Asana (no longer private alpha) | Hacker News Reader

Asana (no longer private alpha)

asana.com

31 pointsaymeric23 comments

I couldn't figure what what this things was after skimming over landing page - after watching 'How to use Asana, in 2 minutes' it seems like it's kind of task-list/to-do/reminder thing - which makes me think of Trello. Honest question - how is it different and/or better than Trello?

You could spend time going feature to feature comparing the two and waiting for feedback from others -- or you could use both for 2 minutes each and instantly know the difference.

Or he could stick with what he already feels he knows well. Customers are not obliged to work to analyze new competitors.

Honest question: how is this different from Google Wave?

If you're asking about Trello - then I see one big difference - Trello has way simpler interface - to the point I could send my boss and colleagues invites and they immediately knew how to use it - whereas even my most geeky friends had problems figuring out how to use Wave (I did too.).

They seem completely different to me. GWave is a collaboration/communication tool. Asana is a project management/planning tool. In theory you could do PM with GWave but it would be a bit of a stretch.

Thanks for the pointer to Trello. What an amazing yet simple tool! I immediately have a ton of uses for it. Thanks to the google account integration I had a new board in literally 10 seconds. Wow...

I tried and compared Asana, Trello and a few other tools a couple months ago. I ended up feeling that Asana was geared more towards larger projects with multiple teams and organizations. Closer to MS Project and Merlin. Trello seems more like a lightweight, less structured tool that is good for individual/small/medium teams. Closer to Pivotal Tracker or RememberTheMilk.

http://asana.com/company/

Too many people?

Agreed - the app itself looks fine, but it is trying to enter a very crowded market that has no real barrier to entry. And also no real killer features.

So I worry whether or not there is an actual underlying business model that can sustain such a large team.

Something in there just does not add up.

I thought you were joking till I checked:

19 staff/founders and 14 board/advisors? No wonder it took them 3 years to get to beta with a fancy to-do app -- too many cooks in the kitchen!

(on closer inspection, not everybody on the list has something to do with the app, they also list their chef, a "coordinator" (whatever that means), and recruiters and sales folks)

with all kinds of ex-FB and ex-Googlers (and an ex-Palantir and Yelp) including data scientists, mathematicians and machine learning folks, I have a feeling they must have more in store than what they show here:

http://asana.com/2011/05/new-asana-intro-video/

And which Trello does much better.

If not...this is way too heavyweight a team.

Oh, and a $9mil round.

I worry that that had such easy access to VC money that they decided to grow too soon. With the names of their roster, I assume people just showed up with wheel-barrels full of of money. With that many people you are already running into coordination and scaling problems. If you don't have a really clear product to focus on then you can have problems.

My company has been using Asana for the last few months and we have been quite happy with the outcome. IT IS really just a glorified task list. Asana team has put lot of effort into building a snappy user interface that feels almost like working on a native app (shortcuts, etc). I miss a native iphone app even though the mobile site works ok.

Looks interesting... but pale grey text on white background, argh!

Personally, I do not care all that much for the Asana task manager but I am eager to see more about the underlying LunaScript technology.

didn't they more-or-less drop that by the end? see the update here - http://www.quora.com/Why-is-Asana-developing-their-own-progr...

but three years to implement a todo list suggests they had a lot of fun with it along the way....

Even though Lunascript the reactive web language has been scrapped, Luna the reactive web Javascript framework is still plenty interesting. Building a web framework is much more reasonable for a prelaunch startup.

However, that's from a quora post written almost a year ago. We'll have to wait and see.

After waiting so long to get access to it and after hearing so much about it I am a bit disappointed.

http://getflow.com and http://trello.com seem to have stolen their thunder.

Will this be free in the future or based on a premium subscription model?

Almost certainly premium/freemium. This type of app is usually marketed to businesses.

This looks great, but I'm still kind of at a loss: How is this different than Trello?

Hadn't heard of Trello - it looks awesome, thanks for the spot :-)

Bagged these two pages in my Trello search. Joel explains the idea:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2011/09/13.html

Answers: promised free as is, possibly freemium features later (7th item):

http://blog.trello.com/trello-common-questions/

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