Ask HN: Review my app: Who Is Working On What?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1979671

by subbu • 16 years ago

6 15 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Dear HN, as a long time member, and being truly inspired it's my turn to announce an app. I've built a tool to keep track of 'Who is working on what?' in your team. URL: https://whoisworkingonwhat.com. Please review and let me know what you think. Specifically:

    1. Is the idea good enough to build a small business around?

    2. I don't have a recurring billing system integrated. I live in India and I do not have access to services like recurly or chargify. Assuming the tool gets some traction, I might want to to build in a recurring billing system. For now though, I am planning on requesting money using PayPal if required.  I plan to charge $8 monthly for a basic plan (2 private projects) and $14/monthly for a plus plan (5 private projects). I've pulled these rates out of thin air for now. Are they reasonable?

I have learned most of my product building skills reading you guys here at HN. The community is awesome and I've constantly felt that I had to try and share as well. I am offering a 3 month plus plan as a token of appreciation for all you good folks out there for making my year memorable. Link: https://whoisworkingonwhat.com/signup?promotion_code=yc As always, please keep the the comments coming in.

subbu7• 16 years ago

Clickable: https://whoisworkingonwhat.com

goombastic• 16 years ago

Nice to see stuff come in from India!! Awesome. Mumbai,Chennai,Delhi or Bangalore?

subbu7• 16 years ago

Bangalore

mdwrigh2• 16 years ago

As a quick side note, under the $8/month plan, it's "up to", not "upto".

subbu7• 16 years ago

Thank you. Will correct it.

desigooner2• 16 years ago

I tried to sign up and I was directed to this page after I submitted the registration form:

http://cl.ly/2U0E3g0w3U0s3s213527

Might want to change the notification messages on there

desigooner2• 16 years ago

seems like duplicate entries are across the board:

http://cl.ly/1a292d1P283a1k1I0x14

subbu7• 16 years ago

Thanks. I'll take a look at this.

gabebw• 16 years ago

It's be great if the dashboard showed which one of the people was me more clearly (possibly you could show that box in a different color?). Just having "^ You" is not very easy to find. Other than that, it looks pretty neat. Not sure I'd use it, though.

subbu7• 16 years ago

Point noted. I'll highlight it better.

iamgoat2• 16 years ago

I don't really like the project grouping. A developer can work on multiple 'projects' on the same day and you don't want to have to look for them on Project A and Project B to get their latest update.

Maybe add a Team layer to the mix. A user can belong to multiple teams. You can have a Dev team and an IT team. Then an overall Tech team which includes everyone in Dev and IT. Then update the dashboard to allow you to view by Team or Project.

You'd have to work out a good way of explaining/displaying this to users.

Additionally, it'd be great to see the last 2 updates underneath each person. Or maybe on the team view list all updates under each person for the same day (otherwise show last 3).

This it personal preference, but adding different views to the dashboard would be pretty simple and would help sell me on this for my use.

Lastly, I don't know how well the pricing model works by limiting to a certain number of projects. To me, users is a more important grouping and I would do pricing based on that.

subbu7• 16 years ago

I need to think about organising the updates teamwize. I usually go with projects because most of my projects are small. That said, I will collect more feedback and see what's the best way.

Interesting view on user-based pricing. Basecamp, github, and most other sites that I use personally go by project numbers. User count comes in the second level. E.g. 20 projects and up to 50 users.

iamgoat2• 16 years ago

My problem with the project model is a project could be anything. If someone didn't want to pay for the next tier they'd create less projects or have 1 generic project which is the name of the company and dump everything into it. Which is what I do with the free version of FogBugz for my personal projects.

A user will always be a user. One business may need 12 projects while another may only have 1 project everyone is working on. But if both have 30 users they use up the same amount of bandwidth.

And as you suggested, it really comes down to how different businesses work. Some companies work faster than others where 1 project may last 2-3 days. Someone in that company would have to be on top of closing that project and the next one. Or do they create a Generic project for the quick ones and a specific project for the more long term ones?

Properly utilizing Projects (and milestones for that matter) have always been a challenge for me with the project management applications I've used (Basecamp, FogBugz, etc).

notahacker• 16 years ago

The revenues generated by the well-funded similar startup Yammer probably suggests there is a market for the service you're operating, though assuming you won't have an enterprise sales team you'd be wise to undercut their hideously expensive per-user charge ($5 per user might be OK for a five person company but not for a 25 person company that probably spends less on mission critical stuff like their CRM and/or bug trackers). The price range you're aiming for doesn't sound unreasonable if you're aiming for the smaller businesses; any more and you start getting compared unfavourably with services like Basecamp that can keep people updated to what others are doing plus several other useful tasks. I agree that charges loosely based on number of users (up to 10; up to 50; up to 200; make up the price as you go along if you're lucky enough to get serious enquiries for larger companies and consider a free 3 user plan as proof of concept) make more sense than by project.

I'm not your target market, and probably wouldn't use it, but I like the execution of the product, particularly details like Github commit based updates. One thing I would change is the contrast of the forms; I have to squint or highlight the white-on-pale-blue text to be able to read it.

subbu7• 16 years ago

Thank you for the feedback. I am definitely looking at smaller businesses. At least for the moment.

I agree about the contrast of the forms. I'll change it in the next deploy.

Ask HN: Review my app: Who Is Working On What?

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