
Show HN: Tara – A smart and free alternative to Jira - iba99
https://tara.ai/
======
iba99
Hey folks. My co-founder and I started noodling on productivity tools a few
years ago. After interviewing 250+ engineers and founders, we discovered that
most project management software a) takes a lot of time to configure b) is not
built for cross-functional teams and c) takes away focus from the release
cycle. The status quo is that engineers spend precious time wading through
tickets, and EMs + PMs continue to lack visibility at the release level. This
only gets worse with distributed teams across different time zones, and as
teams outside of engineering rely on product to meet customer milestones and
release dates.

Currently- the tool helps run and manage tasks, requirements and sprints. With
team level insights and a smart indicator for sprint planning.

This is our open beta. RN Github integration is live for PRs and commits tied
to sprints- we're still working on Bitbucket and Gitlab.

~~~
otabdeveloper4
I've never worked in a place that had 'release cycles'.

Maybe it's just me, but maybe not.

So I'm glad that Jira doesn't force its 'release cycle' shenanigans on me.
Like with git, not being opinionated is the road to success.

~~~
slow_donkey
I work at a place with mobile apps. You can't continuously release a new app
update every day so a release cycle is useful for structuring when we're going
to ship, when qa starts to test, and having deliverable dates in anticipation
of app store/play store approvers (couple days)

------
Terretta
It’s a nice looking tool, but the marketing feels oh so very Enterprise
Agile(tm) in ethos.

“Run your weekly sprints on time” — as opposed to them taking two weeks?

To achieve predictability, something has to give. It’s usually “learning”
which is never on the plan.

The next release will be done when the right top priorities are met well
enough. When’s that? You decide by prioritizing how many priorities are in the
release and your bar on quality.

Focus on execution? Why not on building the right thing, and building the
thing right?

The thing to manage isn’t tasks, requirements, and sprints. The thing to
manage is: “Is this team effective, enough to be trusted?”

Meanwhile, a week takes a week.

~~~
lifebeyondfife
As a manager I follow two principles that help me to prioritise tasks for a
weekly sprint.

First, every project has three levers: budget, timeliness, features. Choose
two. So it's not about not trusting the development team. It's about
understanding the tradeoffs and how the delivery date will be affected.

Second, how well can you predict what you can achieve as a developer in one
day vs one hundred days? The estimate for the former is more reliable.
Likewise the estimate of what you can achieve is more reliable in a one week
sprint than a two week sprint. Being able to break fully deployable commits
into smaller chunks (up to three days coding time) is a skill that gets better
with practice. But sometimes you just don't know how long something will take
because it needs breaking down and investigating. One week sprints are ideal
for timeboxing investigations; here the output isn't software but discrete
software tasks that fit in a one week sprint.

Ultimately it's not about trust, it's about accountability and predictability.
Sprint planning tools when used appropriately don't constrain engineers, but
rather highlight the truth of how things are going.

~~~
discreteevent
> every project has three levers: budget, timeliness, features. Choose two

You forgot about quality. It can blow the other 3 out of the water.

~~~
aaai
_...if you consider quality a lever, you 're not the kind of person anyone
should want to work with!_

You agree on quality standards before you begin, and you deliver the quality
level that you agreed beforehand, not more, not less (you deliver _sooner_ if
it goes better than expected giving the product-owner ability to add features
or redirect effort _actually using your "superpowers" if any to give the
business a real advantage_), at a profit or at a loss. Otherwise you're not a
professional, you're either an amateur or maliciously dishonest/exploitative!

~~~
vannevar
You could just as easily say that you agree on the feature set beforehand, and
you deliver that feature set, not more, not less (you deliver sooner if you
finish the features early).

"The quality level you agreed beforehand" is meaningless without some
infrastructure and processes in place to verify it. And in practice, those
infrastructure and processes are compromised at least as often as the feature
set, the budget, or the timeline.

------
jimbob45
As someone who makes this type of product, I tend to hate this industry. We
make things far more complicated than they need be. It's all just ticketing
software with labels changed and I just want a list of _all_ the tickets for
me to manually filter. I'm tired of companies thinking I don't know the best
way to see the tickets I want to see.

~~~
Aeolun
I made this for Jira. It just ingests all the issues in the project, and
displays them in a big list, sorted by a variety of factors (is it assigned to
me? Is it in progress?). It generally allows me to just go down the list of
issues until there’s nothing left unfinished.

At some point I realized that there’s just no stopping enterprise from going
to use Jira, so it’s better to work around it.

~~~
Jolter
Can you show us what you made?

------
cyrialize
I wish I could be off of Jira and all of Atlassian. Sadly, that is not my
decision to make.

Atlassian's antics with Jira, Confluence, and BitBucket have really started to
make me mad.

Jira is changing it's editor... slowly. The old editor had nice shortcuts,
like h1. - h6., {code}, {blockquote} etc. When you create a ticket - it's the
old editor, but when you edit a ticket or write a comment, it's the new
editor! This new editor has none of the markdown-ish shortcuts the old editor
had.

Confluence is also changing it's editor and the old wiki pages do not have a
1:1 match to the new wiki pages. This means you have to go through each page,
convert it, and edit it to fix the broken things - because depending on what
you use, it will be broken. For example, there is no longer a note, warning,
or error macro - instead it gets turned into a info macro that you have to go
in and edit it to the style you previously had. Code blocks no longer let you
pick the color scheme you had, instead they're all generic. There's even more
here I'm not listing.

Confluence has also just been wonky lately. It's supposed to automatically
format a link into something nice (e.g. [https://confluence/page-
name](https://confluence/page-name) -> Page Name or
[https://jira/AAA-1234](https://jira/AAA-1234) -> AAA->1234) and this only
happens sometimes. Other times I'm finding the page frozen or slow and the
only thing that fixes it is refreshing the page or publishing the page and
going back to edit it.

Of course with BitBucket I dislike that they're dropping Mercurial. I
understand why, but I am really going to miss it. Git is way more powerful but
Mercurial is (at least to me) way easier to use and pick up. The infuriating
part is that they offer no tool for converting existing repositories
whatsoever. Github has a tool that will turn your BitBucket Mercurial repo
into a Github repo!

For any tool that aims to be an alternative to Jira / Confluence / BitBucket,
please don't do what Atlassian does. If you are going to make any transitions
or any major change - please make it as easy and seamless as possible for your
users.

~~~
naringas
it seems to me that often the people who decide whether to use Atlassian
products aren't actually using them personally...

~~~
imafish
Definitely. From a buyer’s perspective, Atlassian is awesome. It checks every
single box of requirements a development team could give to an “IT
department”.

------
pj_mukh
We've been using Tara for a while now.

As a smaller team, we never had good luck with the hyper-complexities of JIRA,
we were stuck with Trello (and/or a simple Notion Kanban board) for a while.
But Tara's really worked the best for us.

I personally, really like the personal dashboard for every developer on the
team, flagging all your main tickets, PR's, and your teammates commits. I'm
hoping for awesome things here.

~~~
qznc
That sounds like a more realistic description than "alternative to Jira".

Jira is an Enterprise product which means it is designed to tick every feature
checkbox any company could ever wish for. It integrates with whatever
(Enterprise) ecosystem is around it.

Tara sounds like "once you have outgrown Trello".

~~~
nerdbaggy
I think it’s kinda the opposite. It seems like Jira/Confluence doesn’t really
do much on its own. Anything semi complex you need plugins.

------
red_admiral
Literal quote from the privacy policy:

> With your permission, we will collect location information from your mobile
> device to [insert purpose]. You may turn off this feature through the
> location settings on your mobile device.

Maybe fix that?

~~~
iba99
On it.

------
im_dario
Kudos for the release! This comment might seem counterintuitive, but I think
Tara's adoption would grow a lot if you offer a way to sync or import from
JIRA.

JIRA sprint planning is painful. In my current company, we use it, and its
shortcomings shape our way of working. I.e., not able to link histories'
subtasks to a sprint, causing that the backlog is full of long histories, and
you need to go looking around to see how the histories are going.

If we were able to sync epics and histories (JIRA <-> Tara), we could probably
have the better of both worlds. I see Tara very focused on devs, but not all
JIRA users are devs. For instance, how would critical bugs - reported by users
- be handled in Tara?

I imagine this synchronization as bidirectional, where you write the specs as
a list in JIRA's issue description, but they are actionable in Tara. So no
more subtasks in JIRA and Tara become a complementary tool that, once you are
used to it, you can go with entirely standalone.

Just writing this quickly, with no deep thought, but it was my very first
thought after checking your website.

I hope this feedback can be useful to you.

~~~
iba99
Thanks! A few quick thoughts:

\- We've done exactly this for Github <> Tara. We have a bi-directional sync
with Github issues, and active issues are converted into tasks in Tara.
Basically, if a user wanted to, they could just use Tara as a Github issue
tracker.

\- We wanted to start with Github, then work our way through more git/source
control platforms, and then move to Jira. Interestingly, structuring incoming
data from Jira requires a few months of work on data models IF we don't want
the user to spend a ton of time labelling. Jira's data structure can be a hot
mess to deal with.

\- If the sync took a day or even a week of configuration, would you find it
worth your time to invest and go through that? Or would yo expect the sync to
work instantaneously (like Github <> Tara).

\- What would be your expectations on mapping for histories?

~~~
im_dario
It makes sense that you started with Github. I agree too that Jira's data
structure is a mess. I've managed one instance for years and any update was a
whole mess on itself.

I think the sync configuration should be quick, something that can be
bootstrapped like Trello integration with an export artifact.

About mapping for histories, it should be 1-to-1 and each spec to be a list
point or a subtask. Nothing fancy nor complex if Tara is the main source of
truth, leaving Jira as a way for non-tech users to report issues.

------
rawoke083600
Well done for getting your project out there ! I'm sure its great. I've
commented on this in the past. This is what I want from my "ticketing-
software":

-I don't want 100 ways todo things or configure a ticketing tool...

-Sell me the BEST "Software Development PROCESS" with a tool.

-Don't give me a "Great Ticketing-System" !

I want to know what is the fastest, best process to develop software and track
it.

All of "these ticketing software" starts with "track , manage , assign
tickets" but leave the process up to you... I want to buy an EXPERT PROCESS
not a REALLY GREAT TICKET TOOL with x10 options.

I always use the example of the "ultra high-end amplifiers" they don't come
with a "Tone-Control" because these companies are THE BEST... my ears can
never be better than their in-house "mozart-prodigy-tuning-expert".

Why would I soil my ears by thinking I can better adjust the "tone" of the
amplifier that cost $500k :/ I'm buy FANTASTIC SOUND... not a great amplifier
with 100 ways to get good sound.

Sorry rant over.. So... Sell me a GREAT SOFTWARE PROCESS - if it comes with
software and a ticketing system... so be it. But make sure the software
supports the process and I don't want to configure anything but user accounts
:)

Sorry for all the caps... don't flame me :)

~~~
devocracy
That was the fogbugz approach, I hated fogbugz as it was too prescriptive

~~~
pookeh
Also pivotal....but pivotal is nice

------
alkonaut
One thing that bugs me with development workflow tools is how they never
really integrate with the _true_ workflow of developers. Once you have a
development workflow with Pull Requests, Code reviews, QA etc, it would be
nice to be able to encode it into the

What's the true progress of an issue (ticket, work item...)? Why do I need to
remember to set a ticket to "resolved" after a PR completes, and so on.

Every place has a different workflow and they are usually very complex, but
these tools (Jira, YouTrack, GitHub issues, Azure DevOps, ...) _are_ complex.
They _are_ often configurable, yet they still (as far as I'm aware) fail to
integrate the process part of things with the code part of things. At best you
have some loose integration between version control and process e.g. "this
ticket has these changes" but they don't integrate the two processes so that
the state-machine that is a ticket (is it done? why is it not? is it because a
PR build failed? Is it because an approval that must be done after merge has
failed? is it because the issue has several pull requests associated with it
and not all are merged yet?).

I absolutely don't mind complexity in these tools. Having an extremely simple
post-it process is good. This is the second best. The process complexity in
big enterprises and distributed teams _will always be there_. If I can
configure a tool to make it go away I'm glad. The worst situation is when you
have a hyper complicated process and no tools to help. That's the situation
many businesses are in. "You didn't mark the two fields and change the state
to Y and then send the email to the translation person and notify the regional
development person about the change! You have to do that".

~~~
azmenak
We use JIRA to track our product development with a fairly large team
(including 17 engineers) and while JIRA has its pain points, it does have
integrations with development workflow.

In our setup, after a PR is merged in Github, the ticket automatically moves
to the next “step”, in our case “Ready for QA”.

Beyond that there are automation workflows that accomplish much of what you
are asking for here, the issue is that these are complex tools/flows that
require a lot of up-front work and continuous maintenance which might not be
worthwhile for all teams.

~~~
iba99
So internally, we're calling it the "task lifecycle". It's going to be a big
feature, and the idea is to figure out the true development workflow (that
works for 80% of users) and have statuses that update automatically based on
Git. We're working on figuring out how to do this well enough, where the user
doesn't have to go through complex configuration.

------
sideproject
I've been using clubhouse for myself and it's pretty much what I need in terms
of "advanced to-do list" but "not as heavy as JIRA".

What I'm more interested in is how project management software like this keeps
popping up and I genuinely wonder what the rationale is?

We use JIRA, Trello and Asana at work and between three of them, yeah, things
are working. How much more do we want out of them? Not much. Let's just get on
with actual work.

But I must be missing something - some market research, some user research
where there is a big unmet need or problem that none of these tools are
currently solving and not just in "missing a feature" way, but at a
fundamental level where it justifies an entrepreneur to jump in and create an
entire software from scratch.

I'm not in the domain, so I obviously don't have the data. I know lots of
people complain about JIRA (including me), but my complaints don't warrant me
to move.

Maybe these companies are targeting "new" users? New companies, new teams,
people who are starting projects anew and looking for project management
software?

~~~
alexmingoia
They keep popping up because ticket/todo-list software is a perfect medium for
people to project their aspirations for success. People believe if they use
that software they will accomplish their goals.

------
munkay
great tool - congrats on the open beta!

it wasn't immediately clear to me that the product is still in beta, and was
unable to find any pricing information which threw me off.

another question - is there a reason why Github isn't a support authentication
method, considering that Github integration is a big part of the product?

But the tool looks super interesting - going to try it out and intro it to our
team!

~~~
iba99
Hey munkay- we're free for unlimited users. Principally, we believe teams
shouldn’t have to be limited by user counts when deciding which project
management system to use. Most are still clunky and cap at 10 users for free
accounts- planning to have a free forever plan for unlimited users (much like
Gitlab).

Paid plans may include functionality for enterprise teams, full fledged
integrations and/or smart features such as automated sprint management.

As for Github auth- that's coming!

~~~
yboris
Super amazing that you're aiming to have it free for unlimited users.

I wonder if it's worth sharing prominently on the website a bit about the plan
and an explanation of how you expect to fund this project.

Without someone paying for the development it's not clear to anyone why this
won't collapse and be closed in a month.

~~~
iba99
Good idea! We definitely need a pricing page to highlight the free forever
plan.

~~~
hanniabu
Another recommendation is that I see task states are To Do, Doing, and Done.
It'd be nice to have a Review state as well which could be used to say it's
ready for either code review or QA. This could also end up being a runaway
train so it may be better invest time in allowing the user to specify up to x
(3?) amount of additional custom states.

~~~
pookeh
And this is how Jira started with it's complexity. Welcome to the club.

------
beart
Looks awesome and I would love to try it out.

Unfortunately I work at a large company which has 'standardized' on Jira +
other related tools. Now that the majority of work is being done through Jira,
it would take a world ending event to move away, no matter how good of a
product the alternative is.

~~~
bberenberg
Disclaimer: I run an Atlassian consulting company.

In most scenarios I run into, "Unfortunately I work at a large company which
has 'standardized' on Jira" translates into "Someone set up Jira poorly and
now we dislike using it". The thing is that if you replace Jira with any tool
you can imagine, the statement will hold true. Jira isn't inherently a better
or worse tool than most others out there.

If you're at an org where it feels like Jira is holding you back, and you
don't see the org changing tools in the near future, the best thing I can
recommend is to bring in an external team to show the org how to clean it up.

Feel free to ping me if you need help (info in profile)

~~~
Scarblac
Or maybe the problem with Jira is that bringing in an external consultant is
the best recommendation.

~~~
bberenberg
Depends on what your timeline is for changes, but you can also learn how to
use it and do it yourself.

My experience is that if an org decides to use <HIGHLY CONFIGURABLE TOOL> then
they will do it wrong the first time without external assistance. This holds
true even for popular tools like Postgres, AWS, Terraform, or even Git.

Anecdotally, I don't know of any tool that is highly configurable that makes
it easy for users to set it up and then scale it over time without learning
the specific domain knowledge. Jira is no different in that sense. If you have
an example of a tool that bucks this trend, please share it, I would love to
play with it and see what I can learn about how to better serve users in this
type of use case.

~~~
Scarblac
I feel that Jira first adds a lot of restraints and red tape, and then makes
those highly configurable. I prefer tools that don't have the constraints in
the first place.

Ie if in the middle of the sprint a developer finds that some tickets are
stuck waiting for some other team and he wants a column on the board to make
that visible, he should just be able to add the column.

In Jira if I accidentally put the wrong issue in Done, I have no idea how to
get it out... It's the complete opposite.

A physical whiteboard with post-its is rather good. You can use different
colors, if each team member has one magnet with his/her name then it can't be
on multiple tickets at once, you can draw lines and write words wherever, it's
very flexible.

What an online tool should add, besides corona compatibility, is being a good
issue tracker. Jira doesn't seem much different on that front compared to
almost everything else I've used.

What Jira adds is lots of rules and constraints and imposed structure that
gets in the way.

We are in the process of leaving it in favour of Github projects.

~~~
bberenberg
Re: the board thing, Jira has actually been trying to solve this problem for
years now with a concept called Simplified Workflows. [1] This allows the
project admin to create Statuses and adjust their workflow without needing to
get a Jira admin involved. The problem with this approach is that every
project does something completely different (often times even multiple teams
within a project use different processes) and the people working to do higher
level planning can't grok what is going on.

The rules get in your way, but as an entire org, they provide value. A lot of
what we do is work with large orgs to actually enforce those rules top down on
devs. The difference between our approach and most others is that while we
agree with the idea of governance and top down rules, we drive the creation of
those rules as a bottom up process. This way the devs get to agree on how they
want to work, and as long as there is a degree of consistency, we get to tell
management that this is the way forward, and we can now report on things while
ensuring we're not getting in the way of the devs.

1\. [https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-
cloud/docs/use-t...](https://support.atlassian.com/jira-software-
cloud/docs/use-the-simplified-workflow/)

~~~
Scarblac
That's what we tried (our teams are self-organizing, as they are in Scrum, so
we couldn't do it another way) but the things the teams wanted had hardly any
consistency (partly because the products and projects are very different,
partly because of the people).

~~~
bberenberg
This is where an experienced consultant can help. We often start with what
you're describing here as the baseline, and then work to find a middle ground.
I would say that 3/4 times we can find something that works for everyone. And
it's ok that sometimes people need different workflows. Some Jira admins or
managers trying to pull reports will be upset about this but they can be
handled once you demonstrate why doing it this way provides more value to the
org as a whole.

------
cooperadymas
How closely is it coupled with Github / Github issues? Would it work as a
replacement for something like Zenhub, which is mostly just a facade over
Github's own interface? Can you still add replies to issues directly in Github
or do you have to do it in Tara?

I would love to replace Zenhub, but almost every other tool would require us
moving some key functionality out of Github. We still want to keep all of our
issues, estimates, labels, and planning in Github's native issues, while also
having some advanced planning and sprint features.

~~~
derektwong
Our Github integration is a two-way sync, so that you can import any open
GitHub issues into Tara as Tara tasks. If you update the corresponding the
Tara task, the corresponding GitHub issues are also updated, so you can
certainly keep using the GitHub issues.

The main benefit of using Tara is that it provides the team a much better way
of plan upcoming sprints, and the system also pulls in GitHub PRs to eliminate
any blindspots on PRs getting stale.

I'd encourage you to give it a go and try it out to see if it works with your
teams workflows.

~~~
techntoke
So no self-hosted option like Phabricator?

~~~
xellisx
A link for us lazy folks
[https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/](https://www.phacility.com/phabricator/)

I've been wanting set this up to play with, but not much free time. We use
Kira and Bitbucket cloud at work and they suck.

------
lidHanteyk
Hi. I worry that this sort of tool does not benefit engineering very much; in
my experience, Jira and other time-management tools are used to allow product
ownership and management to request ever-sillier features, while penalizing
engineers who do not make themselves legible with constant status updates.

When designing Tara, how did you account for the power differential between
the employees who will be using Tara to record their daily work and the
managers who will be using Tara to supervise said employees?

~~~
robotron
I hope you've at least read the first page. It doesn't sound "like" Jira at
all.

~~~
lidHanteyk
Could you explain more? Tara sounds extremely like Jira, both in form and
function. The original poster (who is pointedly not answering my question,
probably because it is painful and embarrassing) used "alternative to Jira" in
the original submission. Other top-level comment threads are directly
comparing Tara to Jira. How would you distinguish them?

~~~
iba99
Painful and embarrassing is whenever I try to ride a bike.

A few quick thoughts on this:

\- Jira started out as an issue tracker to monitor issues and tasks - it
really wasn't built to handle software projects or the SDLC from the get go.

-Setting up insights and reporting can be a pain. And you need to be familiar with all the jargon (epics, stories, burn-down charts). Overall, it's a ton of cognitive overload.

-I used to just manage my issues on Github vs spending time configuring Jira. I only used Jira when the corporate overloads demanded it.

Here's the take on Tara vs Jira.

\- We're zero to low config. There are entire 60 minute videos on youtube on
how to setup sprints on Jira. On Tara, it's one click. We're really focusing
on minimal functionality maximum impact in terms of matrix, and seeing how we
can continue to be low config as we make the platform more powerful.

\- Insights are ready and built- in with no setup. Once your github is
connected, you can view commits and PRs by sprints

\- We shipped our first smart indicator- it basically looks at your past few
sprints (x>1 when x is no. of sprints) and tells you if your sprint has been
overloaded. We're planning on shipping more smart indicators that make
suggestions around effort, etc.

------
juandazapata
I couldn't find the pricing anywhere in the site.

~~~
pc86
It says "free" twice, in colored CTA buttons, in the first ~150px or so.

~~~
chme
Well it doesn't look like there is a non-profit organization behind it, so
someone has to pay for that somehow.

Is it support, ads or information?

~~~
pj_mukh
Saw this earlier[1], looks like they are working on enterprise features for
larger teams, which will be paid.

[1] [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tara-
ai#comment-1029087](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/tara-ai#comment-1029087)

------
egorfine
I have just tried it and after planning a small sprint for my team I loved it
immediately.

I'd absolutely love to give it a go at my company. I want an on-premise
version.

~~~
iba99
What would be your biggest hurdle for adoption for a web-based version?

------
m1sta_
On premise option?

~~~
borkyborkbork
This is key for us.

~~~
iba99
Not yet - we're focusing on delivering other features related to task
lifecycle, teams and integrations.

------
pritambarhate
Does it allow to export all the user entered data in structured format? So
that moving out of it is easier if we don't like whatever pricing you guys
decide later?

------
mehmehmehmehhem
I'm getting double flickers on some pages like
[https://tara.ai/about/](https://tara.ai/about/). I'd totally switch over if
there was a JIRA importer tool. I've used JIRA for years and would love
something similar with a faster and less confusing UI.

------
HelloNurse
Your Jira alternative is currently a better replacement for a limited but
important part of Jira features: clearly only an initial, promising feature
set that will be expanded and improved. But in what direction? The more
technical side of software development (e.g. configuration, building and
deployment of the releases)? Generic ticket handling and time
tracking/accounting to expand the product's usefulness beyond specialized
software product development teams? Integration with other software and
processes?

~~~
iba99
The key for our platform will always be simplicity. For now, the plan is to
head into the technical side of software dev (Gitlab, Bitbucket and
integrations with CI/CD tooling), without alienating business teams.

One of the biggest issues with existing PM software is that it's purpose built
for singular teams, vs providing utility to cross-functional teams (e.g.
engineering and growth). And it's usually overly complex with significant
configuration required.

We're seeing early signs of this with requests from teams/orgs to add in
marketing, growth and design teams as they need to be in the loop of releases
and the overall SDLC.

------
aarbor989
Would love to get off JIRA but the leverage jira has over alternatives is that
there are integrations for _everything_. Slack, PagerDuty, Freshdesk, etc. I
wonder how long it will take Tara to get up to speed

~~~
iba99
We're releasing about two integrations per month (April was trello import and
Github bi-directional sync) so we should get there soon! Our speed of shipping
integrations is getting faster with time however.

~~~
aarbor989
Awesome..is there anywhere I can track the integrations, like a public roadmap
or something along those lines?

~~~
iba99
Ahh that's a cool idea- we really need to work on public sprint boards and
actually show our weekly sprints and releases. We typically just discuss them
on our twitter and our blog. Here's today's release:
[https://blog.tara.ai/release-log-may-1/](https://blog.tara.ai/release-log-
may-1/)

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antigirl
Performance for me is very poor; the app is very unresponsive - you should
consider optimistic UI updates. Im based out in Asia at the moment so its the
server latency im assuming?

~~~
syed99
It's a mix of both latency and lack of optimistic updates. We're working on
improving our front-end at the moment and some of those improvements relate to
optimistic loads and improvements on redux that go in every week.

------
techcofounder
Hey Tara team. Ben here from Armory (YC W17). Love that you are tackling this
very important problem for product and eng teams. We use JIRA (surprise!) as
do all of customers. I've long wished I had the time and energy to think about
and maybe even tackle the challenge you are facing - building a JIRA-killer.
Go forth and conquer! I would be very happy to help in any way I can!

------
cryptos
What is the business model?

~~~
macspoofing
What else can it be? Per-user/month subscription. Probably free initially.

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solarkraft
Oh, "free" means "free to use", not "free software". Would've been a cool
feature. It also looks pretty cool otherwise, but ... does it contain "AI"?
The TLD and title seem to point towards it.

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sjohn93
Cool idea. We would like to feature your startup in our website, submit here:
[https://www.startupjohn.com/submit-
startup](https://www.startupjohn.com/submit-startup)

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mkchoi212
Congrats the on beta! Just a quick question though. Seems like in the about
page, you guys mention that the "platform leverages machine learning". How do
Tara leverage ML? From the landing page, it was hard to see any features
relevant to ML.

Thanks

~~~
iba99
We actually need to update our about page - it still shows copy from our older
version which was a predictions only product (I also talk about this below)
with ref to a question asked about our .ai TLD.

We will be bringing our ML models back into the product for predictions over
time. For now, we're really focusing on workflow and design as a platform.

~~~
mkchoi212
Ah gotcha. Yeah, the same situation for us over at
[http://getmosaic.io/](http://getmosaic.io/)

Initially, we were worried that people would think we're putting "AI/ML" in
the name/description just for the hype. But hopefully if the workflow/design
is good enough, and the AI/ML features follow, customers should be satisfied.

~~~
iba99
Mosaic looks cool! Will give it a spin.

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dotjosh
Unless you are going open source, you might not want to ship your typescript
sourceMaps in production.
[https://i.imgur.com/A1tQtVO.png](https://i.imgur.com/A1tQtVO.png)

~~~
syed99
I agree sourceMaps shouldn't be exposed and they also bloat up production
code. The reason we have them exposed for the time being is for debugging
purposes in open beta and we intend to remove it out of production in our
upcoming weekly release.

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mahesh_rm
Tara looks great, trying it out. Also, I love the clarity of the landing page.
I apologize if it is off-topic: what product/tool did you use for creating the
main video in landing page? Thank you!

~~~
iba99
Good ol' camtasia from my video editing days! Side hustled as a Udemy
instructor in 2012, and camtasia is just as good now as it was back then.

~~~
mahesh_rm
Thank you!

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westoque
Not sure if it's only me. But there's some funky funky things happening on
that frontend. There's a white modal that covers that whole screen that pops
out at every page load.

~~~
iba99
Any chance you can share a link to a screenshot and the console log?
Appreciate it.

------
siphor
why the ai tld?

~~~
iba99
Our first version (which failed miserably) was a prediction-only product with
no workflow and a minimal interface. Here's what happened:

\- Initially our hypothesis was we could build data models that automatically
suggested a specification or tasks based on certain criteria the user
identified (for e.g. iOS app for video based calling). \- The system would
suggest programming languages, frameworks and a set of tasks based on the
criteria \- User would immediately reject the suggestions/predictions outright
(even if they were based collectively on data from stack overflow and other
platforms). This would be due to a number of reasons: 1) Didn't trust the ML
models to make the right predictions 2) The predictions were their first
interaction with the platform.

As a result- we went back to the drawing board- and realized that to build a
true "smart" project management system, we would need to start with intuitive
workflows, and pepper in predictions over time based on usage and a team's
actual stats. The AI tld stuck, plus we're planning on bringing the ML models
to our public version soon. TBD.

We also plan on using NLP for automatic task connect to Git repos/PRs/commits
and ML for predictions around effort estimates. But - we're still some time
away from the open beta on making that a reality.

P.S. We recently acquired the tara.com domain which took 2 years of
negotiations. A story for another time.

~~~
adrianmsmith
Do tell us the story of the tara.com domain negotiation some time!

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yoz-y
Congrats on shipping the beta.

One thing that strikes me is that while you present your product as
alternative to Jira, both the name and the logo (bluish form looking like an
A) hint at Atlassian and Jira.

------
ranguna
This is just what I was looking for!

But.. How can this be free?

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all_iv
congrats on the release! I tried a little bit and this looks nice. I like the
focus on agile workflow so that people can quickly evaluate whether this is
suitable for them. Liking it so far!

although I seem to have a problem searching for task inside my requirement
details

~~~
iba99
Sorry to hear! Can you elaborate on the issue?

~~~
all_iv
creating several tasks -> creating requirement -> go to requirement details ->
search task -> no loading progress and/or result visible

:)

------
Giorgi
Is this self-hosted? or can custom domain be added?

~~~
iba99
It's web-based.

------
ko3us
This looks great! Any plans for Gitlab integration?

~~~
iba99
Next on our roadmap!

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jowdones
>> Tara, a smart [...] alternative to Jira

If someone there were smart, they would have named it Tira.

