Show HN: Deckchair – Holiday Management for Small Teams

https://www.getdeckchair.com

by squiggy22 • 11 years ago

33 21 11 years ago

rtpg2• 11 years ago

Looks pretty nice, nice and simple. I didn't sign up because I am not managing people's vacations, but I definitely would if I were that person where I work. Value proposition is immediately obvious. Great name too

If you're serious about making money off of this, though, I'd highly recommend some form of per-seat pricing.

Per-seat pricing aligns the usefulness of the app with how much people are paying. Would you really want (for example) a 100 person team to be only giving you 15 pounds a month for what is probably _days_ of saved administrative time per year? Off the top of my head $15/user/year seems like a good price to deal with vacationing. Though ideally that number is MAX_NUMBER_YOU_CAN_CONVINCE_PEOPLE_TO_CHARGE/user/year

squiggy224• 11 years ago

I did think about per user pricing but a flat price seems so much more appealing than competitors in the market. You are right though, size of the market likely isn't that big. Thank you for your feedback.

tonyedgecombe• 11 years ago

>You are right though, size of the market likely isn't that big

Why do you think that?

mgkimsal2• 11 years ago

yearly pricing seems more appealing than monthly, because there may be no months with vacations scheduled, and it might appear that you're paying "for nothing", but there will very likely not be an entire year with no vacations.

$15 feels sort of like the upper end of the price range, unless there's some integration with a payroll service.

I'd encourage considering a flat rate for small companies - $99/year for up to 12 employees, or something like that.

rtpg2• 11 years ago

I agree with the bundling. It's essentially per-user pricing, but it's an easier pill to swallow. The pitch becomes something like "Simple pricing that doesn't break your budget".

My reasoning for the $15 was that that's a fully loaded hour at a bit more than minimum wage. I think it's a good reference point for thinking about how much a company might save with the tool. Though for just vacations you're maybe saving less than an hour.

jsingleton• 11 years ago

Looks interesting. It won't be hard to do UX better than the competition (like https://www.myhrtoolkit.com). Getting people to migrate from their current system will be difficult though.

You might want to update that iPad screenshot. Use the new look iOS.

jholman• 11 years ago

s/abcent/absent/

s/your going/you're going/ (or for style reasons perhaps s/your going to/you will/ )

There are some weird capitalization issues, too (e.g. "Simple, Easy to use", e.g. "Slack integration" in a list where every other entry is all-words-capitalized)

I'd suggest that in general, your copy feels a little choppy to me, and if/when you start making a little money, I'd pay someone to fix it up.

HTH

freshyill• 11 years ago

This looks nice, but in a company that requires us to use a very clunky (but improving!) ADP site to actually file a time sheet and manage/request time off, this would just be an extra step on top of steps we already need to take.

jlarocco• 11 years ago

I agree with jholman about getting the text improved. Lots of weird tense changes and awkward sentences through out.

That's easy enough to fix, though. I'm more interested how this compares to (or integrates with) third party software like ADP and UltiPro. Seems like this would be targeted to a really small niche of companies that are too big to handle holidays informally, but too small to buy a more full featured HRIS.

solomatov• 11 years ago

Provide a price in dollars. People outside of UK don't know what the value of pound is.

squiggy224• 11 years ago

Added a basic converter for you.

TimJRobinson• 11 years ago

Does it have any kind of calendar integration? If it can integrate with our teams google calendar this is perfect for us.

Kunlun2• 11 years ago

I tried it and no it does not (or I did not found it).

squiggy224• 11 years ago

Sorry not at the minute, but its absolutely on the roadmap. I'll drop you a DM when its live.

simonswords82• 11 years ago

We provide Google and Outlook calendar integration:

http://www.staffsquared.com/hr-software/features/online-cale...

Kunlun2• 11 years ago

Pretty nice to handle holidays. However the copy needs a bit of work as well as some prices of the UI/UX. For example:

- First steps you have the text

  - Step 1: "Save Step 1"  
  - Step 2: "Save and Proceed"
  - Step 3: "Add employee"

You should align the text of each button such "Next step" and "Finish".

- Provide more text on each of the step to give better context with perhaps an example or an average for a specific country (selecting a country and auto-completing these fields with the average would be nice).

- Lot of lost space in Step 2 Setup Statutory Holidays. You could make the numbers bigger and space out evenly the selected days. Also it was quite weird to have an extra step with the selected days starred.

- Provide integration with 3rd party platforms: Google Calendar, Slack, login with Google account, etc.

- Provide a way to delete an account. How do I do that right now?

All in all it is pretty cool!

squiggy224• 11 years ago

Awesome. Many thanks for all of that. Send me a mail - paul@getdeckchair.com and I'll sort out the account deletion. Or alternatively a cancel subscription under billing you can use.

mipapage• 11 years ago

Perhaps its just me, but use a deckchair for the logo, or place one on the beach?

kgrin• 11 years ago

Channeling patio11 here, but CHARGE MORE! Or, more to the point, have some ways to price-discriminate. Maybe on # of employees; maybe on features; maybe integrations or SSO or whatever.

Obviously you're not (currently) targeting Big Enterprise, but even within your present target market there's got to be a difference in how much value you're delivering for different clients... price based on that!

arturro_• 11 years ago

we have created similar app which we open sourced at www.github.com/diacode/holidays we have pretty nice ui and slack integration, check it out

Show HN: Deckchair – Holiday Management for Small Teams

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