

Ask HN: Review my app: Who Is Working On What? - subbu

Dear HN, as a long time member, and being truly inspired it's my turn to announce an app. I've built a tool to keep track of 'Who is working on what?' in your team. URL: https://whoisworkingonwhat.com. Please review and let me know what you think. Specifically:<p><pre><code>    1. Is the idea good enough to build a small business around?

    2. I don't have a recurring billing system integrated. I live in India and I do not have access to services like recurly or chargify. Assuming the tool gets some traction, I might want to to build in a recurring billing system. For now though, I am planning on requesting money using PayPal if required.  I plan to charge $8 monthly for a basic plan (2 private projects) and $14/monthly for a plus plan (5 private projects). I've pulled these rates out of thin air for now. Are they reasonable?
</code></pre>
I have learned most of my product building skills reading you guys here at HN. The community is awesome and I've constantly felt that I had to try and share as well. I am offering a 3 month plus plan as a token of appreciation for all you good folks out there for making my year memorable. Link: https://whoisworkingonwhat.com/signup?promotion_code=yc As always, please keep the the comments coming in.
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notahacker
The revenues generated by the well-funded similar startup Yammer probably
suggests there is a market for the service you're operating, though assuming
you won't have an enterprise sales team you'd be wise to undercut their
hideously expensive per-user charge ($5 per user might be OK for a five person
company but not for a 25 person company that probably spends less on mission
critical stuff like their CRM and/or bug trackers). The price range you're
aiming for doesn't sound unreasonable if you're aiming for the smaller
businesses; any more and you start getting compared unfavourably with services
like Basecamp that can keep people updated to what others are doing plus
several other useful tasks. I agree that charges loosely based on number of
users (up to 10; up to 50; up to 200; make up the price as you go along if
you're lucky enough to get serious enquiries for larger companies and consider
a free 3 user plan as proof of concept) make more sense than by project.

I'm not your target market, and probably wouldn't use it, but I like the
execution of the product, particularly details like Github commit based
updates. One thing I would change is the contrast of the forms; I have to
squint or highlight the white-on-pale-blue text to be able to read it.

~~~
subbu
Thank you for the feedback. I am definitely looking at smaller businesses. At
least for the moment.

I agree about the contrast of the forms. I'll change it in the next deploy.

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iamgoat
I don't really like the project grouping. A developer can work on multiple
'projects' on the same day and you don't want to have to look for them on
Project A and Project B to get their latest update.

Maybe add a Team layer to the mix. A user can belong to multiple teams. You
can have a Dev team and an IT team. Then an overall Tech team which includes
everyone in Dev and IT. Then update the dashboard to allow you to view by Team
or Project.

You'd have to work out a good way of explaining/displaying this to users.

Additionally, it'd be great to see the last 2 updates underneath each person.
Or maybe on the team view list all updates under each person for the same day
(otherwise show last 3).

This it personal preference, but adding different views to the dashboard would
be pretty simple and would help sell me on this for my use.

Lastly, I don't know how well the pricing model works by limiting to a certain
number of projects. To me, users is a more important grouping and I would do
pricing based on that.

~~~
subbu
I need to think about organising the updates teamwize. I usually go with
projects because most of my projects are small. That said, I will collect more
feedback and see what's the best way.

Interesting view on user-based pricing. Basecamp, github, and most other sites
that I use personally go by project numbers. User count comes in the second
level. E.g. 20 projects and up to 50 users.

~~~
iamgoat
My problem with the project model is a project could be anything. If someone
didn't want to pay for the next tier they'd create less projects or have 1
generic project which is the name of the company and dump everything into it.
Which is what I do with the free version of FogBugz for my personal projects.

A user will always be a user. One business may need 12 projects while another
may only have 1 project everyone is working on. But if both have 30 users they
use up the same amount of bandwidth.

And as you suggested, it really comes down to how different businesses work.
Some companies work faster than others where 1 project may last 2-3 days.
Someone in that company would have to be on top of closing that project and
the next one. Or do they create a Generic project for the quick ones and a
specific project for the more long term ones?

Properly utilizing Projects (and milestones for that matter) have always been
a challenge for me with the project management applications I've used
(Basecamp, FogBugz, etc).

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gabebw
It's be great if the dashboard showed which one of the people was me more
clearly (possibly you could show that box in a different color?). Just having
"^ You" is not very easy to find. Other than that, it looks pretty neat. Not
sure I'd use it, though.

~~~
subbu
Point noted. I'll highlight it better.

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desigooner
I tried to sign up and I was directed to this page after I submitted the
registration form:

<http://cl.ly/2U0E3g0w3U0s3s213527>

Might want to change the notification messages on there

~~~
desigooner
seems like duplicate entries are across the board:

<http://cl.ly/1a292d1P283a1k1I0x14>

~~~
subbu
Thanks. I'll take a look at this.

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goombastic
Nice to see stuff come in from India!! Awesome. Mumbai,Chennai,Delhi or
Bangalore?

~~~
subbu
Bangalore

------
subbu
Clickable: <https://whoisworkingonwhat.com>

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mdwrigh2
As a quick side note, under the $8/month plan, it's "up to", not "upto".

~~~
subbu
Thank you. Will correct it.

