MetaLab launches "Flow" Asana competitor | Hacker News Reader

MetaLab launches "Flow" Asana competitor

getflow.com

125 pointsalibosworth89 comments

Their intro video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxF7F5T-_Z8) is beautifully produced, but man does it make me uninterested in trying out Flow. The video presents a use case (planning a simple party) that already has multiple "free" solutions (SMS, Email, Cellphones...) which seems like a much easier approaches. Do people really want to assign todo items to their friends? I get that Flow is probably capable of much more, but I can't understand why they'd put so much effort into a well produced video that doesn't do anything to sell the product. Or maybe I'm alone in my reaction to it?

Video done by this guy, in case you're interested: http://lonelysandwich.com/

He's done quite a few iOS/Mac promo videos.

As you pointed out, the video was beautifully crafted and the tune used was quite catchy as well. It's called "Up From The South" by The Budos Band, in case anybody was looking for it.

I recognized it instantly and wondered how they were able to use it for a commercial video. I thought the licensing was too expensive to use a major label group?

Todo lists are a concept most people can already relate to, so there's no need to go to great lengths to explain why the product is useful. Instead they can get away with focusing on a whimsical use-case that's conducive to demos. So it's probably good that they picked a use case everyone can relate to, instead of focusing on a more realistic use case like tracking software bugs that only some people can relate to.

The use case may be relatable, but it's not a pain point use case, so why should I care? Has anyone really had trouble doing what they show in the video? Compare and contrast to 1000memories. In the same amount of time it shows 1000mem's advantages over existing solutions & presents a true value proposition to a usecase that is currently hard. Wufoo's recent video is another great example of getting this right.

I was trying to say that it's easy for people to imagine their own use cases for todo lists. Everyone already knows how to apply a todo list to their own life.

So let me get this right, it's basically twice as expensive as the entire Google Apps suite per seat?

Are they completely mad?

Hey, it's twice as pretty as Google Apps.

As a user of Flow for the past few weeks, I've been blown away by its UI and usefulness. Unfortunately, the pricing seems a bit steep for personal use. I'd also like to see some clarity on how pricing works with groups of people.

I respectfully call this a ridiculous proposition. How is $10/mo expensive for this, or for anything in life?

It seems to me Flow pricing is learning a valuable lesson from MobileMe: if it's useful, people will pay.

How is $10/mo expensive for this, or for anything in life?

That's where the disconnect is. You seem to think that $10/mo is not expensive for anything in life.

I respectfully disagree. There are probably an infinite number of things for which $10/mo is too expensive, independent of how much money you actually have.

Would you pay me $10/mo to have me send you a random Mark Twain quote as a push notification to your device every day?

I'm not trying to nitpick - only pointing out that your worldview and ideas of what you would pay for don't match that of many/most people.

It seems to me Flow pricing is learning a valuable lesson from MobileMe

Not sure that MobileMe is the best example of this lesson.

Would you pay $1000/month for the top 100 personal (not business related) sites that you visit in a given month?

If you're using it to help generate income, then it's a tiny price to pay. But the demo video shows "planning a party" as a use case and that can be done almost as effectively for $0 using email.

I don't think the argument is whether or not the product is worth 10$, but whether or not people will think it's worth it, and pay. I don't think 14 days is enough time for a product like this to become indispensable to me, and for 120$/year it needs to be.

120$ buys a lot of egg salad sandwiches.

Are you a Flow or MobileMe customer? I'm genuinely curious and want to know why you'd pay for these.

I'm not a Flow customer, but if it solves a problem for me I may signup (I gave up on Things, just started using Wunderlist, but delegating/collaborating are very useful features I've wished for...)

I pay for MobileMe b/c it gives me true over-the-air contact/calendar sync on my iPhone. If another solution came around, I might consider it, but could it be free? And if not free, less than $10/mo?

I also pay for Flickr for purely personal use, b/c I want to be able to share my photos and let my friends/family download full-res files.

You can "over-the-air contact/calendar sync on my iPhone" etc. with the FREE Gmail also. Yes, you can set it to have push & notifications too...

You, Sir, truly are a rare gem, the kind common web app developers can only dream of.

Producteev (http://producteev.com ) has been around for a couple of months and really solid alternative IMHO, cross platform, free for individuals, and moving fast! We are very happy with it!

I am a Flow user/lover. But if you are looking for a free alternative check out Wunderlist. No group features but similar. http://www.6wunderkinder.com/wunderlist/

Yes. This seems like something that would be valuable to a business (Say a catering service or a party planning service or package delivery service or whatever).

Their video (and pricing) seems to indicate this.

For running a business that requires coordination among many people, the price is utterly reasonable (if not slightly cheap).

So how much would you pay for personal use? It seems almost impossible to sell any web app for personal use.

What's the reasoning behind 'almost impossible'? A price point of $40/2-to-4-users, or even $40/year, is much more thinkable for individuals/families than $120/year/person.

From the screenshots, it seems like it should be possible to have a cheaper capped-to-a-small-set-of-collaborators version that a family of 3-6 could use, but still charge business prices for more/arbitrary collaborators and other features.

(I have a friend who's been looking for a good app to coordinate family tasks with his wife; iPhone apps and simplicity/speed/reliability of interface are of paramount importance... but integration with web/email/desktop, following-features, and threads are all of negligible importance. Flow looks nice but overkill in features and price for this need.)

Do families pay recurring fees for web apps? Apart from some high-quality photo sharing apps, I can't think of any examples.

As a datapoint, they do for mine (budgeting software, https://www.pearbudget.com/). $4.95 / month, or $49.50 / year.

Hey thanks, that looks great! Hope it's working out well for you.

MobileMe, Geni

Thanks, I didn't know about those. I do know some people who pay for family tree research software.

MobileMe is also a desktop app though.

Regargless, my point is that there are very few web apps that people pay for to use outside of work.

Posted it as a separate question - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2356589

It seems almost impossible to sell any web app

I think this is becoming (or always has been) a general truth. Customers now expect everything available on the internet to be free. But they're more than happy to pay money for things that aren't on the internet.

How is that impossible?

How many examples of web apps can you give me, which are being sold directly to consumers for personal use? By personal use, I mean not for use at or for work. I can barely think of a handful and even those are quite often paid for by the buyer's employer as a perk or productivity investment.

I pay $9 a month for DropBox. Alot of my friends spend $9 a month on Spotify.

There's also Netflix & Rdio.

I pay $12/month each for GitHub and Harvest, both for personal use.

By personal use, I mean not using it for work. You may be using Github purely for personal use, but Harvest is clearly for business.

Do you pay for any other apps?

You're correct; my Harvest use is only personal in the sense that I have a single-user account.

However, I do pay for Netflix ($9/month) and TurboTax ($75/year) for non-business use. I used to pay for .Mac, as well.

Since Flow launched first, isn't Asana a Flow competitor?

Just what I was thinking. I'm interested in hearing how long Flow was in development versus Asana (2+ years?). Considering Asana hasn't launched diddly, I'd say flow is the incumbent.

Has Asana really been in development for 2 years? Maybe someone should send them a copy of Dreaming in Code.

Edit: Wow, I just looked at their "feature list" again. Do you REALLY need LDAP integration? Does it really need to be written in an in-house language? Why does a todo list that's supposed to work just as well for a single user need Gantt charts and a wall on each todo item?

If anyone's ever used Quickbase, that's what the feature set makes it sound like.

Given the items you mention, LDAP potential and Gantt charts the enterprise could be a bigger target for Asana than Flow at the moment.

I guess for personal use it's a bit expensive. Remember The Milk costs $25/a year vs $100/year for Flow.

It is, when considering the value proposition over e.g. RTM is the collaboration. $99 isn't terrible but by itself it's really got nothing over the multitude of other GTD options. To use it to collaborate, for just me and the wife, it'd be $198/year, if I understand the pricing correctly.

I'd certainly pay the $99 for a family licence which could be, say, 2 install-everywhere keys plus one just for desktop (for the kids).

RTM doesn't offer any of the collaborative features that Flow does, nor do they have a native OS X app. I use RTM, but mostly as a simple TODO-list that is geo-enabled.

Can you really call it an "Asana competitor"? Last I checked, Asana was still vaporware.

I think you're mistaking a "closed, really private beta" with Duke Nukem Forever vaporware. There are hundreds of people using Asana with great success according to the videocast on their site. Organizations ranging from software companies, recruiting firms to biotech institutions.

<shameless solicitation >Speaking of which if anyone from Asana wants to give an invite to a 5 man Django shop, we'd love to test it out for you guys. My contact information is in my profile :)</ss>

I'd be very interested in hearing if someone from Flow could talk a bit about their client-side code. It appears to meld Backbone.js with Socket.IO, for live updates to models via remote collaboration...

Glad someone asked that question, was thinking I'd get to the bottom and have nothing but pointless discussion on 10 bucks being worth it or not.

I'm looking forward to writing a bunch about that. I'll be drafting a series of blog posts over the next little while that will cover our choices, problems, and experience developing the app so far--and, more importantly, going forward.

What framework/language was this coded in? Cappuccino?

I see traces:

https://app.getflow.com/assets/standard_interface.js

  - backbone.js  (~44 controllers extend from FlowViewControllerAbstract)
  - underscore.js
  - jQuery
  - iscroll https://github.com/cubiq/iscroll
  - socket.io

  - Modernizr
  - SWFupload
  - Showdown.js (Markdown parser)

Server (heroku):

  - Rails
  - nginx/0.7.67
  - varnish

More on the backbone.js part:

Models:

    Flow.Models.BaseModel

  - Flow.Models.Account
  - Flow.Models.Activity
  - Flow.Models.Attachment
  - Flow.Models.Comment
  - Flow.Models.Count
  - Flow.Models.Invitee
  - Flow.Models.ListItem
  - Flow.Models.Tag
  - Flow.Models.Task
  - Flow.Models.TrackedChange

Collections

  - Flow.Collections.Accounts
  - Flow.Collections.Activity
  - Flow.Collections.Attachments
  - Flow.Collections.Collaborators
  - Flow.Collections.Comments
  - Flow.Collections.Folders
  - Flow.Collections.Invitees
  - Flow.Collections.List
  - Flow.Collections.Projects
  - Flow.Collections.Tags
  - Flow.Collections.Tasks

Controllers:

  View:

  - FlowAccountTasksInfobarProjectsListViewController
  - FlowAccountTasksViewController
  - FlowActivityPopoutViewController
  - FlowBillingSettingsAccountsDivisionViewController
  - FlowBillingSettingsCreditCardDivisionViewController
  - FlowBillingSettingsDeleteDivisionViewController
  - FlowBillingSettingsSubscriptionDivisionViewController
  - FlowBoxDetailViewController
  - FlowDelegatedTasksInfobarPeopleListViewController
  - FlowDelegatedTasksViewController
  - FlowFolderDetailViewController
  - FlowFolderInfobarPeopleListViewController
  - FlowPopoutListViewController
  - FlowProjectDetailViewController
  - FlowProjectInfobarPeopleListViewController
  - FlowQuickSearchResultViewController
  - FlowSearchResultsViewController
  - FlowSidebarPeoplePaneViewController
  - FlowSidebarProjectsPaneViewController
  - FlowSidebarTagsPaneViewController
  - FlowSWFPhotoUploadViewController
  - FlowTaskDetailInfobarPeopleListViewController
  - FlowTaskPopoutFormViewController

  Event:

  - FlowAppEventController

  Front:

  - FlowFrontController

Any idea how long it's been in development?

My friend Billy worked on the app. They gave Cappuccino a try but eventually went with custom JS.

Perhaps this is exactly what Asana needs. Nothing drives a group like a strong competitor.

An interesting lesson for all entrepreneurs as Asana has had a beta rolling since June of 2010. Plenty of time to get something to market.

Something > Nothing.

Let's hope both end with great products - I love the concept.

Nothing drives a group like a strong competitor.

Funny I came in to say the "team collaboration" space seems terribly crowded.

They are both a MindWallet competitors. They probably don't know it yet though.

http://www.mindwallet.com

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNpAH7AGhIk

Thanks for peddling your unrelated application.

Your welcome. In what way do you feel it is unrelated? I'm doing something in the group collaboration space. There were a bunch of other links posted. Some of which I hadn't ever heard of. I though it was a good contribution.

Log in. Create an item. Share the item. Let me know if you still think it is completely unrelated. Unrefined. yes. incomplete. yes. Full of bugs. Yes. But it is an mvp and I need all the feedback I can get. Even if it is a little persnickety.

Cut the guy some slack. It's not like he's asking $10/month.

This looks extremely similar to Things...

It does. It's also way more money. If you don't need the collaborative stuff, I don't see how it's worth it.

The UI is absolutely gorgeous. And I thought the intro video was very well done. I've been looking for an alternative to Things.app for a while. OmniFocus is just too expensive and won't let me collaborate with my family members. I really like that you buy once and run anywhere as opposed to Omni's method of buying an individual app for Mac, iPhone, iPad. $10 a month seems like too much though. I would suggest a cheaper (free?) version for 1-2 users. That being said, I'm still signing up.

What about Wunderlist?

Very well designed. The quality is so well done in fact, that I'm surprised it's not behind a pay wall. This would be perfect for the iPad. I suppose giving us a 14-day play time should help convert.. but If I were MetaLab, i'd charge from day one.

Treat it like an iPhone app. plenty of folks waiting to click Install. Not only that, people tend to make time for the apps they pay vs. free apps. Get them to commit from day one. I think this is critical!

Regardless, Congrats! +1 for the Canada :D

>Treat it like an iPhone app. plenty of folks waiting to click Install.

In the App Store maybe, but not many people are waiting to pay for web apps.

Flow is a great product and emphasizes the "ship sooner, rather than later" model. They had a set goal in mind, and with a relatively small team, managed to create a family of amazing apps in a short space of time. Kudos! Asana and any company that has 2-3 year development cycles could learn a lot from MetaLab.

Not true Oliver... They've been working on Flow for at least 2 years.

Not true. We've been working on it for just over a year.

They forgot to use the social collaborative tune!

SocialText (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKezmcIEhZQ) and Chatter (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsK2nXp-fWs) both do, lol.

It says my e-mail is not available, and it doesn't have an Android app.

People have chastised web developers for not developing for IE6 and other browsers, so why is there not the same attitude towards people who don't develop for Android? You're cutting over 50% of your market.

because supporting additional browsers usually doesn't require an entirely new code base, compared to mobile platforms.

looks very professional to me, but... you have to click on sign up to get any price information. if i´d be a "normal" user i´d perhaps had left the site before even knowing that it´s quite expensive.

the video is cool, though the voice sounds bored.

maybe a more interesting example and screenshots/videos of the mobile app versions could be included in the video. i woulldn´t sign up without seeing how the mobile versions look. but anyway, quite interesting! (kept me from finishing, ok starting with, my paper :)

Great interface, which isn't a surprise from MetaLab. It's great to see such top notch work coming from Canadian companies, especially out of my home town (Victoria BC).

Meh. They ripped off Things.

Metalab is so sexy. http://getballpark.com is their other great app. I'm a huge fan of their MAC like design.

MAC... the makeup brand? Or the unique identifier for network interfaces? Sorry, the all-caps MAC is a pet peeve of mine. Almost as bad as iTouch.

Is it just me or does the site not work in Safari?

I have a similar side project.

How do you guys respond to seeing something similar launched? Assure yourself that you have better execution?

I personally would not be able to convince myself that my side project's execution is /better/ than something MetaLab (or any of the many companies I admire) built, but certainly it would be better suited to my personal itches.

That is not intended to be a comment on your execution though, I don't know what you've built.

What I would try to do is refine the niche that I am satisfying. There are a ton of task management applications out there, which means that there is a large number of ways people like to track and do their tasks, which means that something that solves your particular problems very well is going to satisfy more.

Based on the website landing page and the beautifully produced video, is this more than a glorified todo list?

Thats what I thought at first, but to be honest it's pretty powerful. When you combine this with a small to medium company, I think its a strong solution.

Scoble also wrote about convofoy yesterday. Seems like another cool project.

FYI for others looking for this project: it's "Convofy".

Hey, it's That Guy in the video from all the other iphone apps. Strange?

In case anyone is interested or doesn't already know it's That Guy here:

http://adamlisagor.com/

http://lonelysandwich.com/

I went through the "aw, not this guy again!" mode myself.

Anyone know what the group pricing is?

Seems complicated

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