Show HN: Would love some feedback on my weekend project (built in 3 days) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Would love some feedback on my weekend project (built in 3 days)

teamclerk.com

44 pointstc122249 comments

What?? Three days of work and no meta description??? I feel betrayed.....;)

(just kidding)

I just signed up and am going to work through a few things. I'll keep notes as I go, so some of these may seem a little rough, but I hope that they help.

First, my environment:

- Ubuntu 14.04 - Chromium 47.0.2526.106 - Resolution - 1366 x 768

and

- iPhone 5c - iOS 9.2 - Safari

My thoughts:

1.) You sign your confirmation "Team Clerk Team". That isn't wrong per se, but it's kind of awkward.

2.) I know you have only put three days into this, so this is a really shitty thing to say, but when I first loaded this up in mobile, I had to really seriously zoom in.

3.) After I signed up (on desktop), I was presented with a tooltip that reads "Click here to create a project". In my environment, the 'c' in create is cut off.

4.) This may be a time zone problem, but when I created my first project and set it for being due today, it immediately showed up as being overdue.

5.) After I started up that project, I created a task and assigned it to myself. When I checked in mobile, I couldn't figure out how to view that task. In good news, your account settings page looks great in mobile. :)

6.) I wanted to test if I could log out of mobile and then assign a task to myself in desktop to see if the task would show up again when I logged into mobile. I couldn't figure out how to log out in the mobile view.

7.) I couldn't figure out how to show that a project was completed.

Overall impressions:

I like this a whole lot - it's one heck of a good application considering that it only has three days of dev behind it. With a few little tweaks to the experience, this is definitely something that I'd use. Great work! :)

In short - you are awesome! Thanks so much for taking the time and putting thought into your feedback. Very much appreciated! I'll be working out these bugs for sure!

Project management SaaS is a suuper crowded space. You appear to be targeting businesses, educators, designers, organizers, writers, web developers, logistics planners, therapists, and probably more that didn't fit on the screen. If you're a one man band, you're better off picking a really targeted niche that the existing players in the project management space find too small to care about. Otherwise you'll end up competing with people who have more manpower, more experience and more money.

Apart from that, getting to this stage in three days is really impressive. Congrats on finishing & shipping, and doing it fast.

Thanks. You make some good points. I built it more with the idea that I could use it personally and, talking with some friends, realized that other people would probably find it useful too. The industries on the homepage were more me fishing for use cases than anything else. My hobbies / jobs are kind of all over the map so I wanted a simple tool I could use to manage anything I was working on. Thanks for the feedback and taking the time to check it out!

Not really a feedback but... how did you do the landing page? It's so slick! Also you have one picture missing for Designers as your target audience: http://imgur.com/Sq0cFNg (at least on Firefox 43 on Debian).

Thanks! I actually started with a free bootstrap theme for the lander and then took out all the sections it came with and built my own in their place. Kinda silly, I know, but it saved me some time instead of building it from scratch and I didn't decide not to use the stock sections until the end... :)

I was trying to figure out which bootstrap theme you used, and discovered that the CSS embed for https://www.teamclerk.com/home/css/owl.theme.css is resulting in an error

I also see you use Laravel. No wonder it only took you three days :-) Laravel is awesome for fast development. I use it pretty much exclusively lately.

It was this theme: http://www.bootstrapzero.com/bootstrap-template/small-apps-t...

I would appreciate if either a short video is provided or a demo without registration is available. The former is probably quite easy without any code changes if you don't want to keep refreshing the demo instance :-)

I think the pricing is pretty good, especially for people who don't have the expertise in running Atlassian Jira or managing process in Jira.

Thanks for the feedback. And, yeah video is definitely in the works!

Looks like a simple version of Pivotal Tracker. Am I right?

As someone familiar with those kinds of tools, it's obvious to me. To someone who is has not used tools like Pivotal, it will not be as obvious.

Perhaps some examples of benefits from using teamclerk.com would be a good addition.

Nice work!

Thanks! Yeah I'm a long time pivotal user, but I work on a lot of other types of projects than programming. I also do music, art, construction, etc and Pivotal doesn't really fit with those things. I've wanted to build a similar tool that could be used by any kind of business for a while - without all the crazy features that come with things like asana and without the specific tasks types/workflow of pivotal.

> Who is Team Clerk for?

It's missing construction (educators I've a doubt... do they try new things? Are they viral? Do they spend money? etc.). There is a lot of money in construction plus they still may have few good softwares. I don't know, just finger in the wind.

AP4 Project Managers focuses on the construction industry. I've used it for design projects though: https://www.ap4projectmanagers.com

AP4 does the job, but if Team Clerk will do file attachments, it's the better of the two.

File attachments are on the way!

Looks great. Your pricing is reasonable too. I don't see a way to attach files though. Is that functionality on your roadmap?

Thanks! File attachments are on the roadmap, just haven't quite gotten there yet.

Don't make me create another account, just use Google/Facebook/Github and, if you really want to, give the option to create an account just for your site.

It's minor, but in the 'Who is...'section, 'Team Clerk' should be title case since it's your brand name instead of 'Team clerk.'

Nice work!

You're totally right! Thanks! Fixed!

I would replace the text with screenshots (or simply add more images) when you click on features. It hasn't convinced me to sign up yet.

Ask yourself, what do you love about what you built? and work on passing that message along, either through screenshots, short text, 'GIF' like video of you doing it, or an actual video (although it's tricker to do)

And better yet than asking yourself, is now, as apparently you have lots of feedback here and new users, ask your users! (what you love might be different from what your users love).

Cheers

A few issues I came across

1. Sign up btn on main page didn't seem to work but the one at the bottom worked. I browsed aroudn a bit before I clicked on signup and not sure if that had a effect.

2. Post sign up, I got a tool tip asking to create a task. But there were no other texts on screen. I can see a few button and even a arrow menu(top right corner) and none of these have a text in them.

I will check again later

I have the same issue as well when using Chromium (Version 47.0.2526.111 (64-bit)). Works fine in Firefox.

thanks. I wonder if it has to do with Google Fonts....

Thanks for the feedback! I'll check it out!

It's very impressive that you were able to make this in 3 days! I signed up for an account and it was painless enough. My biggest gripe would be on the overall design, I like the layout but it severely lacks polish.

In terms of product, it's definitely something I've looked for in the past (Pivotal Tracker for simpler/non-programming projects). Nice work!

Thanks, yeah I'm not a designer, but I try. Hopefully I'll be able to polish it a little better over the next few iterations.

Found a typo if it hasn't already been pointed out - "Prioritze" is missing an "i" in "..tize". This is under the heading "Track Your Team's Performance. Get Results."

BTW - Excellent job. I've built something quite similar for the company I work for to keep track of tasks and work load internally.

Thanks!

Small typo of "monitor" under Businesses... "Team clerk can help manage your team and moitor their progress."

thanks! fixed!

3 days, I call bullshit on this marketing ploy.

Call it what you will. I registered the domain on Jan 9. look it up. But thanks, that makes me feel pretty good :)

Well, you must have pulled all nighters or had some pre-made snap in parts to do that. Domain dates don't prove anything as you could have built it prior as well. I pulled off kitgui.com in a month and had a 3 day thing for a component I sold not including marketing. Maybe you kept it simple. Good job if so but it does reek of marketing.

When I click a task to edit, I can't go back to the task list without refreshing the page or hitting delete? I think there might be an issue with scrolling, looks like I should be able to scroll as the description box is cut off a bit but alas I cannot.

Man this is seriously awesome. Really clean design too I like it!

Can I ask what you build this using?

Thanks I'll check it out. There should be a save and cancel button underneath the description box. What device/browser are you using?

To answer your question, I just used Laravel (PHP), jQuery and Bootstrap. Pretty simple setup.

Chrome and mbp 2015 :).

Having not spent much time on it is not a badge of honor! If you're not proud of what you're sharing, put in some more effort until you can submit it as "Proudly presenting, my project management prototype" :).

Haha. Not trying to pass it off as the next google :) I have about 20 of these kinds of side projects. Don't worry, its not my day job. I'm proud of a lot of stuff I do. I posted this to get feedback from HN, not to present my life's work. Thanks for your input though.

Like the guts to ask for money. More people should.

I agree. If you don't ask for it, no one will ever pay you.

I'm very impressed, I've often thought that Pivotal / Jira / Trello wasn't well suited for more generic tasks.

Have a few points which may or may not be of use to you.

- I'm not a fan of the 'No risks. No credit card required.' subtext to the sign-up call to action. It may be just me, but when someone explicitly states there's no risks, it makes me consider that there might be risks. No need to put doubts into someones mind.

- Love the interface, really intuitive (Just thought that needed its own point)

- I think the permanent call to action to 'Upgrade Today' on the dashboard view is a little too in your face, and takes up a fair amount of real-estate which.

- The 'Add a member' option could also do with having a 'Add a team member' option (it may have it on the paid tiers, but for the free tier it would be a good call to action to upgrade)

- The difficulty field on a ticket doesn't seem like it intuitively will make sense for all tasks, perhaps as an optional field, or allow users to customise the names and values of the fields at the project level. I.e. if instead of high, medium and low priority, I wanted 'Later, Soon, Now and Yesterday' for my priorities.

- I think the Project Tasks and My Tasks could be collapsed into one column, freeing more space to work with, or maybe even a dedicated create task column. Just a filter of 'show my tasks' or 'show all tasks' would work well. Especially on the free tier it's a lot of wasted space.

- I'd shy away from using points and other metrics like that, as most of the time a 1-3 or even 1-8 scoring system becomes restrictive and not representative of the time taken to do a task, over time it just loses meaning to a user in my opinion.

And a minor issue or two:

- If I have two tasks assigned to a project, one high priority and difficult, the other low priority and easy and I complete the high priority task the 'Tasks Completed' in the project overview jumps to 75%, which isn't what i'd expect.

- The text on the 'Time Elapsed' and 'Tasks Completed' seems centred on the progress bar and not the container, and the small white font makes it hard to see.

- You can't access any of the support / terms of use etc.. without first logging out of your account.

Aside from that all I'd do is iterate a little bit on the text of the website, as it just doesn't quite bite yet.

But all in all, very good work. I've bookmarked so I can come back later and see if I can get more use out of it. :)

Thanks so much for the feedback and taking the time to write all this down. I really appreciate it! You've made some really good points and I'll be adding them as tasks :)

Impressive achievement in just three days!

Thanks a lot!

What framework did you use to build? Is there a standard framework that you can use for sass product?

I used Laravel for this one. I know Taylor (who built Laravel) is working on something for SaaS. Spark is what its called, I believe, but its not really ready for production yet last I heard.

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