New productivity software startups
ben-evans.com
ben-evans.com
For example - Facebook made itself into a productivity app, called Facebook at Work. It’s not great, but they use it. Notepad, Excel, literally anything that is a good ‘single-player’ experience will eventually end up one, either built by a third party, or if they’re smart and act fast, their own. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just probably better to let things shake down on their own for a while. We’re just now getting the social aspect of work right, after a decade of Google Plus grade attempts.
(Disclosure being, with some irony, is that I make a Reddit as an engineer productivity app at https://aether.app, so I have some personal experience with this proliferation.)
Anything accepts email - almost anything can send email. So for example in Aether Pro we’re building email pipelines so you can tie your CI to a ‘subreddit’ and all messages coming from that CI would appear under, without polluting everyone’s inboxes. It can also trigger further actions based on parsing those emails as well. It’s messy, but it’s the only thing that kind of works with anything.
We’d love to be able to rely on APIs of other tools, but those are just never there, or too fragile, or the API owners think the data they are ‘leaking’ is too valuable to let go, so email it is.
It's all in the context of providing an internal gathering space that isn't just a notification-heavy Slack channel. Reddit-style forums work surprisingly well for both humans and robots, so it's pretty nice.
The number of tools used daily is growing, which is in one way beneficial for the worker since they get a better and more specialized tool to do their work. However, it increases fragmentation and the chances of missed work.
Email is the most common solution, but that has its own downsides and seems to be used less and less for daily work. We think the solution is an ever-updating and fully synchronized “command center” for everything across every app you may be using.
Gmail already reminds me of stuff like emails I didn't respond to. I've set up some filters and scripts to do more like create a triage queue for PRs and such.
It's also those "filters and scripts" you've set up to create your own triage queue that we're trying to replace. The average user should not have to write scripts to receive and process their work in an efficient manner. That's what we're trying to solve at Monolist!
Have you considered pricing by #integrations connected?
To be honest, just based on the screenshot it seems like a nicer management for even a single service than GitLab/GitHub's notifications.
We didn't get where we are today, in any field, using this approach. We don't have 30 different measurement systems, and a company whose job it is to coordinate conversions between them. We don't have 30 different text file encodings (any more!), and a company whose job it is to automatically convert them as necessary. We say: here's the standard, and now you can use it or be ostracized in the market.
If writing custom adapters to interface with GitHub/GitLab/Jira/... is anything other than a temporary solution, while you work on some grand plan to get issue-trackers all on the same page, then it's just a money-grab on the road to failure. Someone will cut off API access, or drive up your costs, or refuse to offer an API, and users will be stuck with "one command center (for the 3 most popular services they use), plus 3 oddballs", and it's just not going to be worth the hassle.
It's a band-aid. Normally you stick a band-aid on something that will heal itself, and then rip it off tomorrow. This particular problem is getting worse. This is a very pretty band-aid, but you've applied it to a sucking chest wound.
Yes! I remember that. I worked at Sendmail at the time (a unix function that became an internet company) and we joked about starting a sister company called Syslog.
Given how many logging companies have sprung up since, maybe that wasn't such a bad idea!
I have not used OnShape but Sketchups's win at the time was ease of use not features.
Also putting all software in the browser doesn't necessary mean that the users have to give up control over their software and data. Maybe there's a middle ground by making it easy for the end users to run their own software in the browser. At least this is an idea I've been working on for quite some time - a self-hosted visual (no-code) software builder called FormBeaver[0] that let's users build and host their own custom database software without any code. Currently the users need to download it and run the App Builder on their own machine for it to work, but I'm hopeful that in the near future it would be possible to put it entirely in the browser thanks to WebAssembly. The one thing that's missing in the browser right now is an SQL database. I haven't found a way to run SQL in the browser.
Actually, there's a way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database (see https://caniuse.com/#search=websql for browser support)
You can see a live example with SheetJS here: https://sheetjs.com/sexql/
Unfortunately, Web SQL Database has been deprecated in favour of IndexedDB, which in my opinion is no real replacement because it's a NoSQL database that's nowhere near as powerful in terms of the queries you can run with it.
However, the deprecation is understandable from a browser vendor's point of view. Maintaining and developing a browser is difficult enough as it is. Having to maintain an RDBMS adds a lot of complexity on top of that for what's probably a marginal use case for most users.
That said, it might be possible to integrate SQLite by using browser extensions. That of course depends on the users' willingness to install a browser extension in order to run your software builder.
> from a stand-alone PC application that saves files to a file share into a new collaboration-first web application. (I would really like someone to do this for presentations)
I consider that market fairly saturated: Google Slides, Prezi, slides.com...
Using Slides etc is like moving from Excel to Sheets instead of moving to Everlaw or Salesforce - there's no change in the workflow. Slides is just a light-weight copy of Powerpoint, 'but on the web!'.
That might sound like I’m making fun of productivity software, but I’m not—-now that instant communication is a commodity, organizational/productivity software has value mostly because it’s a self-limiting tool that shapes how we think and interact so we can do what we were already capable of doing.
I recently wrote my first piece of productivity software, which I use everyday. The main benefit I get out of it is reminding myself, “This structure is how I want to think about things.”
The unlimited freedom of a spreadsheet comes with downsides, at least for me.
The big downside to emacs for productivity is that it’s less easy to share.
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My wife applied to residency last year. Each specialty has these giant spreadsheets (just like a database) they maintain collectively. which places are giving out interviews, how experiences were, what to look for, chat, questions, etc?
These are 20+ page spreadsheets. I briefly worked on an app for helping put this in a better format (spreadsheets suck on mobile). It's a ton of work just to match the basic functionality of this document.
Excel is great for ad-hoc exploration (is kind of a different repl!) but is best AT THE END of the data pipeline.
To make it well rounded, you need a good storage (rdbms), data language (sql, or hopefully my lang someday!), good way to do entry (CRUD form builder).
And at the end, put a spreadsheet and/or interactive repl like Jupiter.
More fancy stuff is welcome but this is the definition of a well rounded tool useful for small business.
I suspect many people are going to "rediscover" native desktop clients that are connected.
Microsoft is the dark horse here. Office is more than a bunch of productivity apps. It's an established platform.
Now there's a snazzy domain name (that, alas, was already taken).
But I was able to yoink the almost as catchy http://coolproductivityapp.com.
Hey VCs, where you at? ;)
I've been waiting for a lot of this to move into the browser so the workhorse server machines can do all the heavy lifting.
I want to build a similar product for speedy, automated editing, and a head's up for dailies and on-set editing.