Show HN: Rollcall – An easy way to build a status board for your team

https://www.gorollcall.com

by sujal • 12 years ago

57 25 12 years ago

opendais• 12 years ago

It is neat, especially with the integration, but like alot of such services I think it generally assumes you need highly granular information about what someone is working on. [e.g. specific ticket/issue]

Many small operations carve out services and say 'You two work on X, Y, and Z services'. At which point, no one else cares until you hit a point/prod release.

Maybe that is just me tho.

sujal8• 12 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. I agree - if you've got one product or one specific thing you're working on, this probably is overkill. In our case, we have several products out in the market, and a small team that manages it all, including maintenance & support.

Thanks for the feedback, though - it would be good to hear if others have similar thoughts.

dang• 12 years ago

This post set off the voting ring detector, but I'm restoring it because we want to see original work on HN.

A voting ring is when people get friends to upvote their post. This is against the rules. We want stories to be on HN because they're good, not because they were promoted.

All: Please don't do this; just take your chances with HN's randomness. If a post is solid and hasn't gotten any attention yet, a couple of reposts is ok. Be careful not to abuse that, though, since accounts that repost too much eventually lose submission privileges. Send any questions to hn@ycombinator.com.

matiasp• 12 years ago

You need to show a demo or screenshots of the product.

AustinScript• 12 years ago

I wish I could use the cool things I see on HN. If it runs on someone else servers, I can't use it. The woes of working in a heavily regulated industry.

programminggeek• 12 years ago

Charge more.

Your most expensive plan is for a team of 40-100 people. For the sake of simplicity, you are talking about a team that is costing a company a minimum of say $1,200,000 a year (assuming $15/hr FTE's) and you are asking them to pay you $300 a year for a tool they are supposed to use throughout the day.

Why have you built such a low value tool?

Take your prices and multiply by 10 and you are probably at a more correct pricing strategy if you are selling to businesses.

pbiggar2• 12 years ago

Agreed. CircleCI does very similar things for status and Rollcall looks like a great way to replace some ad-hoc things we do.

But $15/mo seems insane for a 13 person team. It makes me think you guys won't be around in a few months, and makes me reluctant to commit.

Baremetrics charges $250/mo! You should charge at least $50, but probably $150.

sujal8• 12 years ago

Thanks - we're going to look at the pricing again based on the comments here. (Love CircleCI, btw - I used it at a previous gig).

brandon2722• 12 years ago

Basecamp, which seems to do a whole lot more than this app, charges $20 a month for a 13 person team (limited to 10 active projects). I never looked at the product at any point in it's existence and made me wonder if they were going to go out business at any moment over that kind of pricing.

ams6110• 12 years ago

How important is it, really, for everyone to know what everyone else is doing at every moment. I see two issues:

1) Daily stand-ups are adequate to communicate what I'm working on each day. Updates more often than that become noise.

2) The issue/task tracking system will let me see who, if anyone, is working on a particular issue. I more often care about who is working on issue X (if X is blocking me, for example) than I care about what Joe is working on right now.

sujal8• 12 years ago

The value here, IMHO, is that this leaves an artifact behind of what's been done in a way that stand ups, at least the way I've experienced them, doesn't.

The "realtime" aspect of it is less important than it seems at first. Our team, for example, updates 3-4 times a day on average, sometimes a bit more if we're just jumping from project to project to cleanup bugs or do general maintenance.

The fact that we've positioned this as a status board just reinforces that perception - that seems to be a common sentiment, and something we're going to have to consider again.

Thanks for the feedback.

sujal8• 12 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. We're still working through the pricing model, but we erred on the side of making it easy to get on board. I hadn't thought about it the way you put it, though, so we may re-evaluate this sooner than later.

The other aspect of this is that we have other features coming that we expect to be able to charge more for. Complicating the pricing matrix was something we're concerned about, but we were thinking something like Github's two-tier pricing model when we got those features out.

But, like I said, the way you explained it was not a perspective I had considered. Thanks for the feedback, was helpful.

xerophtye2• 12 years ago

But that's like $30 per user per per month, no? (i only saw ONE pricing plan when i opened the link earlier). So that's $360 per user per year. at a team of 50 people, that's $18,000 per year. That's not exactly "cheap" you know...

sujal8• 12 years ago

We changed the pricing page last night (and added a note about it being something actively being thought about). However, it's not $30/u/mon but $3. That puts us in between services like Hipchat and idonethis. I'm compiling a more thorough spreadsheet of competitors in the space and how they break down. Lots of different price points in this space.

gingerlime• 12 years ago

It looks nice. How is this similar to / different from iDoneThis? visually it seems nicer, but does it have the same email integration and daily updates? (I noticed weekly, is this configurable?)

The only reason I can see for us to NOT use it, is because we already use rollbar[1] (for tracking js errors) and rollout[2] (for feature flags). The name 'Rollcall' will create way too much confusion for us. Sounds silly, I know, but it does have an impact.

[1] https://rollbar.com/ [2] https://github.com/FetLife/rollout

sujal8• 12 years ago

One of our beta testers during our closed beta brought iDoneThis to our attention. It looks like a good product. We don't have the email replies built in yet, but it's something we're looking at based on that early feedback.

and, the naming conundrum - we just stuck with what we called it when it was an internal tool. I can respect the confusion angle, though. Still, you should give it a try :)

hapless• 12 years ago

I seem to recall this was Twitter's original model, at the very beginning. "Let your team know what you're doing" or something along those lines. Retweets and replies and the whole pile of other things made Twitter into a completely different thing that couldn't be used for that purpose.

I thought it was a cool idea then, and it's cool to see someone re-examining the status-communicating problem today.

wc-• 12 years ago

I was disappointed to not see integration with pivotal tracker.

Maybe it would be too duplicative since pivotal is supposed to show what is being worked on at a glance, but this integration was the one thing I was hoping to try out in the free plan after viewing the landing page...

Skrypt• 12 years ago

Will this integrate with Slack?

sujal8• 12 years ago

On the list. We focused on what our beta testers used first. We're trying to roll through more integrations as fast as we can.

sujal8• 12 years ago

We just pushed out a simple integration. Check it out :)

notduncansmith• 12 years ago

Not trying to be snarky, just genuinely curious: why would I use this?

My team uses an issue tracker right now (YouTrack, from JetBrains) as a central hub for our activity. Telling people what you're working on is as easy as changing the status of a ticket to "In Progress".

Is there something about this system that reduces the friction of that process (simply selecting an item from a dropdown)? It seems like having to actually go type out what you're working on would be more work (not to mention that if someone wants more detail about the ticket you're working on, they have to look it up themselves instead of clicking on it).

Show HN: Rollcall – An easy way to build a status board for your team

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