product here on HN is better than what I read on the site itself). Notion.com has good concise copy you might want to look at. - focus on problem uses cases it solve, not implementation details (like how it can be a building block platform) - Pricing page is very confusing. (A) There’s essentially no differentiation between the various price tiers, which is an issue and (b) it’s way too complex in what it shows. - Address how your product is different than competition (than the all-in-one platforms like Zoho, Notion, - which I assume is your competition but still not 100% sure) Wishing you all the best & success.
• laserDinosaur 3y ago
  "Unlimited free trial" I finally found the pricing page (it's strange only having it in the footer and not the top of the site), and I guess you are referring to the free tier. Which is both NOT a trial (it doesn't expire) and NOT unlimited (there's a 10K block limit). The copy there is confusing since it's actually the opposite - a limited free tier.
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    Thanks for pointing that out. I actually had "generous free tier" but worried some people might not think it's generous...I'll think of something better
• felixg3 3y ago
  Looks awesome, but Lego will come after you for your logo.
  • AndroTux 3y ago
    100%. They're very protective of their studs. I’d recommend changing that logo before gaining enough traction for LEGO to notice it.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• HiPHInch 3y ago
  Did anyone else tried page embed? My attempt doesn't work.
• crazygringo 3y ago
  First of all, I want to congratulate you on what seems to be a massive (solo?) technical achievement. I can't even imagine the amount of work that must have gone into building all of this and making it function. There's clearly a huge amount of engineering talent behind this, so a million kudos to you on that! That being said, since you're asking for feedback -- if you're trying to turn this into a business, there are three major issues that immediately jump out at me: 1) What is your actual business strategy? It appears like you're trying to compete directly against Microsoft and Google, but they have literally thousands of engineers working nonstop on the long tail of features businesses require. Your spreadsheet app looks fine for making lists or simple functions, but I'm assuming it doesn't do pivot tables, or 1,000 other things businesses do with Excel that they need to do. You simply can't compete against Microsoft and Google unless you have hundreds of millions in venture capital at a minimum, and since users need a lot of those long-tail features, it's not clear to me who you think is your customer? 2) What makes it better than Microsoft/Google? It's not a pain point for me that all my info in Google Workspace is split up between apps, because they all interoperate perfectly well in all the ways I need (I think). It doesn't matter to me whether I have 18 apps on my phone, or 18 icons within a single app. Your home page talks about "modular" and "pages" and "blocks" but even after browsing for a while, I don't understand exactly what those are, nor do I have any idea why I would want them. I would suggest that, to start, your home page needs to present 3 clear, obvious ways Nino is better in terms of how it helps the user. E.g. what is a basic common workflow that Nino lets you do in 5 clicks, that requires 1000 clicks in MS/Google and 100 lines of scripting? How is this going to save somebody hours/days/weeks of their time? Potential users don't really care about whether something is apps or modules -- they care about whether it lets them get their work done faster. 3) Whether it is or not, it looks like a solo project. It doesn't look like a business. It doesn't look like you've hired marketing professionals who can explain what it does, it doesn't look like you've hired a graphic designer to give the site a unique brand identity, and there are even a lot of subtle mistakes in the English copy ("by having all tools in one place" needs to be "all your tools", "we only collect metrics on the server-side" needs to be "collect metrics server-side", etc.). I can see that you know what you're doing as an engineer, but none of this inspires confidence that you know what you're doing as a business. I couldn't recommend anybody purchase your software because I simply don't trust that you'll be around a year from now. Again, I want to congratulate you on such a truly massive technical achievement. But it's hard for me to see this taking off as a business the way it looks right now. What I would do is suggest two possible directions, depending on your personal preferences: a) If you want to turn this into a large business that competes with Google and Microsoft, identify and rank the use cases where this is superior. Find a cofounder with more of a business/product management background, and an enterprise sales cofounder as well, get VC funding, and figure out how you can be a "disruptor" by meeting enterprise needs in ways that Google/MS somehow can't do. b) Or if you just want to focus on your awesome engineering accomplishments, open-source this as something people run on the cloud of their choice -- that way potential customers don't need to worry as much about you going out of business. Get other engineers interested and turn it into something 100's+ of people are invested in maintaining and building features for. And then build a consulting business on top of it, where you and people you hire visit enterprises, set it up for them, build their business logic flows for them, provide phone support and SLA's and all that stuff. Sorry for this super-long comment, but I hope it helps. You've really built something incredibly impressive, and I want to see you succeed!
• growingkittens 3y ago
  I think this has a lot of potential for non-technical knowledge users. At Google and Microsoft, files are available throughout the ecosystem. If I understand correctly, Nino makes the data within files available throughout the ecosystem. This is a fundamentally different workflow. Google and Microsoft seem to have disparate teams working on their ecosystem. Their products work in a system, but not as a system. There's little to no integration past surface level connections.
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    That's correct. Thanks for coming up with a new way to explain it!
    • growingkittens 3y ago
      Nino's workflow is on my "technology wishlist"! I study systems and system dynamics. The technology we have is capable of so much more, but so little of it works as a system. Nino is a step in the right direction. Imagine a standard for sharing data between apps like Nino! Nino faces an uphill battle in competing with Google, Microsoft, and other ecosystems baked into our lives. I really want it to succeed so I can use it, but the paths to success are few. One possible failure mode has an opportunity: using your experience gained and organizational momentum to create the standard for app interoperability like Nino.
• csmpltn 3y ago
  One of the most important features to get right for tools like this is collaborative editing. It's incredibly difficult to get this right (live preview, conflict resolution, history management, etc), especially given how the vast majority of users are non-technical folks (which aren't used to toolks like git). Could you expand a bit on how you intend to tackle this problem in Nino?
  • klabb3 3y ago
    I actually think this hyper-granular realtime collaboration like in Google docs is slightly overrated. I think it’s ok to have more a git-like workflow where feedback and changes happen over cycles. As a programmer, I don’t give a shit about your working directory. I do care, however, about your commits :) All I’m saying is this CRDT craze isn’t always necessary or even appropriate for many products. It adds a lot of technical complexity, especially for a small shop.
    • q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
      > I actually think this hyper-granular realtime collaboration like in Google docs is slightly overrated. Disagree, with the caveat that I understand how it can feel overrated if you're not using the new ways of remote collaboration that it enables. The fully-live remote-collaboration UX in tools like Google Docs [1] and Figma is magical because you can get on a video call with people [2] and co-create, in the moment, without having to fumble with all the nonsense of figuring out who's "driving" and who's "navigating." Since you're all looking at and editing the same doc, everyone can arrange their windows to have a line of faces along the side and the doc in the center. It's actually better than in-person collaboration. There's no haggling over who's got the whiteboard marker, no one sneezing on everyone else, no crowding around to make sure everyone can see the board... All the extra nonsense drops away, and you get to be just a group of people making something together. [1]: Notably, Google Sheets uses a much more ham-handed idea of "realtime." A cell appears "locked" while someone else is editing it, and you don't see their work until they hit Enter. So you end up having to sit there like a buffoon while they type, their work invisible to you, and that friction destroys the magic of live collaboration. [2]: If you don't do much remote work/collaboration with others around the world, then none of this matters — and it's easy to miss the world of possibilities that this feature unlocks.
• callalex 3y ago
  Edit: I want to start with something nice since this discussion seems like it could be overwhelming you. Nice job on the name, it’s short, memorable, and works in many languages while not already being associated with something else. If I build my business on your platform but your funding dries up next year because you didn’t 10x enough times to hold gnat/VC attention what happens to all my stuff?
• not_your_mentat 3y ago
  This looks really neat! I'd be interested in giving it a try, but doing so would replace existing tools and workflow. As a user, I'm unwilling to do this is I can't both own my data and application hosting. If Nino doesn't pan out and the product gets shut down, how do I continue to access my now (trigger warning, words used to describe as I understand, not critique) tightly coupled proprietary data? Can I self host? Is source code available? Are document formats open? How do I not get screwed as an enthusiastic adopter in the unhappy case that things don't work out? If I put my data in and the product isn't working for me, how do I get my data out?
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    Thanks. I think the concern about software provider shutting down is valid. Heck, I still remember being pissed when Google deprecated two products I used within a month (a few months back). Self-hosting might be too complex to setup, but do you think single tenant offering helps? I don't know if it makes sense for individuals tho. In addition to HTML & CSV, there is an option to export JSON, which supports more formats. In a way, it is an open format (.json) but I'll have to add relevant documentation. PDF support will also come at one point.
    • buildbuildbuild 3y ago
      Self-hosting is key for us as well. Companies working with sensitive data really value "on-device" / "on-premises" architecture, which it looks like you're close to nailing. Check out Bitwarden and Gitlab's self-hosting approaches, and congrats on the launch. I'm excited to try it. And regarding self-hosting complexity, start with a "docker-compose up" example and iterate from there.
  • bertil 3y ago
    One great solution for that would be the approach many advanced Markdown editors like Obsidian have: the documents remain usable. You might lose some benefits (the integration between documents in a graph-like structure) that are specific to the tool. Still, your work is preserved in a universal format that anyone can leverage. Most elements of Nano have widely accepted standards, presumably easy to integrate, so that guarantee should be doable.
• usernamed7 3y ago
  > app that supports 18 modules, saving you time from switching and integrating between different providers. this is not a compelling pitch. I can tell you this and other "problems" you identified have not been real problems in places i've worked. you're trying to play the same game that google and microsoft are losing at. that's not a solid strategy. I think you should take a page from basecamp and focus on a subset of these that small businesses would be interested in.
• johndevor 3y ago
  Small nitpick: Chrome isn't auto saving the password field for me.
• D-Se 3y ago
  If I were going to make a hard switch from apps I use (docs, sheets, todo, meet, ...), I would do so from the conviction I don't want vendor lock-in, and want to own my data. I like the concept. The Collection module seems powerful. Yet, I question the scalability - how long should users wait, for example, for a <tab> to be possible in a code block, in a notebook? Since you're looking for feedback; - support markdown where possible, and include links like Obsidian, include Unicode completion like Julia REPL. Point and click is nice, but shortcuts/common syntax is expected, - support scripting via a modern language, - let users write plugins for modules / modules.
• continuational 3y ago
  I think there's a lot of potential in this idea! I've been pondering how to pull this off for a very long time. My 5 minute test run: - For documents, I couldn't figure out how to make anything but plain text. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl+/ doesn't work on my keyboard (no "/" key). - For sheets, I couldn't figure out how to write a formula. And this isn't a really a spreadsheet, it's a database table, which is a related but distinct thing (more structure, but less freedom).
• urbandw311er 3y ago
  Honest and genuine feedback. I am concerned that you may be working on something that does not have a market in its present form, or possibly ever. I am worried as to how much of your life / time / money you might be pouring into this. It is difficult for me to be categorical about this, as for all I know it's a tiny side venture and you're not bothered about adoption. But, based on the marketing copy / launch, previous HN posts and your comments here, it does seem that you feel this could potentially compete with Workspace/Zoho/365/Notion with the USP that it's more tightly integrated, plus some local storage and encryption benefits. I think that's quite a stretch. And that's not to dismiss or play down what you've achieved. What you have created is, measured on sheer volume of work/technical accomplishment (and assuming it's a solo project completed in around 1-2 years, when you first began posting about it) really impressive for a solo dev. I say this as somebody who considers themself a fairly speedy full-stack dev. There is a lot of complex functionality - an MVP recreation of Docs, Drive, Airtable (e.g. Sheets, which appears to be an 'Airtable'-style visual database with support for multiple datatypes) and the UI is, in many parts, clean, fluid and responsive. All this is without even trying/testing the additional 4-5 client apps! But in my opinion, the difference between your current product and something that would gain significant adoption is light years. Just some very basic examples: adding keyboard shortcuts to the docs module, drag and drop table re-ordering, image resizing, multiple fonts, page sizing, tabs, a ruler, text flow options and layout. (just the basics here to get it to circa-Word-2000 level) The need for a spreadsheet module. File permission management, upload progress, account onboarding, help and support. The UX of the workspace itself - at the moment it's unclear why some modules exist (what is a 'canvas'? Why would I need it? Same question for a 'grid'. Don't make me work to discover this, tell me upfront. Inline help, or example documents would help steer users). I could write out a ton more examples, but I'm not trying to beat you over the head, more just to illustrate that the road ahead of you is far longer than you might imagine. If there's just one of you developing this, then I'm not sure how long it would take to just get even one of these modules up to feature parity with a close competitor. This, plus the maintenance, support.. ..and that's before we even begin to discuss the issues around marketing and onboarding, which are probably the area where you're most significantly falling short. Some of your UI choices bely a certain naivety, for example why would you choose to name a module 'Sheet's, when this is already the name of a popular web spreadsheet, and your module appears to be something other than a spreadsheet? This introduces confusion and frustration for users and makes me question your ability to succesfully get this project to profitability. Much of your main website doesn't do a great job of explaining to a layperson what the product is, why they'd want to use it, or giving real-world examples. Even the screenshots on your Play Store app don't really provide good reasons to download, or insights into concrete use cases. Why would somebody pay for this in the era of free-Google-Docs or $5 Zoho plans? How much B2C marketing money would you need to spend to market it to them just so they're aware of its existence in the first place? I know how difficult this might be to hear, and I don't want to demotivate you, in fact quite the opposite. The thing is, I have had several occasions during my career when I was in a similar place to this. I have, in the past, obsessively focussed on product development, with my head in the sand about market potential. It's great that you have now asked for feedback and I'd rather risk annoying you than squander an opportunity to make you sit up and think for a moment, even if you end up choosing to ignore me. I'm sure that, if you chose to take a different path with this IP/product, there would be lots to salvage and some valuable learnings to build upon based upon all the code you've created and approaches you've refined. As a suggestion, would you perhaps be better off here just taking one single component and making that world-beating, instead of trying to develop 18 different modules to pre-MVP quality. Whatever you decide, you're clearly a very talented and prolific developer. Very best of luck with everything.
• iamcasen 3y ago
  Very impressive from a technical perspective. I should know, since I worked on a startup for 3 years who attempted to productize a similar system. If this can scale, I think you have a very valuable foundation. Did you build Nino Meets using AWS Chime? I'm curious. Now for the feedback: Because the use cases are so broad and all-encompassing, marketing and onboarding into your system will be a huge challenge. Do not underestimate it. At my startup, we hired onboarding specialists since most small business owners we were attracting were not exactly engineers. They needed a lot of hand holding to understand how all the parts went together. Take notion as an example, they have a huge community dedicated to showcasing things you can build. Even then, I don't really like notion because it is such a blank canvas. It's a hard hurdle to overcome! I think a valuable next step would be to partner with people from different industries to create custom templates that are built on top of your more general purpose foundation. Those templates should reliably solve specific work flows that those users would be familiar with, and they should have no trouble getting up and running right away. If you can solve that, you will really have something! Your current website looks like docs for other engineers, so I'd strongly suggest creating a few more websites, each one branded and showcasing specific workflows for the target audience you are looking to convert.
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    Nino Meet is built on LiveKit, shout out to them! Thanks for the actionable feedback regarding marketing and onboarding. You're spot on that the home page is being like docs for other engineers, I didn't even realize I was doing that.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• duckman1 3y ago
  So you've made a new tool to solve the excess of tools problem? Right.
• pbronez 3y ago
  Ok, lots of thoughts. I’ve reviewed the website and started drafted this as a Nino Doc. Haven’t dug into the more complex functionality yet. # Tactical Feedback On iOS, my password manager doesn’t recognize the Nino app with the Nino.app domain, so autofill doesn’t work at login. Not a problem, just a little friction. Breaking problem on iOS: I cannot type the letter “m”. It appears to trigger a keyboard shortcut that toggles a reorder paragraph block mode. I had to abandon Nino and finish this write up in Notes. In iOS Nino Doc, it’s not obvious how to “Select All —> Copy”. Moving from Nino to Notes I had to copy each paragraph block individually. Concur that it would be good to have some templates or something to orient on first app open. I tried “Notebook” first because I assumed it was like “Notepad”, a very light text editor. Seems to be more like a Jupyter notebook? Maybe an easy way to address this would be to add a tag line for each document type. Just a couple words to orient folks beyond the name. Perhaps add a “compare to X” as well. # Strategic Feedback First, the “too many tools” problem is real. Lotus Notes was good. There is appetite for consolidation in some large enterprises. It’s impossible to get a big organization to switch over to this directly. You need to target smallish teams (10s of people) that can make their own decisions. Security is everything. Recommend you review Sandstorm’s capability security model. That was the most promising productivity revolution I’ve seen in a while. It failed in part because they expected other people to write applications to their security model. If you can deliver the fine grained security AND a broad swath of functionality, you have something really special. End to end encryption is excellent. Let me bring my own keys. Some more specifics on security: Block level security would be a killer feature. Especially if it goes beyond RBAC to ABAC. In my world, you frequently want to share a document with someone who is only authorized to view part of it. Automatically redacting the parts they aren’t supposed to see would be amazing. Then allow those blocks to be reused, with the same security labels, in many different contexts and app paradigms? Honestly it would be amazing and I could sell it. Next thing on security is data sovereignty. Absolutely respect going single region GCP to start. However, self-hosting will be an immediate ask in my world. Several tiers of this, all of which you can absolutely up charge for. First, single tenet instances. Give me assurance that when bugs show up, they won’t leak my data to other customers. Second, enterprises will want to run it within their VPC/Tenet that they already use / trust / audit. The major cloud vendors have regions focused on different industries, you need to be able to run there without calling home to your central instance. Third, direct self hosting. Especially for smaller teams with poor connectivity back to the cloud. Can I run this on a NUC out of a trailer to help coordinate disaster recovery efforts? Can I host it in a VM on dedicated hardware where I understand the cost, capacity and backup story? Google and Microsoft can’t do this, so you can differentiate. See Next Cloud for a good approach to this. Finally, interoperability. You have many different app views into the core block abstraction, but there will always be other tools and databases in play. Make it super easy for those external things to read and write blocks. Don’t write the integrations - just expose the API. Good luck!
• smugglerFlynn 3y ago
  So are you competing with 18 different products at the same time? Or is this just a glorified note taking & publishing app? Either way I am getting strong https://zombo.com/ https://zombo.com/ vibes from the description here and your landing page. Instead of a clear problem statement and user use cases, you have this word salad of “consolidation” (of what?), “superapp” (that does what?), “unmatched privacy” (to do privately what?) and “offline mode” (I still have no idea what I can do with the app, but apparently I can do this something offline?). That said, I am double surprised with all the praise comments here on HN. Can someone explain in one sentence what this app is supposed to do?
  • Solvency 3y ago
    "Privately consolidate your multi-app documents offline." Like a desktop folder!
  • tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    The same thing as Microsoft or Google suites, which is to minimize workflow and maximize productivity by allowing apps to be interconnected. I will say however that I agree, the page doesn’t sell me on much. The apps/“modules” themselves are not well displayed and I am not convinced even by its unique points such as its (eventual?) encryption, namely due to how opaque it all is. I wish it was more transparent, between its file formats, its encryption standards and implementation, and how it actually works.
    • smugglerFlynn 3y ago
      Do you have a practical example of such interconnectedness (or lack thereof?)
• monroewalker 3y ago
  This must have taken serious effort, congrats! Lots of those features seem like huge time sinks Btw at a glance, this looks pretty similar to Microsoft Loop which just came out. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-loop https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-loop
• m-p-3 3y ago
  I'll give it a shot, see if that works well for us to manage a hobby-project (non-profit) we're running in our spare time. Looks quite neat :)
• kkfx 3y ago
  Do not take it as a judgment of your work, it's instead a broad observation using your work as a catalyzer to state it: I have much more integration with a much older app, it's name is Emacs, in my case it feature: - a Windows Manager, module named EXWM - a very powerful noting tool, org-mode - integrate to the note module there is file attachments, calendar, tasks, ... - a mail module, notmuch in my case, fully usable inside the note tool, so I can link a single message, a thread or a search query in a note, something simple as notmuch-search:tag:unread that open all my unread messages. - of course being a fully user programmable environment a mere link can execute code, meaning I have a clickable link to transform a note into a slide (zpresent, my favorite, but a mere zoom might suffice in most cases), a link can open a mail compose buffer and so on - I have various nice file handling goodies like mass renaming, regex selection and so on. This since DECADES. Now ending the joke the statement: classic desktop model feature an OS witch is a complete user-programming environment, apps are just bits of code, listings part of the OS, meaning that if you have a CAS functionality you can solve an ODE inside an email you compose, annotating it while composing and made a slide out of it. Take a look at https://youtu.be/B6jfrrwR10k https://youtu.be/B6jfrrwR10k for Emacs, a demo for Pharo (a modern Smalltalk, the oldest of such classic desktop systems from Xerox) https://youtu.be/Pot9GnHFOVU https://youtu.be/Pot9GnHFOVU and so on. The statement is simple: for COMMERCIAL REASONS we tried to subdivide and isolate software to sell it in pieces, oh, for decades people have SUFFERED without knowing the existence of alternatives such crappy model, a step at a time, with decades of time in between old features are reintroduced selling them as news while they aren't, and only when someone have found a way to made them anti-user. Your project actually use one of such step, the modern web, witch is a limited and limiting anti-user version of classic DocUIs, since the user have essentially no practical control of them, at least not a comfy one, and rediscover the power of integration, but limited due to the limitation of today tools. Not made do mix data and code, not made for end-users programming and so on. I've no doubt it can succeed simply because it's a piece of an ancient tech we need, but the point remain: modern software is untenable and it block an enormous slice of potential innovation and computing power just to enslave users.
• swalling 3y ago
  I’d suggest making a demo video for your landing page. The concepts make sense, but to grok how they can be used, some demos (perhaps with SEO landing pages like “Nino for project management” or “Nino for documentation”) would be helpful.
• eurekin 3y ago
  If anybody asks me who do I want to be, when I grow up I'll point at this author
• sgarland 3y ago
  Single biggest thing you need to nail down fast: the data model. It is extremely hard to shift as things grow, and without careful thought, it’ll turn into a horrifying miasma of JSONB columns, duplicated data, orphaned rows, and garbage performance. Customers are going to store surprisingly large items in Docs, where you’d be tempted to inline them instead of offloading to S3 et al. Chat practically needs to be its own DB. Discord runs on Scylla, Slack runs on Vitess over MySQL. The needs of chat access are wildly different from other types of storage. If you’re doing any kind of active-active, have a plan for how to move off of that, because it does not scale (at least, not without breath-takingly expensive hardware). Source: DBRE at one of your competitors. EDIT: The fact that you’re doing offline saves (which is very cool!) makes me think that you may be using something like Ditto [0], which IIRC is MyRocksDB under the hood. I have no experience with either, but I do know some super sharp folks working at Ditto. [0]: https://ditto.live https://ditto.live
  • winrid 3y ago
    He's most likely using SQLite per account, because that's the easiest way to have an offline DB and sync it, which will most likely scale perfectly fine with appropriate indexes as long as you are careful about the feature set.
    • sgarland 3y ago
      That introduces a new problem when it syncs to others in the same workspace, if it’s large.
      • Mertax 3y ago
        Nice thing about SQLite is you can “clone” the repository by copying a single file. And in cases where you need incremental sync, you can use an SQLite of diff’s as a single packfile (similar to git). Things like cr-SQLite also have a lot of potential to make single SQLite per client a lot more viable. But I’m interested to see what you think the problems are? Have you found a solution or alternative?
  • japanman185 3y ago
• jsyang00 3y ago
  Microsoft Teams already is this as long as you don't care about anything basically working.
• howmayiannoyyou 3y ago
  I'm using whatboard.app to do much of this now, but your solution has a desktop app which is a nice addition.
• sergiotapia 3y ago
  Is this related to Zoho? I ask because many screenshots have the same Zoho colors and logos.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    Nope, but I guess the fake logos in the demo screenshot might remind you of them. Google also has these rainbow colors tho.
• Quanttek 3y ago
  To add to what other commenters said: Your app sounds very interesting, but the use cases and use scenarios remain a bit unclear. Personally, I would love to be able to just try it without having to sign up. Right now, the copy leaves the user experience very much in the dark
• blntechie 3y ago
  Wow, I have never been more impressed with any other Show HN before. The sheer number of features and platforms you have covered and also keeping to some core engineering principles at the same time is extremely impressive. I will be trying this product for sure and wish you all the best with this app.
• i13e 3y ago
  This looks really cool! I tried to sign up but it doesn't seem to be sending out verification emails right now. Will give it another go a bit later
• 2024user 3y ago
  Is this done by a single dev? If so, that's a massive risk for anyone who might start using these tools.
• d3w4s9 3y ago
  This is not the first product of the kind and won't be the last one. And they look great in theory but get complicated and very confusing and ultimately never find their place. People don't need an integrated tool that does everything. People need a few very good tools that work well with each other. Confluence/Jira is such an example, and to some extent Google's suite and Microsoft's, plus a few more. Unless you can do it better than them in each category -- doc, spreadsheet and project management etc -- people won't choose your product over those. (RIP Google Wave.)
  • berkes 3y ago
    Indeed. The issue I've repeatedly seen, is that ten different people, have ten different combinations and alternatives of what are "very good tools". And even then, these people aren't fixed in time. Maybe today I need a killer personal time tracker, tomorrow I might need an advanced scrum board and in two years I need a way to aggregate time tracking of a whole team. And that's just one tiny tool.
  • maxloh 3y ago
    I tried the "Doc", "Sheet" and "Slide" feature and each of them are incomplete and lacks most of the popular features. It would be better if the author uses existing solutions instead of implement them from ground up. editor.js [0] for documents and Grist [1] for spreadsheet are some good examples. [0]: https://editorjs.io/ https://editorjs.io/ [1]: https://www.getgrist.com/ https://www.getgrist.com/
    • harrisonlo 3y ago
      Do you mind sharing what you tried to do? So I can improve the feature discovery or add the features later on. Editor.js looks interesting. Nino Doc is based on ProseMirror. Never heard of grist before but I think react-datasheet-grid is a pretty good. I've been itching for a frontend rewrite of Nino Sheet.
  • feel-ix-343 3y ago
    Personally, I use neovim and markdown for everything.
• agluszak 3y ago
  The problem with modern apps is not that they are separate. The problem is that they are walled gardens with deliberately reduced interoperability, using non-open protocols and APIs.
• rodolphoarruda 3y ago
  The most chaotic landing page I've seen in ages. I've seen it on my computer. I can't imagine how it looks on a smaller screen.
• mvdtnz 3y ago
  There appears to be a demo thingy under the "The modular workspace" header but clicking on things doesn't seem to work.
• yoz 3y ago
  Initial impression after a few minutes of use: there may be a huge amount of power here, but the app and site seem to be completely lacking guidance and I've no idea what to do or how to learn. I've installed it on my Mac and am trying to add a set of records representing contacts with a couple of basic fields: name, phone, birthdate. I want to query those records elsewhere in other modules. The app is giving no guidance on how to do this. On open, it just shows me a blank tab, and I had to try a few different controls to work out how to add a module. I don't know which module I should use to add queryable records, so I'm trying Board. Now that I've added a board, I can add a first record but there doesn't seem to be a way to add a second. There are columns named "None" and "Unnamed"; the one named "None" has the first contact in it. Pressing the "+" button in the corner adds another column. Eventually, I drag the record from "None" to "Unnamed"; "None" disappears, now there's just "Unnamed", and I can add other records. I'll keep playing with it a little, but there's only so far that people can be expected to try to work out the usage model that you've designed this for. Sure, there are loads of modules, but how do they link together? An example setup for a fictional team might really help here.
  • 0thgen 3y ago
    I honestly found it pretty intuitive. Every module uses the same basic action-flow, which was super clever UI design on the creator's part
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    Noted on the lack of guidance and onboarding. I can see the confusion you had with the board module and have some ideas on improving it. Thanks for giving it a try.
    • joenot443 3y ago
      Piggybacking to say I really like GP's suggestion of a living demo the user can jump right into after onboarding. I'm working on a similarly open-ended product right now and I've been thinking hard on ways to avoid the daunting "what now?" feeling of being presented with a big, unfamiliar, blank canvas.
• j45 3y ago
  This is really impressive. Please keep in mind all feedback here in context with whether they have shipped anything this broad and through on their own. 2 questions: - I like what you have said about E2EE, is there any chance the implementation could become zero knowledge encryption? - There likely may be interest in the world where users will pay to be able to self host this, while you can continue to maintain and develop
• dwb 3y ago
  There is just no chance you'd hold my attention long enough to work out whether this was all width and no depth, or if it was actually good. If you're going to propose a new do-it-all system, it's got to be a lot more convincing than that.
• mavci 3y ago
  Redminds me of CryptPad https://cryptpad.fr https://cryptpad.fr
• ajvs 3y ago
  If you're going to offer an offline-capable Linux app then no-one wants to use Snap. AppImage or Flatpak is the way.
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    Curious what the argument is against Snap? They allow very easy updates
    • ajvs 3y ago
      It doesn't work on various distributions, lots of people disable it because of various issues like it being much slower to start, it can only connect to one backend at a time (which is Canonical's proprietary one) unlike Flatpak, and generally the Linux community has settled on Flatpak and AppImage as the preferred universal packaging formats.
• FrancoQA 3y ago
  nice article!
• justinl33 3y ago
  First experience with the app was 10/10; other than not being able to type the letter ‘m’ in my first Doc. Little things like these can make the difference between instant churn and lifetime users.
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    The letter 'm' bug is fixed on version 0.22.7, sorry about that!
• FrancoQA 3y ago
  good insights
• gwbas1c 3y ago
  I built something similar many years back. Mine was web based: https://github.com/GWBasic/ObjectCloud https://github.com/GWBasic/ObjectCloud What I would tell my younger self is to spend more time reading through YC's resources about how to start a business. In my case, I built something that I thought there was a need for; but I should have spent a lot more time iterating off of tangible customer needs. IE, I should have found a handful of customers who needed tight integration among these use cases and let their needs drive the implementation. Why? There are already plenty of applications that do the same functions. (MS Office, Google Drive, ect, ect.) These applications are mature, and well-understood by the whole market. I would suggest finding a few customers who are hampered by poor interoperability among 3+ applications / use cases, and focus on their use cases. It'll take you 15+ years to be as mature as products like MS Office, Google Drive, ect; but if you solve a niche's tangible, need, they won't care, because they can't operate their business without you.
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    Sorry I replied a little late, but thanks for the advice.
• rcarmo 3y ago
  Actually downloaded the Mac app and gave up on the Sign Up screen. I just don't want to have another login in another cloud service.
• nicbaranow 3y ago
  We have similar ideas at Frame (https://frame.so/); https://frame.so/); but more looking into offering a MacOS look and feel and oriented towards strictly productivity apps :)
• yieldcrv 3y ago
  and then 1 api changes and you go to update that, but find out that dependency you ignored the deprecation warning for no longer exists, and then you have to refactor your whole codebase, and then another api changes, and then another service discontinues api access entirely but it happened to be your most sought after integration so then you try making a headless scraper but their UI keeps changing but then…
• aetherspawn 3y ago
  A lot of people are saying to specialise your business or die. I think you have a good opportunity here to do what nothing else does quite well, and that is to implement a vertically integrated document management system for use cases such as ISO 9001 etc. Use case 1, document management: This basically just means that you need to implement the capability to “publish” a document version, permanently view that document version (think tag), and auto generate a document “identifier” using the companies naming convention (and allow this to be embedded automatically in the document so the client can use it too). The document ID might look something like SOP-2401001. Once a document is published it should be read-only, and you should be able to put artifacts a long with published documents … ie exported PDF copies, or signed copies or something. Use case 2, document siloing: One of the most difficult parts of document management is creating forms for procedures, and then teaching everyone how to not ruin the document management of these forms once they are filled. I have always wanted a silo that automatically copies a form when you start to fill it out, allocates it a brand new document ID, and collects it together with all the other forms of the same kind. This could be integrated with an automation platform so that ie if you fill out a form it sends someone an email or something like that. Or if you wanted to get really fancy, you could allow people to define “workflows” for documents and actually visually show a business process alongside a document.
  • squeezebees 3y ago
    This is indeed a clear market gap. Ideally it has the workflow features but they can also be swapped out. Enterprise market though as opposed to wherever this was aimed.
• autocole 3y ago
  If you haven't seen a team using Feishu/LarkSuite, then I'd make an effort to see how that works. It's essentially a super office app that does the whole "everything is integrated" significantly better than Microsoft and Google have with their office products. For example, you can share a document during a call and interact with others inside the live document.
• q2dg 3y ago
  If it can't be self-hosted, I have no interest. Thanks, anyway
• stevage 3y ago
  >solve the app chaos problem for today's knowledge worker I'm today's knowledge worker and I don't have an app chaos problem. Integration between different apps is not really an issue for me. Mostly I care about each individual app being as good as it possibly can be. I don't have any need for spreadsheets to integrate with calendars, or email to integrate with docs for instance.
• shp0ngle 3y ago
  Google Wave flahsbacks just from description... but I didn't click yet
• tony-allan 3y ago
  I notice that you have been working on this for a while [1] and announced a couple of modules last year so I expect you have already validated the concept with a bunch of users. I love the idea and played with a couple of modules and didn't find it intuitive (e.g. embedding a block from a sheet into a canvas using block embed) I also tried to drag and drop. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nino.app https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nino.app
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    Thanks for trying it out. Yeah sorry for the confusion, embedding a record was not allowed but I think enough people tried to do it so I'll enable it.
• jitl 3y ago
  Next, focus on making something some percent of your users will love. I think you have a good first pass technical implementation, and your next task is to polish your UX/UI to the point where at least one of your apps will inspire a following of passionate advocates. I don’t think your current pass will do that - the “all in one” interoperability angle alone wont be enough. The docs market is $100B+ - it’s huge, and highly contended. Notion targeted creative, designer types with great typography and minimal UI taste. Coda targeted Product Manager types with lots of features for building fluid workflows for complex projects. What’s going to be your first user story & angle?
• toasted-subs 3y ago
  Looks like a great set of starter apps if anybody wants to try and revive HP's WebOS.
• quickthrower2 3y ago
  It looks good. The problem for me, to use it is that Google Sheets and Docs are way more fully featured, even if they aren't integrated as neatly as you have done. You will need to find the people for who having calendars, docs and sheets in one place matters a lot. Maybe it is the kind of people who already use notion and obsidian etc. There are some UX things I think should be looked at: 1. New sheet asks me 'Create source' or 'select source'. One is black and the other blue. I assume they are both links? Looks like I need to click "Create source" to do the thing I would intuitively expect, which is to show me a blank spreadsheet to edit. 2. First column of a new spreadsheet is called "Name" and I cannot rename it, it only has sort options, but if I add another column it is called "unnamed" and I can rename it. I am not sure why this is. Since all I have been told at this point is that it is a "sheet" I am expecting a free homogenous experience like Excel. If it is not that, you might think about how to make it more obvious what it is. (Do I need training, a quick tutorial, a quick highlight-feature/click-next intro etc.?)
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    Thanks for the feedback. You would click the select source option if you want to use data from another page. Good catch on the name field not being rename-able, that feature will be added soon.
• novok 3y ago
  I would take your current marketing front page and make it the page for developers. Then I would work with a B2B SaaS marketer on what you actually need for the people who make the purchasing decisions. You made a great construction kit, now you need to demonstrate with actual app demos what you can make in an amazing way that your competitors cannot. Developers love making libraries and construction kits as a product, but almost nobody buys construction kits unless the target market is constructors (like dev tools). You need to turn this into an actual product normal people would use. I think your pretty close to that although, you just need a few extra steps for that. What your targeting is a next step evolution in the target market that microsoft office is targeting. You need to demonstrate with demo videos (not workflow diagrams) so this reality is more apparent with what you've made. Go talk to users, understand what their needs are and then create a message and glue features that would make that happen. Notion kind of languished for years in their 'productivity dudes' niche and then exploded relatively recently. Figure out how they made that transition. Looking at what you made, it effectively looks like a better notion. I would also look into what makes people transition off notion to a more specialized tool. Like you can do task management, standup tracking, etc with notion, but it doesn't scale after a while and people go on to things like linear and teamplify. What can make people scale with your tool? That will probably be a thing to think about at a later stage with your company product although.
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    Thanks for the advice. Appreciate it.
• voodooEntity 3y ago
  really would like to test it but not getting the verification email *shrug
• mvkel 3y ago
  Seeing this, the advice: "do one thing really well" comes to mind.
• splittydev 3y ago
  There seems to be no way to delete my account..
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    If you want delete your workspace after testing it, you can go to Tools > Workspace > Scroll down to the bottom, click "Danger Zone", type in password to delete it
• solidsnack9000 3y ago
  This seems like the logical direction to go. Many of these apps have to be opened up to each other -- they are "modules" in a system that each company has to cobble together -- because integration is part of how any work gets done with them. The effect is a sprawling and uncertain security and access story. Hopefully Nino can bring some harmony to all this. The simplicity of the end-to-end story -- from authoring to collaboration to content delivery -- is amazing. One thing I wonder about, though, is the effect on the engines of innovation. Something that works well about the current system -- where chat, spreadsheets, &c, are all disaggregated from each other and we have a big mess of access click-throughs -- is that many different firms can enter the space and bring new energy and ideas to these problems. Say all the apps were consolidated from the get-go -- would we ever have gotten the amazing profusion of capabilities we have now? I imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever. Even when the new generation of knowledge worker apps integrate plugins, they don't seem to integrate them in a way that is amenable to commercial enterprises. For example, Obsidian does not have paid plugins, to the best of my knowledge. Without the commercial incentive, how far can that really go?
• mgkimsal 3y ago
  Clicked link above. Went to site that pointed to me iOS app. Downloaded. Tried to sign in, but I have to register. It sent me an email verification link, which I clicked. Got to a web page that had a button to open the app again. Which I did. And was taken back to the sign in/sign up form. Can't get past that.
• jdthedisciple 3y ago
  Looks great! Unfortunately I couldn't manage to log in. I signed up, pressed on "create workspace" and for a verification link. Where do I set a password to log in? Also, did you create this using Flutter?
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    You can setup a password upon clicking on the verification link. Someone here suggested OTP and I think it's a good idea, might have that in the future instead. Yeah the mobile apps are built with Flutter.
  • mihalycsaba 3y ago
    Probably it is, based on the platforms it supports this early.
• silentsanctuary 3y ago
  Really liking it so far! An offline-first platform that lets you store your information in a central way and provides multiple forms of use and access is exactly what I've been trying to find, without much success until now. I'm not sure I've understood how to fully realise the promises of it though. I created a board, and added some records to it, alongside fields for additional data. It's not obvious to me how to use the calendar module using that board as a source. I don't have a way to see the existing records. I can create new records inside the calendar view, but when I look at that new record using the board, or using a sheet, the "Time" field disappears. The "Time" field appears only to be visible when looking at the records via that calendar. Similarly, the to-do lists don't seem to map the "checked" nature of the boxes to any field on the record. I would also like to be able to link to the record or embed its content in another page somewhere, but don't seem to see how. It would be nice to be able to immediately link to (or embed) blocks/records by using `[[` or `@` instead of just documents. In particular, it would be nice for the quick search to yield blocks/records as you type, and not have to fall back to the advanced search. Also, as an offline-first application, I would like to be confident the app is always fully synced - but after creating a few documents on my computer, then opening the first of them on my phone, I tried putting my phone into airplane mode, and once I'd done that I could open the other documents I'd opened before (great!) but when trying to open one of the others I'd created (that the app clearly knew about whilst it was online), it said "You're not connected to the internet". But well done on a really awesome implementation of an awesome idea so far! I think it's very cool, and has a lot of potential.
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    You raised an issue that I plan to fix soon. Currently certain fields (i.e. time range) only show on specific modules (i.e. calendar) but I'm planning to allow them everywhere. Could you share your use case on embedding a single record? I disabled that for now because I imagined people would usually embed all records together in a certain view. Hm I'll think about searching for blocks in autocomplete, or perhaps some way to use advanced search inline. Your experience in offline mode was actually expected. I assume you never opened the other pages on your phone, so they weren't saved on your device. Nino's not syncing all pages all the time, but only the ones you open, for performance reasons. Do you think having some sort of mechanism to pre-sync certain pages is necessary?
• consumer451 3y ago
  Curious if you could share which component was the most surprisingly difficult to build.
• owenfar 3y ago
  Delete account option?! I checked it out but not interested, what now? This should be the first "feature" made available.
• mihalycsaba 3y ago
  My favorite parts are site and blog. Had some requests for websites and blogs and I like the idea, that it comes with a lot of other stuff integrated. I could offer this to my clients as a solution, but... It needs an e-commerce and a payment solution, at least with debit/credit cards. I saw you don't want to integrate external services, but this would make it a lot easier to sell the platform to businesses.
• yangcheng 3y ago
  it's nice that everything is integrated into one system! I have always been searching for similar solutions. But one thing that bothers me email. If I use an email provider from Google workspace or Microsoft365, then sooner or later I was forced to use their calendar, and soon docs because the preview and integration. The closest I found is larksuite[0] which they recently added email hosting. But I am still paying microsoft so I haven't switched email. I just use lark's IM as email client as well. While I am trying the product, I am curious what's your thought about add email hosting. [0] https://www.larksuite.com/ https://www.larksuite.com/
  • louis-lau 3y ago
    Contacts and calendar are nice to have in the same place as email, because of needing to email contacts and because of calendar invites. Then again, if you use an email client you can use a mix of providers even for those features. I'm not sure I see the need for any other additional apps next to email. Let alone the feeling of being forced to.
    • yangcheng 3y ago
      For example, when sharing a google doc in Gmail, the experience is more feature rich. And if an organization is already paying for gmail, it's hard to stop people from using gdoc and gsheet. In real work, I can't just reply a gdoc share with "use nino or I refuse to read".
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    It's doable. Just curious what's stopping you from switching email? Is email forwarding possible in your case?
    • yangcheng 3y ago
      For my particular cases there are features like shared-mailbox and distribution list that requires additional setups. I don't see a clear advantage to move over a critical provider so I kept things the same. If from dayone I have a choice, I would go with all-in-one.
• wanderingmind 3y ago
  I strongly recommend creating a demo video of its capability. I cant see what it can do from the images on the website. Atleast some users like me want to see how it feels before signing up and trying it out.
• nawfalak 3y ago
  I've been messing with this for a bit and as a single person, I find this a lot more intuitive than something as complex as Notion and something made for a large business like monday.com and Asana. Only issue I have is Flutter. As much as I love it being cross platform everywhere, on the iPad app, I have a lot of touch sensitivity issues. I have to double click a lot of buttons for them to react and a lot of the feel of the app in general is somewhat unpolished and finnicky.
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    The double tap thing is a known issue on iOS. It's in the backlog and will be addressed at one point. Thanks for trying it out.
• psnehanshu 3y ago
  Nice app. May I suggest one change? Instead of sending a link to verify the email to create workspace, consider sending an OTP. This way, you don't need to manage the headache of opening the app post verification as you can accept the OTP on the same screen that accepted the email. In my case, after verification, the app is just a white screen.
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    OTP is a good suggestion, thank you. Sorry that you're seeing a white screen, are you maybe on iOS? Anyhow I'll look into the issue.
    • psnehanshu 3y ago
      Thanks, I am on Android.
• 2143 3y ago
  This seems technically impressive, and I wish you good luck. I personally prefer apps that do one thing well. I don't like "super" apps that does everything. I like separate tools, and not a Swiss army knife. This is kind of why I detest apps like WeChat; even before taking into account the privacy considerations, from a user perspective it does chat, social media, payments etc, and I dislike it for that reason. WhatsApp too seems to be headed in that direction (atleast where I'm from). And I also prefer tools that allow seamless data exchange with other tools. Sort of like the Unix philosophy. > This means we won't do integrations with other services, unless they are under the hood Not sure how I feel about that. > your team can eventually conduct all work on Nino Great! Another walled garden. I hope this doesn't happen, but what if you go bust? Will the user lose all their data? Or what if, for whatever reason a team decides to move off your platform? Is there data export capabilities? You better have export capabilities if you want commercial entities to even consider your product. Also, I feel the Free tier has slightly more features than your Pro tier (the former has unlimited members, for example). Nevertheless, I wish you good luck.
• rvba 3y ago
  Sounds a bit like Office + Google Wave. Will check it out later. Does it have task automation via some macros?
• johntash 3y ago
  This sounds like a pretty cool idea. I'm assuming it isn't open source, but do you plan on allowing data sync without any sort of cloud offering? E.g. either sync to a local directory, webdav/etc, or allow self-hosting a sync service. Even with e2ee, I don't really want to store my documents somewhere I don't control. And if you're targeting businesses, some businesses won't even look at the product if they can't control the data completely.
• bionsystem 3y ago
  I love the idea. Will try some of it this week. Is there plans to have a linux offline client too ? (I use both linux and windows).
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    Offline mode should work on linux too. I only have ubuntu so that's what I tested. It's just service workers underneath, so if it's the first time you open the app, you do have to wait for a few minutes for it to download.
• graynk 3y ago
  > I want to hear from you Since you asked - I‘m going to be a grumpy old man and yell at the clouds - I hate superapps. With a passion. I really hope we start to move away from them, I would much rather use 18 different apps and uninstall the ones I don’t need than dig through the noise of the superapp, which inevitably becomes cluttered, hard to navigate and impossible to customise. I understand why big companies do it, since it gets foot in the door and makes it easier for the user to try other services even if they intended to only use one, but as a user I despise the experience 100% of the time.
• HenryBemis 3y ago
  Any chance you can add a link to download for Windows but NOT on MS Store? I (and perhaps many others) have the bridges to the mothership torn down, so not MS Store.
  • harrisonlo 3y ago
    Can you elaborate? Are you not able to access MS store for some reason?
    • HenryBemis 3y ago
      Yes. I have been using the Windows Firewall Control (bought a license around v4.x)(before it was sold off and became free - and worse at v5) and have been using it in all my Win machines. I play hard ball, use "allow" approach (block everything except Outlook, FF, and a few more apps). I have also used plenty of Win10 privacy tools and have cut all paths to MS. I use "WuMgr" and/or "WAU Manager" for some very few security updates. And also regarding the Store, I have uninstalled all (if memory serves well) the "default/stock" modern/Win10 apps (I am using an older version of Calculator, the XP version of MS Paint, and so on). I've used SysInternals and killed all auto-tasks, most services, etc. I like me OS the way Steve Gibson describes it. Boot it and that's it.
• ngc6677 3y ago
  beautiful project, congrats for bringing it up there with this quality.
• fakedang 3y ago
  Looks good in the landing page, but the app didn't let me sign in using the magic link on Android. I'm not sure if it's safe to use it on iOS, else I would have gladly tested it.
• luke-stanley 3y ago
  Seems like a cool idea, and presumably for a closed source solution with a single host, trust would need building up, and the argument for switching needs to be higher than the switching costs, or people just need to be blinded by love, which may be possible! Other than the single host problem and close source, what is the situation with normal interoperability, e.g: import / export? It's also cool you seem to have clients on mobile and even Linux desktop clients. In the open source world, there is AppFlowy, Anytype, NocoDB, and APITable too so that's some strong competition. Is there a better argument for using your tool over one of those?
• gorkemcetin 3y ago
  I believe especially for the sheets part, there is long way to go. There are strong players like Airtable, Retable, Baserow etc - all having a good base, and it will be hard to catch up (and there are 17 more apps to do the same). But all in all, I am impressed - good luck with your journey!
• rmbyrro 3y ago
  Very appealing product. I tried to add/link a "List" item from inside a "Notebook", but couldn't find a way. Am I missing something or isn't it really possible?
• WesSouza 3y ago
  I am not receiving the confirmation email. Are you having issues emailing iCloud accounts?
• pelagicAustral 3y ago
  Got an account... Seems pretty good, I've been using Monday for a while but I think it's too convoluted, potentially way too much for my needs. This looks clean, cross-platform just works, pricing is fair and the features are pretty good.
• Projectiboga 3y ago
  Your app is installed as a snap, and has no other form. This is basically a recent Ubuntu only app. https://mxlinux.org/wiki/applications/snap-packages-and-mx-linux/ https://mxlinux.org/wiki/applications/snap-packages-and-mx-l...
• benoror 3y ago
  Provide an API with https://www.baseql.com/ https://www.baseql.com/
• aagha 3y ago
  I spent a few minutes looking at this and just want to point out how impressive of an effort this looks like the result of. Kudos.
• rodrigo5244 3y ago
  A map module would be greatly appreciated by me.
• devilsAdv0cate 3y ago
  [dead]