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Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

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Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#11

Post by Operyl »

kevsim wrote: post #8
benreesman wrote: post #4

Phabricator is (IMHO) in a class of its own as a code review tool but the tasks stuff is nothing to write home about. If you folks end up doing an integration my group would be excited to give it a try. Good luck with the venture!

Very cool! We tried Phabricator years and years ago but haven't had much experience since then. GitLab is next on our list, but then we'll see what comes after that. We've gotten a few BitBucket requests. Any idea how popular Phabricator is these days?

Not terribly too popular, but used by a few large companies still. We evaluated it for use at a non-profit I help run/volunteer with, but the task system was too subpar for our liking. Wikimedia uses it pretty heavily, though.

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#12

Post by mellavora »

Just set up an account. Looks slick.

I'm on slow internet at the moment, and between when I entered my username and the box asking me to set up my organization, a popup flashed saying "that user name is taken" (disappeared 1/2 sec later).

Might want to check your business logic throughout for effects of slow internet. Because sometimes a remote team member can be more remote than you expected.

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#13

Post by kevsim »

mellavora wrote: post #12

Just set up an account. Looks slick. I'm on slow internet at the moment, and between when I entered my username and the box asking me to set up my organization, a popup flashed saying "that user name is taken" (disappeared 1/2 sec later). Might want to check your business logic throughout for effects of slow internet. Because sometimes a remote team member can be more remote than you expected.

Thanks for reporting this! We'll take a look.

And thanks for trying it out. We really appreciate it.

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#14

Post by nounaut »

kevsim wrote: post #6
Operyl wrote: post #3

Are there plans for self-hosted versions? That's pretty much the "if I will use it or not" question for me. Atlassian's killing of their self-hosted solutions for smaller companies is just really a shame.

We've been waiting on this a bit to see if there's much demand for this and so far the answer has been "not much" but we're open to the idea. So the answer is "not right now". Good news I don't think it would be super tough for us since we're built using pretty boring tech (i.e. not a lot of dependencies on a particular cloud vendor), don't have a bajillion microservices, etc.

Adding myself to the list. Also worth considering that this would be a requirement for basically any government entity.

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#15

Post by pchal »

Congrats on the launch! My favorite task management tool — We’ve been using it since early days for more than a year and very happy with it, especially with how responsive Sigurd and Kevin have been. It really gets out of the way when making work items and makes it easy to have team discussions around these. Highly recommended !

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#16

Post by bachmeier »

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

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#17

Post by Supermancho »

No hierarchy of tasks makes this about as (slightly less, no linking) useful as JIRA for practical purposes. There are a number of tools that do this kind of thing, so I'm struggling to figure the difference between kitemaker and say...Asana or Wrike.

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#19

Post by kevsim »

Supermancho wrote: post #17

No hierarchy of tasks makes this about as (slightly less, no linking) useful as JIRA for practical purposes. There are a number of tools that do this kind of thing, so I'm struggling to figure the difference between kitemaker and say...Asana or Wrike.

Thanks for the feedback!

What we find is that the document-ish interface of Kitemaker lends itself to people sizing their work items a bit bigger than they would in Jira or GitHub issues, and then breaking them down a bit with todos inside. We have a lot of improvements planned around our todos to make this even nicer.

We also have themes (kinda like epics in Jira) for grouping larger initiatives together.

Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams

#20

Post by bahmslap »

Our experience with Kitemaker comes from a small team starting a company with a blank canvas to shape our processes.

We've been using Kitemaker for a couple of months now and are loving it. When we started we went with tools we knew from past lives like JIRA and ClickUp but given the freedom of our situation we wanted something better.

I feel like when I go into the tool I am there to focus on the tasks I'm currently doing and what I need to do next. The _lack_ of sprint reporting and fixed time frames is a great feature IMO.

They also put out some thoughtful content (https://medium.com/kitemaker-blog) that we used to help shape our current agile practices. Looking forward to the features ahead!

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