Earlier quoted context omitted.
Super sorry this is my first post on HN. Which part is inappropriate?
All of it. Wrong thread dude.
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Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams
131–140 of 178 posts
Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams
#132You'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 l…
There's like 80 alternatives and none of them are as useful as JIRA. Notion, Asana, TFS, LeanKit, Pivotal, agile central, version one, wrike
Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams
#133First time user. Couple of feedback
1. One thing I liked about this tool was I felt less complex UI. It's like it is simpler as trello. Other tons of PM tools does have complexity which feels me less comfortable using product
2. The loading time for opening app after user has logged in is something that I wasn't used to. The loading screen kept showing until 20-25 secs.
Anyways, a great experience using this product
Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams
#134You'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 l…
There's like 80 alternatives and none of them are as useful as JIRA. Notion, Asana, TFS, LeanKit, Pivotal, agile central, version one, wrike
IMHO they are probably all way more efficient for developers and team leads (Jira has the worst UX I’ve ever worked with) but managers who barely use it will complain it lacks some features.
Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comparing Kitemaker to Clubhouse write may may get a bit further. I found Kitemaker after I realized the tight relationship between epics and documentation, and was stunned at how difficult it was to find a PM tool focused on fusing them. Clubhouse write seemed to be headed that direction, but was in beta forever and details were sparse. I began researching on my own to see if it would be worth building myself, stumb…
> after I realized the tight relationship between epics and documentation Could you elaborate a bit on that? I'm curious what you discovered in that regard.
Not the parent poster but: Imagine you have an elaborate user flow diagram for a complex workflow. Every state/page a user could find themselves in, the outbound transitions perfectly match all cases of what someone might want to do. Now, these transitions end up quickly becoming stories: "A user in state X should be able to do Y."
And you can bundle those together like "A user should be able to cancel and return to the project screen from any step of the wizard." Alternately, you can separate things by teams like "An API exists to cancel the reservation in progress, releasing the underlying inventory" vs. "A user can cancel the reservation in progress using the API" vs. "Factor out cancel buttons into a UI abstraction" if you want people to be able to pick those up and show progress independently.
But fundamentally all this stems from an underlying plan, that flow chart from which all these stories flow. That plan is the epic. But that plan can't just be a frozen flow chart; it needs to be a living central repository of documentation, ideas, and mockups.
Ideally, you have few enough of these epics that you can maintain things in the tools they're meant to be in: a Clubhouse epic, for instance, could simply link to the top-level Notion table of contents for the planning process for that epic.
But if you're pulled in a billion different directions and have a massive feature surface, having this all in one place, alongside the chat related to that feature, with live references to the ongoing action items, would be incredible. Whether Kitemaker solves it or someone else, there's amazing work still ahead here.
Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of companies doing that though. ClickUp is the best one I’ve tried to this point, but I’m interested to explore Kitemaker.
ClickUp is astonishingly good. Our whole team (devs, sales, CEO, everyone) absolutely loves it. I have had two truly delightful, joyous SaaS experiences in the last few years: ClickUp and Retool.
ClickUp is so good it feels like an endgame for this kind of products
Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
ClickUp is astonishingly good. Our whole team (devs, sales, CEO, everyone) absolutely loves it. I have had two truly delightful, joyous SaaS experiences in the last few years: ClickUp and Retool.
ClickUp is so good it feels like an endgame for this kind of products
I have been building web software for 20 years and honestly don't understand how they could built something so complex (under the hood), flexible, configurable, and still fast.
For example, you can flip major features on and off without even a hiccup (like Sprints or Subtasks). I just can't begin to imagine the architecture behind that capability.
Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
ClickUp is so good it feels like an endgame for this kind of products
I have been building web software for 20 years and honestly don't understand how they could built something so complex (under the hood), flexible, configurable, and still fast. For example, you can flip major features on and off without even a hiccup (like Sprints or Subtasks). I just can't begin to imagine the architecture behind that capability.
Yeah, honestly it feels like it’s something that shouldn’t exist. They just put together features that make sense and just should be there naturally and you don’t have to come up with some crazy schemes to use it or learn 20 PM patterns or get into the heads of their designers. It seems as simple as a Todo list that you’d use for convenience but has everything you would need for crazy PM work.
It’s the first PM app I am actually recommending to people, and we tried so many. Every single one has been just a “lesser evil”.
I am in no way affiliated with ClickUp. I just hope they don’t overmonetize or something like that.
Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams
#139I always wonder why Jetbrains YouTrack never gets much mention, it's a really versatile system. Though the real area where it shines is where you have multiple projects to manage and teams of people who are spread across multiple projects.
I tried YouTrack a while back and it was super buggy, e.g. I would make a bunch of changes then navigate to another page and come back and they would all be gone. I just couldn’t trust it to not lose my work.
Re: Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams
#140First time user. Couple of feedback 1. One thing I liked about this tool was I felt less complex UI. It's like it is simpler as trello. Other tons of PM tools does have complexity which feels me less comfortable using product 2. The loading time for opening app after user has logged in is something that I wasn't used to. The loading screen kept showing until 20-25 secs. Anyways, a great experience using this product
Thanks for the feedback!
And sorry you experienced long loading times. It should definitely not take that long to load so maybe we were getting hugged hard when you tried. Would you mind trying again to see if it's better at all?