
Acunote (YC W11) Takes On Project Management With A Gmail-Like Interface - gleb
http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/02/acunote-yc-alum-takes-on-project-management-with-a-real-time-gmail-like-interface/
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pdx
I'm playing around with it, and it seems similar to our current solution,
<http://www.liquidplanner.com/>

I wonder if there's a compare/contrast between the features/capabilities of
LiquidPlanner, Acunote, and others.

EDIT after downvotes: I was being diplomatic, out of respect for anybody who
ships in general, and any YC company in particular. However, since I'm now
feeling less charitable, let me be less diplomatic. The features of this app
are a subset of LiquidPlanner. I see no features that it does not have, and
considerably less polish. I would say this is a good start, but they have a
long way to go.

~~~
gleb
I haven't done a serious competitive evaluation of Liquid Planner so I would
hesitate to offer an opinion about them. Much like with a new source control
system it take 1-2 solid day to get a feel for a system like this, and your
understanding stays primitive until you talk to real customers.

I can tell you that talking to our customers, some of whom evaluated 50
alternatives (no joke) at the end it all comes to:

    
    
      * being fast
      * easy to use
      * scalable
    

I know it sound undifferentiated, but the reality is that while everybody
claims all of these, few products do any of this well.

I'll give you one example. We have keyboard shortcuts for just about every
operation in Acunote. For many power users this is really important, as lets
them do a lot of stuff rapidly. It's a qualitative difference when you can
work at the speed of though.

From the engineering and feature point of view that's like 5% of the product,
but that's what matters to customers, so that's what makes sense to talk
about. Having said that, Acunote does offer a ton more, but we do it based on
a few powerful orthogonal primitives, so we don't have to come up with a new
button for every kind of need as it leads to unusable interfaces. This lets us
serve large customers with complex needs while remaining highly usable and
approachable for smaller groups.

One thing we should offer is better training, screencasts, tutorial on getting
started. That's definitely something we are working on.

Please shoot an email to our support. We'd love to discuss this further with
you.

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rmorrison
We've been using Acunote for almost a year, and love it. I highly recommend
checking it out if you haven't done so already. Congrats!

~~~
gleb
Thanks!

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mahmoudimus
I've been a big big Acunote enthusiast for a long time. I recommend it to
everyone -- they're an incredibly sharp and responsive team.

It's essentially a hacker-friendly task management system. I have trained all
my engineers to use it pretty efficiently -- if people are interested in
seeing how I use it, I will think about putting up some videos of how
efficiently I use it.

~~~
gleb
Thanks! It would be awesome to see the videos, we've had customers ask for
this actually.

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fg
Wonder where they got their pricing page design from:

<http://www.acunote.com/plans-and-prices>

<http://highrisehq.com/signup>

~~~
dsawler
Also like every other site out there. It's the most generic way to showcase
pricing and plans.

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dr42
while it might seem like a reasonable response, it's just not true. I don't
see anything wrong with making the pricing page similar to 37signals, but it's
not the case that this is "like every other site out there"

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dsawler
Tons and tons of sites use the 3-4 column approach to showcasing plans and
pricing Here are just a few: <http://patterntap.com/search/pricing>

In terms of styling, you're right, it's very close to 37signals.

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rdl
Wow, this looks awesome -- I was actually looking for something exactly like
this recently, and was worried I'd be stuck using mac-only software.

Would be interesting to learn about your security.

~~~
gleb
We should chat about that. We take it super seriously. Would love your
feedback.

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mvkel
We've been using Acunote for almost three years. How is this a "launch"?

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raheemm
I came here to comment about the how the proj. mgmt. problem has been solved
in numerous ways by several companies. How could there by anything left to
do?! And yet there are raving fans of this product right here. I guess there's
a hundred different niches within the project management domain.

~~~
gleb
Right, project management software has a ton of niches, and it is also much
harder than it seems. It hasn't happened yet, but much expectation is that
somebody will be able to consolidate a big chunk of this space. We count on
that being us :-)

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hubrix
Been using it for a long time. Great product. Going to be using it to manage
contractors building my house too

~~~
alexg0
Would be curious how contractors respond to using Acunote. You may need to
explain to them that tasks are like a punchlist.

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mmackh
Just signed up, since I was looking around for a Basecamp alternative. First
impression is that Acunote is more user friendly and faster. Also, thank you
for creating a plan for Indie developers. Are you going to keep it free or
will you start charging in the future? If you do, will you accept Paypal?

~~~
gleb
If anybody says they can predict the future, they are lying. So I can only
that we've never charged small teams and right now we have no plans to start.
We accept VISA/MC/AMEX (and standard enterprise billing terms for large
customers).

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misiti3780
how is this different/better than asana?

~~~
gleb
I think Asana is a solid product. Their long-term vision seems similar to ours
- new category of business software covering all employees who do
project/task-oriented work (developers, operations, marketing, product
management, legal, etc..), that individual contributors actually enjoy using.

Our strategy on how to get there is completely different. Unlike them we
provide the vertical functionality individual groups (like software
developers, product managers, IT, etc.) need in addition to common horizontal
task management. And we expect to be best-of-breed in the verticals we cover.

One vertical they do cover much better than Acunote is personal productivity
using GTD. We focus on groups.

For larger companies we also have a really strong focus on data-driven
management - letting you manage the whole company using data not politics. I
haven't seen Asana offer analytics, but that's probably just a question of
time. It's a smart play to focus on getting basics just right first.

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jotux
From <http://www.acunote.com/how-it-works>:

>Acunote integrates with your source control. We support Subversion, Perforce
and __GitHub __.

That wording is rather poor as it makes it sound like github is a source
control system rather than a hosting service.

"and git (via GitHub)" would be better.

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saym
Are there any good free alternatives? I'm a student with a semester long group
project on the horizon.

~~~
adharmad
Try trello.com. Highly recommended.

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edwinnathaniel
What's interesting is that the R&D team is based on Ukraine. Atypical of YC
companies that heavily based on SV.

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Legend
Just curious - are there any open source systems that are just as agile as
this one?

~~~
jotux
Redmine is pretty nice and for small projects you can host it for free on an
AWS micro instance (pretty easy to setup with something like bitnami). For
open source projects JIRA is also free.

~~~
Legend
Interesting! Anything that uses .NET technologies? I'm only looking for
something that is extremely simple.

~~~
jotux
I'm not familiar with anything .NET based that has similar functionality.
Redmine was pretty easy to setup and configure. If you just want
issues/roadmap/repo, that's probably what I would go with. If you're just
looking for a fancy todo list you could try something like trello or workflowy
(not open source, but free).

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steelaz
Any plans to add Bitbucket (git or hg) support?

~~~
gleb
Yes!

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ams6110
_We have intentionally made the user interface similar to Gmail’s_

Be ready for a flurry of patent lawsuits from google.

