Show HN: Made a process management tool to solve a painful issue in my company | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Made a process management tool to solve a painful issue in my company

workflawless.com

1 pointaskewbee1 comment

When I started building WorkFlawless, I wasn’t trying to launch a product. I was simply trying to solve a problem that was slowing us down—every single day—in my current company.

My current company was trying to scale. And when you scale, a whole new set of problems comes at you. I realized most of them had to do with processes. Undocumented company processes were creating so much chaos and disruption. They lived in someone’s head, or worse, in outdated docs buried in random Drive folders. Onboarding was inconsistent. Everyone had their own slightly different way of doing things, which made it nearly impossible to maintain standards at scale. And when someone left? A big chunk of know-how often left with them.

I've seen it before, I've been working for 12+ years in companies in three different countries. Looking back, I realize this is a very common issue that often goes unnoticed.

So I built WorkFlawless. Not to check every feature box. Not to be another bloated “all-in-one” tool that aim to manage and do everything. But to be the tool I needed. A clean, focused platform that helps teams map, document, maintain their processes and smoothly onboard new personnel in one simple place, without a steep learning curve. Something anyone on the team could start using from day one.

As I was building it, I realized one of the main pain points of using such tools is the manual input of data you need to do when you map processes. I tried to solve it to the best of my means by adding some AI-driven process generation on top of the main features in the app.

Here's the link if you are interested in seeing the end product as the result of this story: https://workflawless.com

I'd be happy to hear some feedback and what you think about it - means a lot to me as I'm a solo dev which started this as a personal project.

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Congratulations on the launch! I'm impressed by how complete the overall product feels. I think that's the magic when one scratch their own itches: a highly-focused product that solves particular problems, and that's what I like about WorkFlawless.

Do you plan to implement any kind of integration to the existing systems? I'm asking since, just like what you've experienced, every company tend to have their existing ways of maintaining these flows. e.g. embedded Figma in an internal wiki, or even generated artifacts using Mermaid in a Google doc. While WorkFlawless is doing a great job at being the unified source of truth, integrating into existing systems effortlessly would lower the barrier significantly.

Also, I really like the idea of built-in revisioning, since that was one of the pain points of keeping flow charts up to date in many of my previous roles. One solution I had experienced was to maintain these charts as Mermaid scripts in a git repo, so there was a revision history and we could easily see what was changed. I feel it would also be a neat addition for WorkFlawless if one can diff between versions.

Here are some further feedbacks on top of mind:

1. From my previous experience working on the upper funnel conversions, a good heurstic is that every one extra step we add to the onboarding flow, ~20% of people from the previous step will drop off. By the onboarding flow, I meant from the account creation to the actual product experience. I'd highly recommend you to consider simplifying the flow so people can get to the meaty part as soon as possible. e.g. could we move all the company info fill-up to the later stage?

2. This is sort of related to the above point. Even though we've adopted the try-first-pay-later model here, commiting to a paid plan at the early stage would still be a major friction point. It doesn't have to change at all –– I'm just wondering if some other strategies that allows people to experience the value first and pay later would work better.

3. In the pricing grid, it's not clear that "paths" is an advanced feature not included in the Starter plan. I'd recommend to highlight it by including it in the Starter plan card and put a cross sign in front of it. That'd also give a nicely aligned pricing grid.

4. Also about paths. Currently, "paths" is annotated with an "upgrade" when one is on the Starter plan in the admin panel. However, clicking on it will only take them back to the admin panel without further explanation. It'd be both a better UX and a pontentially good upsell to show a modal where they could upgrade directly.

5. I encountered a glitch when editing a conditional node. By clicking at somewhere closer to the edge, the editing dialog would disappear and the whole page would be scrolled to the bottom in a flashy way. Here is a screencast: https://cloudup.com/cIrCvFqFJ6Z

Hopefully my perspective will help. Once again, thanks for sharing and congratulations :)

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