Acunote (YC W11) Takes On Project Management With A Gmail-Like Interface

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/02/acunote-yc-alum-takes-on-project-management-with-a-real-time-gmail-like-interface/

by gleb • 14 years ago

68 35 14 years ago

hubrix• 14 years ago

Been using it for a long time. Great product. Going to be using it to manage contractors building my house too

alexg0• 14 years ago

Would be curious how contractors respond to using Acunote. You may need to explain to them that tasks are like a punchlist.

rmorrison• 14 years ago

We've been using Acunote for almost a year, and love it. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't done so already. Congrats!

gleb9• 14 years ago

Thanks!

mvkel• 14 years ago

We've been using Acunote for almost three years. How is this a "launch"?

ams6110• 14 years ago

We have intentionally made the user interface similar to Gmail’s

Be ready for a flurry of patent lawsuits from google.

mahmoudimus• 14 years ago

I've been a big big Acunote enthusiast for a long time. I recommend it to everyone -- they're an incredibly sharp and responsive team.

It's essentially a hacker-friendly task management system. I have trained all my engineers to use it pretty efficiently -- if people are interested in seeing how I use it, I will think about putting up some videos of how efficiently I use it.

gleb9• 14 years ago

Thanks! It would be awesome to see the videos, we've had customers ask for this actually.

rdl• 14 years ago

Wow, this looks awesome -- I was actually looking for something exactly like this recently, and was worried I'd be stuck using mac-only software.

Would be interesting to learn about your security.

gleb9• 14 years ago

We should chat about that. We take it super seriously. Would love your feedback.

saym2• 14 years ago

Are there any good free alternatives? I'm a student with a semester long group project on the horizon.

gleb9• 14 years ago

Acunote is free for <= 5 users

saym2• 14 years ago

Thanks for the reply! I'm going to check them out.

adharmad• 14 years ago

Try trello.com. Highly recommended.

raheemm• 14 years ago

I came here to comment about the how the proj. mgmt. problem has been solved in numerous ways by several companies. How could there by anything left to do?! And yet there are raving fans of this product right here. I guess there's a hundred different niches within the project management domain.

gleb9• 14 years ago

Right, project management software has a ton of niches, and it is also much harder than it seems. It hasn't happened yet, but much expectation is that somebody will be able to consolidate a big chunk of this space. We count on that being us :-)

mmackh• 14 years ago

Just signed up, since I was looking around for a Basecamp alternative. First impression is that Acunote is more user friendly and faster. Also, thank you for creating a plan for Indie developers. Are you going to keep it free or will you start charging in the future? If you do, will you accept Paypal?

gleb9• 14 years ago

If anybody says they can predict the future, they are lying. So I can only that we've never charged small teams and right now we have no plans to start. We accept VISA/MC/AMEX (and standard enterprise billing terms for large customers).

misiti3780• 14 years ago

how is this different/better than asana?

gleb9• 14 years ago

I think Asana is a solid product. Their long-term vision seems similar to ours - new category of business software covering all employees who do project/task-oriented work (developers, operations, marketing, product management, legal, etc..), that individual contributors actually enjoy using.

Our strategy on how to get there is completely different. Unlike them we provide the vertical functionality individual groups (like software developers, product managers, IT, etc.) need in addition to common horizontal task management. And we expect to be best-of-breed in the verticals we cover.

One vertical they do cover much better than Acunote is personal productivity using GTD. We focus on groups.

For larger companies we also have a really strong focus on data-driven management - letting you manage the whole company using data not politics. I haven't seen Asana offer analytics, but that's probably just a question of time. It's a smart play to focus on getting basics just right first.

steelaz• 14 years ago

Any plans to add Bitbucket (git or hg) support?

gleb9• 14 years ago

Yes!

pdx• 14 years ago

I'm playing around with it, and it seems similar to our current solution, http://www.liquidplanner.com/

I wonder if there's a compare/contrast between the features/capabilities of LiquidPlanner, Acunote, and others.

EDIT after downvotes: I was being diplomatic, out of respect for anybody who ships in general, and any YC company in particular. However, since I'm now feeling less charitable, let me be less diplomatic. The features of this app are a subset of LiquidPlanner. I see no features that it does not have, and considerably less polish. I would say this is a good start, but they have a long way to go.

gleb9• 14 years ago

I haven't done a serious competitive evaluation of Liquid Planner so I would hesitate to offer an opinion about them. Much like with a new source control system it take 1-2 solid day to get a feel for a system like this, and your understanding stays primitive until you talk to real customers.

I can tell you that talking to our customers, some of whom evaluated 50 alternatives (no joke) at the end it all comes to:

  * being fast
  * easy to use
  * scalable

I know it sound undifferentiated, but the reality is that while everybody claims all of these, few products do any of this well.

I'll give you one example. We have keyboard shortcuts for just about every operation in Acunote. For many power users this is really important, as lets them do a lot of stuff rapidly. It's a qualitative difference when you can work at the speed of though.

From the engineering and feature point of view that's like 5% of the product, but that's what matters to customers, so that's what makes sense to talk about. Having said that, Acunote does offer a ton more, but we do it based on a few powerful orthogonal primitives, so we don't have to come up with a new button for every kind of need as it leads to unusable interfaces. This lets us serve large customers with complex needs while remaining highly usable and approachable for smaller groups.

One thing we should offer is better training, screencasts, tutorial on getting started. That's definitely something we are working on.

Please shoot an email to our support. We'd love to discuss this further with you.

fg• 14 years ago

Wonder where they got their pricing page design from:

http://www.acunote.com/plans-and-prices

http://highrisehq.com/signup

dsawler2• 14 years ago

Also like every other site out there. It's the most generic way to showcase pricing and plans.

dr42• 14 years ago

while it might seem like a reasonable response, it's just not true. I don't see anything wrong with making the pricing page similar to 37signals, but it's not the case that this is "like every other site out there"

ForrestN• 14 years ago

It is a blatant ripoff down to colors, fonts, and even copy. Absolutely shameless.

Legend2• 14 years ago

Just curious - are there any open source systems that are just as agile as this one?

jotux3• 14 years ago

Redmine is pretty nice and for small projects you can host it for free on an AWS micro instance (pretty easy to setup with something like bitnami). For open source projects JIRA is also free.

Legend2• 14 years ago

Interesting! Anything that uses .NET technologies? I'm only looking for something that is extremely simple.

edwinnathaniel• 14 years ago

What's interesting is that the R&D team is based on Ukraine. Atypical of YC companies that heavily based on SV.

jotux3• 14 years ago

From http://www.acunote.com/how-it-works:

>Acunote integrates with your source control. We support Subversion, Perforce and GitHub.

That wording is rather poor as it makes it sound like github is a source control system rather than a hosting service.

"and git (via GitHub)" would be better.

Acunote (YC W11) Takes On Project Management With A Gmail-Like Interface

Related Stories