Burnout – All-in-one workspace for startups | Hacker News Reader

Burnout – All-in-one workspace for startups

burnout.so

50 pointstablet53 comments

If this is not satire I can only applaud the balls of the marketing. I am certainly not going to forget the name (reminds me of that airplane company "Boom"). On the downside all the HN comments will be about the name.

"Be the first to experience Burnout before everyone joins in." -- Brilliant! I hope it indeed turns out to be satire...

Half the comments think this is satire and the other half think it's serious. I honestly can't tell if it's naive marketing or tongue-in-cheek satire that's taking itself too seriously.

It is brilliant satire. See the apt use of Pied Piper, but more clearly the "But seriously, please take care" footnote.

Unless of course it satirizes product satire, in which case it actually turns out to be a product.

If you think satire layers cancel out, you clearly haven't spent enough time on the internet.

This is the best case study for Poe's law that I've seen in a long time.

I see some other comments have also mentioned the name, “Burnout”. I don’t typically find myself bothered by product names, even ones that may be disliked. However, the name “Burnout” just seems really distasteful to me. I don’t know what it is about this particular name.

I’m also not sure whether my distaste is bad or good. It’s off-putting, sure, but I will certainly remember the product now.

Taking a closer look at this it appears that the word “burnout” is being used incorrectly:

“Estimate stories and plan iterations or go with the flow. Analyze burnout chart or obsess about cycle time.”

These sorts of charts are called “burndown” charts in my experience, not “burnout” charts.

Agreed. Feels like something got lost in translation and they meant for the concept of burndown.

You are taking this chart too seriously. Burndown, burnup, burnout...

I'm not sure if I'm not responding seriously to satire, but are you aware of what "burnout" means?

From https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/burnout :

"Definition of burnout

1 : the cessation of operation usually of a jet or rocket engine also : the point at which burnout occurs

2a : exhaustion of physical or emotional strength or motivation usually as a result of prolonged stress or frustration

b : a person suffering from burnout

3 : a person showing the effects of drug abuse"

I mean, by the looks of the landing page, I guess (3) could fit somewhat?

I personally thought it was a bit of satire and amazing ingenuity personally. Think about burnout as a fire escaping boundaries and growing out of control, but in a good way, and that being your startup powered by their platform. Suddenly it sounds pretty cool.

In that case it should be called "flashover"

This feels like a landing page without a product.

I remember somebody telling (here?) they didn't fumble around with MVPs anymore : just put up a landing page & harvest email-addresses.

Only then decide wether to actually build anything.

No, this is not the case. We are working on the product for 3 years already and will release it in the next couple of months.

Can I see it?

In general we can show what we have in private conversation. Pls fill in the form on a website and mark yourself somehow :) We will contact you.

Liiiiiterally just proved his point.

OK, proof https://d.pr/i/4yEClL

How would you know if enough of these emails will become actual customers?

I stumbled upon this while doing some research : https://fibery.io/

It has some interesting similarities.

Hmm, there is something going on here. The user “tablet” appears to be behind burnout.so in this thread but claims to work on fibery.io in a much older comment. Is this some kind marketing (for fibery) by satire?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16660961

Hmm, indeed...

There's also a tactic to launch the same product with multiple names / marketing / pricing. It's basically multivariate testing the whole business. I don't know if anyone has done it actually.

How is your product different or competing against https://monday.com/?

It seems there's a lot of products that are tying to bring all these tools into one application but what benefits does this bring? Has there been any research that this helps productivity and not produce negatives? Slack, Teams, Google Docs etc.. all of these have tons of functionality which are million dollar plus programs why squish all this into something smaller with half the features?

I personally dislike Monday. I traced its evolution and Monday valuation is totally insane, since product is a set of quite weird tools. They have good automations, but poor views and not very good connectivity between entities.

Notion, Coda and Airtable are more promising. But they don't focus on real work management (so far?)

Burnout strength is that you can install and connect apps together, thus creating a single workspace. For example, you have an Account in CRM. You can connect Account to Features, Invoices, Issues, Pains or Conversations, etc. It means you have a wholly connected domain that you can visualize and work with using Views (Table, Board, Calendar, Canvas, Timeline, etc).

Every App is created on a single platform (thus it is fast to create) and customized via PowerUps (UI extensions).

If you take Notion as an example, you can do pretty many things inside Notion and it competes with many tools as well.

I assumed by the name “Burnout” that this would be satire, but it looks to be an interesting “OS for product teams”. Question: how do you plan to compete against the top-tier products the focus on solving each of your features (CRM, customer interviews, task management, etc.)?

This is a very deep question. Under the hood we are creating a platform that allows to create Apps very fast and with all required specific cases. If you want more technical details, please ask. We use Clojure, PostgreSQL and Javascript.

Oh snap! this is not a joke.

Yeah... So I guess it's tragically comical rather than wryly amusing

Rather than technical details, I'm more curious about in what ways each application is better than what is currently on the market.

At the bottom of the page, it is mentioned that Burnout replaces Asana, Trello, Jira, Google Docs and more. In what ways is Burnout better than Jira? What does Burnout offer more than Google Docs? Asana and Trello tackle task management differently in its own way, and how does Burnout differ from both of these?

Also, if you add an e-mail feature, this would be the perfect example of Zawinski's Law (“Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail...”).

To be honest, I am still wondering if this is a satire page because of such overstuffing of features and there is a lack of details about the product.

>I'm more curious about in what ways each application is better than what is currently on the market.

I think if you take best apps on the market Burnout will not be better. The power is in unification. How many features of Salesforce you use? Usually just 10-20%. How many features of Asana you use? Maybe 30-50%. And these applications have so much in common (Database + common UI + some integrations). You can generalize on that and still add specific depth for every app via extensions and power-ups.

Unification saves time and money. If you can run all these processes in a single workspace, you will always know where to find stuff, how to connect work with customers, don't have to learn new UI tricks with every new app and have clear picture of the whole business. I know it sounds too ambitious, but that is our goal.

Apps can be installed and uninstalled. If you don't need CRM, you will not have. Burnout can be simple or complex based on your needs.

This had me chuckling

"Vacations

Track vacations and plan burnouts"

If only it was that easy

I see people taking it seriously in here and I'm laughing - I hope I'm not in the wrong!

This is absolutely satire and the comments here and wonderful.

Not. Here is the real screenshot https://d.pr/i/4yEClL

OP seems to be taking himself pretty seriously... I sure hope he's just playing along.

"Burnout" – A very sensible name for an IT product!

This is extremely useful! If the product is solid, this would easily replace 4 subscriptions that we already have. Good luck with the release. How do you plan to price this?

Pricing plan (so far) is this:

- Free - up to 5 people (to help startup in the initial phase for free)

- Starter - $7/user/month

- Advanced - $17/user/month (automation rules, visual reports)

- Pro - $29/user/month (granular permissions, etc)

Seems like a product that wants to do to much. I'm definitely not running a startup. So my opinion is of little value. But I do think using the flexibility of Clojure is an advantage you definitely can use it this space.

Reminds me products like Hubspot. It took a while before I even could grasp what they were offering. Perhaps they want to challenge something like airtable?

using unique selling points like "Track vacations and plan burnouts." doesn't give me that much confidence. For a product that is suppose to help the softskills side of a startup, it sure has it blindspots looking at the name. Could definitely be satire, even using quotes and names from the satire show "silicon valley"

Goodluck! Hope you focus on keeping it simple, the products you want to replace already want to do too much. Don't fall into the same trap!

> Seems like a product that wants to do to much.

Hence, burnout?

The one thing I really need from one of these task management platforms but that I can’t find is a way to manage, share, and track the reading of academic papers and white papers on the site and on iPad (IMO iPad in the morning is the best way to consume papers.)

That means being able to store and manage PDF files and snapshots of websites and add them to a reading list with tags for different users. And then in the reader interface to be able to take and share notes.

Any suggestions would be appreciated. We tried Trello and Zotero but they sucked.

Is having 2 emojis every sentence really the world we live in? Or is this satire -- is the product even gonna be real?

We are going to launch in the next 3-5 months. So yes, it is real.

In that case, please consider not using emoji's so heavily.

I'm not 100% your target audience so my opinion should probably not hold a lot of value to you but they feel obnoxious and interrupt the flow of sentences instead of adding to them.

Thanks, we wanted to create something "on the edge". But it seems quite many people take it as a satire. In the next version we will cool down a little bit.

I really liked the content, but at some point it felt too good to be true. Links to feature screens or walkthroughs might quell that doubt without compromising on messaging.

The "diamonds in poop" emojis especially give the impression that it is not a real product. FYI you use "rodmap" instead of "roadmap"

Considering how overworked start-up developers are, instead of calling it a feature roadmap a feature rodmap seems highly appropiate.

"Replaces asana trello jira confluence pipedrive and Google Docs"

Uh, sure it does

Nice work! When you say it integrates Content Production as well, do you mean it can replace a service like forestry.io?

It is more like GraphCMS [1] replacement. Basically you create required content structure (maybe Categories-Posts for blog or Articles for Help), write content inside our tool and publish via static generator somewhere (like GitHub/GitLab Pages).

[1] https://graphcms.com

This has got to be a joke. It's not April 1, but it feels like it.

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