But, all the text about the grand vision with new custom terminology is off-putting. Makes the software sound appropriate for running some sort of utopian hippie commune. A 'Manifesto' makes me think of Marx and the Unabomber.
I suspect that like ThePoint -> Groupon, your opportunity is some pragmatic subset of all the functionality you're currently offering, rather than the entire doctrine.
(This is not to say you're wrong about the big trends. Just that people will adopt the new ways of work via demonstrated success in baby steps, rather than understanding the vision and inevitability in a flash of insight.)
A 'Manifesto' makes me think of Marx and the Unabomber.
A manifesto is just a public statement or declaration. I thought of the Cannibal Manifesto and the Hacker Manifesto in addition to the Communist Manifesto. There are lots more listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifesto#Notable_manifestos
Ditto. This prescribes a new concept AND new tools. I'd like to learn more about how you developed the tools, and if it's all just a vision, or if it's been tested in real orgs (or just self-hosted).
For what it's worth I've had similar ideas, less enterprise focused though. Kudos to you for launching!
I'd like to echo this. The grand vision makes it sound like the product isn't suitable for my needs, when it is suitable (and possibly desirable!). My needs, and the needs of many people who might want to give you money, are mostly humble. It would be nice if the generic messaging spoke directly to more normal needs.
That said, I think a grand vision is both good to have and important to convey. It's great fodder for a blog. Tell your big story on your blog, highlight how your tool contributes to your vision, and promote it like crazy.
> open, democratic, decentralized social enterprise management
6 words and you've already lost me.
This is followed by a complicated screenshot with arrows pointing in various directions, then a manifesto in typefaces that jangle like a political donation chain letter. Then a quote from Albert Einstein. Then a bunch of diffuse conceptual words in different sizes and orientations. Seeing floaty words like "Distributed" and "Emergent" only solidifies the feeling that this product is hot air -- even if it isn't.
You're making it extra hard to understand what it does or why I'd want it. Smart HN readers will pore through and analyze what it does, because they are looking for product ideas of their own, but the rest of the world is damn busy and unlikely to spend that much time.
Perhaps try to cut your initial presentation down by 10x. If I have to scroll at all to figure out what you are talking about, you've probably lost me until I hear from someone I know that it's awesome. Do you already have users raving to everyone they know about how awesome it is?
Not trying to be harsh, just honest! I completely respect the challenge of what you're trying to take on, and I doubt I could do any better.
Edit: Having spent a bit more time on your site to try to find more constructive advice to offer, I have to say I am impressed with your ideas and development of them. I feel myself rooting for you to succeed. But the initial impression you offer is more opaque than it should be. And it seems like your system offers an entire architecture for project management that you'd have to buy into, making that a steep first step. Do you guys use this product internally? Is there anywhere you expose how you're using it?
I like this, but at the same time parts of it strike me as odd.
Nobody tells anybody what to do? Really? Who's taking out the trash next week? Who's working through the weekend to make sure the install goes okay? Who's working Christmas?
It has that open-source feel to it -- wonderful, cool, awesome -- and you wonder whether everything could really be like this, or just stuff people are excited about. After all, there are a lot of things to do in any organization that people do not like doing. And the normative payment idea? Wow! I'd love to see that actually being used. Whether workable or not, its a very powerful idea.
Having said all of that negative stuff, I think you are on to something. Congrats! I want to see real-world, for-profit organizations using this because it makes them competitive. I think that's the put up or shut up moment for this product. But if you're willing to pivot, I know you'll make it. Awesome job.
It should work smoothly for you as a one-man team. But the real magic starts to happen when more people get involved and start needing to make decisions together.
If you know that your team will remain just you, it might be overkill. I would use pivotal tracker, or the free version of basecamp. But would be very curious how it works out for you. Keep me posted on how it goes.
Its certainly an interesting hypothesis and I wish you luck, but I can't see it working out the way it is now.
What you're introducing has to be implemented first as a cultural change by leadership, meaning larger organizations that exist today cannot simply adopt your system unless they fully dedicate themselves to changing. This is expensive and is pretty much guaranteed not to happen.
This leaves your target market to small and medium, fast growing businesses. The problem here is that these smaller companies want productivity tools that accelerate growth instantly; not an organizational revamp for tomorrow.
By the looks of it, it seems your product introduces more work and politics (IMO just as much bureaucracy as the system before) because members have to vote on initiatives, rate each other, etc. I can only guess that in a short matter of time, members stop caring about these artificial ratings or manipulate/game them, especially if management decides that "contribution rating" should be a form of how workers are paid. It is simply not a long-run solution; people don't want to casts votes everyday for the rest of their lives. Workers are motivated by their work, not extraneous organizational concerns.
I'm not really sure if the efficiency trade-off nets positive. But I like your different thinking, and you may be on to something.
//Bachelor of management & organizational studies...never thought I'd ever use it here lol.
You're spot on that it would be almost impossible to approach an already entrenched mgmt system with this unproven model.
It's also true that there's an overhead with using the system, but that's the end of our agreement.
Because folks only vote on what they're interested in, the system works very fluidly. No work is held up waiting for someone, and you don't have to wade through votes that you don't care about.
We use our system, and use the contribution rating to pay ourselves, and distribute equity. And it's working very smoothly. I spend about 20-30 minutes a week 'rating'. And the rest of the voting happens seamlessly (much like voting on HN)
It's very, very difficult to game the system b/c everything is so transparant. It would look ridiculous.
Yeah, after watching the video, I was wondering if this was just a rebranding of Pivotal Tracker.
If you're going to steal an interface... please don't steal from such an ugly and disfunctional web app. Having to use Pivotal Tracker for 3 months on a client project made me batshit crazy. It's one of the worst user interfaces I've ever suffered long term.
I haven't used the dashboard, so I'm basing this solely on the video, but... umm, yeah, you did pretty much rip off Pivotal Tracker. You moved the Icebox over to the left, added a few new buttons, but in the demo when you start adding values and commenting it's a one-to-one from Pivotal. So much so, that I even looked at the company bio to see if someone from Pivotal Labs was involved.
Great idea, but just because you believe in an open enterprise doesn't mean you should go around lifting everyone else's hard work to kickstart your own.
EDIT: I sit corrected. The dashboard is a dead rip off of Pivotal. I just did a comparison of one of the dashboards linked above to the source of the tracker on one of my projects. Shared class names throughout, exact same structure.
I expect this out of an MBA with no idea of the culture and ethos behind dev, but someone who's at least knowledgable enough about HN to post it here. Wow, that's a new low. At this point, saying you're going to send private emails of apology isn't enough, if you want to be truly open the only way I see to repair your reputation is a mea culpa on your blog. Really disappointed.
Yes. The pricing page design is taken directly from github. I have no valid excuse for that. I'm changing it as we speak and sending github an apology for stealing.
It was intended as a placeholder and then I got lazy.
I think there's too much text description on the main page. Try simply having bullets to convey what the site does and why it is better.
Like me, there might be several folks who wouldnt have the time / patience to read through the entire text or view the video.
WOW! This is the most powerful and inspiring thing I have seen in a while. I really hope this catches on. Thank you, it is refreshing to see a webapp that is innovative at this stage of things. Your enthusiasm is contagious, it would be wonderful if it went viral.
Problems:
I can imagine a lot of CEOs laughingly dismissing this. They are not going to let some software take over. It has to be clear how this is beneficial for CEOs, and you make a point that CEOs are overburdened but still.
The overall feeling is that you are giving up control of the corporation. I think it would be better to market it as an enabling complement to traditional organizational structures. An evolution rather than a revolution. Make it clear that your product is a tool with which organizations decide the pace at which they want to move towards open governance, rather than a new set of rigid rules to be used from the start.
For the past 3 years in have been thinking and working in something somewhat related, but chose to focus on the enabling tools, rather than on the organizational ideas.
I'm actually conceptually working on something similar to this. A part of me wants to congratulate you, because I do truly think you are on to something. The concept of not paying for the service if your company is willing to transcend into a democratic process - superb. I sense that you got some of these ideas from working in a crippled work environment, as I.
My advice to you: push the democratic side, leverage the idea of selling to the employees rather than the employers through engagement and fandom, simplify your motions process and dashboard. If possible, have a "democratic functions" toggle somewhere in settings.
The other side of me wants to be upset that I can't post a link...yet.
They are trademarked names that are being used to refer directly to what is named. As such, there is no chance of "consumer confusion", and their use should be perfectly legal.
I think the product is good, the message is wrong.
If your message takes a 4 minute video, it's too complicated to acquire customers. That 4 minute video should be part of a help document, not an explanation.
Also, you should focus on project management, not on organizational paradigms. While I applaud your aims for achieving a better impact in the world, I think it's a bit over-the-top: it's a project management tool, you're not re-inventing the global economy through democracy - or, in reality, you can't change the world economy and it's org structure, but you can influence it via a project management tool. Focus your copy on differentiating yourself from other products, but don't get all high-and-mighty about how someone should run their company.
If I were starting a business, I would instantly be turned off if I was told that in order to use your product, I had to give a copywriter equal say to product I created and built from day 1.
While it certainly sounds scary to relinquish control, what has been fascinating is to find how much people are hesitant to overstep. In our open democratic model to date we have not been burned by giving the "copywriter equal say". In fact it has made our work richer to open it up to many voices helping us out.
The video is fantastic and the product looks amazing, however I'm not sure if democracy is the best way to govern a company. It may work well for open source though or smaller startups where the equity is divided across almost evenly.
We have a greater vision in terms of equity, in that when you work you also gain equity. Unfortunately we are still working through the legal details of making that work. But it is articulated in our white paper (http://bettermeans.org/front/?page_id=306).
We will be sure to share that with all of you once we get there, because that will be the next innovation of our model that could also really shake things up, especially for tech teams and other startups looking for a way to create more fair partnership
I think it's too "out-of-the-box" for most companies, it might fit better with non-profits which are largely driven by volunteers or startups though as their existing working model is closer to the BetterMeans model (i.e. people pick which projects to work on, etc.)
But I think there needs to be some level of hierarchical control rather than a complete free-for-all though, as things like budgets, etc. have to be managed (disclaimer: I told the Wikipedia founders the same thing when they started. I may have been a tiny bit wrong in that case ;-)
I totally agree that it is more suited to non-profits and other social enterprise. Those are certainly the folks we are directing our message to. However I do think it has wider applicability for any team that is interested in working together in a more decentralized way.
In terms of the heirarchy, it is not a total open free for all. While anyone can vote and comment on open projects, only the votes of the members are binding. Therefore we create a forum for all voices to be heard, while still allowing the devoted team members to drive the work in the right direction for the team.
First, this looks like a huge project; congrats on getting it done and out there!
I think you should stick with your title here as the main hook at the top: "Open, democratic project management." The rest seems like too many buzzwords and still doesn't tell me what your app is/does.
I agree with a couple of the others that the front page has too much on it. I think you could definitely benefit from a tabbed set of panels with all of this info on it so people can navigate through it all.
Other than that I like the idea, and will be trying it out with some other team members.
I love the idea, it will make corporate world much better places to work for most of corporates out there, it also encourages ideas of each individual, and cultivates creativity. However, i think its insane to use a software/ IT product to take the power off those politicians, and create democracy within the corporate world. My best wishes to you, kabuks.
i only watched the video, but i really dig the pitch. im a heavy user of Pivotal tracker (which looks very similar to your dashboard), but i find that it can be sometimes too focused on command and control (one person assigning a task to another person). it seems like your solution will encourage more collaboration off the bat, with people having to step up and willingly take ownership of projects, which could lead to better delivery times.
But, all the text about the grand vision with new custom terminology is off-putting. Makes the software sound appropriate for running some sort of utopian hippie commune. A 'Manifesto' makes me think of Marx and the Unabomber.
I suspect that like ThePoint -> Groupon, your opportunity is some pragmatic subset of all the functionality you're currently offering, rather than the entire doctrine.
(This is not to say you're wrong about the big trends. Just that people will adopt the new ways of work via demonstrated success in baby steps, rather than understanding the vision and inevitability in a flash of insight.)