Show HN: Routine Ops – Schedule recurring tasks by role | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Routine Ops – Schedule recurring tasks by role

routineops.com

45 pointschrisraible21 comments

I really think there is an under-addressed niche here. I haven't tried your product yet, but I was pretty hopeful when I saw this posted here. That being said, I have some feedback already:

- $29/user/month just feels too high. My per-service spend on any other SaaS ranges from $3/user/month to $18/user/month. What makes this service so valuable that I would spend more on it than any other SaaS that supports my business?

- There's obviously some overlap here with Jira. It would really be nice to see a page on your website showing what RoutineOps can do that Jira can't already do.

- Some people really, really like learning about products by video instead of text or screenshots. Videos aren't as information dense, I know. But in the past I've found them useful in my goal to influence budget holders.

- Your screenshots don't illustrate how the recurrence flow actually works. If I schedule a new task every day and then do nothing for seven days, do I have one task or seven?

- There is no obvious way to contact you. The page footer isn't just spartan, it's barren. It's missing some really essential stuff. Privacy policy is another important one.

- My primary use case for scheduling and tracking recurring work is based on audit compliance. Are you intending to address that market segment? If yes, then tell us.

- When I'm buying software to help with audit compliance, it's especially helpful to know whether the SaaS organization I'm purchasing from also has passed some audits (like SOC 2 or ISO 27001) I guess it's too early stage for you at this point, but something to think about.

- Thanks for the feedback! Really appreciate the thoughtful notes, particularly on the marketing site which is admittedly very barebones right now.

- Also super helpful note on the pricing - honestly hadn't put too much thought into it yet as I'm still validating that it solves a real problem. Agree that I will need to experiment a bit with pricing once the team option is available.

- As for audit compliance - I definitely had that use-case in mind eventually, but I would love to hear more about your specific use-case and requirements

Agree on the pricing. It looks like a very nice tool but since it's at core just a different way of organizing/bringing together information I can store in other places, at that price point I'd simply improvise with the other tools we had.

This price is bananas.

As CTO for an enterprise, I’d shared this to our chief of staff as a possibly interesting lightweight tool to pilot.

Then I saw they want a multiple of retail or enterprise cost per user of full Microsoft O365 (Office) which includes One Note, Wiki, To Do, and Planner as well as native mobile apps for these.

Also per your last bullet on SOC 2: for us, it’s not just helpful. We require the reports.

For anyone thinking of starting a SaaS enterprise productivity tools business, here is the benchmark enterprise sourcing and procurement will compare you to:

Office 365 Business Essentials. This comes in at the cost of at $5 per user with an annual commitment or $6 with a monthly commitment. It also comes with access to Microsoft Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Planner, and Hub. This plan only includes access to the web and mobile versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

The second, more expensive, option to getting Teams is with Office 365 Business Premium. This plan comes in at the cost of $12.50 user per month with an annual commitment or $15 per user per month with a monthly commitment. With this plan, you not only get Microsoft Teams, but also SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, as well as the option to install Office on all of your PCs, Macs, and phones.

For larger organizations with more than 300 employees, Office 365 Enterprise would be the best way to get Microsoft Teams for free and to all employees. It is included with the E1, E3, E5, and F1 plans:

    - O365 F1: $ 4.00/user/month
    - O365 E1: $ 8.00/user/month
    - O365 E3: $20.00/user/month
    - O365 E5: $35.00/user/month

Look at the enterprise IT management, security, and compliance value they’re offering at each pricing level. Really think about it:

Enterprise F1 is the cheapest since it is more about “frontline” workers and access to online services and apps. On the other hand, Office Enterprise E1 is also reasonably affordable, as it includes all the Office 365 collaboration services, as well as additional controls for IT professionals. In the middle is Office 365 Enterprise E3, which includes the full Microsoft Office suite of applications, and access to additional Office 365 collaboration services. Finally, with Office 365 Enterprise E5, you get the best of the best, which is everything included in all the other plans, and additional advanced security and analytics features.

— https://www.onmsft.com/news/these-office-365-plans-include-m...

The user experience “above the glass” is full featured by the second tier. The higher tiers’ added “enterprise” functionality is below the glass.

If the checkboxes in your tiers don’t look more like this, you might find a real challenge scaling into enterprise sales and sourcing.

Was this just shipped? If so, congrats!

Might be just me, but when I compare the feature list with something like Monday.com (which can be configured to do the given use case with its internal automation tool), I really can't imagine paying $29 per user. That's at least double what I would be ready to pay, especially since I don't see any integrations and there's no mention of webhooks to build on top of.

Thanks! Yes, just shipped and looking for initial feedback / validation so thank you!

Monday is crazy expensive isn’t it? They have raised prices at least twice in a year or two. Now it appears to be a minimum of $250/month or $2400/year for 5 users.

So... a human crontab?

ahah yes! that's the gist of it.

I'm pumped to try it out, but the login flow didn't work for me. When I clicked either "Sign up" or "Login" from the respective pages, the button didn't do anything. The password reset button did work, though. On iOS, Firefox.

Sorry about that, and thanks for the data point! Looking into why that's happening now.

Fixed now! The images were overlapping the form's submit button, even though it didn't look like it. Thanks again for finding my bugs!

Thanks for fixing! Now seeing the same issue on the organization page, can't click the button under the drop down.

Hmm, I fiddled with it and got past that. Thanks for making this!

It feels very unfinished. The "home" page and "dashboard" page don't display anything for me. I like the concept but it's looking very beta, or pre-beta.

Thanks for the feedback!

No doubt it is unfinished! We don't yet offer our paid plan for Teams. I posted the free individual plan here for initial feedback and validation for the idea in general. Appreciate the support for the concept - it let's me know I'm on the right track to keep pushing new features.

Your Stripe key might be misconfigured, FYI. Console is showing the following error when I went to the sign up page:

"apiKey should be string. You specified: undefined"

ah thank you! Haven't actually started collecting payments yet, but that could have caused a snag at some point.

edit: fixed now.

This is pretty great. There are so many business ops teams that end up doing the same tasks over and over on again and this is perfect for that use case.

Thank you! I definitely have a sense that a lot of project management tools are built for the teams that build them...small teams of cross-functional creatives.

You can usually hack your way into something like Routine Ops with recurring tasks in JIRA or whatever, but it's not the use-case their product teams are solving for. That's my hypothesis at least :)

You totally can but many of those teams don’t have the expertise to do that. I really think you are onto something.

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