Introducing, Braintrust, my bootstrapped lean startup | Hacker News Reader

Introducing, Braintrust, my bootstrapped lean startup

tawheedkader.com

34 pointsTawheed23 comments

My criticism:

- You don't have a "try here" or "demo" button. Like many people I won't spend the time creating a free account. And I am not interested in watching a video.

- no other criticism (as I haven't tried it).

Thanks. This is good feedback. I've just now added a one click demo button. http://braintrust.io/demo

I think you've basically created a simple version of Quora but you dont have the experts who can actually answer interesting questions.

Most people just email their friends if they want to figure something out. Braintrust = gmail conversation thread. Plus that is completely private.

I think you need to pivot.

You need to find some type of job which answers questions. And create a way to allow the "answerer" to bill clients per conversation thread or per time or something. There are other solutions to this problem but its just an idea ...

Eg: Lawyers,

Best of luck with it!

I've been casually using this for the last couple weeks. It's really slick for what it does (multiple simultaneous conversations with the same group of people) and has some neat touches like upgrading comments to standalone discussions when people start to discuss them.

Congrats on the launch.

You said that people kept asking for project management features, but your vision was to focus on conversation management. Do you think you will ever add in the project management aspect?

I can imagine that after using this service, people will eventually have to stop talking and actually do something! For example, we use Jira at work, and I find it lacking in the discussion dept. I would love to have your app's conversation tracking about specific revisions of code, QA cycles, production pushes, etc.

Extending byoung2's thought... Right now there is no way to tie in comments/programmer conversation and code. It would be great to have a tool that could be added to svn,git etc which would allow programmers to attach comments to code in such a way that I could then ask for all conversations for a particular feature since that feature was created to any enhancments done on it. ...

That's exactly what I need...and I would be willing to pay for it!

I believe github allows you to comment on commits. I don't know how well that is integrated with their bug tracker, though.

So does Jira. But it's just basic comments. Full conversation tracking like this app (including image and video embedding) would be amazing. For example, I would like QA to be able to embed a screenshot or video walkthrough when evaluating a specific revision.

To be clear, every point in a Braintrust conversation is linkable. So technically, all you have to do is start having discussions and start linking them during checkins.

I'd love to hear thoughts on how to make this more integrated as well.

I'm still steering away from project management aspects. However, I do feel that as part of natural conversations, there are always "action items" -- to complete the swing on a discussion. I can imagine a simple ToDo list being added as "Action Items" for each conversation.

Similarly, I'd be open to integrating with project management tools such as Basecamp so that conversations can flow from ideation to execution across systems.

One things for sure, I don't want to turn Braintrust into a one stop shop.

This is only a little nit-picky but I found the image next to "Real time conversations" on your homepage very very distracting. Otherwise looks pretty cool!

I kept feeling like some ajaxy widget was loading on the side and kept causing me to look over there. So I'd agree.

I agree. I've changed the icon. Thanks for the feedback.

Awesome, looks good!

I like your idea - sort of wave-esque. The way you addressed the encapsulation of topics in an uncluttered interface is definitely important. You might want to put some thought into a logo redesign since it looks so much like Ubuntu's. Aside from that, congratulations on the launch! I'll be taking it for a spin later this weekend.

Very good demo video on the product page. I'm actually surprised that I didn't kill it after 30 seconds as I usually do.

Thanks. This is about the 8th iteration of me doing a demo video. I think I've got the length and the content just right this time, but it was a long road to get to this point.

You borrowed a lot of design from basecamp & co. No necessarily a bad thing though :)

Why the comma after "Introducing"?

maybe also get brainstrust.io

Looks really cool, just from a sales / marketing perspective I'd change "Braintrust Features:" to "Braintrust Benefits:"

Agreed and changed! Thanks for the feedback.

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