Show HN: Someone.io – Task management for teams made easy | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Someone.io – Task management for teams made easy

someone.io

151 pointsterjeto81 comments

Hi guys, my name's Lasse I work at Someone.io :)

We are really pleased to see such interest and enthusiasm in the product, it chimes with what we've been hearing from users since we launched our beta in May. Your feedback is very useful for us - Someone.io is still in development and we are currently in the middle of an equity crowdfunding campaign which you can see over at http://invest.someone.io .

If there is anyone who wants to support us and become a shareholder, we'd love for you to go and have a look at our campaign and invest.

You're also more than welcome to follow us at http://www.twitter.com/someoneapp and http://www.facebook.com/someoneapp Thanks everyone!

Lasse @ Someone.io

When are you going to release it for real? Unclear, given that the pricing page says "Coming this summer"...is it possibly in 11.5 months? If you don't get payments, how can we know it will still exists in a few months?

Looks neat btw!

I came here to ask a very similar question - "this summer" means completely different things depending on where on the globe you sit, and it's even more confusing that the majority of readers have just exited the summer.

It gives the distinct impression they've already missed the promised deadline even if that's not the case.

Exactly!

Hi jipiboily and pc86, thanks for this comment.

You’re right! That plan to release the payment model this summer was made back in spring and that text wasn’t supposed to be there... The reason we changed was we started a partnership with http://www.sintef.no/en/ (Scandinavia’s largest independent research organisation) in March which made us change some things about the direction we are taking the product in.

We have been working with SINTEF and 6 pilot partner companies to fine tune the product to meet user needs as they define them and also to make sure we have a premium, paid version that is going to work.

It will be rolled out by the end of this month and, while I don’t want to give too much away, there will be a free option and a premium version with extra features where companies pay per user/per month. We will be sure to let you guys know when we have more details.

Thanks again, Lasse @ Someone.io

I've been looking for software for months that would help facilitate a lot of collaborative document production. I love the simplicity and user interface of this system -- almost every other system I've tried fails in some major element of the user experience.

It's missing two things that I would need to actually use it:

1. An overview, where you can see the status and progress of all the projects at a glance. Right now, as far as I can tell, the only info the overview page gives about the projects is the project name and participants. I'd love to be able to see which columns were completed in the overview page.

2. Project templates. I want to have a few different project types, each type of which loads a default set of columns, colors, and tasks.

One final observation is that I'm not sure what the "state" field of the columns does. Changing the state doesn't seem to have any visible effect. For my purposes I'd like each of the columns to represent project stages and for it to be very meaningful when we've moved from one project state to the next.

Looking forward to seeing future iterations of this project! I've been amazed at how hard it is to find a software solution for my needs, and am very glad to see new promising new development in this area.

Hi bateman.

Thanks for taking the time trying out our product.

1.The product so far is in its early days. A better overview across projects will definitely be developed. 2. In the backend, a project is based on a template system. It's not visible to the user yet as this concept further needs adjustments before we can roll it out . In fact the current project design is just our first "plugin" of how a project can look. We hope to offer multiple ways to visualize a project in the future.

The state field is a system state (not changeable) that is used for triggers and in the future reporting. When you tick of a Task as finished, a trigger occurs that will look up the column with the system state "Completed" and move the task there. It's a bit rough at the moment, but could be a handy way to automate certain tasks later on and provide reports across projects.

This looks awesome. But our company probably won't use it. And here's why.

Committing to a new process or software is an investment of time and trust. When we choose something to use in our group, we want to know it's going to be there in a year or two, and still doing the thing we bought it for.

Software you can purchase and install on your own servers / desktops does that. In fact, we'll choose one software package over another if it doesn't force us to submit to updates until we want them, or rely on someone else's servers to stay functional.

Browser-based tools from someone else can make it into our workflow, but only after they've been around long enough and achieved mainstream adoption, so we can be relatively sure they're unlikely to "pivot" or disappear. Google Docs and Slack are good examples of this.

When you're new and unproven, there are already a lot of hurdles to leap in order to get users, especially business users.

Making your software user-installable eliminates a huge hurdle, I would recommend it.

That, or even just have an actual way to start paying now, which would already help to survive or make it feel like it would survive.

Chicken and egg problem, from the point of view of the end user it makes sense and I would have the same reaction, but then I think to myself, shouldn't we give a chance for a "Show HN" product/service to turn into a Slack or Dropbox? How do they get there otherwise? We'll never have new shiny things if we are skeptical by defaut.

That's why I advocate for selling software in addition to offering it as a freemium hosted platform. It's a lot easier to make the decision to use something you own than to commit an entire organization to a hosted solution that may not exist in a couple years, or may change to the point that it's no longer useful.

Hi Jaysonelliot, thanks for the terrific comment. It's really helpful for us to get this kind of insight.

Onboarding your team to any software is a risk. Our focus on being the easiest and most engaging task manager is aimed at being the least risky. We want to remove as many of those hurdles for business users as we can through simplicity and making team members feel more interconnected.

It's easy to say Google was also once "new and unproven", but Mahn's response below is an excellent one. I guess the issue is epeople want tools they can trust which here is "only after they've been around long enough and achieved mainstream adoption". But then, Slack was launched in August 2013 with 0 users. By June 2015 they had 1M+ users and a valuation of $2.76bn. (Source: WSJ). So new entrants to this market like us can establish themselves quickly but they need to be very good at what they do and they need to earn trust.

We aim to do just that and as jipiboily points out elsewhere, a payment solution is the first step to sustainability, which we've been developing with our research partners and will be rolled out at the end of the month.

For us, the preferable solution is to let us pay for it and install it ourselves.

For every Slack or Google that reaches mainstream adoption, there are a hundred smaller, often amazing companies, who don't.

Rather than rolling the dice on an all-or-nothing SAAS strategy that requires a big hit to get people to feel comfortable committing a whole organization, you can sell something people can buy, install, and own.

It doesn't mean you can't offer the freemium hosted option. What it does do is give you a chance to see organic growth in the early days. With subscription-based support services, you can even book more revenue — just the kind of thing a startup needs when they're looking for traction in the bootstrapped / angel funded days.

I find it interesting that as a newly released product that is likely to hold sensitive information security seems to be lightly addressed. The only reference to anything you'd do to keep my data safe is this single paragraph under the Privacy Policy: "The security of your Personal Information is important to us, but remember that no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage is 100% secure. While we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your Personal Information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security."

You also have a limit of liability for the actual amount paid to you over the last 12 months (for a free service, this is $0), and on top of that a pretty broad indemnity clause.

Depending on your target audience, I think a pay for option at the lowest tier would help, as at least then I'm not left wondering how you make money and if you plan on selling data to advertising partners as a "related service".

From a design and functionality standpoint I appreciate the simple slick design and feature set. It focuses on the core need without feature bloat. Best of luck!

The quoted clause is part truism part obviousness. There is and never will be absolute security. Then they just state that they do their best - to the extent commercially acceptable - to protect the data (who doesn't?). I really don't see anything wrong here. If someone else promises you something else they're most likely either over-confident or lying. Or investing in their security more than their budget allows them to do.

Paired with liability clause, basically this reads to me (my personal interpretation) as "we'll try our best but don't trust us with anything you that you really value and can't afford to lose". Which is probably acceptable for teams with low or no secrecy requirements, although it probably won't fit a group with stricter needs.

Disclaimer: not affiliated by any means, just looked up few pages, found no demo, haven't bothered to sign-up, still have opinion (haha)

I used to use Trello + Burndown for Trello + Scrum for Trello prior to this. This looks better. It will have to be very fast loading and should have burndown & scrum like features before I can convince my team to switch, but thumbs up for the great job!

I will give it a shot :)

Kudos!

Edit — Tried it out! is awesome! A few minor things though – It's a little too similar to Trello for me to bother switching, but looks way better (subjective I know, but works well for me!)

and also this: For the buttons (signup button on the home page. The element:focus{outline: none;} is something that really goes a long way in showing polish and detail on the front end.

This feels like this should have been a chrome plugin sitting on top of Trello. I might be thinking about this wrong.

Hi arsalanb. Thanks for giving it a try :-)

The product is indeed very basic at its current stage. We wanted to do things right and design it beautiful before we jumped onto more features.

Thanks for commenting on the element:focus button.

"element:focus{outline: none;}" also violates accessibility guidelines unless an alternative styling is added.

It's kind of not cool to discriminate for the sake of "polish".

Reference: http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-WCAG20-20081211/#navigation-me... http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20081211/F78

The page allows to register with www.someone.io Of course, that will not redirect properly to the board afterwards, but I was able to register a board with that address.

Yepp. Saw that :-)

Edited your domain name, and restricted www so it can't happen again. Thanks for pointing it out so we could correct it :-)

How is this different to trello?

If you want a self-hosted Trello clone, check out Wekan (http://wekan.io/).

I've recently installed Kanboard (http://kanboard.net) on the smallest DI instance and it works a treat. Kanban board, task list, calendar view, Gantt chart, it has a view for everyone. Simple enough for non-technical team members, yet enough features to effectively manage development projects.

It's not perfect, there are a few small bugs, but it seems to be actively developed and in general I can recommend the product thus far. Spend an hour tweaking the CSS to taste, and it's a very nice tool.

I don't want a self hosted trello. I really like trello. I'm trying to understand how this is different to trello.

Just tried the demo Wekan, and I have to say that it does not give me any good feelings about it. The screenshot of Wekan on the landing page is totally different to the demo.

Hi garrensmith.

I'll admit that there are some similarities, but our focus is very different. What you see today is perhaps closer to Trello than what the experience of Someone.io will be a few months from now.

We have heard from many users who tell us that it is our design and attention to detail that they prefer over Trello. We know that won’t be the case for everyone, but there is plenty of demand for products that serve a similar purpose to Trello, but do things a little differently.

With that said, I think there are 3 main differences between us and Trello. 1. We are team focused. Someone.io is specifically focused on delivering value to teams in a work environment, where Trello has much broader aims. Our focus on teams allows us to better meet their needs. 2. We have simple but beautiful design. We want to be the easiest and most engaging task management tool on the market. Our research tells us that some users find Trello to be “dull" and “uninspiring" and we’ve found particular traction with creative teams who enjoy our approach. 3. We are in the process of becoming the first "Social Task Management” tool. Together with our research partners, we have developed some features designed to make users feel more interconnected with their team and more engaged with their work which we’ll start deploying soon.

Thanks for your question, have a great day!

Thanks terjeto, that gives a really nice summary. I will take a look.

This is how i read those points:

1. Our focus is to serve teams so in the near future, all of our new features will be directed towards teams. (btw which features of trello do you feel lack "focus on teams" ?)

2. Our visual design is better than Trello.

3. We will eventually bring in more "social" collaborative tools (any idea what these will be like?)

My feelings exactly. Right now it's Trello with a better visual design. The other features are unknown at this point.

If your aim is to provide a better team experience than Trello, then I don't think this qualifies as a MVP. It's not clear what those features are from this summary and trying out the product, EXCEPT the look & feel. It's definitely nicer than Trello IMHO. If that's the main differentiator you wanted to test at this stage, then I'd consider this MVP (and sounds like a great success, hitting #1 on HN). If not, I wish you would've waited a bit longer to include some of those key features.

This looks awesome. A live demo page would have been great, but decided to gamble and provide my email anyways!

Some comments on initial signup: - Great approach to validating emails by sending an email after initially providing just that, As opposed to the classic "doing so after filling in all info". This way you get to figure out you messed up your email early in the process! I liked that.

- The confirmation email had a link to `Get started with...`. It would have been great if you also had smaller text saying "Or copy this link and paste in your browser: ...". Maybe it's just me but I get scared of clicking on links in emails without knowing where they are going to (or downloading in malicious cases)

- Would have been great to not have to go through so many screens for signup. Maybe have me provide my team name, name and password in one screen.

- The animations on the task cards and their dragging is pretty great!

Although the UI looks good, there are a few problems that are still keeping me from using it:

1. When two or more people are editing the same card's description, the description goes out of sync and ends up not saving either of the changes.

2. The UI doesn't feel very snappy -- it feels kind of slow.

3. The state field of a column has no other purpose right now than to mark it as completed so that cards end up moving there automatically when completed. Perhaps show the state field somewhere?

4. Why are cards automatically moved when completed? I liked Trello because I can organize it in whatever way I wish..I'll turn off the Completed lane for now.

5. I can't assign more than one label/tag/color to a card.

Hi pookeh, thanks for your comment :)

This feedback is invaluable to us. We've been receiving a lot since this post hit No.1 this morning and the development team will be hard at work for the coming weeks implementing the best of the suggestions we have got.

Thanks!

So what does this do better than for example Trello? It looks like a very basic product.

Hi Legoblocks. I replied to garrensmith who also wanted to know this. You can read my reply there https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10330518

Signed up to take a look but apart from the lovely interface, it seems to be lacking in unique features that'd turn my head away from Trello.

While I do love Trello, I find it is missing support for some aspects of Kanban such as swimlanes and list limits. If something out there could match Trello on the majority of features, add in the classic Kanban stuff (optionally) and have a nice looking interface + mobile client, I'd be sold.

The quality of web apps seems to be inversely proportional to the vertical length of its front webpage. So this looks pretty good!

For an app like this, dedicating the team's time to it should take no less than 5 minutes of attention per person, about the time it takes someone to deliver post-it notes to everyone's desk or mount a corkboard to the wall. This also seems to work within that principle.

Nice product. We've been doing the same - "Task management is easy" being also our headline at hiTask, http://hitask.com It's a task management tool for teams, with mobile apps, Google sync integration and much more.

Is duplicating a project on the road map?

We've been looking for a tool with a good interface to use as a collaborative check list. Every checklist shares the bulk of its tasks + it has a few unique tasks per project. Duplicating the tasks by hand seems cumbersome.

If anyone has an alternative, it would be appreciated as well :)

Have you checked out:

Process Street; process.st

Asana; asana.com

Wasn't suitable for our use but sounds like these might help you.

Hi waxjar, thanks for your comment.

Yes, duplicating projects is something other users have asked us for and it's something we have in the pipeline. There are a lot of really great suggestions we've had in recent weeks and this is just one that you can expect to see in the run up to Christmas.

Thanks again for your suggestion,

Dan @ Someone.io

Hi waxjar,

In http://tasksinabox.com we use templates for this. You can instantiate a new project, which is a collection of tasks, from a template. That creates all the tasks, and from there on extend and customize as you wish.

We use https://svyft.com/ and https://trello.com/ at office. This looks smilar but will try it for a small upcoming project. Good work.

Hey Lasse and team!

We just signed up and are giving it a spin. So far we love how simple and light everything is at the moment. All the features were intuitive as well, even those not explicitly stated i.e. dragging tasks around to reorder for example. Super cool and looking forward to a mobile app ;)

I scanned over the product's landing page so it's possible that I missed it, but I think something that organizes task priority by color should also have some option for a color blind mode. I wish there was a way to demo the product without giving my email and company name.

Main priority of the website seems to be to get your email address rather rather than to inform.

Ahhhhh!!! I've just got everyone onto trello after a bitter fight. This is too much!

Thumbs up! I gave it a try and ended up using it for my project!

These are the things I like about it:

1. Simplicity and easy set up. 2. I am not forced to provide my personal information 3. Customizable workspace 4. Easy to invite co-workers

Just from looking at it, it looks simple, clean and intuitive. Would love to know how it's different from Trello, since it looks like you guys use Kanban too.

Is it just me or are the icons on the screenshots misaligned? Seems to be off by one pixel to some direction, I don't know why it seems so disturbing to me.

Cant use services that are free for work, if stuff is free there is no liability or even reason for the system provider to fix issues or problems.

Provide a paid version.

Hi Callesgg, thanks for your comment.

i understand your point. A premium, paid solution is actually something we are going to be releasing before the end of the year so you can put your mind at ease on that one and feel free to test the product in the meantime.

Dan @ Someone.io

This is a killer UI. Congrats. Once you get a live demo rolling I'm willing to bet you'll drum-up even more interest.

I fail (as well) to see how this is different from Trello and why I should move all my trello stuff to here.

Hi jnardiello. I replied to garrensmith who also wanted to know this. You can read my reply there https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10330518

> Someone looks simple and feels easy.

This may be the funniest tagline I've ever seen.

Looks great! Could you please share what stack this is built on?

here is some clues: https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fwww.someone.io%2f

Trello is bloated with useless features, this is simple. Kudos!

That's because it's early in development. More features are planned for the future :)

I really expect a live demo for such things these days.

fwiw, I’m still looking for a product that does task management well with good integration/visibility of tasks within Slack.

hi ckluis, thanks for your comment

we actually do integrate with slack! You can read a how to guide right here - http://blog.someone.io/post/117160294470/integrate-slack

Dan @ Someone.io

Your logo looks like RoboVM [robovm.com].

My first thought was Basho's logo, since they both have something sticking out of the top left of the character's head.

Thanks for pointing that out. Funny :-) We chose the ninja-logo as the product was codenamed ninja in the beginning and we kinda liked it.

I would be more tempted to try this if there was a demo board that could be viewed and interacted with without having to sign up. I am wary of giving my email address before I can even see a basic example working.

I tend to think similarly, but there are many ways to generate a temporary email address.

It isn't the case here but site/app makings take note: this is why I never "sign-in using <social media account or some such>" so if that is the only option you offer I won't be trying your service/app/other.

For email I have a sub-domain set as catch-all and give out addresses in that to new sites. If an address starts getting junk I can just block it. If the sub-domain as a whole gets deluged then I kill it and start another (any site/app/other I continue using gets given an address on my main domain so I'd lose nothing, though I've never actually had to do that). Because it is a sub-domain it gets skipped by junk mailers guessing commonname@domain.tld addresses. Some sites have bad email address checking that rejects something@sub.domain.co.uk (I assume their regexp doesn't like the extra dot in the server name) but if someone gets that wrong I don't trust the code in the rest of their app so I move on.

Then it comes down to wether you are interested enough to go through and create a temporary email to check it out. I was not that interested and rarely is.

mailinator takes care of that (use a random address @mailinator.com and go check it afterwards). Of course, some sites block it but most do not.

If you're on Chrome it's as easy as right clicking the email field. The extension's called Easy disposable email address.

The catch-all means I don't have to create an address - just make one up on the fly. Everything to that sub-sub-domain (aside from those addresses blocked because they've attracted junk mail) are forwarded on to one of my "real" accounts.

Or, let them use the product fully without signup. That's what we have been doing at JotForm.

mailinator.com

Useful

so how is this superior/different from other task management system like teamwork, asana, trello, etc, etc...?

Nice application! Task management for teams is exactly what we have been doing at http://tasksinabox.com/ . Besides streamlined task operations, we aim to accommodate and sync your tasks across different applications and sites, such as O365 and Outlook, and integrate with your files and calendars on Microsoft and Google platforms as not having 'one more task-list' was something our users were very keen on. We have a free tier so you don't have to take my word for it. Uservoice is integrated in the app site, and all feedback is more than welcome!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com