Show HN: Matterhorn – Your new project manager | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Matterhorn – Your new project manager

matterhorn.io

298 pointsLinnea210 comments

First thought: you've priced it quite ambitiously. A 10 user team would be $90/month, compared to $20 for JIRA + JIRA Agile, $42 for Asana premium, $50 for Trello business (or free for normal trello), $35 for Pivotal Tracker, ...

(Which isn't to say it necessarily should be cheaper, only that it seems surprising to see that price without any attempt to compare or justify why you believe that e.g. it's already, at launch, worth 3x as much as Pivotal Tracker).

What do you pay 10 people in a month? Probably somewhere between $60,000 and $100,000? Is the $90 vs $20 really that big of a difference? Especially if it's a good tool that helps your team be slightly more productive.

I'm not saying that it will, I haven't tried it so I have no idea. I'm just surprised that people really want to shave less than $100 off of the tools they provide their team.

This logic is sound, but any product will be compared price-wise to its competitors if all marketing statements are taken at face value (e.g. they all offer the same benefit of allowing you to manage your projects).

> if all marketing statements are taken at face value

But all marketing statements are rarely taken at face value. With self-service free trials, products can be compared and contrasted.

One tool will work better for a given workflow than others. And it's a no-brainer to pay an additional e.g. $70/m to buy the best tool for the job.

> I'm just surprised that people really want to shave less than $100 off of the tools they provide their team.

The problem is businesses don't just buy 1 tool for their team, they probably buy dozens, and if each one costs and additional $90 per team of ten that adds up quickly. Save money where you can especially when the results are the same.

A perhaps more salient example is one we faced last year: do we switch from Eclipse to IntelliJ? Nearly all of the Java developers we asked preferred IntelliJ. That's ok, no problem ... but we're facing switching 300 people from a free IDE to one that costs several hundred dollars, for internal appdev (not a product company, so all of the above hits the SG&A opex spend ... which the street always wants to be minimal). So, 300x$400, the 150X$400 MSDN subscriptions we have for the MS guys, plus ~1500 MS servers, plus about 300 RHEL servers, plus .... The point is, it all add up, and as Patrick (patio11) has noted several times, large companies much prefer bulk, one time POs to subscriptions. Being able to forecast and accrue for both Capex & Opex is extremely important in many large, thin margin companies, especially ones that are not IT-centric.

Your servers are the lion's share of your opex, so buy the licenses. That said, if Eclipse is working for you, I'm surprised the CE edition of Intellij isn't fine, too.

These costs could still be modest in comparison to the salaries of 300 people.

So, in the end, did you switch to IntelliJ? The suspense is killing me! :)

> when the results are the same.

Of course, if the results are the same, you should decide on price.

But software isn't a commodity product. Each one has strengths and weaknesses. I'm just surprised at the amount of price sensitivity considering a difference of 30 seconds a day between one tool and the other more than makes up for the price difference.

Realistically this tool will be very rough around the edges because its new. All new apps are never polished, and this might not even still be around in 6-12 months. There will be feature requests, bugs to work around, other deficiencies (and some efficiencies as well). $9 per user is a lot to ask for something that is unproven when there are competitors that have a track record for less. Im just being honest this are all things that go in when I consider buying software for my team. And reiterating that this would be only one of many tools I have to buy to keep the wheel on the bus.

This is exactly how I feel. From the marketing, it seems to be exactly what my team needs. But I've got a 50 person team and we're all currently limping along using trello. $450/month is a big spend for something unproven. We're currently leaning heavily towards JIRA, but I haven't pulled the trigger yet.

That logic doesn't make any sense. It's like saying hey, my car costs thirty thousand dollars, why shouldn't I spend $50 on a sandwich?

No, its more like buying premium oil for an expensive car.

Which I still wouldn't do. It's a commodity, engine oil, and largely the same between brands. Ditto with PM software. Or most any other software.

If the creators of Matterhorn can continue to shelve egos, keep effecting some humble sincerity and focus on why their tool is better, we may find it's an exception to that rule.

Edit: clarified that the devs are already showing low-ego and sincerity - I realized my wording didn't suggest that earlier.

>Which I still wouldn't do. It's a commodity, engine oil, and largely the same between brands. Ditto with PM software. Or most any other software.

As a former mechanic I would like to point out a flaw in your way of thinking about engine oil as a commodity similar across the board.

Regular engine oils vary in overall quality not due to the oil itself being of substantially better or worse quality itself, but because of the different combinations of surfactants and detergents that the varying brands use, and molecular uniformity allowing tighter tolerances in the engineered part using the oil in question.

The more expensive the motor oil, the less it chemically looks like crude oil until you get to the most expensive types of oils (synthetics), which aren't crude based at all but synthesized using the Fischer-Tropsch process.

Precision engineered parts require synthetic oils. It's akin to placing your smartphone face down on an asphalt sidewalk. At high speeds and temperatures the contaminants in a lower grade oil will destroy the car that calls for the 50 dollar oil cans, and it'd be ill advised to ignore the need for it.

engine oil is not the same between brands, and synthetic and regular oil are markedly different.

pm software is not the same between brands either. each one I've used offers a different user experience and each tends to excel in their own way.

software, in general, is also not the same between brands, as you state. yahoo search is different than bing is different from Google.

True, the sandwich comparison was wrong and yours is good. But GPs question stands: what makes this worth the extra price over its competitors?

Or: what makes premium oil worth the extra money, compared to regular?

Assuming the car was making you money and by buying the sandwich your car could end up making you even more money.

Except, the other sandwich costs 5 dollars, and as far as we can tell, will cause our cars to make the same amount more money as the 50 dollar sandwich, so we need at least some kind of value proposition between the two sandwiches if we are to favor the 50 dollar one. (It's actually quite fun to be reasoning about this at ~2 cuils of overextended analogy.)

I assume that is what the free trial is for. Which would be analogous to getting one free $50 sandwich to test out. Granted, there is the cost of switching from feeding your car a $5 sandwich to feeding it a $50 one considering the sandwich-to-gas converter has to learn how to eat each sandwich. (Is there a word for discussing a point using absurd analogies?)

French

The difference is $7/person. If the tool saves them 10 minutes over the course of a month, it's paid for itself.

It's more like paying a construction worker $100 an hour and then giving him a hammer that costs $5 instead of $10, but only drives nails at half the speed because it's too light.

> If the tool saves them 10 minutes over the course of a month, it's paid for itself.

Does that sandwich make your car more 20% more efficient?

$70 dollars is a lot in some organizations. Far more than it should be when compared to the overall budget. Even if a 1% boost in productivity would realize $600 to $1000 in savings, the penny wise culture in many organizations would be stuck trying to swallow a $70 payment.

Well I don't think that comparing costs this way makes too much sense. Running a successful business requires having more income than spendings. If you can achieve the same thing with $20 instead of $90 than you found a potential competitive advantage, even though not a huge one. :) Being frugal works very well for many corporations, including Amazon. I don't see that priced justified compare to JIRA based on the feature list of this tool.

If you're already able to pay salaries, you probably don't care, but for small side-project type startups without any funding but with a few people contributing, it's a _big_ difference.

I suspect this is why JIRA has very different pricing for <=10 and >10 users.

That's not how large orgs do their budgets in many cases.

Totally agree with you, yet here is anecdotal evidence: as soon as I introduced it, Slack has had huge success in our company, yet when the time came for getting into paid tier (20 seats), the answer was a resounding "no" from the top of the chain.

when we do project cost estimations at the large medical device development company I work at, we use $15,000 per person month. so to answer your question, 10 people would cost $150,000.

so this just further proves your point that some large corporations are less price sensitive than others.

Agree 100%. Additionally, unless you also ship with substantial APIs, you'll be a nonstarter in the enterprise market, which demands interfaces to other systems (perhaps including code reviews, static analysis, source control (Git[hub], SVN, etc), ticketing, labor/time tracking, resource planning & allocation, SQA testing & validation, human resources, and whatever standard auth (SAML, OAuth, OpenID, LDAP)).

Your pricing is also too high for a large org, especially when one could use something like Phabricator for free. This doesn't even get into MS Project or document management (MS Office? Google Drive?).

Long story short, this looks like a good start and may work well for SMBs, but definitely not a big company.

Just as an aside, my company has just spend several hundred thousand dollars licensing a well-known product & portfolio management (PPM) app. Not surprisingly, all the project managers were 100% in favor of this spend. Also not surprisingly, all the apps management were against it.

Also as an aside, in most large companies, PPM is handled 100% separately, and by different people, than actual product management and dev planning/resource allocation/bug fixing/testing/support/etc.

"most"

How do you know? I made the contrary experience

Be careful with interfaces and enterprise clients. They are both very slippery slopes at first and generally unnecessary unless you're really targeted there (which it appears you are not).

I run a ~15 person startup, and my first thought was "huh, that's reasonable." And didn't think anything else about it. Shit, we pay hundreds for glorified databases for ATS and several other products. I really think pricing it lower will just push you to a less-valuable userbase.

The lower priced clients can be more demanding and less focused by asking for features they don't really need or use.

It would be nice to track feature requests against customer application engagement as well as uptake by said customer. Attempting to make everyone happy leads to MS like products.

Agreed, Jira is pretty hard to beat for small teams and has a large base of plugins and integrations. This looks really cool but needs something a bit more to really stand out. Maybe at $5/user it could take off.

I'd actively turn down a job if they used Jira. Absolutely horrific; using it genuinely makes me hate my life.

I know a _lot_ about JIRA. I worked at Atlassian for almost four years, in engineering management and product management roles. (Left in 2011, if you care).

JIRA is a total nightmare to configure sensibly, and the UX is complex enough that there's a real learning curve to get your team using it effectively.

The kicker is, that once the combination of JIRA, JIRA Agile, and Confluence are setup correctly, and your team is using them well, there's nothing else like it. It's spectacular for:

- tying specs to issues to code

- surfacing status to non-devs sensibly

- allowing interested folk to keep abreast of projects without having to attend meetings

- getting rid of huge messy email conversations

- figuring out "why the hell did we do that?!"

I'd recommend JIRA + JIRA Agile + Confluence to any team with more than 10 members, with the caveat that you need to find/hire an expert to configure the product and help your team use it effectively.

ninja edit: JIRA will allow you to faithfully model+enforce your fucked-up development process. So, badly-configured JIRA can be one of the least fun experiences of your working life.

We use Jira + Agile + Confluence.

Please help - where can I learn to configure our setup correctly? I think our Agile is pretty ok but the integration with Confluence is almost zero. Where do I find an expert to help with the setup?

How would you say TFS (Team Foundation Server) and related tools compare to JIRA? I'm working through TFS training right now and haven't found too many weaknesses with it as of yet.

Do the total nightmare comments apply to JIRA OnDemand/Cloud?

Jira is insanely configurable - if using jira is painful, that means that your jira admin has not configured it well for your workflow.

The config my company is using makes it somewhat more pleasant than stock bugzilla or trac (though not nearly as convenient as github issues was).

The amount of crap you can turn on if you like can make the interface completely unusable, of course. But that's true in anything with a lot of configurability. It's the cost of being able to build your own process onto the tool.

Small teams generally not looking to pay someone to spend a long time configuring their tools. Configurability is good, but I'd rather have sensible defaults if I can only have one.

The JIRA Agile defaults are ... okay.

I've been a JIRA user for years, and I love it. Rather than turning down jobs over their choice of ticket tracker, consider it an opportunity - take the job and convince them to switch to what you want to use. I made the case for JIRA at several employers because I got tired of less feature-rich alternatives, and the productivity gains were always substantial.

At my current job we use Jira and personally I think it's a pretty good product, at least for a SCRUM workflow. Definitely beats any similar tools I've used in the past. I think the scrum board looks clear, it's easy to create user stories and tasks and it's also easy to switch between an operational and strategic workflow.

We also use Confluence which also seems to do it's job properly as a wiki.

I'm personally considering using Jira for my own projects in the future.

Agreed. We switched to JIRA for a few months and we all HATED it. Back to good old fogbugz :D

Wait what? I've used both and I can't see anything good about Fogbugz over JIRA?

JIRA is awful. But fogbugz? fogbugz? It's the worst piece of crap I've ever used.

What do you use then?

Both, unfortunately. But if given the choice, I'd go with JIRA, simply because I know of no better solution. To clarify, maybe there are better tools, but it's not my job to assess all the PM tools out there.

Interesting - we switched TO jira about a year ago (onsite version), and I love it. Yes, it took time to set up our workflow, but I find it does both the small tasks (day-to-day management and issue tracking) and large tasks (cross-team planning) very well, while other tools we used fall down on one or the other. Also, it integrates with everything under the sun.

Jira screens & workflow can be configured as simply as you would like, enabling advanced features as the team grows. If you had a bad Jira experience, it may have been due to those who came up with development policies, rather than the software which implemented those policies. Any specific issues with the software itself?

Interesting.

So if a successful & profitable software company is about to hire you but you would decline the offer just because She is using JIRA.

Apparently this also says how hard it is to manage people rather than dealing with just code and tricking the compiler.

What is your preferred alternative? My company is looking at changing to another platform from Redmine.

I would suggest to look at Tuleap[1]

Open Source full featured ALM, self-hosted or SaaS[2] consistent & easy to go upgrades.

(Disclosure: I'm part of the dev team)

[1] https://tuleap.org [2] http://mytuleap.com

I prefer Pivotal Tracker by a mile.

I only used Jira briefly before leaving that job for another, what didn't you like about it?

I'm not the OP, but the last fintech startup I worked at used the hosted version. It was slow (server and client side), a memory hog in the browser, every extra feature was more $$$.

It took a few weeks to get a suitable workflow set up, and in spite of my gripes it's one of the best issue trackers around. I miss working with it on other projects.

What I really want is a fast and lightweight Jira.

I've unfortunately had the same experience with hosted JIRA.

If there should be one place in the world where JIRA runs quickly, it should be on Atlassian's own hosting platform, yet I continue to be amazed at how slow it can be.

Are you outside the USA? Atlassian's Cloud (previously OnDemand, Studio) offerings are only hosted in the USA.

So they're clunky and slow on any other continent. Including, amusingly, Atlassian's engineering HQ in Sydney.

Yes, UK here!

Oh and I forgot: the UX is abysmal and has to be learned. It's definitely a 'modern' web app shoe-horned onto the front of an older app.

That's bold. What's a better alternative?

For the past two years we have been developing a commercial product that we consider to be a Jira replacement. It is much faster, as easy to use as Facebook, and profoundly more intuitive to work with and learn. Plus it provides full PSA capability (time, billing, expenses, forecasting/scheduling), and can be used for to model the entire business process, not just software development.

Like anything else, there are things we've chosen not to implement in a V1 release, that we will add in later releases. We focused on differentiating ourselves in the market, not just doing a better job of what Jira does.

So, there is hope. :) It's 'real'. It's awesome. And it's just a few months from Release.

Cheers

> Absolutely horrific; using it genuinely makes me hate my life.

First world problems indeed.

I think it's totally the right thing to do. They can always adjust their price as the market dictates (where "market" is people who do/don't pay for the product, not HN comments).

Way better to charge and learn about what paying customers want, rather than make it cheap and hope to eventually convert them.

Ha!

Maybe he's not trying to make a billion dollars and instead is planning on making a great product.

If you want outrageous pricing have a go at Slack!

https://broadmargins.slack.com/pricing

I thought the exact same thing! It looks like an amazing product, but I will never know for sure because it is too expensive for small teams.

I’m in agreement. The pricing is quite high for a new product, and there is a lot of competition out there.

My reaction when seeing the price was "Woah".

I'm working hard enough for our company to pay $2 per user for HipChat.

$9 per user is very expensive when it comes to these services at scale. I can see this on a team of 10-15 people, but certainly not on a company wide basis.

Bah! Jesus. Price. no matter.

I completely agree with you. The project management niche already has a lot of players and I don't see why I should pay double the price when the product i'm getting doesnt have the feature set to justify it.

Looks great, very appealing landing page, message is passed clearly.

Feedback stuff:

1) agree with pricing plan, too high for large teams

2) call for action - I saw the "sign in" button immediately, but had to scroll all the way down for sign up, will be nice to have a floating sign up button just next to sign in, and in the sign in page, have a link such as "not registered? sign up here" in case people click the wrong button.

3) this is more due to my personal taste, but no gmail sign up is lowering my will to spend time to test the product. I want to click click, play with it a few mins, and if it's good suggest it to my team. I don't have time to fill a form (I'm exaggerating a little, but this goes through a lot of people's mind, filling forms is annoying for some people)

4) I'd like to see a demo the product. having a dummy project that anyone can see with a "guest" login will be really great. (good if you are not willing to add gmail login for any reason)

5) if not a demo, at least a video. the gif is great, so I think a longer video will be even better, seems like a very slick UI.

all in all looks great, I like the hybrid approach, will give it a look.

Hey, thanks for great advice. Demo is a really great idea, we're planning to expand the landing page with more info but went for an early launch just to test the waters. Ended up with a lot more attention than anticipated :)

A guest project would be great for us EE learning-by-fiddling types :)

I have to disagree with you on 1), benefits of this software kick in way better when you have large team, the price is too much for smaller teams, when you have large team you are happy to pay.

I think free for teams till 3 would be nice, I think pivotal was for long time resisting this and had to cave in, that is the only way I will start using it and be in position to recommend for team.

The rule of thumb with this kind of thing is you try to use plausible data in your screen shots. Having "moar project" and "even more project", and "super project" and "new project" makes it hard to envision what your product is really useful for.

Even better: use data from your own project management (or at least pretend you're using it internally).

Haha - very good point!

I think your landingpage looks good, but overall I have a hard time seeing exactly how it makes life easier for me.

I have worked in most of the roles you describe, but even after having scrolled to the bottom, I don't exactly understand how it is tailored to the roles.

What I was left with is that you have boards and progressbars. Doesn't really compare to the stuff I already use.

Maybe you could explain even better how each role can tailor an interface to meet their needs, and what you provide better than other software out there.

Great point, we were working on creating a better tour of the product but decided to launch a more stripped down version just to test the waters, ended up getting a lot more attention than we thought we would! Working on presenting a better breakdown of the features and how they solve pertinent issues for each user type's workflow.

The fact that this post has made it to #2 despite the huge number of PM tools out there reveals two things:

(1) Project Management is painful and the existing providers still don't fully grasp what the market needs/wants

(2) Matterhorn must be doing something right to get over the noise, so kudos to your team! For me, it's your realization that not everyone manages their workflow in the same way, so being able to coordinate while giving people their personal preferences is really powerful. I wish I could see a demo!

>> (1) Project Management is painful and the existing providers still don't fully grasp what the market needs/wants

PM is painful, but I think existing providers do grasp what _their_ markets need/want. There is no such thing as one PM tool for everyone.

The reason why there is a proliferation of PM tools -- and why many vendors survive-- is that they tend to cater to different needs and audiences.

Thank you! Matterhorn is at its best once you get a couple of projects started and have team members onboard, which is why we didn't go with a demo approach to start with, but hearing from everyone about wanting more details about how it works we're going to try and find a better way to showcase the features.

I agree with (1) but maybe you don't mind to elaborate on (2) and what do they right?

The whole thread with all the upvotes and nobody telling us why exactly this new tool is so great feels strange to me.

Disappointed to see it's a saas app with no ability to self-host. For project management I think information is too confidential to be using a third party cloud provider.

I'll keep it bookmarked though, perhaps my attitude in this regard is out of date.

It's not. We've just received a new project which forced us to redo our whole company IT and go back to Selfhosted Solutions in a ISO 27001 Datacenter. (luckily the company that datacenter belongs to is in our building and provides our internet, so we have direct network access to the servers)

Atlassian is so successful in a big part due to their self-hosting option.

I agree, we self host Jira and Confluence for all our sensitive stuff. We'd love to self host our HipChat but the price is just a bit rich right now, so we make sure the teams don't post sensitive stuff there.

Protonet got 3 Mio EUR last year in a crowd funding campaign in Germany for their NAS + collaboration software, with a clear marketing focus on privacy ... so no, it's still a market ;)

Yeah, we got a Protonet Maya some time ago and it's been pretty much a paperweight + expensive wireless router so far. The software is ambitious but ultimately useless.

Funny enough, our biggest boost in communication came from starting using Slack. That thing is amazing, and getting creative with integrations is awesome. It's a somewhat important part of our workflow now.

This page does a very good job at explaining what this project is about. I'd like to have a comparison of features with the competition somewhere (on another page maybe?), but this is very good.

Interesting project, I'll give it a try.

Thank you! We're working on creating a tour page that would walk you through more of the features and explain how it differs from the competition.

Just to add to the positive feedback - the problem statement of "people in different roles have different goals" spoke to me immediately. If you stay focused on solving that problem, and pull it off really well, this could be a great product! (I signed up, but haven't played with it yet.)

No visible privacy/security policy. I'm going to trust confidential company information to somebody on the net who doesn't address privacy and security concerns on the very first page? No, I'm not.

Hey there, very good point. I'm adding the pages now.

The number of people balking at $9/mo in this thread is amazing. $9 is nothing compared to salaries. If it saves you 1 hour of productivity per month, you get 10x return on that cost straight away.

Your signup form no worky.

Mixed Content: The page at 'https://matterhorn.io/register' was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure XMLHttpRequest endpoint 'http://api.matterhorn.dev/users.json'. This request has been blocked; the content must be served over HTTPS.app-6c6e7022ec9660d68ebd624054790399.js:3 sendapp-6c6e7022ec9660d68ebd624054790399.js:3 p.extend.ajaxapp-6c6e7022ec9660d68ebd624054790399.js:6467 (anonymous function)app-6c6e7022ec9660d68ebd624054790399.js:3 p.event.dispatchapp-6c6e7022ec9660d68ebd624054790399.js:3 g.handle.h

Good find! All fixed :)

Still having difficulties registering here.

> Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://api.matterhorn.io/users.json. This can be fixed by moving the resource to the same domain or enabling CORS.

Looks nice, but was sorely disappointed there was no self hosting option. I would be very interested if I could keep my data on my servers, but cannot move to this otherwise.

Just curious–why do you want to host the data on your own servers?

Confidentiality and security. Sharing that level of information with outside organizations is just not possible in some situations. Regulated industries need to have full auditable control of all of their data and infrastructure, and a third party does not allow for that.

Even if it was possible for me, I still would not want that level of information out there with a third party. It increases the surface area for an attack, and puts the company at greater risk relying on an unknown level of security which there is no direct control over.

Perfectly put. I would also add that the SaaS market has shown enough volatility that if I can't run it on my own instance there are no guarantees that a service will exist a year from now.

When it comes to my personal todo list, I'm ok with that. When we're talking about a project management tool that becomes a part of your team's culture, concerns mount quickly.

This service looks really cool, I like that it's flexible for different preferences. Some guys on my team like Trello's columns better while others like full blown tickets a la JIRA.

Will you offer some sort of micro plan for small teams of 5 or 6?

Here's a good comparison of the various PM tools so you can compare Matterhorn to the established players. http://stackshare.io/stackups/trello-vs-asana-vs-basecamp-vs...

Thank you!

We're planning on developing the pricing structure so that there are a couple of more options.

At the moment we're trying to gauge traction and get enough users to be able to take the project further.

On a side note, that PM tool comparison link is a great resource!

I like it. Here are a few thoughts: 1. I agree about the price point. If it were $5 I might be a buyer. I know it's insignificant, but it adds up when you have a team of people. 2. I would run this entire site on SSL. There's some good stuff to sniff here. 3. I don't like having to type in the name of a project and clicking the + to get to the form. I would rather just click + and get the form. Didn't seem intuitive to me. 4. When leaving comments on a feature, it was duplicating the comment. My username was there and then the same comment with blank user data. 5. On the "dashboard" or whatever you want to call it, tickets that I have assigned to myself for today aren't showing up. I have to go to the planner. 6. I clicked "Board" and then all of the links died. Refresh got me to the board. 7. When I move things in the Planner, they don't seem to take effect. I can't seem to get a ticket into Today.

Overall, I like what you've done here. I like being able to segment by customer and the board. Simple interface that is good once you learn the workflow.

I've been looking for a long a time for a good PM software that is standalone (personal use) or can be self-hosted (easy setup a must). Cloud hosting is a show-stopper when you're in a large company.

Already heard about Collabtive? Very easy deployment on your own webserver (or via Debian sources), FOSS:

http://collabtive.o-dyn.de/

Disclosure: I'm one of the lead devs.

Did you realize that your demo page for Collabtive does not allow the user to choose their language? It appears to default to Chinese for the user interface.

It's reset to English every hour. I've now reset it manually.

But you're right, the user should be able to select the language on the online demo before login. I will add this to my TODOs. Thx!

One of the burdens that comes with more than 40 locales... ;-)

This is a pretty lightweight self-hosted kanban solution I've made: https://taskfort.com

The ios app should be coming out by the end of this month.

You can try Duet - http://duetapp.com.

It's self hosted and has a super simple setup process. I'm the developer.

We use The Bug Genie[0] with great success. It's a little quirky out of the box, but it is easy to overcome the quirks, because it's so configurable.

[0] http://thebuggenie.com/

> Cloud hosting is a show-stopper when you're in a large company.

Why? I know some very large companies that use GitHub (not the hosted version).

Because lawyers, pointy hair bosses and so on. Someone simply makes a policy somewhere that all company data should reside on company machines, and no other companies' should share servers, server rooms or ops staff with ours. I'm not saying it makes any sense at all, but this actually happens.

I've deployed a local OpenProject instance for a smallteam. But I think it's too much for single use.

www.openproject.org

First of all: thank you for not asking for a credit card for the free trail version, thumbs up!

I skipped the demo and played around a bit, there are some things I like a lot:

1. When you go to the Home page, the 'To Do Today' Section is cool, when I start my day and open the page, knowing my ToDos gives me a focus, very helpful! 2. On the project board page, filtering tasks by clicking the buttons is very easy, very easy and efficient!

I've used other similar tools before: Mingle, Jira, Trello, etc. In my opinion, each has pros and cons, you need to know what's best for you within your budget. Jira doesn't have the hottest UX, configuring might be a challenge, but it's good enough for daily usage. Trello is small and less overwhelming, it's very handy and no confusion for most of the time. Mingle is pretty good with sharing visibility of your project, they support different card views (you can create a card for almost everything: feature, bug, etc.) and you can pick up your favorite: cards wall, hierarchy, list, tree. Matterhorn has a neat UI and they put lot of effort on walking your through the product, features look cool too.

Overall the product looks good, and price is fair. Good luck!

"Designer, Developer, Copywriter, Project Manager, Strategist, Accountant, Client Relations"

Maybe it'd be better to concentrate on one usa-case. Say Accountant. That way you have more focus. Once you talked to 10-100 accountants and made sure the product is good for them, move on to the next use-case.

From a sales perspective I can't tell the difference between this and trello in less than 60 seconds.

When I load the page I see I can "try it" but I don't want to invest the time. Show me exactly why your product is going to be more valuable and worth the time to migrate over.

> You all have slightly different workflows: workflows that enable you to do your thing in the best way possible.

> You could force everyone to track their time and their progress in exactly the same way, even if it doesn't fit their workflow

These lines briefly made me hopeful that this was some clever layer in front of all the various project management systems that would allow them to talk to each other.

I would value this because I vastly prefer the seemingly uncommon terminal-based workflow, and such a layer would presumably be able to talk to Emacs org-mode or whatever, just as it talks to Jira.

As it is, this is just another project management system that doesn't fit my workflow.

How about educational licensing? I'm forever trying to fit real PM tools into my curriculum but it is hard to do.

Also subscriptions are really hard to deal with at an .edu, and at 16weeks/semester (14 really) so 4 months x $9.00 x nStudents

That's a really interesting prospect, we hadn't really thought about educational licensing because we weren't sure of the applications. But we'll definitely keep that in mind

I got a 404 when clicking the reset password link that was emailed to me.

The create new project button was broken.

It's unclear what the pricing is. The homepage says $9/user/month. When I logged in I think the price was 9£/user/month

Apologies -- Fixed

Isn't project management software a solved problem already?

Seems like all this effort on these type of pm systems could have been applied to some niche market that's still using custom MS Access systems built in the early 2000s.

Project management is a market that defies solving.

Every company (and person!) has their own workflows and requirements, or there'd be no way for businesses to differentiate themselves on operational efficiency. It's possible to encode those workflows into very flexible systems like Jira, but as is usually the case, that comes at a large cost in design and ease of use.

This creates a market for thousands of small project management solutions, each a well-designed, slimmed down service, often equivalent to a particular customization of ClearCase or Asana but far easier to set up and use.

It might be solved somewhere but the problem is for each business to find what software solves it for them. I've been evaluating a switch from a mix of little tools and found no package yet that solves all our business needs. Example: we use four teams with staggered sprint times, so planning, burndowns should allow for that (multi team planning and scheduling on a single project). A lot of tools are out already at that point TFS is one tool with excellent multi-team scrum, but last time I checked TFS didn't even account for weekends in its burndowns. A bug/omission like that left unattended for several releases isn't encouraging. So were still searching.

Not to criticize those who have worked on project management systems in the past, but I've found that most systems are generally pretty painful for me. Generally the project management "systems" that work best for me is something like a shared Evernote checklist or org-mode, but those aren't nearly as good for clients/teams to use.

One of the things that I've often encountered is a granularity/association problem: tasks often become either Omnibus tasks where there's a shitload of stuff jammed into a single task, or a spread out mishmash of related tasks that don't have very good linking between them.

A good example would be a web development feature. I'm going to do the backend, someone else is going to do the frontend. Those are two pretty distinct tasks, but there's a lot of shared communication there. And most PM systems I've used don't have a (good) way to link those together. Mostly in my experience, 3rd party tools end up getting used, with links to shared wiki/moqups/google docs/dropbox whatever.

If I need to have 7 tabs open (email, slack, trello, moqups, google docs...) to get all the information I need to figure out what I need to work on next, my PM system isn't serving me very well.

I wouldn't say project management is really a solved problem, and definitely wouldn't claim that Matterhorn solves 100% of all problems with project management systems.

The biggest issue we had in our team was that some team members are just slowed down by having to use a project management tool and would much prefer to just have a written checklist on their desk, but obviously this causes a lot of issues when you're trying to keep track of what's been done and what hasn't. The planner was created to help circumvent this issue, when tickets are assigned to a user and planned for a certain date they become a checklist on that user's dashboard. This way we were able to let checklisters do their thing uninterrupted and still have their progress tracked on the board and the general product overview.

Tasks becoming either omnibus or overly fragmented is familiar to us too. Matterhorn has a feature grouping system that can help but it always comes down to how you use them. It might be an interesting problem to solve for the future.

Heh, the written checklist is definitely something I can relate to! I'll probably give this a try, it seems like you've had some of the same issues I've had :)

> Isn't project management software a solved problem already?

Not even remotely. By and large because you'll have technical and non-technical people using the same tool for projects that have multiple audiences. There will always be room for change and improvements, and people are always willing to spend money on those types of things. It's sort of a bottomless well of revenue for companies that create this type of software.

You're completely correct, but when the software is just a band-aid for the fact that work is hard and planning it is harder - well, you can sell all kinds of band-aids.

As others listed, in project management space, there are already various tools like Jira,Asana ...etc.

Personally, this space appear more crowded. So far, I have read only positive feedback on existing tools like Jira/trello ...etc and I have not read many bad experiences (may be I have limited exposure). Is there really a window/space for new entrant?

To the current users of other tools: Are these tools (Jira/trello ...etc) fundamentally different to each other or just incremental differences while fundamentally similar?

I see nothing about integrations or an API. Thats a bit dissapointing

We're just finishing up the documents for the API, the whole API is going to be open.

Also Slack integration is coming in the next few days

Awesome, I had been wondering about Slack.

Can you explain the benefits of using this over any of the other project management apps like Trello and Basecamp?

Also: The centered text is annoying to read when there's a series of paragraphs.

This may be nitpicking, but I really liked the marketing material here, aside from this phrase:

"Do you need a way to divide your resources across multiple projects[...]"

It's a pet peeve of mine that so many processes and tools use the phrase "resource" in place of person. It may not have been what was meant by "resources" here, but that's how it reads.

How about:

"Do you need a way to manage multiple projects[...]"

or...

"Do you need a way to divide your time between multiple projects[...]"

I think talking about "resources" is very standard for project planning. I'm a resource at my job and I have no problems with that.

I think that you obviously have to be sensitive of how you use this and context. For example, I once overheard a manager say "my resources are working on it this weekend", which to me betrayed a lack of compassion and dehumanized the team.

That's a really good point. We were trying not to be too sales-pitchy and just get across why we love Matterhorn and how it can help you with your projects. I think the word resource was a bit of misplaced "marketing-speak" that went into the final version. Taking your recommendation on board :)

WOOO! Happy to hear it. :D Thanks for the response!

Definitely more information about your integrations would be really helpful. For software like this, having an integration with Zendesk to bring tickets into the tracker or Github Issues into the tracker is essential; to the point where having an open API is great, but you're probably going to have to do the legwork for those integrations.

Having said that, I think there's a lot of room for improvement in the issue tracking space. Good luck!

Do you have any discounts or even free hosting for nonprofits? I run one which could really benefit from something like this but it's way out of our budget.

I was also hoping a free hosting for my week-end projects. It would allow me to try the service, and maybe, become an evangelist inside my company.

Currently, while there is a free issue management in GitHub or BitBucket, these systems are too light. JIRA would have been great, but there is no way I pay when I do hobbit projects. IMO, a good way to do that is to be free for project with less than 3 users. Or have the first 3 users free, once the project team grows, there is no more choice than to pay :)

What's so attractive about project management tools? Why do we see so many companies doing the same thing with slight variations?

Aw, it's just a project management tool. I was expecting a automated project manager, like Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0.

I see that many upvotes and comments--can anyone summarize in few bullets why this tool is superior to the hundreds of other project management tools?

The landing page and product though very nice and stylish seem not offer any outstanding feature or did I miss something?

Edit: this comment was downranked in the thread in less than 50 seconds, anyone has an idea why?

Honestly, my biggest issue with this landing page is the dummy text in the screenshots. Its nitpicking for sure, but it would look nicer if you took the time to give the projects realistic names in the screenshots and whatnot. Also that Sign In button needs another 5-10px of margin at the top.

Otherwise its a very nice landing page in my opinion.

I know what you mean, I often have a chuckle at the dummy text in screenshots of other products, but it is easy to miss when you have lots of test data names left in there. Updated this now :)

+1, looks much nicer :)

The screenshots need to be not-test-data. Make up some fake company with fake tasks; looking at screenshots of a development environment leave me underwhelmed.

What I want to know is "Why should I use this over Asana?"; the copy doesn't address it, and the screenshots leave me unsure as to the specific use cases for the product.

First thought: show me more app when I load your page, less aspirational lifestyle props. (Is that a moustache brush?)

I see your point, the initial tagline on this was "project management no matter what your team looks like" which made a bit more sense with the aspirational lifestyle props, it does make a bit less sense now. None of us own a moustache brush, unfortunately :)

I hope those are fake keys too:

http://vision.ucsd.edu/~blaxton/sneakey.html

Would you be able to offer it for free for up to 5 members? I figure this would spread the word of mouth quicker and once startups begin using it, and have enough money after they increase their team beyond 5 members, they'll just upgrade to it, rather than switch.

Or do you think free members aren't worth the hassle?

Hi there, we're currently still working out a good price point that would allow us to keep this project rolling while not putting off users. We've been completely bootstrapped up until this point and are hoping to be able to slowly build up enough momentum to the point where offering free use plans wouldnt suck up all our resources and jeopardise the future of the project. We're definitely keeping your suggestion in mind though.

Does anyone know if this does (or has plans to) integrate with GitHub / GitHub issues? I have a pretty similar setup with Trello right now that feeds off of various repos, but this would be a simpler setup if it integrated nicely.

Definitely plans to integrate with Github. We're working on rolling out better integrations over the coming month, we're especially excited about adding slack integration too.

Anyway to sign up to an announce list?

Without github integrations this would end up being another tool to divide our time across, but with github integration then I could see it solving the higher level project management issues that github doesn't do so well.

Looks nice but sign in being http, whereas landing page being https is backwards.

Yeah - the whole frontend (and API) running over HTTP is really making me not want to use this. It's 2015 – certificates are cheap, or Cloudflare is free.

I feel like this is already picked apart by more focused competitors that already exist. For instance, the todos part of this app is competing with Todoist et. al., the kanban board competes with Trello et. al., etc.

The copy needs a fair bit of work. It needs to be more brief. The sentence fragments are difficult to read. It only works if I imagine two voices, like one of those commercials employing a fake conversation.

Looks promising. Seems vaguely Trello-ish. Can you compare and contrast? Specifically, why would I pay for this when I get Trello for free? And Trello has a really good API. Anything comparable here?

Hey there, I'd say the key difference between Matterhorn and Trello is that Matterhorn is more aimed at allowing a team to maintain multiple projects at once - for example overviewing the progress of all your projects at once and planning your project from a global planner rather than having to set due dates on individual tickets.

This sounds very good. I see a calendar icon but wonder what the calendar actually looks like. A limited trial may help potential users answer questions like that. Either way, impressive and will keep an eye on this.

As a "project management" tool, can this do critical path analysis, resource allocation, Gantt charts (gotta love a Gantt chart) etc. The usual PM stuff we use in MS Project?

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Thanks for giving Matterhorn a chance! It's really good for us to see feedback on the price point. We've been completely bootstrapped up to this point and are trying to find a price point that would be good for our users but at the same time generate what we need to keep the project going and allow us to refine and develop it's features.

Would be great to hear any feedback you have on the features, as you seem to know what you want from pm tools.

Looks interesting, but lack of task dependency would be a deal breaker. One of the reasons our team has stuck with Smartsheets.

I agree with earlier comment asking for a demo project.

Looks very nice. Small deal, but the web fonts appear to be getting blocked for me so you may want to host those on the same domain. Keep up the good work!

Thanks for letting us know! Typekit can be a bit of a bastard at times!

http://i.imgur.com/EVRuCIx.png - latest Firefox on Windows. Tried on two separate boxes, none gets your Proxima Nova, so the whole thing ends up looking like butt :) Sorry.

Perhaps at least use sans-serif as a fallback font?

Looks intra-team. How does it handle inter-team access control and/or some kind of read only for non-paying users who just want to know whats up?

Gray text on a light-gray background is difficult to read.

http://contrastrebellion.com/

Someone should make a protest site for that protest site against slow, glitchy scrolling design over usability.

Very true, it seems we're suffering from imac blindness

The company behind this is bankrupt and shutting down. I would avoid this software and there is absolutely no guarantee for service or support.

Congrats on the launch! How is it different from asana/trello and a host of other tools? Why should someone use this over those tools?

All the best!

I'd make it freemium, like Slack or Trello. I'm hesitant to sign up for anything or pay for something without trying it.

At the moment we don't have the capacity or resources to support free accounts, however we are offering a free thirty day trial without requiring any payment details from the user. If we find a stable revenue stream or raise investment we will be able to consider freemium as an option.

Get a demo online ASAP. I have no interest in signing up, confirming email, etc. just to see what the product even looks like.

Thanks Brandon - We're working on it right now :)

why is it so hard to tell who is making all this, where are they, where is this app hosted, where is the company.

I mean this is not aimed at causal users but to people who might want to use this on a daily basis with very important stuff.

And they are suppose to trust an anonymous website?

This is really confusing for me.

I certainly agree with you. I am not willing to share my whole project information with someone who I have no ideas.

Are there any tools like this that support Japanese? The only one I've found so far is JIRA.

Really cool.

Looks like Asana?, but with a focus for agencies who have multiple projects / deadlines?

Yes exactly, Matterhorn's niche is really for managing multiple projects at once, allowing you to have global overview as well as allowing you to focus in on what needs doing in the moment

I was really hoping from the title that I could finally find a way to get rid of our PMs.

But it's just another SCRUM/agile board which seem to just give PMs the means to layer more complex processes on top of my job.

While reading others' first thoughts,

My first thought was hey is this an add-on for gitlab? Does look a lot like it. So my initial quest was to look where i could download the community edition of this, but there is not?

Looks great! Nice work

interface looks nice and slick. gonna give it a try

Love the name

registration page doesn't work

Yep, clicking the Sign Up button doesn't seem to do anything.

Sorry about that -- should be fixed now :)

thanks for fixing the registration page. got the email but the clicking the link takes me to 404 :(

A British SaaS named after a mountain in Switzerland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matterhorn

It seems Uber started a new hype repurposing German words. The opposite is happening in German speaking countries: "handy" for cell phone and "public viewing" for watching a live TV event on a projected wall.

Can one integrate his mailbox? Outlook and MS project server/Sharepoint are a good example, though there is room for improvements.

There's also a Matterhorn in California, if I'm not mistaken. But, if they're british, perhaps it is indeed because of the swiss one!

That one is a Disneyland roller coaster, loosely themed after the real one. And a decent one, at that!

"public viewing" sounds... interesting.

Is that what my roommate does at night on Chat Roulette when he thinks I'm asleep?

It's really annoying viewing a website (especially one that asks for cash) and not finding a page that talks about the team members behind the project. No accountability, No way I'd sign up

Agreed. I do like "About Us" pages, and read them frequently. Luckily, this founder uses his personal email address all over the site (see Contact Us, Learn More buttons). So, with a bit of Googling I was able to learn what I wanted to know about these guys.

Side note:

The avatars are quite stereotypical: male developer, female designer, male project manager. Why don't you switch it up? There's female developers too.

Didn't give much thought to the matching of the avatars to their role, just wrote tham out as they popped into my head :) I'm the female frontend developer that wrote it so I should know!

I agree, this is the first thing that jumped out at me when I was looking at the landing page. I don't know of quantitative evidence that this sort of thing causes harm, but I don't see any harm in mixing it a bit.

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