Interstate (YC S11) Plots Your Development Progress On The Map

http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/12/yc-funded-interstate-plots-your-development-progress-on-the-map/

by tomblomfield • 15 years ago

90 22 15 years ago

Ever since I saw the Cultured Code status page[1] a few months ago, I have been wanting this product. I think a lot of companies would benefit from being more open with their customers about progress.

1. http://culturedcode.com/status

tomblomfield• 15 years ago

Yeah, I really like the ability to make certain sections of the roadmap public.

Good luck to the Interstate guys!

davidwhodge• 15 years ago

Congrats guys!

flyosity• 15 years ago

Some really beautiful, pixel-perfect design across the site and the app. Did they do it in-house or hire an outside contractor/agency?

sim0n6• 15 years ago

In-house! My co-founder (Greg) is a UI designer and so his main task is making the site look beautiful :)

jeffremer2• 15 years ago

It is very nice looking, well done guys. Though it is strikingly similar to Lighthouse, at least at first glance: http://lighthouseapp.com. Perhaps a source of inspiration, or just coincidence?

sim0n6• 15 years ago

I don't see too much resemblance myself and there was no conscious effort of mimicking their design but a lot of project management apps do look fairly similar, UX wise.

joshuahays• 15 years ago

I'm excited about this project and even more excited that we were able to utilize it with our startup. I know these guys personally and this is only the beginning... I promise you.

timdorr2• 15 years ago

I'm surprised Github integration isn't on their own roadmap. It would be killer to mark things as completed via commits and see code activity in one application.

vnorby• 15 years ago

It definitely is! Congrats Greg and Simon, on a perfectly timed TC article :)

sim0n6• 15 years ago

GitHub integration is now very high on our list of ideas (added it to our roadmap as per your suggestion - http://roadma.ps/8d#road-4e1ca10c8927f6eb50000273)!

We've already added support to pull in your commit log to your Overview feed (see: http://cl.ly/2r2K3N052j0G3w2G2i2O - you can enable this via your roadmap's settings page) and we're now looking at pulling in individual commit messages and posting them to roads as update messages, etc (like you suggested).

We're just now trying to decide on the best way to do this :)

timdorr2• 15 years ago

Ah, missed that section down the page. Very good!

hagyma• 15 years ago

Well done. Watch out! We are chasing you! :)

mvid• 15 years ago

For some reason I thought they would actually overlay this onto a map, and that sounded bizarre and cool. Guess not though.

tortilla• 15 years ago

No, I was visualizing the same thing when I read the title.

sim0n6• 15 years ago

Haha, sorry if the title mislead you. We didn't pick it ourselves although it does fit in with our whole 'Interstate' brand and theme which is nice!

ethank• 15 years ago

Having sub-tasks would be cool that auto-percentaged the completion of a milestone.

IE: "Wireframes" as a milestone/road, should have stops per wireframe.

Otherwise its way too abstract to use to manage a granular project.

mkeblx• 15 years ago

I've been playing around with it for a week and I really like it so far, enough to transition everything over from Basecamp.

I really like that I'll be able to incorporate the development progress easily into an internal status page for our startup. (Actually thinking of doing a road-based metaphor visualization of the 'interstates'.)

I'm very hesitant to have a publicly visible progress page though, out of concern that would encourage people to wait to pay until a certain announced feature was in place. Would at least have to be handled carefully.

sim0n6• 15 years ago

First of all, great to hear you're finding the app useful!

We've somewhat surprisingly already heard stories regarding the opposite of users waiting to pay until a feature is added; where users have actually joined a site because they noticed a feature which they thought was missing was actually in the works on the app's roadmap!

I do see and understand the worry that it can be risky for /some/ larger businesses to share all the inner workings but we haven't yet heard anything negative back from our users. Also, you aren't required to share everything that you have planned. If you want to, you can start off by just the information that you think you think would be great to share with your users, whatever that may be.

naeem• 15 years ago

I've started using Interstate with my team. The core features are great, and it definitely helps to get organized. The one fundamental problem that I've found early on with the product, which will be a severe detriment unless they can find a workaround, is that there isn't much that keeps me coming back. The only thing that would keep me coming back is a constant stream of updates, but the way that the system is set-up currently, updates come infrequently enough that I'm not concerned enough to regularly check it. This might change with a bigger team and once we get more involved, though. I think one way to improve is to build some type of real-time collaboration platform to supplement the core product. That may be too great a pivot, but the ability to actually use it as a communication suite for my team while building our roadmap is compelling.

sim0n6• 15 years ago

We've got a some new features which will be arriving across the next few months which will improve the communication aspect of Interstate, among other things.

As you would expect, keep checking our roadmap for more info on what we're working on :) (http://interstateapp.com/roadmap).

Interstate (YC S11) Plots Your Development Progress On The Map

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