Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc.

upbase.io

632 pointstonypham453 comments

Hey HN,

Over the past two years, I've been building Upbase, an all-in-one PM tool.

I've tried so many project management tools over the years (Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Teamwork, Wrike, Monday, etc.) but they've all fallen short. Most of them are overly complicated and painful to use. Some others, like Trello, are too limited for my needs.

Most importantly, most of these tools tend to be focused on team collaboration and completely ignore personal productivity.

They are useful for organizing my work, but not great at helping me stay focused to get things done.

That's why I decided to build Upbase.

I try to make it clean and simple, without all the bells and whistles. Apart from team collaboration, I added many personal productivity features, including Weekly/Daily planner, Time blocking, Pomodoro Timer, Daily Journal, etc. so I don't need another to-do list app.

Now I can use Upbase to collaborate with my team AND manage your personal stuff at the same time, without all the bloat.

If these resonate with you, then give Upbase a try. It has a Free Forever plan though.

Let me know if you have any feedback or questions!

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I would think about your positioning some.

You’re marketing this as having “less complexity” which first of all, isn’t going to appeal to people unless they’ve already used the other tools. But, if they had tried Trello, that’s far from complex, as you say it doesn’t have the features you think are needed, so you are more complex than that. It might be that you’re excellent at UX but that needs some comparative examples to see how you have differentiated things.

Instead, it might make sense to go more with all the features you need, nothing you don’t angle. Note that I don’t think this really differentiates too much from clickup which has personal productivity options, and as you get bigger you know customers are going to ask for more and more features, because that’s what they do, and we also know that business accounts are the money makers in this market. It also runs counter to building an “all in one” tool. If you hope to replace chat, docs, collaboration, calendar, and journaling, that’s a big change for people who stepped in just looking for task management.

I did see that your prices are lower so you might try positioning based on lower prices than your competition, if you have carefully chosen those price points.

DFM may be a nice lens to look at positioning this through IMO. It's thoughtfully designed around the larger workflow which more archaic (jab jab) tools don't understand or ignore. Honestly I love Trello but wouldn't give it the time of day in your positioning. Just emphasizing the depth of expertise and broad perspective on daily/weekly individual/team workflow that made your tool possible will, without saying it, be positioning you agains the anti-pm tool genre of pm tools (like Trello). Combine that with some talk about "delightful UX" (snark snark, you suck Jira!) and "modern, robust infrastructure with insane performance" (lol Asana you also suck!). Just thinking out loud but seriously positioning against Asana, Jira, Shortcut, etc should be as easy as saying, in other words, "brainless, terrible user experience, and buggy" (all of which are true and everybody knows it).

Thanks so much for your suggestions. And yes, you're right. Positioning is what we're trying to figure out at the moment. We'll consider your feedback very seriously. Thanks again for taking the time to give us some ideas. Cheers,

Related on positioning - all of the above is correct and also unless you’re going hard for the SEO marketing / growth hacker angle I’d maybe reconsider AppSumo as a partner as I very much associate them with the SEO / website takeover modal / scuzzy dark pattern side of things. AppSumo will also bring in a very specific type of customer.

Does it have offline support?

This is the one thing I'm missing the most about Notion, Miro, Google Calendar, and all of this - offline support. In German trains, I'm offline, on flights, I'm often offline; while traveling, I'm often offline. Offline capabilities are often neglected.

It's rare to see offline support in a web app for a few reasons:

LocalStorage is easy to use but too limited at 50Mb.

WebSQL got deprecated by FireFox because of secuirty issues years ago ( albeit is still somewhat supported in Chrome ).

The FileSystem API looked promising, and then google killed it.

IndexedDb is the only option, it's slow on writes, therefore requiring major hacks like absurd-sql to be performant. It's also old, written before ES6, needs lots of boilerplate, but it does actually work. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_A...

Even then however there is a limit of 2GB of persistent storage it can use, which is workable but still:

Some versions of Safari are known to delete IndexedDB after 1 week because of power savings. Chrome does not allow it unless you either accept notifications from that domain and/or pass a certain lighthouse score (these reasons are anectodal and not well-documented).

So yeah it's a mess, and a bit sad considering it will take years to ratify a better standard for this, but not impossible to do. Also annoying to know that internally your browser is actually using sqlite under-the-hood anyway.

Web based game engines (i.e. XREngine) are able to get by with IndexedDB i think, and apps like https://github.com/actualbudget/actual created by the author of absurd-sql are good codebases to follow as example.

WebAssembly based sqlite is coming along nicely too. https://sqlite.org/wasm/doc/tip/about.md.

I am personally working on an offline-capable ML product using pyscript, svelte & indexedDb and it's been a painful ammount of fun so far.

We built Linear(https://linear.app) to be offline first from the beginning. It’s kind of hard to do later.

It’s architected in a way that client syncs the data, all the actions happen locally and then delta packets are synced back to the server. This also makes the app really fast because the client doesn’t have to wait for the network to complete the action.

Offline support is costly, and we do not have the resources for it yet. For businesses that have a lot of small customers, offline support is challenging.

Doesn't Notion have offline support these days?

I just launched the Android app with all networking and mobile disabled, the app showed me all my pages etc and allowed me to enter new data.

Yeah, when we built our product (kitemaker.co) we introduced offline capabilities quite early because my co-founder often had very spotty wifi during train commutes. We ended up making all writes totally optimistic with data sync in the background. Has the nice performance benefit of the frontend never waiting for the server as well.

Offline is nice in theory, but not as useful in reality. For solo projects, I will skip all the fancy tools and just use org-mode (emacs), which is offline. For a company project, most people don't get to decide which tool to use. Besides, if you spend significant time in a project management tool, even if your title is project manager, there is something seriously wrong with the project already. In which case, the tools is not the problem you should be worried about.

Remember the Milk (https://www.rememberthemilk.com/) is a fairly advanced todo application which works identically offline and online.

I believe they use Google Firebase Cloud to automatically synchronise data between all devices and platforms.

Have you tried Obsidian with its Kanban plug-in? If so, I’d love to learn what you make of options like that?

Trello has offline support for mobile https://tech.trello.com/sync-architecture/

Try akiflow.com, it has excellent offline support.

Very polished, I'm impressed! It seems like everyone ends up recreating a PM or todo tool at some point. It makes me wonder if there could be a world where we have a standard protocol/api and then anyone can bring their own preferred interface?

For todos you could just use an iCalendar file full of VTODOs [1]. It's a shame that the iCalendar standard is poorly and incompletely implemented even in calendar programs and almost always missing from organizer programs that are basically todo lists.

[1] https://icalendar.org/iCalendar-RFC-5545/3-6-2-to-do-compone...

I think that world is coming. The representation of tasks, dependencies, hierarchies, calendars, and collaborations should be relatively universal.

If there is a popular standard, it will remain popular. The trick is building up enough users that they begin to credibly demand an export to the protocol from big players like Atlassian.

One of the big problems here is that there's no agreed upon mental model for how people think about the pieces fitting together (and I don't think that we could come up with one that would work for everyone).

Even if people do have the same model then the terms are often different, depending on how you learned to do things. (Example: What is the "correct" number of levels of tasks -> subtasks and what should each layer be called, i.e "Epics -> Stories -> Tasks")

We've been building out Shortcut (https://shortcut.com/) for several years now it's not uncommon for new leadership (new VP of Eng or VP of Product) to show up in a large organization (100+ people in eng and product) and decide that whatever problems the org is having can be solved by moving to Jira and forcing everyone into a new mental model around how they're building things.

(Side note: We're tracking the rate of success of people who make this decision and how long they last in the org, and it's [perhaps unsurprisingly] not great.)

I feel it would be like SQL with multiple dialects. Some small set would be interoperable, but eventually things end up diverging.

That would imply that the data model and semantics are the same, but they usually aren’t.

CSV

> if there could be a world where we have a standard...

Probably not.

Then it would be awesome :)

>> I try to make it clean and simple, without all the bells and whistles.

>> Apart from team collaboration, I added many personal productivity features, including Weekly/Daily planner, Time blocking, Pomodoro Timer, Daily Journal, etc.

I'm having a hard time understanding how both statements can be compatible together. Open-minded to an explanation.

Here are my points:

- I want to build a simple, easy-to-use tool. No fancy, complicated features.

- Upbase is built for teams, but it should work well for Solos/Individuals. So you can use it for both team collaboration and for managing personal stuff. In the future, you'll have the option to turn off all team features, so that you can use Upbase as a powerful task management system, without all the distractions. (At the moment, you can turn off Chat if you don't use it)

They're two separate points, though.

Kudos to your effort! I think I will be next in line, over time, with similar post. Everything I’ve tried is just not working (in full). From now great experience, it seems team sizes need definitely different approaches and also it seems people building those tools don’t really have much experience in what works and what doesn’t across orgs and team sizes. To be honest, I strongly believe it’s not possible to build one size fits all solution anyways for project management, and on the other hand I also believe a tool for project management should have ultra strong vision and less flexibility.. with a space then for different tools/methodologies for people to choose from instead of trying to have one tool that fits (not) all.

> it seems people building those tools don’t really have much experience in what works and what doesn’t across orgs and team sizes...

Try Linear.

https://linear.app/method

Opinionated, in a good way, and willing to slay sacred cows, such as replacing estimated sprints with you get done what you prioritized cycles, or milestones with roadmaps.

(Now if I could just get them to replace "Projects" with something evergreen teams can work on, like "Capabilities". Fortunately all that has to change is the label.)

Thanks, I will most definitely check it out. I can already see it sings the song of my people:

Productivity software should be opinionated. It's the only way the product can truly do the heavy lifting for you. Flexible software lets everyone invent their own workflows, which eventually creates chaos as teams scale.

and

Teams at different sizes have different needs.

the question now is if my opinion is overlapping, heh. These two quotes are definitely my experience, with one more which is fluidity in projects themselves from design, to 'tasks' to priority.

Thanks a lot for your feedback. Upbase is specifically designed for solos and small businesses, which don't need a lot of fancy features. I have a sense that most PM tools are built for large teams and enterprises, with too much bells and whistles.

Do you see a way to make migration easy?

If the scope of a project changes, or to try various tools with an 'ultra strong vision' with real life data, it would be very helpful if the project data could be easily transferred. Is there a standard that most tools could support?

We'll need to take a closer look to be able to answer your question, since we're not working on the migration yet.

Firstly, congratulations on your launch!

My personal opinion as a Product Manager is that there is no all-in-one tool, there never will be an all-in-one tool, and anyone promising an all-in-one tool has some significant blinders on around the job functions they have been exposed to.

Sales will use Salesforce. Engineering will use JIRA. And Product will use some generic roadmap-first tool like Asana, Trello, Miro, Monday, or MS Project. Product will beg everyone to use their tool, but no one will because it's for looking at work, not executing on it.

Product will not understand because we Product Managers don't actually DO things, we talk to people, organize ideas at a coarse level - and we have a simple tool that articulates the vision perfectly! Except it doesn't automatically integrate with the CI/CD pipeline, it doesn't automatically log the last touch with a high-priority prospect, it doesn't pass designs from the designer to the UX engineer. It doesn't actually DO anything. It becomes just another SaaS platform in our Okta stack that only the PMs look at - and it gets out of sync with the actual reality reflected in the other SaaS offerings.

And the reason it doesn't do those things is because the people who built it thought that THEY were the ones who could build the all-in-one project management tool and all those sales people, engineers, designers, lawyers, and marketing writers would log in to theirs. Insert relevant XKCD about standards here. The truth is no PM tool will ever be the system of record for the actual work, but everyone is afraid that the complexity of integrating with others will turn them into JIRA.

So we get these vaguely opinionated ways of moving around and arranging candy-colored cards, and those cards never quite show us the state of the project we are managing, so we have to bug people to "update their status in <Monday/Asana/Trello>" before the weekly meeting. Which they don't want to do because it delivers no value to THEM.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying - please think about how a piece of work from each of those functions might be represented in your view, and how that integration would happen automatically.

#facts. Great comment.

How many times have we seen PMs trying to brute-force JIRA (et. al) into a project management tool using weird plugins that don't co-exist peacefully. This always fails, and PMs either retreat to their own trusted platforms (if you're lucky), or in severe cases start asking everybody for "excel summary" or some "one pager" to reveal that holy "project status".

This tracks closely to my experiences as well. Managers need to understand that managing upwards and laterally is equally as important as managing downwards. If your peers and bosses aren't fluent in your team's tool of choice, it is your responsibility to be the translation layer to a tool that works for them.

This is the only way to truly achieve the type of transparency we're all searching for.

first, it uses "PM" in the title, but note that upbase is a project management tool, not a product one. project management tooling could be viewed as a subset of product, but in other ways, project management is a related, but separate discipline.

second, if your product management processes deliver no value to your colleagues, then you may need to work on that, perhaps more as an organization than an individual pm. the product management process and tooling should absolutely deliver value to developers, designers, and other individual contributors. most pertinently, tracking velocity is for the team first and foremost, and secondarily for others. it's like keeping score in basketball--it's how the team knows how it's doing.

third, it may be big and "enterprisey", but jira is just fine for product/project management. when folks complain about jira, ~99% of the time, it's a complaint about the process and people involved, but turned toward the tool because it's hard to criticize the offending party directly.

i do agree that product management tooling is secondary to sales, marketing, finance, accounting, etc., and so must interface with those other systems for "truth" rather than being a system of record.

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts, drc500free. That is a very interesting comment.

For solos and small teams with simple workflows, I think they'll be able to use some types of "all-in-one" tools to manage their work. For large teams with complex processes, I agree with you that there are no all-in-one tools that could work well for all functions.

That is super interesting. To build “the one tool” you’d then need to actually build five tools (one with tickets and commits and pipelines for engineers, one for sales etc.) and find a way to “translate” from one to the other.

Like, how do you translate git commits and tests run to “project Y is now Z% done”?

Crushed it, you're spot on.

I've found the lesser of two evils to be that Product integrate as closely as possible with engineering, which means using either Jira or GitHub issues for high"er" level deliverables. You have to be careful not to use too much of the textbook PM speak--"As a <user>, I can do <new novel stuff> with the platform"--but if you orient yourself around the logical scoping of engineering work, it's a whole hell of a lot easier for engineers to tie their own work items into the progress (or unfortunate lack thereof) that all of us are inevitably expected to report up to our various business leaders.

That does require some technical acumen. I'm the first to admit that I don't have any of the formal bona fides for said acumen (and I deal with a great deal of imposter syndrome as a result). But when I listen to the engineers, understand their technical blockers, AND colocate our work items, I usually have an easier time.

And yeah, I still gotta copy/paste a bunch of shit into Sheets/Slides for management

Recovering marketer from the productivity space here. Your product looks great. Here's my two cents on the "positioning" dicussion happening: the copy on your "Our story" page reads like most other productivity apps out there. Sorry to be so blunt, but it's generic, buzzwordy, and you can swap your company name out for any other company.

> That's why we decided to build XXXXX — an all-in-one work management software that is simple to learn and easy to use.

What's missing IMHO is this: why did you undertake the drudge of building this? All software creation is motivated by a disatisfaction with what's already out there, so what is the unique point of view that motivated you and... it is hoped, will motivate an audience who shares that point of view. It's not why you are better, cheaper, faster (those are terrible vectors for positioning btw) it's what makes you different.

Are you anal-retentive about detail and hyper-connectedness (JIRA)? Are you psychedelic burners who want to bend a spartan UX into infinite directions (Asana)? Are you cutesy but robust (Trello)? Are you so hyper-opinionated about product management to the point of pedantry (Basecamp)? All these are perfectly cromulent points of view by the way. Marketing positioning is about articulating YOUR point of view, in order to activate the tribe that shares it.

For more on this see Simon Sinek or Chris Lochead. This is my favorite topic in the world. Good luck with your product!

Thanks so much for your invaluable feedback and suggestions. We're tech guys, not marketers, so we find positioning really challenging at the moment. Thanks again for taking the time to give us some GREAT advice.

as a founder, you are no longer allowed to say "we're tech guys, not marketers" anymore :) this is now your job. hope you take this great advice and stand out. vsri said it faster and better than i could so will just endorse - please dont say what you think you're supposed to say (leads to generic corporate bs) and say what you really think and give examples to "show, don't tell".

Congrats on the launch. Is there an email I can contact you for private questions?

I am the author of https://Nestful.app (there's some overlap, but we do not seem to compete). I have built it after being through the same ordeal, and have come to the conclusion that the tool is not the main hurdle, especially at the level of Trello or Asana, which are very high quality tools.

The lack of productivity comes from the methodology those tools implement. Their methodologies contributed a whole lot but by now we are used to that contribution, and so we must advance it.

Nestful implements a methodology I call "spontaneous productivity". In which there is no planning. Nestful will tell you what is the next thing you need to do, and that is it. Currently you have to know the methodology very well and "do it by hand", but I am very close for a smooth UX.

Either way, my point is that improving upon Trello or Asana is like honing a sharp sword. At some point, we need to switch to a gun.

Like others have said, your comment here is very interesting and makes me want to learn more, but your (pleasantly minimal) homepage has no more information.

Amplenote has a unique "idea/concept" they're designing for, and they spell it out in a series of very interesting blog posts [1]. I don't practice their "idea funnel" concept but their blog post made me interested enough to eventually subscribe to their service.

It would be really cool to see a similar post for Nestful.

[1] https://www.amplenote.com/blog/jots_unify_four_apps_ideas_in...

Very interesting approach. Unfortunately, the landing page does not give (me) enough that I want to sign up.

Some features, differentiators and screenshots would be a nice addition to the otherwise quite dry homepage.

for perspective, i built a personal crm that told you who to engage next (via a dynamic contact list powered by interaction data streams). it failed[0] because this was not actually the biggest pain point of sales people (folks most likely to use and pay for such a tool), and it was too important a decision point for users to rely on it solely.

a smart tool, it turns out, isn't all that useful, even though it has wow factor. it may even be enough of a wow to be an effective marketing tool, but an effective marketing tool is not an effective productivity tool.

[0]: we found more success as a general sales team dashboard based on the underlying realtime data

Thanks for your feedback. Your methodology of "spontaneous productivity" is pretty interesting to me. Will take some time to check out your app. BTW, love your minimalist landing page.

This seems cool, but I'd definitely focus on explaining the methodology a bit more. I'm not quite sure how I'm supposed to be using it...

Since you haven't provided any information besides "Try it, you'll love it", I tried it, and I'm sorry to say our relationship didn't work out. My Notepad++ is more useful. You comment in a thread on a PM tool, and your app seems like a scratchpad. For sure it fill find its users, but it's a far cry from Upbase and similar projects.

Is there a way to see what your app does / how it does, without signing up with an e-mail?

Your landing page doesn’t tell me much on mobile.

One thing I've always wanted in a tool like this is the ability to map out probabilities, i.e., we do A, then B but after that we do either C,D or E. Each one on these has an associated probability (C: 0.4, D: 0.5, E: 0.1) and an associated estimate (C: 10 +- 5 normal, D: 12 +- 3 uniform, E: 3 +-1 normal).

The UI would look like a graph and like ms project it could include resource levelling in order to show bottlenecks.

I know this probably sounds complicated but I think it maps to reality fairly well and thus actually simple (fighting reality is hard).

Interesting thought. One could do Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the probability distribution of time-to-finish. I considered something like this [0] to explain the empirical log-normal distribution of project completion times [1], although I hadn't thought about including sequencing & bottlenecks. Probabilistic programming [2] is the discipline concerned with solving this type of problem - some tooling might exist, although probably w/o a nice UI.

[0] https://heteroskedasticblog.wordpress.com/2021/12/04/softwar...

[1] https://erikbern.com/2019/04/15/why-software-projects-take-l...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probabilistic_programming

Twiglfo.com allows for this. You can put probabilities on nodes that make up a directed graph (think flowcharts). Bottlenecks and dependencies are also extremely easy to see in this UI.

As others have said, PM tools need to become more opinionated rather than recreating what already exists.

Yeah, it does sound a bit complicated :))

Powerful functionality always comes with the cost of UI/UX. We'll try to make our app simple and easy to use, so we try to avoid any complex features.

Anyway, thanks so much for your feedback and ideas. I appreciate it.

You could try TreeAge for mapping out probabilities: https://www.treeage.com/

And just as a plug, I made https://www.knotend.com which is a keyboard-centric flowchart editor you can use to map dependencies. Im working in adding computation and probability like you say.

And the probabilities could be a result of an intra-team prediction market. Half-joking.

Gantt charts can be made in MS Project, Google Sheets,: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart

Critical path method > Basic techniques: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_path_method#Basic_tec... :

> Components: The essential technique for using CPM [8][9] is to construct a model of the project that includes the following:

> (1) A list of all activities required to complete the project (typically categorized within a work breakdown structure), (2) The time (duration) that each activity will take to complete, (3) The dependencies between the activities and, (4) Logical end points such as milestones or deliverable items.

> Using these values, CPM calculates the *longest path* of planned activities to logical end points or to the end of the project, and *the earliest and latest that each activity can start and finish without making the project longer.* This process determines which activities are "critical" (i.e., on the longest path) and which have "total float" (i.e., can be delayed without making the project longer). In project management, a critical path is the sequence of project network activities which add up to the longest overall duration, regardless if that longest duration has float or not. This determines the *shortest time possible to complete the project.\ "*

Re: [Hilbert curve, Pyschedule, CSP,] Scheduling of [OS, Conference Room,] and other Resources https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31777451 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-31777451

Complexity and/or Time estimates can be stuffed into nonexclusive namespaced label names on GitHub/GitLab/Gitea:

  #ComplexityEstimate: 
  C:1
  C: Fibonacci[n]
  C: (A), J, Q, K, (A)

  #TimeEstimate:
  T:2d
  T:5m

  #Good First Issue

GitLab EE and Gitea have time tracking on Issues and Pull Requests.

Gitea has untyped Issue dependency edges, but there could probably easily be another column in the is-it-a through table for the many-to-many Issue edges table to support typed edges with URIs i.e. JSONLD RDF.

GitLab Free supports the "relates to" Linked Issue relation; EE also supports "blocks"/"is blocked by".

Planning poker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker

Agile estimation: https://www.google.com/search?q=agile+estimation

"Agile Estimating and Planning" (2005) https://g.co/kgs/kDScM7

Pretty impressive to have built this in two years!

I'm a high-level PM and I'm not so sure why the tool is trying to do everything. I use a messaging app to talk to people. I use a todo app to track my personal and business commitments, and I use physical paper and timers to track my personal productivity (weekly plans, journals, timers, etc).

The beauty of PM work is that you can mix and match the tools that make you more effective over time. Maybe that's software, maybe that's more analog tools.

I think this is an excellent solution for teams that aren't established and small in nature though.

I especially feel it will be extremely difficult to compete with the likes of where Notion and GitHub are headed with project management tooling.

Yeah, the tool is specifically designed for solos and small teams with basic needs and simple workflows. Big teams will find it not powerful or flexible enough. Thanks for your feedback. I appreciate it.

Nice design! Your features do resonate to me as a contractor because a lot of my clients know very little about computers and sharing them links to Trello, Slack, etc. often confounds them with technical debt. Having everything in one place for collaboration is ideal for those kind of customers.

It's also a double-edged sword, because decentralization is safer for me if your company ever goes belly-up or you are acquired by a company that decides to change the product for the worst. On that note, I'm not seeing any options to download or export all my upbase data. Will that be on the roadmap? I don't think I can really commit to upbase until that safety net is at least on the roadmap.

Not to derail this conversation but I would love to hear more about this use case. If you don't mind could you contact me? https://github.com/jeremylcarter

I got your point! Exporting data is on our roadmap, and it's one of the top priorities since a lot of users are asking for it. So you're not alone here.

Immediately turned off by the AppSumo lifetime deal. Seems to be where projects go to draw in a bit of cash before they fail or get sold off.

Lifetime deals on products that have a real recurring lifetime cost rarely work out, and are an immediate red flag, especially for a new project.

Being on AppSumo helps us gain initial traction and feedback to improve the product at a faster pace, since we're not VC-backed.

Better uptime https://betterstack.com/better-uptime has done it and built amazing product using this initial money. It makes sense for small bootstrapped teams.

Would be great to have a self-hosted version for the lifetime plan

Sorry, we don't have a self-hosted version now.

Every non-FOSS piece of software I've ever deployed slowly degrades over time as founders get greedy or need to recoup costs from investors. Plex is the canonical example. Linux is the canonical counterexample.

Sorry, I've been burned enough times by this now that if your software is not FOSS, I'm not deploying it. Your take is not a good look.

For an open source alternative, check out Focalboard [0]. Note however it is backed by a for-profit company, but the code is open and can be compiled from source (so you can thus remove all telemetry and paid upsell nonsense).

[0] https://github.com/mattermost/focalboard

OP knows, that's why he is suggesting it

Agreed

> Most of them are overly complicated and painful to use. Some others, like Trello, are too limited for my needs.

I would argue this just means that, in this space, one size does not fit all. There are many productivity features, and everyone has a different set of features they want. If you're using a tool that is missing some features you want, you perceive it as limited. If you're using a tool that has a lot of features you don't care about, you perceive it as overly complex.

Yeah, your point makes perfect sense, since people have different needs from each other.

I ran an open source project management system for years and I'll say: Good luck.

In short, everyone has their own dreams, preferences, (perceived)needs, and workflows and they are usually unwilling to tweak their own approach and would rather have a tool that fits them. They may be right that their "needs" are truly needs instead of just preferences but either way, you end up with a swarm of nasty little variations that are meaningless for vast swathes of the space. That's why any list of "project management tools" has 100+ entries and is still incomplete.

~10 years back, I realized that most of the people who are open minded enough tweaked their own processes to flip to something like Trello (as I did a few years later). They're still unsatisfied - I wish Trello had intercard dependencies and per-checklist item due dates - but making due.

Happy to offer more info and advice, feel free to ping me.

So far paper and pen is still effectively the most malleable productivity environment that conforms to all my needs.

> I wish Trello had intercard dependencies and per-checklist item due dates

Intercard dependencies may be covered by a power-up[1].

Per-checklist item due dates were added in the last couple years[2].

1. https://screenful.com/card-dependencies-for-trello

2. https://support.atlassian.com/trello/docs/how-to-use-advance...

This can probably be boiled down to a config language that can be used to express various needs and preferences.

The problem is enumerating them all and consolidating the language such that it is neither more nor less expressive than necessary.

Then we can truly dump JIRA once and for all.

Thanks for sharing your experiences. Yeah I agree with you that it's hard to convince people to tweak their process, but the opposite is true. Hopefully, we can attract (enough) people who find Upbase a good fit, not the other way around.

Obsidian meets all my (personal productivity / PKM / Tools for Thought) needs for this kind of thing for now and the forseeable future. But I'm happy to share my thoughts as someone who's been fairly deep in this space for several years.

If you're looking for broad adoption, I'd focus heavily on your interop and portability story: import and export. If it's easy to try with "bring your own extant content", and mitigated risk of lockin via robust export, the PKM / TFT community will be much more likely to engage. And the community per se is a huge factor in such tools' appeal and viabilty.

Thanks for sharing, good on you for actually shipping, and good luck!

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts. And yes, you're right. Not being able to import/export is a deal breaker for many people who are really interested in Upbase. We'll need to prioritize that.

Congrats on the successful "Show HN". I'm sure you are getting some quality visits out of it. Apart from the feedback here which also very important.

I'm wondering, would you bother verify Upbase.io on SaaSHub? Pls ping me if you do so, and I will get it featured on the newsletter there. Cheers!

Thanks for your support. It would be awesome. I definitely will ping you. Cheers,

I would strongly suggest not having password complexity or length requirements except for perhaps a minimum length of 16+.

Anything else is additional user frustration and serves no real purpose given that you're presumably not storing passwords in plaintext in the year 2022.

Thanks for your feedback. We'll consider making it a bit easier for users.

I dunno.. looks complicated, very much so. few years ago i made a big review of all trello alternatives and they were all too complicated to use and were lacking the copy of board & list (as an actually working method and not just copy the 1%) and also lacking of share a board with customer via secret link, but only with limited visibility not to see all the cards and their details..

made trello still the best and most clean

You can try it out yourself. Probably you'll find that it looks complicated but is actually very simple and easy to use :)

FYI, ClickUp does have real-time chat which is I think the only feature you note on the compare page that Upbase has that ClickUp does not. Also, this might not be a popular opinion but this sales pitch just doesn’t do it for me, “At first, it might seem great that you can do everything with [ClickUp], but after a while, you realize you don’t need that many features.”

It would be nice to see a comparison with Linear.

Thanks for your feedback. At the moment, ClickUp does have real-time chat in lists, not global chat, so you can't send one-on-one messages to someone yet. For some people that love simplicity and don't need the many features ClickUp has to offer, it's overwhelming. We have a lot of users switching from ClickUp for simplicity alone.

I was skeptical until I saw that you’ve included messages, a separate chat, and file hosting. It’d be hard to migrate an existing team over to this, but for new teams, this would be cool to adopt. One single “work space.” I

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Yes, migrating data from one app to another is not always easy.

Dragging tasks from the board to the calendar and pomodoro are great features. I've been looking for an app like this for a long time. I will go for lifetime access. Congrats on a great idea executed well, and thanks.

Glad that you like it. And thanks so much for your support. There are still a lot of exciting features coming in the upcoming months.

Does it support Markdown? That's what I find lacking in many of these PM tools - they either use some custom, complicated markup, or wysiwyg, which makes it hard to format text properly and copy and paste text.

I'm a solo founder working on a project management tool which supports markdown. Take a look. :)

https://macroapp.io

Currently, only the Chat tool supports Markdown. But we do plan to have Markdown all over the place.

Small note: on the clickup comparison item 4 you have a grammatical error. "Upbase have..." Rather than "Upbase has..."

I think it’s a US vs British English thing. Company names are plural in one and singular in the other.

Thanks for your feedback. Yes, it's an error.

"Our story" page doesn't tell us anything about you, the founders, team etc. Before I give you access to my Google data, it would be nice to know who you are and your backgrounds.

I assume that people want to hear about our story and why we decided to build "just-another-PM-tool", rather than who I am, since it's boring and makes no difference unless I'm a well-known founder.

Well done on the launch!

There are a lot of these Trello/JIRA alternatives. I am sure they are better in one or more dimensions, but I sort of need some kind of evidence breadcrumb to make me believe it is worth the 5-10 hours of time to work out if your product is worth spending another lots of hours transitioning from JIRA to. In some sense then, for people using X already, the price doesn't matter, as long as it is not ridiculously high.

I imagine it is better to target more. Your story says "our team of six people was working on a small content marketing project.". Maybe if you target content marketing teams, you can talk directly to their pain? You might need a landing page per customer profile. Obviously with HN you can only submit one link, so the one for Engineering teams would make sense I guess.

I think start by selling to content marketing teams, as your mouths are full of that dog food already, and it tastes good presumably!

Thanks for your feedback. Upbase is a generic tool and people can use it in whatever way works best for them. I might need to create pages highlighting use cases of how to use Upbase for Product teams, marketing teams, etc.

Pretty cool! Congratulations on launching a useful product.

As a side conversation, this project and how you described it made me think about why I have such issues with Jira. Jira is actually fucking useless to me. To the business, it's indispensible because it captures the larger tasks that roll up to a larger business objective. However, for each of those larger tasks I have a series of conversations and cross-functional dependencies that must be negotiated. More basically, my minutiae is much more than the larger tasks can ever describe, and that minutiae is much too noisy for the business to track - which is why we cover it informally in stand ups.

What I need is something offline that tracks my minutiae like stories where the larger tasks (that are currently stories to the business) get tracked like epics on my end.

I say this from the perspective of working at a very large, top-level engineering firm.

Similar take re: Jira at work. But for me personally, Jira is valuable in that it at least provides shorthand for a body of work. I manage my own deliverables (and my small team's, to a lesser extent) in Obsidian, in a work-dedicated private vault. Referencing Jira tickets ("WF-1234" or "CICD-9999") in my per-project devnotes is helpful for organization and providing centers of gravity for related | interdependent notes. YMMV but it's been working fairly well for me.

This is a huge ask, but would you mind elaborating on your workflow a bit? I really struggled with Jira at work, and I _think_ it was for similar reasons that you described.

Are you saying that what is a story at work, and captured within a single “unit” within Jira (I don’t want to use “task”, because that’s a separate thing in Jira) is more broad, but you benefit from having that story broken down further, and that’s where you would use something like Upbase?

Jira is powerful for Dev teams. But I've never heard anyone say that they love using Jira.

For large teams with a complex process, I think the problem is the process itself, not the tool.

I'm sure this has some amazing features that really help with project and personal productivity mgmt compared to other systems.

But let me ask you a question. If I want to get your attention, which one of the following techniques will work best:

1) Write you a snailmail letter 2) Send you an email 3) Send you a text 4) Write it on a yellow post-it note on your refrigerator

The answer is 4. Because it's the most difficult to ignore and leverages our ancient human physiology. It's not an accident that Kent Beck (Author of "Extreme Programming: Embrace Change") used post-it notes stuck to a wall that had every story written on it that mattered to the team within eyesight of every developer.

The problem is that when we get together to put information into a Jira or a Trello or whatever, we're making THE TOOL happy. What matters is the state of the tool, not the state of the system you're working on.

I think it depends. For simple notes/reminders/to-do lists, paper and pen are enough. But for bigger projects, you might need a tool. Choosing the right tool for your needs can make a significant impact on your progress. That's why there are so many PM tools on the market. Cheers,

The Privacy Policy [1] only covers what is defined as "Personal Data". What about the data created by users themselves? E.g. Tasks/cards created by users.

Is user-generated data private enough? I know Trello, Asana, etc. are widely used by businesses, but that is after many b2b guarantees about privacy, defined through legal agreements. For everyone else, it's what you say in Privacy policy document.

Bonus: If the data is end-to-end encrypted, you won't even need to get legal involved. It is a big feature in itself, but it's worth considering in the interest of future opportunities.

[1]: https://upbase.io/privacy-policy/

Thanks for your feedback. We'll update this page, or even create a separate security page to talk about data security.

Uses the same folder-list paradigm as ClickUp, which, as a long time JIRA user recently converted to ClickUp, I find to be a plus. The simplicity and responsiveness of the interface appears to be an improvement over ClickUp. However, one thing I love about ClickUp is its ability to quickly configure task statuses (which in JIRA, is the equivalent of programming a VCR). So if this product could add flexible task statuses, and also task tags, it might be a low cost contender to ClickUp.

Edit: also, rather than folders > lists > sections, it might be worthwhile to introduce nested folders, which is a very popular feature request in ClickUp but that team never actually got around to adding it. Another thing: subtasks.

Thanks so much for your feedback. We do plan to add custom fields in the upcoming months, and you can create custom task statuses from there. Tags in on our roadmap as well. We'll consider nested folders if there are enough demands. You can create subtasks now, but not nested subtasks yet.

Chat/message feature is great -- can avoid project-related slack messages.

Just figured out that sections map to statuses. Not a bad idea.

I love this and would love to try this out.

My question is, you say, there are 2 lists for the free users.

What exactly are "lists" in your app?

____

On a different note, I always long for an app that is designed for the solo user for personal needs only.

Most people, including myself, have to use for work what their org uses for task management.

But an app designed specifically for solo users would be great. No need for collab tools or messaging, just simple one-user workflow across multiple devices with free sync.

I would pay $10/$20/$30 one-time for it. It would be so great.

I would like to track here what languages/libraries I am going to learn next, to what movie I want to watch to books that I would want to read.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Lists in Upbase are like projects in other apps. We plan to have an option for you to turn off all team collaboration features, so it'd be clutter-free.

I manage all of my personal stuff inside Upbase: Books to read, Places to visit, Movies to watch, etc. so I think you can use it to manage yours.

Wow! I love your work!

You need to add 2FA to you authentication, security is a big deal. How do will I know that my project information is safe on your site? It has almost all the features would need for doing pm. I will definitively try it out!

Thanks for your kind words. We're still early days, and there is big room for improvement. I'm aware that security is a big deal, and we'll take it very seriously.

I am looking at decent PM tool myself. To the point that I am entertaining the idea to do it myself as a side project. Reason I am not using any of available offering is simple: unless someone puts a gun to my head I never buy software that does not have perpetual license and that can not be hosted on my own premises.

I found some piece of software that I can host and it gets me limping along but not very happy with it.

I am more than willing to pay for license and for upgrades (when I feel I need those) but as much as possible I absolutely refuse to become a hostage of multiple different companies holding my data and extracting monthly rent.

I understood your concerns. But finding great self-host apps might be challenging though, since they're rare.

I just bought the lifetime license, because it looks useful and I hope you're successful. Reminds me a lot of the self hosted https://duetapp.com

Thanks so much for your support! We'll try our best to make the app great!

As someone whose team just got bitten - again - by Jira descriptions being overwritten by an unwitting user with unsaved changes, I feel you. I just can’t imagine why it isn’t easy to recover a previous description and its formatting. Jira solves the larger collaboration problems, but blows it on the small stuff.

I spent the next hour fuming and imagining how it would work if it was done right (i.e. the way I thought it should work). Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.

I soon sobered up, realizing I had neither time nor patience (or talent, maybe) to build it right.

Respect to you for rolling your own.

It is very easy to recover a previous version of the description field in Jira. Jira keeps a full change log / audit log of every change to the description field and other fields. You can definitely roll back to an old version of the description field or see what changes were made and when by whom.

https://www.tutorialspoint.com/jira/jira_view_change_history...

Thanks so much for sharing your experiences.

It looks very helpful! I tried other tools before and the best so far was azure devops - but It's not for PMs. Jira is, well... jira (driven by a pm team that doesn't stop adding useless changes). Trello is just to simple for complex things. I guess upbase is exactly what it needs to have a small and good pm management. I will buy a lifetime license. A question thoug: will it support jottacloud for document storage? I don't like google drive because of google and my documents are better stored in norway.

Thanks for your feedback and support. Upbase doesn't support Jottacloud at the moment since there are very few requests for it.

Congratulations for your contribution to PM, creating and sharing your toolbox. I wish I will be able to accomplish releasing such work for my process as well at some point in time.

Building a team is always a turn-key project. Tools are a part of it.

Time will tell if this is going to be a widely adopted framework or you are able to inspire several people with your ideas and some of them get adopted in other tools. Even if it only allowed you to better understand your ideas it is worth it. Once again - congratulations and continue inspiring others!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I learned a lot along the way. I think the hardest part is having the courage to take the first step.

I was trying this and looks good, but I can not edit what time a task is done, when on week view, which makes it impossible to setup the time a task could be done at at a future date.

Also if I create a task on a weekly planner view, it should I believe show up as a task which "needs to be done" . It seems to not exist, unless I am in weekly view.

Because of this missing functionality or my ability to figure it out I cant use it - I think its a simple expectation my end though. Just offering feedback, looks great tho.

You can open the due date picker to set the time, or go to the Daily Planner page and then drag and drop a task onto the right sidebar Calendar to set the start and end time.

Weekly Planner and Daily Planner are the two main views, so you need to go to these pages to check for due tasks.

Another productivity founder joining the discussion. Congratulations on your launch! I built https://www.workast.com with similar motivations, but our go-to-market strategy was to focus on teams that use Slack to communicate, and we still do today. While there is tons of competition out there, the market is big enough for all of us to share. It is a bumpy ride but today we are a profitable business. All the best!

Thanks for sharing. Yes, the Slack community is huge, and I can see a demand for your product. Cheers,

When I tried to sign up, I've run into issue where your password prompt[1] would require uppercase character, a number and a special symbol... While in my opinion my password satisfied that requirement, your app didn't accept it. If you don't consider period and underscore as a special symbol -- you should mention list of special symbols you accept.

[1]: https://imgur.com/a/JvsXVIN

Thanks for your feedback. We'll make it more clear to users.

Upbase looks great!

“most of these tools tend to be focused on team collaboration and completely ignore personal productivity.” - did you consider tools like Todoist and Nirvana which are more individual-focused? (Yet Todoist has project sharing and collaboration for teams as well).

Also remember the best to-do list app will fall flat if you don’t pair it with a good method and a lot of discipline - kudos for including some links to relevant materials in your web page.

Yes, Todoist and Nirvana work great for personal task management, but not for teams. We want to build a tool for teams that empowers personal productivity.

Did you build this all by yourself? Looks like a great tool.

Looks like it's a team of 6 people according to their "Our Story" page.

The "I built" in the title seems misleading, what's up there @OP ?

We're a team of 3. The app is too big to build it myself alone.

You write that this is more focused on personal productivity, yet everything from your copy to the features seems to be focused on teams.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but what I am taking away as someone who wants a personal PM tool from your positioning is that most future updates will be team productivity focus rather than individual productivity. Therefore, I shouldn’t invest in it as an individual.

Really cool PM tool overall tho!

Thanks for your feedback. We'll work on the website copy to make it more clear.

There are many upcoming features that solos will find helpful, like tags, custom fields, Google Calendar sync, etc.

Furthermore, we plan to have the option to turn off all team features so that you won't find the app cluttered if you use Upbase as your personal PM tool.

Just signed up. Feedback so far:

  - Specify what counts as "symbols" in a password (a = sign apparently does not).
  - When you click rename on a "section" (a column in the kanban board), I suggest focus the text box in the modal so the user can start typing immediately).

Apart from this, it looks great and I'm going to try it out a bit.

Thanks for your helpful feedback. We'll work on these issues shortly.

I'm excited to try this. I've done the same dance with PM tools over the years and had similar experiences to OP. I've always ended up back on Teamwork which is amazing but they do a hard sell and the price per head is prohibitive for people in my situation (2 person agency, no interest in "10 seat pricing"). Will be good to check it out!

Hi there, I work on product and pricing for teamwork. I’m looking at how we can make plans better suited to smaller agencies. I’d love to chat if you’d be open to it.

That's why a lot of these tools don't have a Solo plan. Because they are built for teams, not for individuals.

To me personally, your product description here at HN (on top of this page) is more to the point than the copy on the homepage!

I agree. That should be the "pitch" in the marketing copy. Something like "I got frustrated with Trello, Asana, etc. so I decided to fix it" and build the narrative from there.

To the OP: this is extremely well done. Congrats on launching. Love the design and the packaging.

Thanks for your feedback. Probably on our website, we're trying to sound "smart" with fancy words. We'll work on the copy to make it more clear.

And for me it's quite the contrary - the description on HN says nothing about how it actually works, it looks just like whining and flaming and bragging.

Interesting. We are very much in need of something like this.

BUT; I setup both mobile and and desktop web. Seems like they are not syncing. Certainly not real time. Added to desktop and still not on mobile 3 minutes later even if i refresh. I logged into both with my goggle account. Are they even the same board?

Deal breaker on the lack of realtime sync.

On mobile, are you using the app or the browser? The app has real-time sync with the desktop web.

If i add on mobile and do a CNTL-R to refresh the entire page the item shows on desktop.

Maybe I don't get it, but why use this over Microsoft Teams with the To-Do app and/or Planner?

Even with a personal Microsof account you can use Onenote, Teams (for chat I would use maybe Discord) and ToDo for lists.

or Google Workspace ofc. Or even Proton.me

But I have been interested in Notion or Wordpress to get my own Wiki going, but this does look good.

Switching back and forth between multiple apps is not very efficient, and you might have a hard time managing all your information when stuff's all over the place.

You can check it out to see if it's a good fit.

Cheers,

It's look very good and just what I need. I'm using a trial version right now, but can't seem to invite guests? (If I purchase a license I would like to invite clients). Edit: Below the 'read more' I found the answer "Invite guests/clients into lists to collaborate (upcoming)"

Thanks for trying the app. Yes, the guests/clients feature is in progress now, and will be available in the upcoming weeks.

What calendars can you integrate? It's a no-go if it doesn't have Outlook calendar integration. App developers always assume everyone is OK using Google calendar. Functionality for only Google calendar alienates a large portion of the your prospective user pool who are "Google-Free".

Due to popular demand, Google Calendar will be our first integration. After that, we'll consider adding more Calendars, like Outlook.

Ah yes, the glorious Atom character input delay. Still, pretty interesting. I also found that Trello lacks some features and became too bloated over the years. NightReader plugin works well for darkmode, that's a plus. I will give your thing a try

Thanks. The dark mode is in progress now. It will be available in about 2 weeks.

Finally, a tool that isn't Plan[0] with a daily planner that lets me schedule my TODO list into my calendar. I've been waiting for years.

Will definitely check this out OP.

[0]: https://getplan.co

Thanks

This is really nice. What is the tech stack?

One quick thing i noticed, When i enter new section name and press tab, it is ignored unlike if you press enter, at least in board view. I'd imagine pressing tab after input is typical user behaviour.

We mainly use Golang for BE, Vuejs for FE.

I got your point on section naming behavior. We'll optimize it in the upcoming days.

Will you open source it if it unfortunately fails, so users have an escape hatch ?

At the moment, we don't have a plan for it yet.

This looks really impressive even more so with the small team. For how long have you been marketing/getting word out there? I started trying to get word out on an app of mine last week, things are moving sloooowly.

Thanks for your feedback. We started focusing on marketing a few months ago. Yeah, it's tough to get the word out about the product since there's too much noise out there.

Interesting! Would you consider offering an API so third parties can create extensions?

I’ve developed an extension that I’m trying to make compatible with as many product(ivity) tools as possible and would love to add yours to the list.

We do consider offering APIs, but probably not very soon, since there are a lot of essential features we need to add first.

Great approach - build first for yourself but with others in mind.

Don't listen to the flood of critics online. Instead find trusted friends and colleagues who have your best interests at heart when they give feedback. Best of luck.

Thanks a lot for your suggestions. I appreciate it.

Would you mind sharing what the tech stacks is.

(Granted it doesn’t matter, use what you know best)

Agreed, I'd also like to know the high-level details of the stack.

Mainly Golang (BE) and Vuejs (FE)

Looks awesome!

Is it possible to sync the calendar with iCloud and Google? If yes, both ways? We have shared calendars in our family and don't want to use an external app to see whats up but happy to the planning in upbase ofc.

Google Calendar is our top priority on the roadmap. And we aim for 2-way sync.

While all these tools are impressive, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to actually use these in a methodology sense, where do I look for a comprehensive howto for actually setting up and managing things?

The tools are pretty generic, so you can use them in whatever way works best for you. In the future, we'll publish some tutorials/use cases so you can better set up your workflow.

I am encountering a few bugs:

On Board -> Task opens in sidepanel -> Drag and drop task from section to sidepanel ##Fails

Bought subscription -> appsumo returns key code -> used it in promo code. Still don't have full version.

Very frustrating.

Hi nashashmi,

Appologize for the issues. Please send me a message via help@upbase.io.

Very nice, I'm impressed! Seriously considering purchasing lifetime access.

Any plans to add dark mode?

And why does it default to 'list view' every time I click on 'my tasks'? I want to see the board by default.

The dark mode is in progress now, and it'll be available in about 2 weeks.

The autosave view is on the roadmap and not available yet. Basically, the app will automatically save your last view.

Looks great!

I might have missed it but does it support flexible recurrence for tasks? E.g. "change furnace filters every 3 months" but not on a fixed schedule but 3 months from when I last completed the task?

Yes, it does support custom repeat.

This looks very cool, I will be signing up and testing it out! Quick question, how many hours per week would you say it took over the two years to reach this point? Full time or part time? Thanks.

Thanks, mikeg8. About 40-50 hours per week. Fulltime. It takes a lot of time to build the infrastructure.

"I built my own" -- makes it sound indie and hip.

Turns out a team built this.

Interested because it has all the basic features I want, and like the lifetime membership thing, but the mobile experience is unusable, and for that reason, I’m out. /sharktank

On mobile, you should download the app, instead of logging in on the web browser, as it's not responsive on the browser yet.

If there is 1 feature that all of these tools neglected, it's speed.

They are way too slow loading huge Javascript libraries unnecessarily.

By the way, what you are building looked almost exactly like Wrike.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Agree with you that speed is super important to have a great experience.

If you test it out for some time, you'll see that it's much different from Wrike.

Looks very good and really impressive if it was built all by your lonesome !!

Not trying to be pessimistic, but doesn't notion give you all these already ? Or did I miss something here ?

Upbase has a completely different way of structuring all the tools it has to offer. Each tool has its own place, separated from the others. And that creates clarity. In a nutshell, it's more organized and way easier to get started with than Notion.

Found a typo on the landing page: "No more switching back and forth between a dozens of apps." Either drop the 'a' or put 'a dozen apps.'

Got it. Thanks for your feedback.

Looks exciting, sent a link to my boss for his consideration.

Thank you so much!

Reminds me of Tasks by Planner and To Do by Microsoft

When I saw “a project management suite for solos and small teams”, it made me go back and re-consider it under a new perspective. Loved it.

I will try it out soon! Good luck!

Thanks. And yes, we don't plan to make it for enterprises.

Years ago I found the perfect tool for managing anything from small personal projects to large complex software development teams:

A prioritised to-do list.

It’s simple. It works.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Yeah, everything should be simple.

Have you looked at Sunsama?

I have few ideas on how you can improve this with lots of integrations. I can be reached at fameoflight@gmail.com if you want to chat.

Thanks for your support. I'll reach out to you in a few days to learn more about them.

Aaand it's in the cloud.

Is it possible to create links between documents? It doesn't seem to be a slash command or markdown syntax.

Not yet, at the moment. The Docs feature is still pretty basic, and we plan to make a lot of improvements to it.

It’s a cool tool, but you are in a highly commoditised market with intense competition. Your product has to be more than good to win people over. I use Jira in a project right now and it’s a sea of tickets with no order or structure. So there may be a problem to solve if you can find a great workflow.

Thanks for your feedback. We're aware that we're in a very saturated and competitive market, and the product needs to be GREAT, not just good.

Is migration from Linear supported? Looks awesome but I don’t want to manually copy over dozens of open tickets.

It's still early days at the moment. So there is no import from other tools yet.

Hi, I couldn't find this in the feature list, does Upbase have the ability to add private comments / subtasks to tasks / other entities? That's something I really like in project management tools when I want to track my progress but not create noise for the rest of the team.

There is another competitor, perhaps, which is any simple, agreed-upon way to share data. For example, a Google doc and a calendar. That also has downsides, but that's probably what I would try before Trello etc. Are you trying to attract those types of people?

Yes, and I think these types of users will find our app useful.

This looks great! I'm definitely trying it out.

My only feedback for you is this: Charge more. You're undercutting yourself a lot by just charging $6 per user. At the very least double that to $12 and it would still be a great price for the value you're offering.

Disagree with this. Companies like Microsoft, and Zoho provide these types of tools as part of a broader subscription. For $5/user, I can get email, MS Teams, cloud storage, a tool similar to this, plus tons more.

Why would I pay $12/user just for this tool?

> My only feedback for you is this: Charge more.

This advice just won't die in these Show HN discussions. Please show some evidence to support your assertion.

> At the very least double that to $12

Every tool listed in the post costs way less than $12/month. Those are established companies, selling to large businesses, and they probably have more information on pricing than a random HN commenter.

A shallow "charge more" with nothing to support that advice does not add anything to these discussions.

Thanks for your suggestions. We're still early days, and the app needs a lot of improvement though. We'll definitely consider charging more in the future. Cheers,

Hey everyone,

I'm thinking of introducing an Individual pricing plan (one user only) in which we strip away all team features. This would help bring much better user experiences since there was no unnecessary clutter or noise.

I'd like to hear your thoughts about it.

I would love that.

This tool looks like the perfect productivity tool for me - as a staff engineer with accountability for the deliverables of 2 teams (might become 3 soon).

As I can no longer simply track my work in a team's JIRA board, I need some way to keep track of what I'm planning to do, what's in progress, and what's done -- and separately for each team; also including journal entries so I can log research I've done or conversations I've had. The Pomodoro timer and other personal productivity features just make it all the more attractive - a perfect fit.

Upbase looks perfect for this -- minus the team features.

Individual plan works great. Since these tools are in an infancy, the user culture has yet to catch on. Launch individual plan (no limits). Launch a friends feature with tracking/comments.

Launch teams feature under paid plan that has a management system built in, with a manager.

Btw, i bought a lifetime plan (sucker?) but it is not activating.

Heads up, under "What makes Upbase different", #1:

No more switching back and forth between a dozens of apps.

There's a typo there; you just need to delete the "of" and edit "dozens" to the singular "dozen."

Or remove the "a".

Less editing.

Noted. Thanks for the feedback.

Do you provide an automatic file sync tool? We still need to work on some documents (Word, Excel) on our local Macs, but want the latest version automatically synced to the cloud, to share with our colleagues.

Can you share pages using a public link and can you use your own domain for it?

Yes, you can share a page with a public link. White labeling is not available yet.

The Time Blocking feature is very sexy. It is exactly what I need. Currently, Evernote allows linking notes and calendar events, but it is cumbersome. Your solution is absolutely great.

I'm glad you like it. Let me know if have any feedback.

Looks great!

There seems to be a bug with dates (maybe timezones)? I'm in the central US, and just created a task with a date of today (Nov 13) -- it shows up as "Yesterday".

Thanks so much for your feedback. We'll check the timezone issue.

Nearly bought the lifetime license,

but a calendar without Google calendar integration? How is this supposed to work? (not asking to be mean but perhaps I'm missing something)

Since we're still early days, the Google Calendar integration is still on our roadmap and not available yet. It's the most requested feature, so we will try to ship it as soon as we can.

Looks good. What would be the difference from e.g. Basecamp?

Basecamp is great for team collaboration, but not so great for task planning/management. It's mainly a team communication platform.

Congratulations on shipping and getting to revenue! This is terrific looking and you and your team have done some really nice work here. Just purchased.

Thanks so much! It's still the early days, and we have a lot of things to do to make the app better.

If I may ask, do your have significant customer numbers? I'm asking this because I think all of the PM tools you mentioned are very popular.

We're still very early days, and we're working hard on growing our customer base.

Found a typo on your website on the ClickUp competitive page. “Upbase have global chat. ClickUp doesn’t” should be “Upbase has global chat…”

Noted. Thanks so much for your feedback.

Curious why are you selling your lifetime plan on AppSumo instead of on the website? Doesn't AppSumo take a fat cut.

Yes, AppSumo does take a 30% cut. We'd like to tap into its large customer base, so we decided to run on AppSumo only.

Am I late to the party? www.focustask.app

Unlike OP, this is meant as purely personal tool, kinda like Things.

I made it for myself, and love using it.

It looks cool

I like checklists. That works for me. :)

Thanks

This is maybe shallow, but on the about page, could you put you and your co-founders pictures w/ a short description and maybe your twitter handles? For some reason I'm a sucker to pay for an indie service like this when I see who the people behind it are. I feel like me $6 to those founders goes a much farther way than to something like Trello.

Thanks for your suggestion. I'll take it into consideration.

Please consider Basecamp’s pricing model instead of $/user/mo.

Really love the look and feel. Did you use tailwindUI by any chance?

Thanks. We did use tailwindUI for the app.

What is the front end stack for this app? Is it based in React?

It's Vuejs

Looks nice, well done.

Thanks for your kind words.

Looks cool, good luck!

Thank you so much!

Do you have an affiliate program? I would like to resell.

Not yet at the moment. But we do plan to have one in the near future.

i think most founders who have done the appsumo deal agree its a scam that only benefits appsumo. their banner is distracting. would drop them asap

AppSumo can be really useful for early-stage startups to get some initial traction quickly, since they have a large customer base.

Any more context for someone who is hearing about appsumo for the first time?

Is this open source?

No, it's not.

unlimited storage for $49 one time fee? I'm guessing you'll be introducing new plans in the future?

I can guarantee that there's no upsell whatsoever. Yeah, some users will use a lot of storage, and we'll end up losing money on them, but not all users - I guess.

Per user per month = no thanks.

Or "Pay once and get full access for life": https://upbase.io/pricing#:~:text=Pay%20once%20and%20get%0Af...

excel is all you need

Welcome to the club.

Hhhjw2hûawan eñ.2

Tech stack?

Mainly Golang and Vuejs.

Where is the mandatory xkcd of too many standards?

My goodness there are so so SO many of these productivity apps. Even in the comments here, there are multiple people saying they too are building their own productivity tools. Someone should keep track them all on a kanban board so we know which ones are developing/released/acquired/abandoned :P

Lol. Upbase has a kanban board for this purpose :))

I'll say this. Without being critical of this tool, over 30 years of involvement with software projects, I have found that good project management is a result of a good project manager, not the software tools he or she uses.

A good project manager will do a good job even with index cards taped to the wall. A bad project manager will do a poor job even with the best software tools.

People who have the aptitude and desire and organizational skills to be good project managers are rare. You need to seek them out, not keep looking for magic in software tools.

If it's personal productivity you are after, you need to work on the skills that support that. I can't tell you how, because I'm pretty bad at it myself. Maybe look at some of the best-sellers such as Getting Things Done. But it won't be easy if you don't naturally have the necessary organized mind and self motivation. Software won't give you that.

Agree with you on this: Skills first, tools later. Nevertheless, great tools do help. Great PM skills and the RIGHT tools would be the best combination.

The central issue with “simple” productivity tools is that everyone wants a different 10-40% of what Jira does. There’s a reason most of us end up begrudgingly giving money to Atlassian.

Yes, functional simplicity is tough.

I haven't tried the app yet and wanted to make sure it had one deal breaker feature: does it integrate with Github issues/PRs?

When something goes wrong, I look at the code, recent changes to it, and the discussion that happened in writing that code.

I'm not interested in anything that washes its hands of scope when the item is marked done. I want easy ways of getting back to all that data long after it's marked done.

Github integration is not available at the moment, but we do plan to add it. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

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