
Asana raises $75M Series D round led by Generation Investment Management - mostafah
https://blog.asana.com/2018/01/asana-funding-series-d/
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matte_black
The problem I have with products like Asana has always been context. It’s just
too much hassle for businesses with very unique processes, often requiring
something more custom built, and of course, a deep introspection of data.

~~~
radicaldreamer
There are way too many "highly opinionated" productivity apps which are not
built with enough freedom and "leeway" for anything but a very basic workflow.
It's almost like the software is built for how the company itself works or
from an idealistic design standpoint than for the messiness of complicated
work.

I still think a properly configured JIRA instance is the best framework for a
growing software company to build upon. It's very easy to misconfigure or mess
up JIRA but done correctly, it's one of the best pieces of software for
getting things done at a larger company (50+ people).

~~~
matte_black
Personally I’m not even thinking about software companies, I’m talking about
the vast majority of companies out there in countless industries.

It’s just not possible to have a good generic app to serve all of them.
There’s just too much variety in workflows and edge cases to capture them all,
and few companies will change the way they work to accommodate the opinionated
workflow of some productivity vendor.

The best solution is still to build custom applications for each company,
molded around the way they work, and owned by them 100%, so they can feel
fully confident that the product will not disappear or change in ways they
don’t like.

~~~
rushabh
On non-tech setups, such systems are called ERP systems. The its a mature
multi-billion dollar market with hundreds of entrenched players. The moment an
application like Asana tries to cross that threshold, they get compared to the
ERP products that are designed to handle specific workflow.

ERP products lack flexibility and generally have very poor user experience
(since the buyers are not the users). I think there is a separate place for
both these products and it depends on the organization when the switch from
one domain to another.

~~~
matte_black
Thank you for that term ERP, I hadn’t heard it before but it describes
precisely what I’m talking about.

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dmode
Productivity apps in Silicon Valley startups are out of control. My wife's
company has Slack, G Suite, JIRA, Facebook at Work, Zugata, and now getting
Asana. If you need to ping someone, you have to ping them in Slack, Hangouts,
FB Messenger and hope they respond to one.

~~~
conradk
Hence tools like Zappier. I've had great success getting all notifications in
Slack via Zappier, reducing switching between different tools. But that means
that Zappier has access to EVERYTHING, which somewhat scares me from a privacy
and intellectual property standpoint.

~~~
shard972
I'm personally more scared about CI/Deployment SaaS companies.

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neya
>“Asana’s mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work
together effortlessly.“

I worked in many companies previously where Asana was used. I can tell you
with sheer confidence, at no point did we feel the "help humanity thrive by
enabling all teams to work together effortlessly." part. Not once, not ever.

Every time we used it, the project managers would love it for the first two
weeks and they would simply revert back to email/slack for reminding teams of
deadlines or deliverables.

But you know what REALLY helped out the most? Unsexy Excel sheets combined
with regular checkin meetings. We would have ONE meeting every Monday morning
where we would review our excel sheet for everyone's progress, updates and
deliverables.

Heck, I think even Trello works much better than the god awful interface that
Asana has. But, Asana has never worked for any of the teams I've worked with
in the past, irrespective of the company size. Maybe that's just me.

~~~
lobster_johnson
Same here. We quickly grew to hate Asana, and eventually switched to Trello,
then ClubHouse, but I'm personally pretty fed up with these tools. In the end,
they become bottomless buckets of stagnating information. We don't need charts
or burn rates or estimates.

For projects (like a big new feature with a clear set of tasks), a Google Docs
document or spreadsheet works just as well, and usually it's best to have this
stuff in the project manager's hands, and not let people mess with it
individually.

That said, there's parts of the process that don't have an obvious place. A
typical example is a customer issue that arises and needs input and
coordination between multiple people, including devs and salespeople and the
customer themselves, perhaps including some files that need to be shared.
Email is so terrible at this, since adding new people late to the conversation
don't let them easily see the chronology, and no email client has yet to make
conversations (which sloppy top quoting and huge corporate signatures)
readable. A group direct message on Slack, perhaps? I'm thinking Slack is a
little too real-time and chaotic. Maybe a private Discourse install?

Managing one's personal queue of tasks (which don't necessarily map to the
project's tasks, they could be things like "refactor X") is where I personally
seek a better tool. A Markdown file really isn't sufficient. Apple's Reminders
app is terrible. Evernote is not good at it. I've yet to find something good.

~~~
cr__
Can’t recommend OmniFocus
([https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus](https://www.omnigroup.com/omnifocus))
enough. Has kept me sane the last couple of years.

~~~
lobster_johnson
Never liked it. Omni's apps are generally cluttered, over-complicated and full
of bad UX. No iCloud support, clunky iOS app, everything feels like it's 2006
again.

I like Things — both Mac and iOS apps have good UX — but it lacks some
essential features, the most critical of which is the ability to add files to
tasks. It's an absolutely must-have for development tasks. Its limited
notational support (just a tiny, cramped text field) also makes it less useful
for anything except basic personal reminders.

The lack of file support also makes Things less useful for other things, such
as doing research into things to buy (new sofa, that kind of thing) or places
to go. I use Evernote for this, but it's also a terrible app.

~~~
clarkdave
Have you tried Bear - [http://www.bear-writer.com](http://www.bear-writer.com)
\- for notes? I've found it far more pleasant than Evernote, although it's Mac
+ iOS only (no web).

~~~
lobster_johnson
I have tried Bear, thanks. It's not good enough for me.

For one, it's tied to Markdown, which I find distracting to work with,
especially on mobile. (I don't understand the tech community's current
obsession with Markdown; it's fine for documentation or Github comments and so
on where there's a clear workflow separation between writing and publishing,
but for personal tasks? Ugh.)

Bear also makes the same mistake with regards to files that Evernote (and
every other note-taking app for that matter) does, which is to only display
them inline. If I dump in a bucketload of images into a note, they're all
display as huge images that need to be resized. Actually, Bear doesn't support
resizing images at all, all you can do is switch between displaying them full,
and as thumbnail (just like Apple's Notes), which is even worse. Evernote's
image editing/annotation mode is great, Bear doesn't have anything like that.

No folder support. Evernote is also bad here, but it does allow you create
"notebooks" and to "stack" notebooks inside each other.

I like Bear's modern UI much more than Evernote's, but a note-taking app would
have to be _considerably_ better than Evernote for me to switch everything
over, and it's unfortunately not.

Sorry about the rant, talking about note-taking apps fires me up. :-)

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edshiro
$75M... for what??! Call me sceptic but I just don't understand how they can
raise that kind of money. There is just nothing special about Asana. Is it
purely fuelled by amazing growth? And What is the exit strategy here? An
acquisition by Atlassian?

Meanwhile, I am bootstrapping and dreaming of launching and making a few $K or
hundreds of $K. Maybe I am not ambitious enough when there seem to be so much
"free" money up for grabs.

~~~
stingraycharles
There are plenty of people like you. They're just less "sexy" to write about,
because they're not as vocal and do not care about KPIs like "velocity".

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aymeric
Congratulations to Asana.

Let's celebrate their success rather than criticize their software.

Everybody here would probably be very happy to have created a company like
this. Why be so negative?

~~~
diggan
Why can't we do both? I'm happy for them sure, but that doesn't stop people
from questioning how they can't be profitable on their own already, why the
performance is still one of the worst from all of the PM tools, or why you
cannot allow more customization.

Why be so unary?

~~~
Zhyl
I think tone on HN can come across as very derisive or dismissive sometimes.
It's one thing to not be unary, but it is another to be able to write down a
coherent set of thoughts which critique the platform without sledging it, and
congratulating a company on their success.

Overall HNers aren't the most supportive and compassionate bunch, but then
again we're here for news and discussion and not back slapping.

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stanleydrew
I'm happy for Asana as I find the core product useful, but I do wonder how
much more growth is possible without branching out into other product areas.
Hopefully they've got some interesting stuff in the pipeline.

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wellboy
30,000 paying customers after 6 years. How much do they make from each
customer, $100?

That's $3M revenue per year justifying a $30M valuation at the high end. How
do they come up with $1B with slow growth like that? Is it because they have a
famous founding team? Seems like a small startup with little growth potential,
who can raise any money they want anyway, because their founders are
billionaires.

Not hating on that, but how do they think of paying back their investors. Is
this an ego thing, that they think they MUST build a billion dollar startup
even though their revenue and growth is tiny?

~~~
Lunar_Lamp
I've never used nor paid for Asana, however...

It looks like your numbers are way off
[https://asana.com/pricing](https://asana.com/pricing)

30,000 customers with an average of 100 users (on the non-enterprise tier)
puts that revenue over $400m/year.

~~~
wellboy
Where did you find that paying customers have 100 users on average? In that
case it would also only be 30,000 customers * 100 users * 10 = $30M a year.

~~~
Lunar_Lamp
I didn't - that was an estimate (in the same way your $100/customer was).

However, you're missing that the price is $9.99/month/user, not per year (for
some reason I used $11.99, which is the price when not billed annually).

So it's 30,000 customers * 100 users * 9.99 * 12 ~= $360m per year. Your $30m
is per month.

~~~
wellboy
Ah ok, then valuation should actually be $4B no? :D

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alex_young
~$163M project management software. [0]

Last round valued at $600M. [1]

Any guess what this round is valued at? Unicorn?

[0][https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/asana](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/asana)

[1][https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/30/task-management-app-
asana-...](https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/30/task-management-app-asana-
raises-50m-at-a-600m-valuation-led-by-ycs-sam-altman/)

~~~
whoisjuan
900MM according to Business Insider. You would think this should be enough to
get a 1B+ especially when they have been around since 2008. My guess is that
they have a decent ARR but they are struggling to find more addressable
market.

~~~
jkaljundi
Often for task and project management software the churn is high and customer
lifetime short.

~~~
cgallello
I'm actually curious about this - do you know of articles that talk about
this?

~~~
tablet
In our pm product (Targetprocess) average customer lifetime is about 4 years.

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jkaljundi
That's really good and above average. How different it is for you in the
SME/SMB segment vs enterprise? Churn is much higher for small 5-10 person
installations usually, as the switching costs are small and often even initial
payments are to continue trialing it. Much different for 1000 users
implementation.

~~~
tablet
Average churn is close to 20%. Definitely it is different for various cohorts.
For Targetprocess we have this distribution:

1-20 users - churn 35%

21-100 users - churn 18%

100+ users - churn 7%

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rdlecler1
“Asana’s mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work
together effortlessly.“ I’ve tried the product and if that was their mission I
couldn’t tell. Trying to force some sort of higher purpose into every company
seems disingenuous at best. Seems like a stretch for an impact investment
firm.

~~~
keyle
"effortlessly" with modal windows everywhere, sparkly animations and spaghetti
ticket management

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bovermyer
Personally, I prefer a whiteboard kanban made up of post-its over any work
organization software. When remote workers are involved, then I reach for
Trello.

Communication tools are a different matter, but generally, a mindful email
culture seems to work well.

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sebleon
Ha, I've tried to use this product with 3 different teams, never caught on -
ended up mostly syncing up via Slack+Email+Google Docs.

Anyone here been able to get a team to use Asana?

~~~
motdiem
We’re fairly happy with Asana - but it took us a couple of weeks to figure out
how we wanted to use it and come up with our own conventions.

I think it works well for mixed teams- jira was too technical for half of our
team, and I was opposed to email. It doesn’t absolve you of doing project
management though - I wish its reporting tools were more powerful...

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forkLding
Asana reminds me of that saying that there are only software that people love
to hate and those that nobody has heard of, Asana has been reliably bad when I
used it, this in a humourous way confirms it.

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shubhamjain
I don't usually complain "what the heck are they doing with that kind of
money." But, from a cursory look, Asana seems to be one of the most
functionally simple Project Management software I have seen. I know it's trite
to undermine the complexity of software, but in this case, I can't find many
reasons why they need that kind of money. What are they doing that
necessitates a big team (251-500 employees)? The software isn't handling
massive amounts of data. Its complexity seems comparable to Trello, which
raised only $10M (<7% of Asana's total funding) [1].

How are they burning this amount of cash? Am I missing something?

[1]:
[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/trello](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/trello)

~~~
Bjorkbat
Obviously Trello lacked the mission to help humanity thrive, so their burn
rate was much lower ;)

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ftoo
Facebook billionaire funds his own company and gets his friend’s companies to
use it at work.

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ajeet_dhaliwal
I think it's a great product. It saddens me that they need to keep raising
funds, in theory this should be a business that works. There's companies
offering products that add questionable value and can be highly profitable,
especially in finance and around real estate.

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kumarm
Site Down?

Edit: Backup now. When the Story was posted here, site was down.

~~~
andygcook
Seems like it:
[http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/blog.asana.com](http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/blog.asana.com)

