Show HN: Constructor – simple issue tracking for small teams, inspired by Trello

First of all, This platform is amazing. I love the feel, UI, and how I can easily try it out without signing up. It reeks of quality.

However, every platform in this market tries to solve a similar problem in a different way but I think no one tries to solve the biggest problem.

That problem is that there will be one or two people that really care about all of this tracking stuff but everyone else just don't. Developers don't need to check tracking tools everyday to know what they need to do and once they finish, they will not update the tracker. So when the people that cares check the tracker, it doesn't give them the latest info.

So the problem with tracking software is that it requires everyone to use it the way it was meant to be used, but employees just wanna do the 8 hours and go home and not care who is on what page.

Thanks for the feedback! It's really great to hear appreciation like that.

This is an awesome point, and one which we're keenly aware of. This is how we think about this:

Constructor must serve different roles with their own notions of success, and those notions may be at odds. That is, there are some tensions and tradeoffs within teams that exist independently of any tool, e.g., managers want stuff reported but developers just want to build software and not fill out TPS reports.

So our approach to solving your biggest problem is to try to create the best UX for each role, period, which implies Constructor must mediate these tensions where possible. For instance, our approach to blockers is very lightweight and we saw immediate uptake from devs when this was released, indicating they saw it as a help, not a burden. And of course it makes it apparent to managers what's going on without having to pester anyone. So we consider this a feature that helped both managers and devs do their jobs better without imposing an unwelcome burden on anyone. We're looking to extend this pattern in much more clever ways to get managers the facts they need without burdening developers with housekeeping tasks to provide those facts. It's a tough problem but we're optimistic we can make headway here.

Thanks for raising this point; it's really, really important.

It's a practical limitation; we don't have a mobile app (yet) nor is the web app mobile-optimized (yet), but you can certainly use it on your phone – and hurl abuse at us until we fix it.

Thanks for your feedback and questions! Constructor is a great choice for teams using Trello that are feeling the pain of its limitations but don't want to sacrifice its glorious simplicity, or teams using GitHub Issues for similar reasons, or non-dev tools like Notion or Asana looking for something that understands software dev but isn't extremely complex to configure and use. We've been building it for a little over a year now, having onboarded our first customers in Jan 2021 and raised our first round shortly thereafter.

Our differentiator is lightweight flexibility, supported by conceptual models that reflect reality and don't impose one particular way of doing things on teams. Our goal is for teams to be able to "start simple and evolve easily" because for many teams their process is always being adjusted as they grow and mature. Our approach is essentially "Trello is like 90% of what many teams need, let's redesign it from the ground up for software teams and get it to 100%". It's early days but it's an approach that seems to resonate with many teams. At least partly this is because PMs and designers readily understand Constructor instead of being annoyed/overwhelmed, so everyone is happy using the same tool, and that's pretty important (to avoid tool schisms).