
Show HN: Would love some feedback on my weekend project (built in 3 days) - tc1222
https://www.teamclerk.com?utm_source=hn
======
hluska
What?? Three days of work and no meta description??? I feel betrayed.....;)

(just kidding)

I just signed up and am going to work through a few things. I'll keep notes as
I go, so some of these may seem a little rough, but I hope that they help.

First, my environment:

\- Ubuntu 14.04 \- Chromium 47.0.2526.106 \- Resolution - 1366 x 768

and

\- iPhone 5c \- iOS 9.2 \- Safari

My thoughts:

1.) You sign your confirmation "Team Clerk Team". That isn't wrong per se, but
it's kind of awkward.

2.) I know you have only put three days into this, so this is a really shitty
thing to say, but when I first loaded this up in mobile, I had to really
seriously zoom in.

3.) After I signed up (on desktop), I was presented with a tooltip that reads
"Click here to create a project". In my environment, the 'c' in create is cut
off.

4.) This may be a time zone problem, but when I created my first project and
set it for being due today, it immediately showed up as being overdue.

5.) After I started up that project, I created a task and assigned it to
myself. When I checked in mobile, I couldn't figure out how to view that task.
In good news, your account settings page looks great in mobile. :)

6.) I wanted to test if I could log out of mobile and then assign a task to
myself in desktop to see if the task would show up again when I logged into
mobile. I couldn't figure out how to log out in the mobile view.

7.) I couldn't figure out how to show that a project was completed.

Overall impressions:

I like this a whole lot - it's one heck of a good application considering that
it only has three days of dev behind it. With a few little tweaks to the
experience, this is definitely something that I'd use. Great work! :)

~~~
tc1222
In short - you are awesome! Thanks so much for taking the time and putting
thought into your feedback. Very much appreciated! I'll be working out these
bugs for sure!

------
msvan
Project management SaaS is a suuper crowded space. You appear to be targeting
businesses, educators, designers, organizers, writers, web developers,
logistics planners, therapists, and probably more that didn't fit on the
screen. If you're a one man band, you're better off picking a really targeted
niche that the existing players in the project management space find too small
to care about. Otherwise you'll end up competing with people who have more
manpower, more experience and more money.

Apart from that, getting to this stage in three days is really impressive.
Congrats on finishing & shipping, and doing it fast.

~~~
tc1222
Thanks. You make some good points. I built it more with the idea that I could
use it personally and, talking with some friends, realized that other people
would probably find it useful too. The industries on the homepage were more me
fishing for use cases than anything else. My hobbies / jobs are kind of all
over the map so I wanted a simple tool I could use to manage anything I was
working on. Thanks for the feedback and taking the time to check it out!

------
S4M
Not really a feedback but... how did you do the landing page? It's so slick!
Also you have one picture missing for Designers as your target audience:
[http://imgur.com/Sq0cFNg](http://imgur.com/Sq0cFNg) (at least on Firefox 43
on Debian).

~~~
tc1222
Thanks! I actually started with a free bootstrap theme for the lander and then
took out all the sections it came with and built my own in their place. Kinda
silly, I know, but it saved me some time instead of building it from scratch
and I didn't decide not to use the stock sections until the end... :)

~~~
deftnerd
I was trying to figure out which bootstrap theme you used, and discovered that
the CSS embed for
[https://www.teamclerk.com/home/css/owl.theme.css](https://www.teamclerk.com/home/css/owl.theme.css)
is resulting in an error

I also see you use Laravel. No wonder it only took you three days :-) Laravel
is awesome for fast development. I use it pretty much exclusively lately.

~~~
tc1222
It was this theme: [http://www.bootstrapzero.com/bootstrap-template/small-
apps-t...](http://www.bootstrapzero.com/bootstrap-template/small-apps-
themefisher)

------
yeukhon
I would appreciate if either a short video is provided or a demo without
registration is available. The former is probably quite easy without any code
changes if you don't want to keep refreshing the demo instance :-)

I think the pricing is pretty good, especially for people who don't have the
expertise in running Atlassian Jira or managing process in Jira.

~~~
tc1222
Thanks for the feedback. And, yeah video is definitely in the works!

------
whatnotests
Looks like a simple version of Pivotal Tracker. Am I right?

As someone familiar with those kinds of tools, it's obvious to me. To someone
who is has not used tools like Pivotal, it will not be as obvious.

Perhaps some examples of benefits from using teamclerk.com would be a good
addition.

Nice work!

~~~
tc1222
Thanks! Yeah I'm a long time pivotal user, but I work on a lot of other types
of projects than programming. I also do music, art, construction, etc and
Pivotal doesn't really fit with those things. I've wanted to build a similar
tool that could be used by any kind of business for a while - without all the
crazy features that come with things like asana and without the specific tasks
types/workflow of pivotal.

~~~
highCs
> Who is Team Clerk for?

It's missing construction (educators I've a doubt... do they try new things?
Are they viral? Do they spend money? etc.). There is a lot of money in
construction plus they still may have few good softwares. I don't know, just
finger in the wind.

~~~
hotcool
AP4 Project Managers focuses on the construction industry. I've used it for
design projects though:
[https://www.ap4projectmanagers.com](https://www.ap4projectmanagers.com)

AP4 does the job, but if Team Clerk will do file attachments, it's the better
of the two.

~~~
tc1222
File attachments are on the way!

------
hotcool
Looks great. Your pricing is reasonable too. I don't see a way to attach files
though. Is that functionality on your roadmap?

~~~
tc1222
Thanks! File attachments are on the roadmap, just haven't quite gotten there
yet.

------
u03c6
Don't make me create another account, just use Google/Facebook/Github and, if
you really want to, give the option to create an account just for your site.

------
stevewillows
It's minor, but in the 'Who is...'section, 'Team Clerk' should be title case
since it's your brand name instead of 'Team clerk.'

Nice work!

~~~
tc1222
You're totally right! Thanks! Fixed!

------
joantune
I would replace the text with screenshots (or simply add more images) when you
click on features. It hasn't convinced me to sign up yet.

Ask yourself, what do you love about what you built? and work on passing that
message along, either through screenshots, short text, 'GIF' like video of you
doing it, or an actual video (although it's tricker to do)

~~~
joantune
And better yet than asking yourself, is now, as apparently you have lots of
feedback here and new users, ask your users! (what you love might be different
from what your users love).

Cheers

------
galtwho
A few issues I came across

1\. Sign up btn on main page didn't seem to work but the one at the bottom
worked. I browsed aroudn a bit before I clicked on signup and not sure if that
had a effect.

2\. Post sign up, I got a tool tip asking to create a task. But there were no
other texts on screen. I can see a few button and even a arrow menu(top right
corner) and none of these have a text in them.

I will check again later

~~~
kbrownlees
I have the same issue as well when using Chromium (Version 47.0.2526.111
(64-bit)). Works fine in Firefox.

~~~
tc1222
thanks. I wonder if it has to do with Google Fonts....

------
mdolon
It's very impressive that you were able to make this in 3 days! I signed up
for an account and it was painless enough. My biggest gripe would be on the
overall design, I like the layout but it severely lacks polish.

In terms of product, it's definitely something I've looked for in the past
(Pivotal Tracker for simpler/non-programming projects). Nice work!

~~~
tc1222
Thanks, yeah I'm not a designer, but I try. Hopefully I'll be able to polish
it a little better over the next few iterations.

------
Phillips126
Found a typo if it hasn't already been pointed out - "Prioritze" is missing an
"i" in "..tize". This is under the heading "Track Your Team's Performance. Get
Results."

BTW - Excellent job. I've built something quite similar for the company I work
for to keep track of tasks and work load internally.

~~~
tc1222
Thanks!

------
sprucely
Small typo of "monitor" under Businesses... "Team clerk can help manage your
team and moitor their progress."

~~~
tc1222
thanks! fixed!

------
sebringj
3 days, I call bullshit on this marketing ploy.

~~~
tc1222
Call it what you will. I registered the domain on Jan 9. look it up. But
thanks, that makes me feel pretty good :)

~~~
sebringj
Well, you must have pulled all nighters or had some pre-made snap in parts to
do that. Domain dates don't prove anything as you could have built it prior as
well. I pulled off kitgui.com in a month and had a 3 day thing for a component
I sold not including marketing. Maybe you kept it simple. Good job if so but
it does reek of marketing.

------
LifeQuestioner
When I click a task to edit, I can't go back to the task list without
refreshing the page or hitting delete? I think there might be an issue with
scrolling, looks like I should be able to scroll as the description box is cut
off a bit but alas I cannot.

Man this is seriously awesome. Really clean design too I like it!

Can I ask what you build this using?

~~~
tc1222
Thanks I'll check it out. There should be a save and cancel button underneath
the description box. What device/browser are you using?

To answer your question, I just used Laravel (PHP), jQuery and Bootstrap.
Pretty simple setup.

~~~
LifeQuestioner
Chrome and mbp 2015 :).

------
orthoganol
Having not spent much time on it is not a badge of honor! If you're not proud
of what you're sharing, put in some more effort until you can submit it as
"Proudly presenting, my project management prototype" :).

~~~
tc1222
Haha. Not trying to pass it off as the next google :) I have about 20 of these
kinds of side projects. Don't worry, its not my day job. I'm proud of a lot of
stuff I do. I posted this to get feedback from HN, not to present my life's
work. Thanks for your input though.

------
rokhayakebe
Like the guts to ask for money. More people should.

~~~
tc1222
I agree. If you don't ask for it, no one will ever pay you.

------
finyeates
I'm very impressed, I've often thought that Pivotal / Jira / Trello wasn't
well suited for more generic tasks.

Have a few points which may or may not be of use to you.

\- I'm not a fan of the 'No risks. No credit card required.' subtext to the
sign-up call to action. It may be just me, but when someone explicitly states
there's no risks, it makes me consider that there might be risks. No need to
put doubts into someones mind.

\- Love the interface, really intuitive (Just thought that needed its own
point)

\- I think the permanent call to action to 'Upgrade Today' on the dashboard
view is a little too in your face, and takes up a fair amount of real-estate
which.

\- The 'Add a member' option could also do with having a 'Add a team member'
option (it may have it on the paid tiers, but for the free tier it would be a
good call to action to upgrade)

\- The difficulty field on a ticket doesn't seem like it intuitively will make
sense for all tasks, perhaps as an optional field, or allow users to customise
the names and values of the fields at the project level. I.e. if instead of
high, medium and low priority, I wanted 'Later, Soon, Now and Yesterday' for
my priorities.

\- I think the Project Tasks and My Tasks could be collapsed into one column,
freeing more space to work with, or maybe even a dedicated create task column.
Just a filter of 'show my tasks' or 'show all tasks' would work well.
Especially on the free tier it's a lot of wasted space.

\- I'd shy away from using points and other metrics like that, as most of the
time a 1-3 or even 1-8 scoring system becomes restrictive and not
representative of the time taken to do a task, over time it just loses meaning
to a user in my opinion.

And a minor issue or two:

\- If I have two tasks assigned to a project, one high priority and difficult,
the other low priority and easy and I complete the high priority task the
'Tasks Completed' in the project overview jumps to 75%, which isn't what i'd
expect.

\- The text on the 'Time Elapsed' and 'Tasks Completed' seems centred on the
progress bar and not the container, and the small white font makes it hard to
see.

\- You can't access any of the support / terms of use etc.. without first
logging out of your account.

Aside from that all I'd do is iterate a little bit on the text of the website,
as it just doesn't quite bite yet.

But all in all, very good work. I've bookmarked so I can come back later and
see if I can get more use out of it. :)

~~~
tc1222
Thanks so much for the feedback and taking the time to write all this down. I
really appreciate it! You've made some really good points and I'll be adding
them as tasks :)

------
module17
Impressive achievement in just three days!

~~~
tc1222
Thanks a lot!

------
la6470
What framework did you use to build? Is there a standard framework that you
can use for sass product?

~~~
tc1222
I used Laravel for this one. I know Taylor (who built Laravel) is working on
something for SaaS. Spark is what its called, I believe, but its not really
ready for production yet last I heard.

