Show HN: Rewrote Basecamp, Gmail, Dropbox in 3 years with a team of 3
dynado.com
dynado.com
Integration with accounting packages would be nice, but not vital - there are few enough people involved in that side of the business that having the ability to extract, prepare reports, etc., will be sufficient.
I'm a partner in a small consulting firm. We're just over a dozen, and we are already struggling with "keeping everything in one place". We need shared calendars and shared contacts, we need a way of easily keeping track of all interactions with clients (the CRM bits), we need a way of getting useful reports on employee/contractor activity (I really like the idea of iDoneThis, but unless timesheets can be derived from the digests, then it is duplication of effort, since we need those - the timesheets - first and foremost).
We live and die by our billing, and our billing depends on time tracking. And we work through a mix of direct contracts, middlemen, etc., like pretty much everybody in this business. And in many, many other businesses.
I've rejected business apps because they use a "timesheet per client" model, instead of the more intuitive and useful (for my staff) timesheet per worker model: I want one place for my worker to enter everything they did, and I want the system, the computer that is supposed to be good at drudge work, to extract which bits go to which clients. If an admin needs to tweak that (based on rates, discounts, and the thousand other things at play), so be it. But my employees DO NOT decide how much of their time gets billed, I do; they tell me what they worked, I make sense of it.
If time reporting is still a thing on the side, this isn't everything in one place.
If CRM is still a thing on the side, this isn't everything in one place.
Other things that would be useful: Document collaboration with built-in version control, like Quip. Kanban boards like Trello.
Maybe also Zapier integration: Write a few zaps to allow your users to integrate with their existing tools.
Integration with existing is more useful and powerful than you may credit: Most of your potential users are already in business, suffering their tools, but making do. You will convert them if you make it easy for them to adopt your tools step-by-step.
Businesses that spring up "post-Dynado" and move immediately to Dynado will be rare, so don't assume an "all in" mentality or assume "clear fields".
You will need Android and iOS apps, you may want to have a BB app. The web interface may be cool, but what about when I am on a long flight without Internet access? How will I get anything done?
Quip has an offline mode for its mobile apps, but if I am working offline for a long time, I want a real keyboard and screen, which means my Air, which means a native OSX application.
And if you have integrated document collaboration, you will need import and export. My customers want Office formats, so I need them. Can't live without 'em.
Fundamentally, business is about managing revenue and cost and keeping the customers coming back. All of the other stuff - single inbox, simpler project management, etc., etc. - are all just polish and veneer, shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic, if they do not contribute to increasing revenue and lowering cost.
So customer contact management (from shared contacts to CRM) and time management (from project management to time tracking to timesheet management) are fundamental.
(Edited to add a few missing words, correct a few typos.)
It would also be good to have tiers. $19/month doesn't seem all that much, but for an unproven product from an unproven company, well, it seems high. You are competing with github and Trello and Quip and iDoneThis and a host of other tools that are either free or much lower cost.
CRM companies leave bad tastes in the mouths of many small business owners because they are only marginally more useful than a lot of the low-cost freemium tools but much, much more expensive - and require us to adjust to them.
Improve that situation, you may win more you think.
thanks for the extensive writeup. We do have time tracking exactly in the sense which you mentioned - while someone works on a task, or when he completes it - he gets a bubble asking 'how long did it take you and what were you doing?' - then he just inputs the time taken and optionally a comment - and BAM! you can see the history of work in his profile. Plus you can see the total time/cost of each project, plus estimated time of completion for each task and project.
We do have a kanban-like board where you can specify in what exact order an employee should work on tasks.
The reporting part is not fully fleshed out yet but we will work on it as soon as we launch.
Regarding CRM - it's the first big item on our TODO list once we launch, and stabilise the system. And it will base on our internal task/discussion engine so we won't have that much work to do.
We share your opinion about the need to fully onboard users and collaborate with their existing tools. Right now we are finishing up desktop file synchro, and mobile contacts/calendars synchro. The stuff you mentioned will come next. We have a really small but very talented team and it's about time to launch at last after so many years - so we can't have everything in version 1. But we already have enough to interest people and it's comprehensive enough to satisfy all their basic needs (except CRM :).
Please sign up on our beta site and please contact me directly via contact at dynado.com if you have any additional questions. I will be very grateful for your ideas now and feedback once we launch. If you are not worried about bugs and would like to look the product sooner than we launch - please let me know.
Will do! I'm intrigued....
If you are not worried about bugs
I am torn. If I was on my own, I would in an instant. What can we look at and learn from without having to move major parts of the business over, i.e., we want to leave email and calendar where they are, can we do that and still using e.g., the time tracking and project reporting?
Vibrant, I just tried a few times, but clicking on "get notified" didn't seem to do anything. My email address is in my profile, perhaps you could check your logs to see if you see it there.
I don't see your email in your profile :/ Please just email me at contact at dynado.com.
Also since you compare the service to gmail, could you tell us something about your anti spam solution? Gmail is pretty much a benchmark for results here, given the volume they process.
Considering it was created with such small team - really good work :)
PS. does that mean there's no operations team at the moment?
I'm curious how deeply you went for an integrated approach for projects / email / tasks / files. I find the more integration you do, the more learning users must do vs. individual applications with loose integration that are more familiar to users (that behave like those in the title).
I've spent a fair amount of time trying out both personal and business team workflow in Trello, Jira/Agile, Asana, Google Apps, Evernote, etc.
Currently giving a couple weeks of my productivity to IQTELL (http://iqtell.com), which goes for a heavily integrated full-on GTD approach that I'm finding rather refreshing (everything in one tool!). Was waiting for the past few years for them to figure things out and open to the public. It has its own issues and learning curve, and lacks that final 20% polish that makes Trello and Asana such a pleasure to use. But with such deep integration between email, projects, tasks, contexts, contacts, calendars, and Evernote (would love direct Dropbox file access), along with a fair amount of customizability, I'm finding the learning curve to be worth it.
So all the advanced features are hidden behind a simple interface.
And an example of integration between the calendar and tasks: if one of your support consultants goes on vacations, the workflow managing support tasks automatically stops assigning tasks to him so that they don't pile up while he is away.
A blog post about what went into the development over the course of the 3 years would be an interesting read.
A product which is so complex and aimed at businesses can't be 'bootstrapped' in 3 months and launched. The result would be that nobody would care about it because it would be incomplete and wouldn't cater to their needs. There are a lot of such products and nobody remembers about them. I hope our effort will pay off, and that's what our current testers are telling me :)
But otherwise this site looks great. Captured my email.
Where you guys are from? (The fb button is in Lithuanian I guess on my computer)
Plus everyone will be able to cooperate with external contractors for free - you can add as many of them as you want and their accounts will be fully functional but with a few limitations.
For example instaed of sending an email to someone - you can send a task (the form is nearly the same), automatically creating a free account for that target user. This way you can keep track of the request and ping him if he forgets, store it in your project hierarchy, etc. And the recipient gets it through email and can reply only via email without even registering.