Acunote (YC W11) Takes On Project Management With A Gmail-Like Interface

I haven't done a serious competitive evaluation of Liquid Planner so I would hesitate to offer an opinion about them. Much like with a new source control system it take 1-2 solid day to get a feel for a system like this, and your understanding stays primitive until you talk to real customers.

I can tell you that talking to our customers, some of whom evaluated 50 alternatives (no joke) at the end it all comes to:

  * being fast
  * easy to use
  * scalable

I know it sound undifferentiated, but the reality is that while everybody claims all of these, few products do any of this well.

I'll give you one example. We have keyboard shortcuts for just about every operation in Acunote. For many power users this is really important, as lets them do a lot of stuff rapidly. It's a qualitative difference when you can work at the speed of though.

From the engineering and feature point of view that's like 5% of the product, but that's what matters to customers, so that's what makes sense to talk about. Having said that, Acunote does offer a ton more, but we do it based on a few powerful orthogonal primitives, so we don't have to come up with a new button for every kind of need as it leads to unusable interfaces. This lets us serve large customers with complex needs while remaining highly usable and approachable for smaller groups.

One thing we should offer is better training, screencasts, tutorial on getting started. That's definitely something we are working on.

Please shoot an email to our support. We'd love to discuss this further with you.

Thanks!

Thanks! It would be awesome to see the videos, we've had customers ask for this actually.

Also like every other site out there. It's the most generic way to showcase pricing and plans.

We should chat about that. We take it super seriously. Would love your feedback.

Right, project management software has a ton of niches, and it is also much harder than it seems. It hasn't happened yet, but much expectation is that somebody will be able to consolidate a big chunk of this space. We count on that being us :-)

Would be curious how contractors respond to using Acunote. You may need to explain to them that tasks are like a punchlist.

If anybody says they can predict the future, they are lying. So I can only that we've never charged small teams and right now we have no plans to start. We accept VISA/MC/AMEX (and standard enterprise billing terms for large customers).

I think Asana is a solid product. Their long-term vision seems similar to ours - new category of business software covering all employees who do project/task-oriented work (developers, operations, marketing, product management, legal, etc..), that individual contributors actually enjoy using.

Our strategy on how to get there is completely different. Unlike them we provide the vertical functionality individual groups (like software developers, product managers, IT, etc.) need in addition to common horizontal task management. And we expect to be best-of-breed in the verticals we cover.

One vertical they do cover much better than Acunote is personal productivity using GTD. We focus on groups.

For larger companies we also have a really strong focus on data-driven management - letting you manage the whole company using data not politics. I haven't seen Asana offer analytics, but that's probably just a question of time. It's a smart play to focus on getting basics just right first.

Acunote is free for <= 5 users

Try trello.com. Highly recommended.

Redmine is pretty nice and for small projects you can host it for free on an AWS micro instance (pretty easy to setup with something like bitnami). For open source projects JIRA is also free.

Yes!