Free business idea: clone Pivotal Tracker as a solo dev / small team. 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 Tra…
Ah, I do love the smell of fresh optimism in the morning! I think the biggest challenges are that a) the vast majority of solo devs capable of pulling this off quickly are well-employed, and b) the timeline for MVP++ is effectively January 1st, else the migrators will make different decisions. And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch.
Pivotal Tracker will shut down
221–230 of 271 posts
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#222The thing that I always liked about Pivotal is that it was visibly obvious that there was only one queue. It forced everyone to ruthlessly prioritize and make the hard decisions. In this moment, do you want me working on this bug, or this new feature? You have to decide - you get one or the other. It avoided the "Everything is a high priority" dilemma.
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#223Back when I did contract software engineering, Pivotal Tracker made managing client relationships a breeze by giving the client perfect visibility into the impact of feature requests, and allowing them to make the tradeoffs that made sense for their business.
"Want to add this new feature, and do it right away? No problem, but as you can see, if I drag it into this week, as a 4-point task, it pushes everything else back by two days, which means we'll have to cut something else or change the launch date."
Great UI, great vibes, and was just a delight to use. Even as PT dies, its legacy lives on. Thank you, PT team!
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
To a first order approximation, Wikipedia serves everyone the same page. So the cost of pages in Wikipedia is proportional to the rate of edits, not the rate of page clicks and inbound links. Because once I hit Save, the page they display is pretty much the same one they'll show you when I send it to you to ask your opinion. If I show each user of a website a highly customized, user- and workflow-specific page for th…
What you write seems very interesting, but I'm afraid I'm not fully grasping it. There are few immediate counter examples I can give, and I wonder if I'm missing a point and those are not really counter examples. Is Gmail a highly customized website? What about Atlassian suite?
Is gmail viable as a standalone company?
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
To a first order approximation, Wikipedia serves everyone the same page. So the cost of pages in Wikipedia is proportional to the rate of edits, not the rate of page clicks and inbound links. Because once I hit Save, the page they display is pretty much the same one they'll show you when I send it to you to ask your opinion. If I show each user of a website a highly customized, user- and workflow-specific page for th…
Thanks for explaining and I am sure you have more experience with this type of scale but wouldn’t you say that ChatGPT is an example of “hand crafted artisanal page”, where not only every person sees a different answer but every interaction with the page results a different response. Of course they have a ton of VC money to burn but could it be that technology optimization (especially on the backend and hosting provi…
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you write seems very interesting, but I'm afraid I'm not fully grasping it. There are few immediate counter examples I can give, and I wonder if I'm missing a point and those are not really counter examples. Is Gmail a highly customized website? What about Atlassian suite?
Gmail is one, not making money, and two is mostly showing text files that already exist. Is gmail viable as a standalone company?
Does showing different snippets of existing texts for each user,and providing sorting and searching functionality is highly customized in a way that will usually be too costly on the backend to make viable money?
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#227Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also loved that it was adamant about having specific, defined states with no customization. The issue is todo, in progress, done, delivered, accepted… that’s it. Custom issue states are a special kind of hell in JIRA.
> Custom issue states are a special kind of hell in JIRA. The nth circle of hell looks like a Jira workflow. https://i.imgur.com/dQE9vWn.png and https://medium.com/@daitcheson/you-can-do-better-than-jira-1...
> Whilst I wouldn’t recommend remote team members having to endure a subpar experience, for example during the daily Kanban meeting, is that really a good reason to degrade the experience for the rest of the team, losing out on all the benefits that gathering around a physical board can bring?
Are they seriously proposing _physical kanban board_ as a viable alternative to JIRA? This got to be a joke, right?
(Checks post date, it's 2019... Ah, that explains it)
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Custom issue states are a special kind of hell in JIRA. The nth circle of hell looks like a Jira workflow. https://i.imgur.com/dQE9vWn.png and https://medium.com/@daitcheson/you-can-do-better-than-jira-1...
For the article: > Whilst I wouldn’t recommend remote team members having to endure a subpar experience, for example during the daily Kanban meeting, is that really a good reason to degrade the experience for the rest of the team, losing out on all the benefits that gathering around a physical board can bring? Are they seriously proposing _physical kanban board_ as a viable alternative to JIRA? This got to be a joke,…
Re: Pivotal Tracker will shut down
#230Wish 37Signals would clone something like this and sell it via https://once.com/ (pay once, install and host yourself).