Ask HN: How come we keep seeing yet another succesfull corporate todo app? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How come we keep seeing yet another succesfull corporate todo app?

5 pointsaristofun9 comments

I wonder how all those companies (monday.com, asana etc.) are constantly reinventing the same wheels and still manage to be a success?

Why there's no point in making another Facebook, but every year I see new "trello" or "jira" getting funded and growing?

What's the secret sauce? How does it work?

I often don't see any major difference neither in the product, nor in marketing messages.

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I think it may just be the office software category that hasn't been entirely ossified into a single product as of yet. If you want a word processor and a spreadsheet editor, you have Microsoft Office. Or if you hate Microsoft (and yourself), you have Google Workspace. And that's it. There's not a huge amount of room for new competitors in that space, because a Microsoft Office product doesn't have to be the best at what it does, it just has to be included free with Office and it wins (see Microsoft Teams, and I guess, lol, Google Meet).

The todo/planning area really isn't satisfactorily filled by Office or Workspace, so there's room for competitors to jump in and play still. And it's a huge market not currently filled by one of the big product suites there.

Of course, the downside is that as soon as Microsoft clones your product as part of Office, your business is dead. Calendly and such set a whole new trend of meeting scheduling behavior, and now Microsoft and Google both built the functionality directly into their platforms.

This doesn't answer the original question - why all those companies keep stacking up and surviving despite Microsoft/Google and despite being essentially a clone of each other.

The market isn't saturated yet. Tons of businesses aren't using these types of products yet. When you have a new product category everyone can grow, because there's new customers for everyone. Once it's saturated, then you tend to see more shifting, where one business actually loses out as another one gains, because people switch from one to the other.

how can this market be not saturated yet after ~20 years of saturating?

Well it tends to be kind of personal, until you have enterprise contracts and vendor lock-in, and it only needs to be personal to one person with decision making power and suddenly you convert a whole company to a product.

So you can build a SAAS TODO app and have one killer feature thats useful for 1-1000 or 10,000 paying customers, and survive on monthly subscriptions if you manage to keep churn low.

And this can happen in a niche segment or generally just survive off of a few evangelists buying licenses for their company to use X tool.

TODO apps are probably never going to be a $billion app but can reach a few million in valuation. But with an ocean of customers and competition, many competing apps can survive and meet a niche.

For example we used X small startup app for a few years until we needed Y companies feature, so we moved to Y company instead and it was fairly painless of a transition for <100 users and our simple project/task management requirements.

One innovation in the todo app space I'd love to see is a neural network that automatically organizes and categorizes tasks according to say "sentiment" or some other useful metric.

I find the categories I often make become static and overwhelming and would love a process that relabels them for me.

Generally they aren't completely satisfactory so people are always looking for something new which might be satisfactory.

If so - why most of the old heros are usually doing fine as well?

Complaining about Jira is almost as popular as association football, but people are still using it.

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