61–70 of 271 posts
Shortcut as a product is team-oriented with solid GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket and Slack integrations.
People often ask: how do I find business ideas?
Well, here you go: many people publicly saying how they love a product that is going away.
This is a validated product: people were paying for it. Apparently quite a lot of people. It doesn't get better than this.
All you have to do is to clone the product. You can literally market it as a Pivotal Tracker clone. It's not like VMWare will care.
You can research companies currently using Pivotal Tracker and build a database for cold calling / e-mailing when you have the product.
It's also a product that is doable as a single person or very small team. With modern technologies (React or Svelte, hosted databases etc.) it's relatively simple to clone.
Staying small is important: those businesses topple over when revenues don't justify expenses, especially if VC funding is involved and VCs are pressuring for going big or going bust. Or when a profitable product is acquired with the hopes of growing the profits but they don't grow.
Stay small to keep expenses in check and you can build a profitable company.
This is a bootstrappable business: a $100/mo Hetzner box, backend in efficient language (Go, C#), front-end in Svelte or React and you can serve lots of customers. The rest is your time and hustle.
I always wondered, did Pivotal Tracker invent this paradigm? They were surely using it before any of the big players utilized it.
We have to use Jira at my current workplace and it's so complicated. Pivotal Tracker, which I used at previous workplace, was so simple and focused. Sad to hear it's shutting down!
That's too bad. At one of my companies they were using Trello for all engineering development which I found just too casual of an approach. Jira would have been overkill. Pivotal provided a nice middle ground and was so easy to use with just the right amount of customization and power user functionality. But I always felt like there was a small group of users and it just never got a foothold in companies.
Shortcut ( https://www.shortcut.com/ ) is a solid alternative to Pivotal Tracker. I work as an Engineering Manager there and helped build an importer for Pivotal Tracker data into Shortcut ( https://github.com/useshortcut/api-cookbook/tree/main/pivota... ). Shortcut as a product is team-oriented with solid GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket and Slack integrations.
Pivotal Tracker - ice box, backlog, or current iteration.
I see companies in Trello Hell - well meaning, but often conflated, grey area states. There's like 10-15 columns on their boards.
It's a hot mess.
Unfortunate. Of all the PM tools I've used, I hated Pivotal the least. It made it easy to do the things that were frequently done. It limited customization down to a sane level. And it generally seemed to stay out of the way (significant look at Jira).
Linear is the one I've settled on, it stays out of my way. For now. Looking at the competition it's only a matter of time before it becomes bloated to justify valuations. https://linear.app/
Unfortunate. Of all the PM tools I've used, I hated Pivotal the least. It made it easy to do the things that were frequently done. It limited customization down to a sane level. And it generally seemed to stay out of the way (significant look at Jira).
I agree. I have been on Pivotal Tracker for over a decade. Still am. Tried Jira and a few others, usually feeling like they are too taxing on the management part. What are alternatives that are light on the customization and day-to-day management?
To set up a new Shortcut workspace:
1. Sign up 2. Invite teammates, group them into teams if desired 3. Activate the GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket integration, so as engineers work via VCS their work in Shortcut progresses automatically 4. Set your workspace's timezone 5. Turn on/off Iterations (sprints) based on your process. Unfinished stories can be set to automatically roll from one iteration to the next. 6. Turn on/off point estimation based on your process
Then start writing Stories (tickets/issues) to track work.
Going further: Stories can be grouped into Epics. Epics can be grouped into Objectives (with associated Key Results if that's your thing). You can put Epics on a Roadmap to "share out" what your team is planning to work on. All optional, based on how you work and the size of your org.
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