
Show HN: Clubhouse – project management built for software teams - andrewchilds
https://clubhouse.io
======
benrict
We're currently using Clubhouse (and very happy with it), and one thing it
does extremely well is the Github integration; you can assign steps in your
workflow to events in Github, including merges and pull requests. For example,
in our setup, if you tag a commit or branch with a Clubhouse issue number,
then the issue automatically moves into "in development", then if we open a PR
from a branch to our development main branch, it moves into "ready for
review"; once the PR is closed it moves into "ready for deployment". As a
developer, it means you don't have to micro-manage your issues most of the
time, especially if you have more than 3 steps in your workflow. This is a
very nice experience, and I don't think I've seen this in other products
(apart from tinkering with APIs and Github webhooks of course).

~~~
glossyscr
Sounds like a good reason for Clubhouse.

Do you think the same would be possible with Trello connected to Github either
directly [http://blog.trello.com/github-and-trello-integrate-your-
comm...](http://blog.trello.com/github-and-trello-integrate-your-commits/) or
via Zapier?

------
andrewchilds
Hey HN, if you want to give Clubhouse a try, you can use this link for a $100
credit:
[https://clubhouse.io/signup?referral=hn](https://clubhouse.io/signup?referral=hn)

(I'm a co-founder, also happy to answer any questions.)

~~~
skewart
I'm curious to hear how you would describe Clubhouse relative to the
competition. Are there aspects that are fundamentally differentiated? Or is it
more a matter of making lots of little improvements, which add up to a much
better experience overall?

I ask because project management software is a super crowded market, with a
lot of products that seem only subtly different from each other. On the
surface Clubhouse also seems like it's only subtly different from other
products. I'm curious about strategies for navigating these kinds of markets.
Is high-level differentiation useful? Or are the details more important? Or is
it really all about marketing and branding?

Or, if you guys just wanted to make something you like and are hoping enough
other people like it too so you can pay the bills, and you're really thinking
strategically about growth fight now that's cool too.

I haven't really tried Clubhouse yet but it looks really nice. And I certainly
have yet to fall in love with anything out there. I will definitely give
Clubhouse a try.

~~~
andrewchilds
Good questions! It is a crowded market, but nobody has really nailed it yet.
Clubhouse is being built specifically for software teams, and we're trying to
provide just enough structure to let you see what's going on at a high level,
but keep it flexible enough so that you can work the way your team wants to.

Part of what makes us different is the little details that add up to a better
UX, but our GitHub integration is pretty sophisticated: we don't just link
stories to pull requests, we can actually automate your Clubhouse workflow
using your existing GitHub workflow. We've also put a lot of work into cross-
project visibility, so most other tools only let you see one project at a
time, so it's difficult to know what a single person is doing across multiple
projects, but in Clubhouse it's very easy. We're also starting to get into
more interesting features, like providing data-driven guidance around
milestones and deadlines, the ability to create roadmaps and more organic
story dependencies, more analytics/dataviz... we still have a lot to do.

~~~
glossyscr
Everyone who visits your landing page thinks 'Trello' and here you try to
explain why Clubhouse is advanced (without mentioning Trello) which is not so
easy to digest.

Why don't you just create a nice comparison matrix on your site where you
compare Clubhouse to Trello feature by feature and highlight the advantages
(which are mentioned here and there in your posts in this thread). Would help
a lot.

~~~
kschrader
It's on the list of things to do at some point soon.

Here's a blog post that one of our users wrote a few months ago that covers
some of the same ground: [https://medium.com/humans-in-space/clubhouse-is-the-
best-pro...](https://medium.com/humans-in-space/clubhouse-is-the-best-product-
management-tool-this-year-3b6f75c093c3#.54h382exp)

------
glossyscr
Trello is free for unlimited users, this thing here is free for 3 users? So
what's the point?

We use Trello for years and never had the need to get the paid versions and
those are the same price as Clubhouse.

Could somebody enlighten me— _why?_

EDIT: It was predictable that this post is getting downvoted instead of just
replying to some valid points

~~~
etjossem
Don't downvote this. I want to hear the differences between the products too.

------
atombender
We've been using Clubhouse for about two weeks, having transitioned from
Asana, which we found lacking in many respects. (Before then, we used Trello,
which we also found to be not fit our workflow very well.)

So far, Clubhouse has been working really well. They are emulating the Slack
aesthetic pretty hard, and that's not a bad thing. It's pretty responsive and
well designed. I find the story card view friendlier than Trello's.

Clubhouse is really a clone of PivotTracker, and I don't mean that as a
criticism. They even use the same terminology (points, stories, epics,
workflow) and categories (bug, chore, feature). However, there's less of a
focus on iterations, and the UI is decidely smoother from my perspective.

There are some features I'd like. For example, I would like their Slack
integration to PM me personally about changes; Clubhouse can currently post
updates to a Slack channel, but monitoring _all_ the story activity is just
not an option when you're on a team working on many different things.

There are also some rough edges in the UI. You can save your story view as a
workspace, but if you alter anything (e.g. hide an epic), you have to save it
under a new name, then remove the old workspace. I expect stuff like this to
improve over time.

~~~
Joe8Bit
AFAIK 'points, stories, epics, workflow' are generic 'agile' terms rather than
specific to one particular tool.

~~~
lobster_johnson
They are, but if you look at Clubhouse's UI there are exact analogues to
almost all of Pivotal's UI. Didn't Pivotal invent some of these terms, too? I
could be wrong.

~~~
kschrader
We tried to use rather generic agile terms.

Here's a reference to most of the same concepts on the Jira site, for
instance: [https://www.atlassian.com/agile/delivery-
vehicles/](https://www.atlassian.com/agile/delivery-vehicles/)

(I've worked with Pivotal on projects in the past and I worked at Thoughtworks
for a while, so we're definitely using language that should be familiar to
users that are familiar with the flavor of "agile" promoted by those
companies.)

------
throwaway2016a
We user Pivotal Tracker but at 15 people switching to this would be over twice
as expensive.

It looks really nice, I'd love to try it. But we're a small startup (many of
the 15 people are part time or consultants) and doubling our expenses on this
is more than we can afford.

~~~
kschrader
We tried to price things fairly but still make enough to grow and invest in
the what we're building.

PT uses tiered pricing, so if you have 16 people we're only $10 more a month
than PT and at 26 people we're $40 less expensive each month.

~~~
throwaway2016a
Yeah, I'm just an unfortunate edge case where I'm right under the Pivotal
price break.

15 * $8.50 = $127.5 vs Pivotal $75 flat. But if I had one more user Pivotal
would jump immediately to $150 and Clubhouse would only go up $8.50.

So pretty much you are cheaper at the low end of the ranges but more expensive
at the high ends.

Don't get me wrong, this looks awesome! I really want to try it. Maybe when we
hit the next user barrier on Pivotal I'll use it as an excuse to switch :)

------
citrusx
As a former preview user of Clubhouse, I can say that it's easily my favorite
work/story manager to date. It gives you what you need for keeping track of
your work in an agile environment, and more or less just stays out of your way
beyond that. It's totally worth a try if you're fed up with JIRA, Pivotal
tracker, et al.

------
rubiquity
Seems like a nice combo of things I've stitched together (at 3 different
companies now) with Trello + Zapier + GitHub.

~~~
robinwarren
I'm interested to know how you identify the trello cards in the commit
message? Are you using your own codes to identify them? I'm thinking of
building something similar myself.

~~~
rubiquity
We squash commits before merging so we use the PR as the tie between cards and
commits.

------
michaelmior
This feels like a more opinionated Trello, which is not necessarily a bad
thing. One oddity on the pricing page. You say the standard plan is $8.50 for
unlimited users. Then if you read the small grey text underneath, you see that
this price is per user per month. This doesn't really make a lot of sense.

~~~
andrewchilds
Good point, we've removed that line. Thanks for your feedback!

------
faizshah
After searching through these kinds of products for the past couple weeks,
this product looks great and is priced reasonably (unlimited projects!).

Theres a few features it's missing though. It needs a calendar view, daily
agenda for scheduling tasks in your work day, and time logging/tracking. These
three features would make it perfect for me.

Additionally there's some UX issues in my opinion in terms of how you get from
one view to another. For example, if I click on a story, the story modal comes
up, how do i get to a view where I can see all the stories for that project? I
haven't tested this yet, but it seems that the dashboard doesn't show upcoming
due dates, which is one of the most important reasons I would check the
dashboard.

All considered, this app still seems great and I'll continue using it for the
next few weeks.

------
desireco42
Based on the description it really sounds great. I didn't really try it, but I
intend to, because even though there are a lot of options, unfortunately, they
are all lacking. It seems the general topic of work and organizing work is
much more difficult then we are willing to admit.

------
amelius
Does it cooperate with an issue tracker? I.e., is it easy to convert tickets
into tasks?

Also, I just watched the demo gif. To move a task from "unstarted" to
"started" you have to drag and drop it? Doesn't that get clumsy when the
"unstarted" column is really big (which it will probably be in realistic
sitations).

~~~
andrewchilds
You can use an integration like Zapier or our API [1] to automatically
generate stories based on some external event. As already mentioned you can
update the state within the story dialog, or using our GitHub integration you
can partially automate the process by setting up rules like so:

\- When pull request is opened on master, move story to Ready for Review

\- When branch is merged to master, move story to Ready for Deploy

We use these rules ourselves, and they not only reduce process overhead, they
make your cycle time data more realistic vs. doing these steps manually.

[1] [https://clubhouse.io/api](https://clubhouse.io/api)

------
stingraycharles
This looks like a good alternative for Trello. One thing I am missing from
Trello is time estimation / planning / tracking. With a bit of help with
extensions you can make it work, but it's not a nice experience overall.

Does this tool has this covered, and/or how do other people deal with this?

~~~
kschrader
We have estimation in place, and planning is done at a high level via Epics,
but not at the granular level of "you can get 25 points done this week, based
upon past performance" (yet).

Related: We have cumulative flow diagrams in place at the Epic level so that
you can see where your bottlenecks are and visualize progress.

Suggestions are welcome on how to best add tracking to the system without it
being too overbearing.

(I'm also a founder here.)

------
chm
I just want to say that your product looks great and the presentation is
excellent. I knew what it was in under 10 seconds. I feel like I already know
how to use it, in a weird way.

Definitely trying it out tonight! I'm a single dev, but still could be useful
to manage projects!

------
joneholland
Is it just me, or can you only set up one workflow per organization? Does that
mean that you can't have multiple teams/projects using their own styles within
one account?

~~~
kschrader
It's a constraint imposed, by design, so that you view progress easily across
projects. (i.e. view the progress of the frontend, backend, and UI team
against a common epic)

Some of our users have extra steps in their workflow (for example, "waiting
for app store review") that some of the project teams hide in their workspace
(each column in the workflow can be hidden by an individual user).

In the future we might support different "departments" within an organization
to allow for multiple ways of working, but it's not at the top of the list of
things to do currently.

~~~
taco_emoji
I feel like you're missing out on all the money that big companies with more
than a handful of dev teams could be spending on you.

~~~
kschrader
We're focusing on teams of 3-150 developers right now.

We have some of the building blocks in place for bigger teams, but it's not a
priority right now.

------
xfalcox
Good Product. Been looking for something similar (multi-projects project
management) for years, but we would need something to self host due to company
policy. Any plans?

~~~
kschrader
The software is built so that we can ship an on-prem version at some point in
the future, but we don't have the processes in place yet to make that a
reality.

Nothing planned yet, but if there's enough interest we'll consider it.

------
bastijn
Do I need to sign up to try? I see no live demo option? If you want people to
try best to provide a no strings attached option (I.e. No account needed).

------
merb
Too many things inside the cloud. Does nobody create software to install on
bare metal=

~~~
manyxcxi
It's much easier to dev, test, deploy, and migrate when you are only
supporting your own technology stack. It's so much easier than supporting all
the random platforms everyone has.

Additionally, the account management side is so much easier. It's a pain in
the ass to maintain license servers, and it costs more. If you're shooting for
fast early user adoption and/or small and medium size businesses it's a lot
less daunting to charge $x/user/month than $1000x + yearly maintenance, or all
of the other on premise licensing schemes.

------
nikolay
$10 (or $8.5) per user per month is relatively expensive.

