interesting. couldn't this just be done with a popular kanban tool like jira + Zapier?
Launch HN: Flowdash (YC W20) – Human-in-the-loop tooling for operations teams
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Re: Launch HN: Flowdash (YC W20) – Human-in-the-loop tooling for operations teams
#22This is a problem that I'm facing right now, and the solution looks simple and easy to use.
I wonder if anyone has experience to make a comparison with more complex BPMN tools like Camunda and Zeebe? Or with Salesforce plugins like Process Builder? These came up when I looked at more established solutions for the "business process automation" solutions.
Can Flowdash handle fan-out/parallel stages for example?
Re: Launch HN: Flowdash (YC W20) – Human-in-the-loop tooling for operations teams
#23interesting. couldn't this just be done with a popular kanban tool like jira + Zapier?
You're right, simple workflows can be wired up with Jira + Zapier. Tools like Jira are great at tracking work, but the work itself generally happens somewhere else. Our vision is for Flowdash to not only be the place work is tracked, but also where it's performed. We make this happen by providing common building blocks like reading from a database or kicking off a document signing flow and allowing teams to configure them to match their workflows.
Re: Launch HN: Flowdash (YC W20) – Human-in-the-loop tooling for operations teams
#24This is a problem that I'm facing right now, and the solution looks simple and easy to use. I wonder if anyone has experience to make a comparison with more complex BPMN tools like Camunda and Zeebe? Or with Salesforce plugins like Process Builder? These came up when I looked at more established solutions for the "business process automation" solutions. Can Flowdash handle fan-out/parallel stages for example?
> I wonder if anyone has experience to make a comparison with more complex BPMN tools like Camunda and Zeebe? Or with Salesforce plugins like Process Builder?
I don't have any personal experience with these tools, but am also curious to hear from the HN community here.
> Can Flowdash handle fan-out/parallel stages for example?
Not at this time, but we're adding new features every week. If you're up for it, I'd love to learn more about your use case and how you're evaluating the different options on the market.
Re: Launch HN: Flowdash (YC W20) – Human-in-the-loop tooling for operations teams
#25Good idea, works really well for companies with "established" operations.
However, the missing problem we've found (and are investing significant resources internally to fix) is that, in a lot of situations (especially in a startup), you don't actually know what you're doing operationally at a detailed enough level to have engineers write code for, or even humans to "do". You're learning as you go, but still need everything in the database as you do so you can automate thing sooner rather than later.
So, automation is still required. But not yet! You need a way for humans to do things, then automation, and back again...on a "flow" (to use your terminology) that is radically changing as you learn.
In our case, new business opportunities require creating and/or updating tens of millions of rows in our Postgres database, but can start out very small as we learn—say, 5000 independent flows.
Oftentimes, we need to temporarily "fix" things that we've already done a lot of work on—again, with a mix of human and compute tasks, depending on what's going on. Those fixes are temporary and we remove them once the data in Postgres is clean.
Another major area is, for lack of a better term, "tech onboarding". There's a lot of work that's effectively one-off, needs to be done at scale, and yet each day it's something different. (Imaging ramping up some service over four weeks—a literal situation we encounter regularly.) Being able to mix human and automation there is again critical, but really no tooling that I'm aware of exists to help with.
Anyway…congrats on the launch. I can definitely see it working for really well-defined operation systems that just need that extra touch of automation to reduce the busy work when humans are inserted into flows.
Re: Launch HN: Flowdash (YC W20) – Human-in-the-loop tooling for operations teams
#26This is really cool. My one concern is the pricing strategy. I run a really small ridesharing business with sub 500 users, and $25/mo is too steep for me right now. I was extremely excited to start transferring some of my flows over, but the pricing plan killed it. Can you talk a bit more about your pricing strategy and how you settled on these plans? I may just not be in your target market, in which case - totally u…
How much can you afford to spend on something like this?
Re: Launch HN: Flowdash (YC W20) – Human-in-the-loop tooling for operations teams
#27This is really cool. My one concern is the pricing strategy. I run a really small ridesharing business with sub 500 users, and $25/mo is too steep for me right now. I was extremely excited to start transferring some of my flows over, but the pricing plan killed it. Can you talk a bit more about your pricing strategy and how you settled on these plans? I may just not be in your target market, in which case - totally u…
How much can you afford to spend on something like this?
I can definitely put down the $25/mo, but if I want to add two people who can help me out that jumps to $75/mo or $900/yr. I'm not at the stage where I can afford to hire employees yet (I'm the only one, and the drivers are contractors), so this would be a big expense for the company.
Re: Launch HN: Flowdash (YC W20) – Human-in-the-loop tooling for operations teams
#28This is really cool. My one concern is the pricing strategy. I run a really small ridesharing business with sub 500 users, and $25/mo is too steep for me right now. I was extremely excited to start transferring some of my flows over, but the pricing plan killed it. Can you talk a bit more about your pricing strategy and how you settled on these plans? I may just not be in your target market, in which case - totally u…
Happy to provide more details. We settled on our current pricing based on conversations with our early customers. For many of them, the alternative was to build something in-house, so they saw our pricing as pretty affordable when compared to the dev cost to build a custom solution. That being said, we’re pretty early and still iterating on our pricing. If you’re up for it, we’d love to learn more about your use case…
Sure. What questions do you have? I replied to another comment down below explaining why the pricing model is out of my reach, but I'll copy it here too:
>
I can definitely put down the $25/mo, but if I want to add two people who can help me out that jumps to $75/mo or $900/yr. I'm not at the stage where I can afford to hire employees yet (I'm the only one, and the drivers are contractors), so this would be a big expense for the company.
Re: Launch HN: Flowdash (YC W20) – Human-in-the-loop tooling for operations teams
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much can you afford to spend on something like this?
I can definitely put down the $25/mo, but if I want to add two people who can help me out that jumps to $75/mo or $900/yr. I'm not at the stage where I can afford to hire employees yet (I'm the only one, and the drivers are contractors), so this would be a big expense for the company.
That makes sense. I often find per user pricing to not scale well, though I recognize how well it works as part of each employee’s overhead in a fully funded org.
Re: Launch HN: Flowdash (YC W20) – Human-in-the-loop tooling for operations teams
#30This is a very interesting solution, and is going after some of my main pain points right now (I operate within a large operationally focused org with about 20,000+ employees). I signed up for early access, would be very interesting to try out.