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Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…) (nino.app)
810 points by harrisonlo 9 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 258 comments
Nino is a radical approach to solve the app chaos problem for today's knowledge worker. I believe there are still too many tools; even using them becomes work in itself. I'm building all these apps from scratch in one place, using the same database and UI, with the flexibility to eventually support the majority of work from one "superapp."

Currently there are 18 apps (called "modules") on Nino:

- Database types: Sheet, Form, Calendar, Gallery, Board, Todo, List

- Composition types: Doc, Slide, Drive, Notebook, Canvas, Grid, Blog, Site

- Communication types: Channel, Chat, Meet

I want to improve these modules and build more. Your feedback is important!

FAQ: How is it different from Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or startups like Notion and Clickup?

A: I think Nino has a better foundation to (1) consolidate a lot more apps than they currently do, (2) drastically improve speed with offline architecture, and (3) offer unmatched privacy and security with end-to-end encryption (coming soon)

Let me expand on these points:

1. Consolidation

In Nino, pages and blocks are interoperable with each other. Google and Microsoft still have mostly isolated apps. Nino is one (super)app that supports 18 modules, saving you time from switching and integrating between different providers.

2. Offline mode

This is actually more complex than it seems, but I ultimately decided it's worth it, not only for people who need to work without internet, but also for everyone else who want instant page load. Everything is saved locally by default.

3. End-to-end encryption (E2EE)

This is just a preview and not open to public yet, but is something I have been building alongside since day 1. In fact, it's likely not architecturally possible for existing products to add later on. Nino is built to offer both E2EE and cloud features (backup, search, collaboration).

One more thing: pages on Nino are also publishable! There are blog and site modules, but you can also publish other modules (i.e. sheet, board, canvas, etc.) on your custom domain or on a free nino.page subdomain.

Give it a try and let me know how it can improve. I want to hear from you.




Single biggest thing you need to nail down fast: the data model. It is extremely hard to shift as things grow, and without careful thought, it’ll turn into a horrifying miasma of JSONB columns, duplicated data, orphaned rows, and garbage performance.

Customers are going to store surprisingly large items in Docs, where you’d be tempted to inline them instead of offloading to S3 et al.

Chat practically needs to be its own DB. Discord runs on Scylla, Slack runs on Vitess over MySQL. The needs of chat access are wildly different from other types of storage.

If you’re doing any kind of active-active, have a plan for how to move off of that, because it does not scale (at least, not without breath-takingly expensive hardware).

Source: DBRE at one of your competitors.

EDIT: The fact that you’re doing offline saves (which is very cool!) makes me think that you may be using something like Ditto [0], which IIRC is MyRocksDB under the hood. I have no experience with either, but I do know some super sharp folks working at Ditto.

[0]: https://ditto.live


Single biggest technical thing, anyway. IMO, the single biggest thing is focus and clarity in their communication. If people without a working mental model of software development can’t instantly understand the tangible problem it solves in their existing business process, they won’t even scroll past the break, let alone pay for it. Consolidation and modularity are solutions, but people don’t go shopping for solutions without a problem. Have you ever gone out looking for a better commercial version of work-related software you didn’t have any problem with? “App chaos” is way too abstract of a problem for most people to grasp. Do people have trouble sharing google docs over slack? Do companies have trouble with sharepoint and teams not being integrated enough? Does your tool do it better? Does your tool do it approximately as well, but cheaper? More reliably? If so, do people find the existing solutions too pricy or unreliable, or does that not impact them enough to care?

Unless they define, upfront, specific problems people really have, that their unified solution solves, then nobody is going to pay attention.

The second biggest problem is having an interface design team that makes all of those disparate apps consistent enough to be more usable than individual solutions. The fact that nearly no popular user-facing applications are developer-managed FOSS (as opposed to Firefox/blender/signal/et al which are managed by a company that hires professional designers) despite being free, tells you everything you need to know about dev-driven UI/UX. This is coming from someone that worked as a full time developer for years and contributed many thousands of hours of coding to FOSS projects before switching to design.


Fair point. I know little to nothing about design, and don’t really care about it. It’s not that I think it’s unimportant, it’s just not something I want to expend any time learning. To be fair, I’m also not trying to create any user-facing products.

To me, rsync.net is peak design. It has just enough modernity to appeal to people who might expect that, but it quickly gets out of the way and tells you what it is, why it matters, and how much it costs.

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s tarsnap.com, which is probably a turnoff for anyone who doesn’t like text. I love it (as, apparently, do enough other people to keep its author comfortably employed), but I get that it’s an extremely narrow niche.


There’s less than no shame in not having expertise in something outside of your area of expertise, and realizing that’s the case puts you way ahead of the pack. There’s a reason most designers you work with have relevant degrees, and the ones that don’t that are in high level positions in good organizations might as well have them— it’s just a lot more complex than most developers assume. When they realize that, great! When they’re swinging around giant Dunning-Krueger derived overconfident declarations about something you’re designing… not so great.

As a full-time developer for a decade, and in other technical roles for a decade before that, I had a few similar experiences with designers. One repeatedly insisted that Wordpress along with their ramshackle loopdy-looped spaghetti php plugin (still including comments from the tutorials they copied tidbits of code from) was robust enough to enough to replace our very tight Django-based code base that did a hell of a lot more than serve up our website… but they insisted it would take half as long to reimplement it all in php. There wasn’t even a good reason for it– they learned everything they knew about development by osmosis from working on web projects, and a mishmash of articles they read on the topic over the years, and after getting one piece of code to work in a low volume application, thought they were a dual-field specialist. That’s actually pretty rare among designers, but developers that feel that way about design are the norm. We all know what Larry Wall thought the three most important traits were for developers…


Nailed the real important part, the product marketing


It can sting to realize your grand, genuinely useful technical idea won’t sell itself, but it just won’t.


He's most likely using SQLite per account, because that's the easiest way to have an offline DB and sync it, which will most likely scale perfectly fine with appropriate indexes as long as you are careful about the feature set.


That introduces a new problem when it syncs to others in the same workspace, if it’s large.


Nice thing about SQLite is you can “clone” the repository by copying a single file. And in cases where you need incremental sync, you can use an SQLite of diff’s as a single packfile (similar to git).

Things like cr-SQLite also have a lot of potential to make single SQLite per client a lot more viable. But I’m interested to see what you think the problems are? Have you found a solution or alternative?


No one cares about that. Export to open document format or microsoft. You are living in a bubble of “hackers”. You are not your average user.

Case in point of “engineers are not product people”


He's actually dead on point.

Back in the day, here is Sokovia, there was a local competetitor to Facebook. They had a great start and everything went perfect for them, but it quickly turned out that the technical side was really bad. Sluggish interface, constant outages, etc.

They tried to rewrite the app from scratch two times, and eventually failed.

So yes, making sure you're moving in the right direction at the beginning of your journey is pretty important. You don't have to overengineer and stay in your shed until you have a complete, feature complete product, but at least make sure, that you're building on the right foundation.


This is actually the same reason Friendster failed in the face of Facebook, pun intended. Friendster simply could not keep up technically and had to shut down. Later, Facebook actually had a more solid technical footing and could scale quickly.

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/startup/n8hogn

https://gimletmedia.com/shows/startup/8whow5


Facebook didn't kill Friendster. Friendster getting popular killed Friendster's weak stack, and then everyone moved to Facebook.


Yes, that's what I meant, my apologies if I conveyed that incorrectly. Friendster's own scale was untenable for them but Facebook was able to handle their own scale much better.


By all means, don’t spend forever agonizing over the perfect schema and never ship. It really does not matter at small scale anyway, DBs are absurdly fast.

Just understand and accept that you are taking on heavy technical debt that will need to be repaid, and that it’s much more difficult to do once you’ve already vertically scaled several times along the way.


If your selling point is consolidating apps, you absolutely have to get the data model right, else you don't solve the problem. Just because you don't go in and sell it that way, doesn't mean it's not important as hell. The very reason it's hard to get apps to interoperate is that each one has it's own data model. If they used one giant data model... it wouldn't be a problem.


Product sell lies to customers that engineering struggles to produce, because reality is a harsh mistress.


if you can dream it, you can type it into a chatgpt text prompt!


Different apps have different technical problems that can be an enabler or a source of never-ending technical debt. Being able to add new features easily, rather than being stuck scaling, could make or break this product.


The problem with modern development is having to nail down the data model first.

I wish we would develop software where the data model could easily change.

To do this every data dependency in the system needs to traceable. Nothing does this so far. And everyone just picks a database off the shelf but none are even remotely useful for this.


> The problem with modern development is having to nail down the data model first.

Schemaless was one of the original drivers for NoSQL databases.

Now, when I need something schemaless, I start with a Postgres table with an ID and a jsonb or json field... which at least makes it easy to have a schema when the inevitable happens and schema-dependent code ends up getting added to the project.

> To do this every data dependency in the system needs to traceable.

This is a hard problem.


Admittedly, yes. This is the massive appeal of Mongo et al., or just JSON[B] columns in an RDBMS.

Unfortunately, at a very deep level, that’s simply not how RDBMS works. The tuples are a B+tree, and in some (MySQL [InnoDB], SQL Server) cases everything is clustered around the PK. If you don’t create a data model that’s easily exploitable for optimizations designed around that data structure, you’re gonna have a bad time. It’s no different than if you decided to use strings to store ints – you _can_, but it’s a bad idea for a variety of reasons.

What you can do is give yourself as much leeway as possible, by following some basic best practices. For example, it’s a hell of a lot easier to update a tiny reference table than to update billions of rows when you decide that column `region` should say `European Union` instead of `EU`.


Nosql doesn't solve the schema migration problem. It just means you don't formalize your schema. But your code will implicitly require a certain schema anyway. Changing the schema means changing the code and migrating data. You'll have to write migration scripts and think about backward compatibility. Same problems as in sql.


The trick is maintaining a full graph of all data dependencies through the entire codebase. Then migrations can be done with ease. But no one does this. They shovel data from one database to the next, with tons of little adhoc data stores along the way.


Yeh RDBMS is probably the wrong choice for most apps. It was good for crunching sales data in batches back in the day. Everything today is pipelines and reactivity.

My dream is to have a tool to model my logical data model and then it will organize my data into the best storage and caches.

I don't think any existing database today is useful.


Ah, I misunderstood your point. I disagree that RDBMS is the wrong choice. Most apps are CRUD, and have the same basic patterns.


I'd rather the data model be designed properly upfront so that it doesn't need to change, but can be extended with new functionality.


This is impossible.


If you know people at Ditto, let them know their website looks completely obnoxious if fonts are not loaded. It looks something like this:

> Sync aPPS WItH OR WItHOUt tHE InTeRneT


Notion might have written something about their journey in this regard?


They have [0] [1], yes, but they also mention [2] learning that skipping building indices during a DB copy (doing so instead after the new instance is built) is much faster, which is pretty basic RDBMS knowledge. It’s great to be learning, and even better to be sharing that knowledge, but it gives me pause about accepting much of what they’ve written as expertise.

IME, many SaaS companies have eschewed the idea of having any DB experts, and this inevitably leads to pain down the road.

[0]: https://www.notion.so/blog/data-model-behind-notion

[1]: https://www.notion.so/blog/sharding-postgres-at-notion

[2]: https://www.notion.so/blog/the-great-re-shard


Super impressive app by the look of things, but as you asked for feedback, it is (to me) very confusing on the product side of things (i.e. what is it and why does it matter to me).

As a business user it's not clear how I would use it, and why I would care.

Your front page reads as:

> Nino is a collection of apps that can interoperate with each other on the block-level from one uniform interface. It has interoperable pages and blocks. It is flexible, extensible, and adapting to your needs as you grow, as Nino helps you consolidate tools and reduce costs. It has page sourcing so you can view pages in a different way. It has page embed, so you can sync page to another page. It has sync block to another page, but you can also block mirror and sync block on the same page.

A good comparison against your front page would be against monday.com or Asana who start with use-cases and practical application. See Monday:

> Monday - A platform built for a new way of working. What would you like to manage?

> * Work Management - Run all aspects of work

> * Sales CRM - Streamline sales processes

> * Dev - Manage product lifecycles

Then if I click any of those categories, it goes into the exact ways it can help me.


+1 to this. Focusing on usecases would be great. ex: I wanted to see what features were available for your sheets module.

Was willing to spend 5 minutes on a walk. Tried the web app - ios safari is not supported :( downloaded the ios app and registered. Got a totally blank app - no onboarding, no template / samples, no obvious way to import from my existing google sheets to see how things scaled. I added a datasource and a few fields (which felt confusing) and my walk was over.


[flagged]


more than 50% of mobile users are using ios safari. https://www.statista.com/statistics/272664/market-share-held...


[flagged]


Google chrome is worse. Safari on iOS has native features like auto-filling verification codes.


Google Chrome can't even use it's rendering engine on iOS, you're comparing WebView implimentations (which Apple will always be superior at... since they control the OS and every API entitlement).

Antitrust regulation says what?


Eh what? Mobile safari on iOS is surely something like 20-30% of the market.


I totally agree. Coming across Simon Sinek's 'Start with Why' has helped me a great deal in communicating in general. Even in conversations this applies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZoJKF_VuA

I also suggest reading his book.

In terms of this theory you should communicate like this: Why, How, What

You are starting from your 'What'.

I haven't really grasped the core of your product, but to restructure it could be something like:

Stop wasting time looking up documents, e-mails and chats in different systems. Stop paying for 20 different single purpose services just to run your business.

By having everything in one place it is easier to find and share information throughout you business. Creating custom combinations of docs, chats, sheets, forms, etc will allow you to create the tool to support your own processes and ways of thinking rather than having to learn some app's way of thinking.

Nino allows you to quickly build your own custom flows using modular building blocks. Create the tools that you need and have all of your information in one place.


Good call, I'm also a fan of Simon Sinek.

Thanks guys for the feedback. I think it's pretty clear what should be worked on next.


> interoperate with each other on the block-level from one uniform interface

Sounds quite a bit like Notion. A comparison would be apt.

Also sounds a bit like OLE / OpenDoc on desktop, embedding an Excel sheet into a Word doc along with an Access form. If it can do that, it could make quite a demo.


Microsoft was pushing something like that few years ago under the name Fluid Framework: https://youtu.be/tPw5kFkXtt4

But seems to have devolved into generic state synchronization library these days.


Yep. This is a product in desperate need of a "Showcase" page showing off why it's valuable.


> very confusing on the product side of things (i.e. what is it and why does it matter to me)

My initial thought was, this vision looks like what happens when a company realizes that their core product is less valuable than everything adjacent to it and starts growing their product a dozen different directions simultaneously.

But maybe there's something different about embracing this holistic vision from the start, as opposed to trying to be focused and then getting forced into scope creep.


A lot of people are saying to specialise your business or die. I think you have a good opportunity here to do what nothing else does quite well, and that is to implement a vertically integrated document management system for use cases such as ISO 9001 etc.

Use case 1, document management: This basically just means that you need to implement the capability to “publish” a document version, permanently view that document version (think tag), and auto generate a document “identifier” using the companies naming convention (and allow this to be embedded automatically in the document so the client can use it too). The document ID might look something like SOP-2401001.

Once a document is published it should be read-only, and you should be able to put artifacts a long with published documents … ie exported PDF copies, or signed copies or something.

Use case 2, document siloing: One of the most difficult parts of document management is creating forms for procedures, and then teaching everyone how to not ruin the document management of these forms once they are filled. I have always wanted a silo that automatically copies a form when you start to fill it out, allocates it a brand new document ID, and collects it together with all the other forms of the same kind.

This could be integrated with an automation platform so that ie if you fill out a form it sends someone an email or something like that. Or if you wanted to get really fancy, you could allow people to define “workflows” for documents and actually visually show a business process alongside a document.


This is indeed a clear market gap. Ideally it has the workflow features but they can also be swapped out. Enterprise market though as opposed to wherever this was aimed.


Initial impression after a few minutes of use: there may be a huge amount of power here, but the app and site seem to be completely lacking guidance and I've no idea what to do or how to learn.

I've installed it on my Mac and am trying to add a set of records representing contacts with a couple of basic fields: name, phone, birthdate. I want to query those records elsewhere in other modules.

The app is giving no guidance on how to do this. On open, it just shows me a blank tab, and I had to try a few different controls to work out how to add a module. I don't know which module I should use to add queryable records, so I'm trying Board.

Now that I've added a board, I can add a first record but there doesn't seem to be a way to add a second. There are columns named "None" and "Unnamed"; the one named "None" has the first contact in it. Pressing the "+" button in the corner adds another column. Eventually, I drag the record from "None" to "Unnamed"; "None" disappears, now there's just "Unnamed", and I can add other records.

I'll keep playing with it a little, but there's only so far that people can be expected to try to work out the usage model that you've designed this for. Sure, there are loads of modules, but how do they link together? An example setup for a fictional team might really help here.


Noted on the lack of guidance and onboarding. I can see the confusion you had with the board module and have some ideas on improving it. Thanks for giving it a try.


Piggybacking to say I really like GP's suggestion of a living demo the user can jump right into after onboarding. I'm working on a similarly open-ended product right now and I've been thinking hard on ways to avoid the daunting "what now?" feeling of being presented with a big, unfamiliar, blank canvas.


I honestly found it pretty intuitive. Every module uses the same basic action-flow, which was super clever UI design on the creator's part


This looks really neat!

I'd be interested in giving it a try, but doing so would replace existing tools and workflow. As a user, I'm unwilling to do this is I can't both own my data and application hosting.

If Nino doesn't pan out and the product gets shut down, how do I continue to access my now (trigger warning, words used to describe as I understand, not critique) tightly coupled proprietary data? Can I self host? Is source code available? Are document formats open? How do I not get screwed as an enthusiastic adopter in the unhappy case that things don't work out? If I put my data in and the product isn't working for me, how do I get my data out?


One great solution for that would be the approach many advanced Markdown editors like Obsidian have: the documents remain usable. You might lose some benefits (the integration between documents in a graph-like structure) that are specific to the tool. Still, your work is preserved in a universal format that anyone can leverage.

Most elements of Nano have widely accepted standards, presumably easy to integrate, so that guarantee should be doable.


It's not a universal format since a lot of data is for only for Obsidian plugins that can work work it, and it isn't universally extensible, so not suitable for proper tools this aims to be


Thanks. I think the concern about software provider shutting down is valid. Heck, I still remember being pissed when Google deprecated two products I used within a month (a few months back).

Self-hosting might be too complex to setup, but do you think single tenant offering helps? I don't know if it makes sense for individuals tho.

In addition to HTML & CSV, there is an option to export JSON, which supports more formats. In a way, it is an open format (.json) but I'll have to add relevant documentation. PDF support will also come at one point.


Self-hosting is key for us as well. Companies working with sensitive data really value "on-device" / "on-premises" architecture, which it looks like you're close to nailing.

Check out Bitwarden and Gitlab's self-hosting approaches, and congrats on the launch. I'm excited to try it.

And regarding self-hosting complexity, start with a "docker-compose up" example and iterate from there.


For sure this is a super-impressive (solo?) effort and I'm certain a ton of work went into this.

Some feedback:

Who is the customer for this? Can you describe what their day looks like and how Nino helps them get their work done better/faster/cheaper? What are the top 5 problems that they face that Nino is clearly better than the competition? Be specific and show the workflows.

Where do they work? Who do they collaborate with? What are they collaborating on? Do the same exercise - SxS comparison with how they do things in existing tools and show how Nino is clearly better than their existing solution.

Finally, don't ever underestimate how difficult it is to get people to change from whatever they are doing today. Today is not 1990 - people have been using solutions to the general information worker problem for decades now. Why will they switch?


I'm not really sure that I see an "app chaos problem". For each company/job workflow that I've encountered, there are a set of apps that solve for the specific use-case.

For example as the head of devrel at the last company that I worked for, we used Atlassian products for internal documentation and work tracking, we used Google's docs and sheets for collaborative writing with external teams, and we used github and markdown for external docs building. It's all text, but the work flows were different, had different needs (like permissions), and ultimately we found the right tools for the job.

I wish you luck with this endeavor, but I hope that your looking for a specific problem. To solve that isn't "app chaos".


Exactly, my company have a similar setup and I don't think people have trouble figuring out which tool to use or how they work with each other. Nino seems to try to solve a problem that hardly exist.


This is really cool -- congrats on the launch! The productivity worker's "app chaos problem" as you called it is a real problem and a solvable one.

I'm building something similar after spending 10+ years working with those numerous different apps day in and day out in quote-unquote "high stakes" white-collar roles. It's early days and I'm approaching it from a slightly different angle, but there's a certain amount of overlap between the two visions. I'm focusing on a smaller set of apps but more fleshed out set of features, aiming for feature parity with incumbents + my own features (which incidentally is why this is taking a while to build well...)

Curious to see how Nino progresses and we should connect later on when I have something tangible to show, if you're up for it


We should! Just sent an email to the address on your profile


I built something similar many years back. Mine was web based: https://github.com/GWBasic/ObjectCloud

What I would tell my younger self is to spend more time reading through YC's resources about how to start a business. In my case, I built something that I thought there was a need for; but I should have spent a lot more time iterating off of tangible customer needs.

IE, I should have found a handful of customers who needed tight integration among these use cases and let their needs drive the implementation.

Why? There are already plenty of applications that do the same functions. (MS Office, Google Drive, ect, ect.) These applications are mature, and well-understood by the whole market.

I would suggest finding a few customers who are hampered by poor interoperability among 3+ applications / use cases, and focus on their use cases. It'll take you 15+ years to be as mature as products like MS Office, Google Drive, ect; but if you solve a niche's tangible, need, they won't care, because they can't operate their business without you.


Sorry I replied a little late, but thanks for the advice.


Security & privacy are tough selling points; fewer people care about either than you may think, and the existing platforms provide a lot more than most who do care are willing to admit.

Also the “too many tools” pitch sounds like an unhinged rant. There’s almost certainly a better way to phrase that, because otherwise the idea that the mere existence of a wide variety of tools bothers you doesn’t stand up to the “so don’t use them all” rebuttal. Maybe focus in the convenience factor, and the integration within your platform instead, as that is a genuine value-add.

Good luck!


On your first point: I think the trend is more will start to care. I agree many platforms provide a lot of security features, but few allow you to encrypt with custom keys though.

On your second point: That's a good point, bad phrasing on my part. Thanks for the feedback.


Something to keep in mind about all this (and something that my wife reminds me of when I get annoyed trying to write product descriptions) is that the description and the product are separate. In that, if I struggle to write a description that is attractive to everyone, it doesn't necessarily mean that the unattracted ones won't like the product. And some that are attracted to the description will dislike the product.

This is just part of the difficulty of marketing; you can't please everyone. You have to figure out what problems the bulk of your possible user market are trying to solve that your app solves, and present that plainly and concisely. Flowery language tends to obfuscate; just plain simple "If you have problems XYZ, this will solve those", then link to greater detail about how each of X, Y, and Z, are solved.

It's hard to do this because we are so used to seeing mid level manager bullshit PR speak on every product page we look at; it seems like a requirement. I've had very refreshing experiences with product descriptions written by a technical writer who just did not give a fuck. Just wrote it up like he was sending an email about a bug report, published it, and it was fantastic.


Great job on the launch. Your pricing is reasonable for small biz, but I'm unclear on what "Email" in https://nino.app/pricing means. Does that mean you offer email hosting like Outlook/Gmail or email support?

For anyone not in the 365 corporate world looking for office apps, you're unfortunately competing with https://workspace.google.com/pricing, regardless of the unique feature set you offer.

For anyone looking for a no-code solution, your pricing is very low for one person startup when compared to https://www.softr.io/pricing but would get pricey for a team of 5-10.

I am someone you should target because I help startups get started, with low/no code solutions. I also use many paid solutions personally like Cozi.com, Zoom, and ProtonMail for managing my life. I can see your tech is great and what you need is to figure out your place in the market. Where are you positioned in comparison to Zoho, HubSpot, and Zapier? How can I integrate you with Shopify? Also, you need a LOT of templates for https://about.nino.app/en/site

I applaud you for building what you've already built in such a competitive and demanding market. You need a hook - the one thing I cannot get easily from any of your competitors, which would make it easy for me to suggest you to a founder. I don't think offline mode or security cut it.


> Your pricing is reasonable for small biz, but I'm unclear on what "Email" in https://nino.app/pricing means. Does that mean you offer email hosting like Outlook/Gmail or email support?

That's under their `Support` section (as in, they're offering support via email).


Unrelated but I didn't knew Google AppSheet[1] existed before seeing it on that pricing page. Interesting.

>The fastest way to build apps and automate work

>With Google AppSheet, you can build powerful solutions that simplify work. No coding required.

[1] https://about.appsheet.com/home/


This seems technically impressive, and I wish you good luck.

I personally prefer apps that do one thing well. I don't like "super" apps that does everything. I like separate tools, and not a Swiss army knife.

This is kind of why I detest apps like WeChat; even before taking into account the privacy considerations, from a user perspective it does chat, social media, payments etc, and I dislike it for that reason. WhatsApp too seems to be headed in that direction (atleast where I'm from).

And I also prefer tools that allow seamless data exchange with other tools. Sort of like the Unix philosophy.

> This means we won't do integrations with other services, unless they are under the hood

Not sure how I feel about that.

> your team can eventually conduct all work on Nino

Great! Another walled garden.

I hope this doesn't happen, but what if you go bust? Will the user lose all their data? Or what if, for whatever reason a team decides to move off your platform? Is there data export capabilities? You better have export capabilities if you want commercial entities to even consider your product.

Also, I feel the Free tier has slightly more features than your Pro tier (the former has unlimited members, for example).

Nevertheless, I wish you good luck.


One of the most important features to get right for tools like this is collaborative editing. It's incredibly difficult to get this right (live preview, conflict resolution, history management, etc), especially given how the vast majority of users are non-technical folks (which aren't used to toolks like git). Could you expand a bit on how you intend to tackle this problem in Nino?


I actually think this hyper-granular realtime collaboration like in Google docs is slightly overrated.

I think it’s ok to have more a git-like workflow where feedback and changes happen over cycles. As a programmer, I don’t give a shit about your working directory. I do care, however, about your commits :)

All I’m saying is this CRDT craze isn’t always necessary or even appropriate for many products. It adds a lot of technical complexity, especially for a small shop.


Realtime collab apps tend to kill their competitors without realtime collab. See Figma: slightly worse UX and performance compared to Sketch, easily killed Sketch. How did Notion penetrate the competitive docs/wiki market? Much more collaborative than the incumbent Confluence (now confluence is iterating on realtime collab to remain relevant).

Realtime is becoming table stakes in any online collab system. I think code is the exception, not the rule, because it’s 100x more brittle than prose or pixels that need to convey approximate meaning to humans.

You can implement realtime without using CRDT/OT, Notion is paragraph-by-paragraph last write wins, no fancy algo, but mostly good enough to remain competitive.


We used jira for live incident handling back in 2015 at a young company. It was horrendous. Multiple people would add roughly the same update at the same time. It wasn't until they refreshed jira that they'd see the duplicates. This led people to constantly refresh jira both before and after adding a comment. I still remember two people adding the same comment, refreshing together and both deleting their own comments after refreshing and seeing the duplicate. (Found this out after the incident during one of those "what could have gone better?" conversations). We switched very quickly to using Google Docs for documenting the live incident and simply attached that doc to the jira ticket at the end. It sucked badly and made a lot of people hate jira.

As soon as Slack became a thing at our company we immediately switched to using it for realtime incident updates, because Google Docs was unsuitable for a bunch of other reasons. And we wrote some automation around creating a jira ticket, creating a slack channel using the ticket name, and updating the jira ticket with a link to the ongoing incident). At the end of an incident when the jira ticket got moved to "resolved" the slack channel would get archived. Extremely simple and effective.


You are absolutely right. I am in the minority, no doubt. My POV is that standard corporate realtime collaboration is generally a waste of time, personally. Or at the very least, the results always reek of design-by-committee - inconsistencies and compromises. This is independent of tech, and I would say the same about the 2000s white boarding and mindmapping. Sometimes, there are cases where it works, like an 1:1 session with someone you can really vibe with. But even in those cases, it’s usually better with single-control (ie only one person editing at a time).

I’m perfectly fine talking about work on a high level, but when it gets too gritty it’s usually better to sit down in quiet and solve the problem or improve the design on your own. (Needless to say, I did not exactly thrive in a corporate environment.)

So to me realtime collab can be very neat, but it’s not a common enough use-case to be a dealbreaker. That said, there’s tremendous value in being able to easily view, comment, duplicate, copy the latest version that others publish, in read-only mode. Perhaps the success of Figma etc is partly also because of that?


> I actually think this hyper-granular realtime collaboration like in Google docs is slightly overrated.

I have to disagree. It's absolutely necessary for a lot of workflows, especially when people are collaborating on a doc in real time during a meeting (super super common), or when you've got 10 reviewers of a doc all leaving their feedback in comments, and comments responding to comments, over the course of the same hour.

The model of clean commits works well for code. It doesn't work well at all for business team documents that are in-progress.


Heh I’m glad that there’s disagreement. I think I was even surprised myself coming to this conclusion.

> It's absolutely necessary for a lot of workflows, especially when people are collaborating on a doc in real time during a meeting

Well yeah you included the solution in the problem description. I’m not convinced of either the shared control, the talking-typing multitasking or even that the artifact should be a document. Assuming the meeting shouldn’t have been an email in the first place.

> when you've got 10 reviewers of a doc all leaving their feedback in comments over the course of the same hour

This one is easier for me to argue concretely. Shared control with 10 people is awful imo. Suggestions with click to accept can make it better (but then you have a notification problem). But what I really dislike is this perpetual state of work in progress. I think a cyclic workflow is better, with drafts and publish and much less back and forth.

In summary, I’d say that the promise of async work (which is good) ended up being sync instead - for the purposes of the human brain. I don’t want to context switch because Bryan fixed a spelling mistake, or see Janice typing out another bullet point right under mine.


I agree. I haven’t yet interviewed a user that views realtime collaboration as something desirable in itself. In my research, user mostly are forced to do this kind of collab because it’s still better than coordinating via side channels such as email or phone. It has lower friction but at a very high usability cost. In contrast it makes people undervalue the importance of a structured plan of execution for projects with a significant number of collaborators. There are practically no polished, in-between, git-like experience in mainstream tools. The outcome of real-time for users is always remembered as messy and frustrating. I don’t even agree with the premise of shared control as being an effective basis for creative or productive process at large, it is useful for brainstorming and exploration in some specific cases, or highly specialized and niche settings like pair programming. IMHO this is super valued by developers and marketers because it’s challenging, cool and it makes for a good pitch. Not rare to see people who conflate digital collaboration with shared control, thinking they’re synonymous – such is the influence of these modern workflows. We can never know how good other collaboration strategies can be if alternative experiences are under-developed and people default to shared control.


> I actually think this hyper-granular realtime collaboration like in Google docs is slightly overrated.

Disagree, with the caveat that I understand how it can feel overrated if you're not using the new ways of remote collaboration that it enables.

The fully-live remote-collaboration UX in tools like Google Docs [1] and Figma is magical because you can get on a video call with people [2] and co-create, in the moment, without having to fumble with all the nonsense of figuring out who's "driving" and who's "navigating."

Since you're all looking at and editing the same doc, everyone can arrange their windows to have a line of faces along the side and the doc in the center. It's actually better than in-person collaboration. There's no haggling over who's got the whiteboard marker, no one sneezing on everyone else, no crowding around to make sure everyone can see the board...

All the extra nonsense drops away, and you get to be just a group of people making something together.

[1]: Notably, Google Sheets uses a much more ham-handed idea of "realtime." A cell appears "locked" while someone else is editing it, and you don't see their work until they hit Enter. So you end up having to sit there like a buffoon while they type, their work invisible to you, and that friction destroys the magic of live collaboration.

[2]: If you don't do much remote work/collaboration with others around the world, then none of this matters — and it's easy to miss the world of possibilities that this feature unlocks.


Has Nino integrated Git into their tools? Editing lines of code over a GitHub diff window makes sense, but I’m not sure how that would work in, say, a spreadsheet: I don’t know if adding a line =21%*G17 below G17 is a good idea; I’d much rather have the changes in the context of a sheet and understand that it’s computing the VAT on top of the total cost.


I think this has a lot of potential for non-technical knowledge users.

At Google and Microsoft, files are available throughout the ecosystem. If I understand correctly, Nino makes the data within files available throughout the ecosystem. This is a fundamentally different workflow.

Google and Microsoft seem to have disparate teams working on their ecosystem. Their products work in a system, but not as a system. There's little to no integration past surface level connections.


That's correct. Thanks for coming up with a new way to explain it!


Nino's workflow is on my "technology wishlist"!

I study systems and system dynamics. The technology we have is capable of so much more, but so little of it works as a system. Nino is a step in the right direction. Imagine a standard for sharing data between apps like Nino!

Nino faces an uphill battle in competing with Google, Microsoft, and other ecosystems baked into our lives. I really want it to succeed so I can use it, but the paths to success are few. One possible failure mode has an opportunity: using your experience gained and organizational momentum to create the standard for app interoperability like Nino.


Some thoughts while installing this in order to test (and trying to find the pricing page): I believe putting interoperability first is the right idea, and we have barely begun to scratch the surface of opportunities in this area. The browser based technologies can gain an upper hand here because of the platform independence and reusability of technologies across functionalities.

That said, there is an enormous amount of work required to match the functionalities of legacy programs: interoperability itself is probably not enough to compete with these. I believe the most viable route is some sort of open source solution. The amount of VC financing would likely need to be staggering for a solution like this to gain any major traction.

(That is, unless an LLM can be made to produce the whole thing over a weekend at some point in the near future ...)


>I believe putting interoperability first is the right idea, and we have barely begun to scratch the surface of opportunities in this area.

Is it really 'interoperability' if it cannot integrate with any external applications?


I'm sure programs like this can achieve the same interoperability with external programs as other applications that already do this. That's a fairly primitive level of integration though, compared to the possibilities that would seem to open once you control both sides of the API.


Word, Excel, Google Sheets, Access, etc. All of these are substantial software titles with massive feature sets. How do you propose to offer even a fraction of the capability and at a high caliber of quality when your focus is spread so thin across so many of them?

I acknowledge I'm coming across as a naysayer, but I almost didn't click the link because my common sense insisted it must be a toy, and you might need to overcome a similar initial reaction from other prospective users.


It's a valid point. From a technical standpoint, I'd say over time the number of feature implementations that can be re-used across modules increases. You're right for now that nino has yet matched all the feature sets, but the path to reach there might not be as linear as you think.


I'd say that most people don't use the massive feature sets, they use the basics. For them, this offering may suffice, given the other upsides it may have, like self-hosting.

With time, more features will be added, as revenue grows and the demands become more sophisticated. If you remember, at launch Google Sheets were relatively bare-bones, as were Google Docs.


>I'd say that most people don't use the massive feature sets, they use the basics.

That's true .. but the problem is that there is a long tail of more advanced features than are needed. That is, for any given advanced feature only a small number of users care about those, but if you aggregate all the 'small number of users' that need some advanced feature, that number can be quite substantial.

>If you remember, at launch Google Sheets were relatively bare-bones, as were Google Docs.

Right, and Google Docs did not make any meaningful traction in the enterprise - and it still has issues outside of education. What Google Docs did do well when they came out was 1) Have great live/collaborative document editing, 2) 100% web-based - so it worked great on Macs, PCs and Linux systems and 3) even though they were feature-poor, they still had a base level of features that was much greater than what Nino has today ..

So Google Docs was able to find a nice niche - I was finishing up University that around that time, and it was great to use that for projects.

Keep in mind, Google Docs was released mid-2000s - it could get away with being feature-poor compared to Office and rely on its 'secret sauce' of being free and 100% web-based. This isn't enough today.


I would take your current marketing front page and make it the page for developers. Then I would work with a B2B SaaS marketer on what you actually need for the people who make the purchasing decisions. You made a great construction kit, now you need to demonstrate with actual app demos what you can make in an amazing way that your competitors cannot.

Developers love making libraries and construction kits as a product, but almost nobody buys construction kits unless the target market is constructors (like dev tools). You need to turn this into an actual product normal people would use. I think your pretty close to that although, you just need a few extra steps for that.

What your targeting is a next step evolution in the target market that microsoft office is targeting. You need to demonstrate with demo videos (not workflow diagrams) so this reality is more apparent with what you've made. Go talk to users, understand what their needs are and then create a message and glue features that would make that happen.

Notion kind of languished for years in their 'productivity dudes' niche and then exploded relatively recently. Figure out how they made that transition. Looking at what you made, it effectively looks like a better notion.

I would also look into what makes people transition off notion to a more specialized tool. Like you can do task management, standup tracking, etc with notion, but it doesn't scale after a while and people go on to things like linear and teamplify. What can make people scale with your tool? That will probably be a thing to think about at a later stage with your company product although.


Thanks for the advice. Appreciate it.


It looks good. The problem for me, to use it is that Google Sheets and Docs are way more fully featured, even if they aren't integrated as neatly as you have done. You will need to find the people for who having calendars, docs and sheets in one place matters a lot. Maybe it is the kind of people who already use notion and obsidian etc.

There are some UX things I think should be looked at:

1. New sheet asks me 'Create source' or 'select source'. One is black and the other blue. I assume they are both links? Looks like I need to click "Create source" to do the thing I would intuitively expect, which is to show me a blank spreadsheet to edit.

2. First column of a new spreadsheet is called "Name" and I cannot rename it, it only has sort options, but if I add another column it is called "unnamed" and I can rename it. I am not sure why this is. Since all I have been told at this point is that it is a "sheet" I am expecting a free homogenous experience like Excel. If it is not that, you might think about how to make it more obvious what it is. (Do I need training, a quick tutorial, a quick highlight-feature/click-next intro etc.?)


Thanks for the feedback. You would click the select source option if you want to use data from another page. Good catch on the name field not being rename-able, that feature will be added soon.


This is not the first product of the kind and won't be the last one. And they look great in theory but get complicated and very confusing and ultimately never find their place. People don't need an integrated tool that does everything. People need a few very good tools that work well with each other. Confluence/Jira is such an example, and to some extent Google's suite and Microsoft's, plus a few more. Unless you can do it better than them in each category -- doc, spreadsheet and project management etc -- people won't choose your product over those. (RIP Google Wave.)


I tried the "Doc", "Sheet" and "Slide" feature and each of them are incomplete and lacks most of the popular features. It would be better if the author uses existing solutions instead of implement them from ground up.

editor.js [0] for documents and Grist [1] for spreadsheet are some good examples.

[0]: https://editorjs.io/ [1]: https://www.getgrist.com/


Do you mind sharing what you tried to do? So I can improve the feature discovery or add the features later on.

Editor.js looks interesting. Nino Doc is based on ProseMirror. Never heard of grist before but I think react-datasheet-grid is a pretty good. I've been itching for a frontend rewrite of Nino Sheet.


You’re describing Unix philosophy basically, right? While I like it I think it doesn’t scale past certain point - think about cases like companies finding they have trouble maintaining a system made up of tons of bash scripts (most config driven systems e.g. CIs fall into this).

Same applies to SaaS IMO.

> ultimately never find their place

Here’s a few counter examples: - Clickup - Notion - Datadog - Amplitude

I feel like they have found their place quite well.

In fact there’s an industry trend in 2020s of SaaS consolidation over to “vertical SaaS” that just does everything in one tool.

Happy to be proven wrong and hear some counter examples btw, this is just my theory based on what I’ve observed in b2b saas world over past 10ish years


Not going to counter you. In related examples, I will pick ClickUp from your list. It is the closest to this one in terms of trying to combine a database, (multi)composition, and communication (Notion is more specialized than that.)

I would say that in this arena, the 2010s started with Quip and ended with ClickUp. Quip was sold at $750 million, but Salesforce never let it bloom. ClickUp is now worth 4 billion dollars.

Just one critical thought: Consolidation must transcend mere visual modularity and deliver deeper usefull integration to compensate for the absence of features of dedicated tools.


This. Salesforce, is a great example of this. I can't tell you the number of companies that exist just building a simple application that does the one thing customers bought these bloated app suites to do that they liked and became burdened with the developers ecosystem or constant enhancements they make just to justify their dev teams existence. Adobe and Microsoft are also notorious for this, as well as just about every cloud company.


It surely isn't. Before everything had to be online, you had Microsoft Works, AppleWorks, BeagleWorks, Symantec Works, Lotus Works, Claris Works, a Wordperfect product and a Corel product, and probably a solid half dozen other suites that tried to be everyghing for all knowledge workers.

The integration story didn't work that well back then, and that was when any one of those "integrated suites" cost the same up front as any single office tool, so the cost savings was more significant.

I still like the idea, but it seems harder to make it work well now than it was in the 90s.


Indeed. The issue I've repeatedly seen, is that ten different people, have ten different combinations and alternatives of what are "very good tools".

And even then, these people aren't fixed in time. Maybe today I need a killer personal time tracker, tomorrow I might need an advanced scrum board and in two years I need a way to aggregate time tracking of a whole team. And that's just one tiny tool.


Personally, I use neovim and markdown for everything.


The problem here is that people are not trained on YOUR implementation.

Everything you have listed here is very nice to have (offline mode, interoperability, …) , but MS (with O365) or G (with G Suite) are often available for free to students, teachers, and professors at critical stages in life.

Just look at Apple with their productivity suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote). The market penetration is probably worse than LibreOffice.

The academic setting often carries over to the professional setting. Changing workflows is one of the pain points I would see in migrating to this.

I do think it looks nice and I do hope you succeed though! Good luck.


You could've said the same about Notion and its current valuation is at least 10B. Don't let this kind of feedback deter you, OP.


Valuation cool, but are they profitable or still burning money.

As a solopreneur you don’t have piles of cash to burn to make people use it.


They burned money but 2024 will show if they can maintain or grow revenue without more cash infusion.


How is this different than what any new market entrant encounters? This is what sales and marketing is for; business as usual. I’ve never launched a product that the world was familiar with before I launched it.


I heard that if you want to convince people to switch from what they're used to, you can't just be 10% better, you need to be 10x better.


Congratulations on releasing your product! It looks super interesting. Some questions from the top of my head: - Where is the data stored geographically? (US, EU, or a specific country) - Do you plan on having multiple options for the web version (cloud vs self-hosted)

I find that data sovereignty is very important to me (it might not be for everyone), which is why I ask about those points specifically ;)


Thanks! Data sovereignty is also top of my mind, but I think we should approach it not with the physical location of the servers/databases, but with the ability to encrypt, thus own, your data.

Currently it uses GCP with data centers in the US, but when E2EE is rolled out, I don't think it would matter where it's located? There might be legal complications so I'm also thinking of moving the physical databases to jurisdictions like Switzerland, if it comes to that.

Given the complexity of the backend, I think a self-hosted version might not be possible in the short term. However, single tenant versions (like GitLab dedicated) is definitely doable.


Unfortunately, it always matters. There's always someone who wants to know where the data is physically located and they will always want an answer for it.


I would love to know a little more about your tech stack and architecture?

You say "Everything is saved locally by default", with full office support. Essentially you have built a "local-first" app, or about 10 of them!

I would definitely play on that for marketing, the local-first place is getting quite a bit of buzz. (I'm biased, but I think 2024 if the year local-first is going to go mainstream)

What tech are you using for conflict resolution for offline edits, I'm guessing you have generalised this in some way? Are you using CRDTs? And any particular local-first database tech?

Have you considered adding any real-time multiplayer features? If you've solved the offline edit problems, you are 95% of the way to real-time.


It's on GCP and 99% "serverless" with TypeScript + React frontend. Flutter for mobile apps and Electron for desktop apps (planning to switch the desktop apps to Flutter too once their desktop frameworks are more stable)

Noted on the "local-first" term, thanks!

I thought about doing CRDT in the beginning, but because not every block type is text, I simplified the implementation to last write wins. Note that every paragraph is a block, so it's not like the entire page is overwritten. CRDT is still doable though.

There are real-time text cursors and block selections, but I intentionally did not implement Figma-style floating cursors that people may expect in certain modules. I thought it looks cool but doesn't offer much value, especially when you can already see what other people selected.


Interesting you say that because I've always felt like a big drawback of Google Docs is the inability to see the floating cursor. It doesn't feel as immersive as, say, Figma editing. However, I'm just one person and my opinion doesn't speak for them all! It'd be interesting to see an A/B test with this sort of functionality.


Have you thought about use flutter for web as well? It seems a lot of effort to maintain 2 codebase for web and desktop


The problem with modern apps is not that they are separate. The problem is that they are walled gardens with deliberately reduced interoperability, using non-open protocols and APIs.


This must have taken serious effort, congrats! Lots of those features seem like huge time sinks

Btw at a glance, this looks pretty similar to Microsoft Loop which just came out. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-loop


Wow, I have never been more impressed with any other Show HN before. The sheer number of features and platforms you have covered and also keeping to some core engineering principles at the same time is extremely impressive. I will be trying this product for sure and wish you all the best with this app.


I strongly recommend creating a demo video of its capability. I cant see what it can do from the images on the website. Atleast some users like me want to see how it feels before signing up and trying it out.


Since I haven't seen it mentioned here, our small team adopted coda[0] in 2020 which has a similar thesis, as our organization's central information hub, and have not looked back. It has the simplicity of falling back to plaintext, but whenever we want to structure data better gives us tables, charts, publishable forms, sites, etc.

It's exciting to have more tools in this space, as I think it addresses a major use case across workplaces in today's world of remote-centric work: Asynchronous knowledge transfer and documentation, especially amongst non-technical workers and organizations. Extremely poor documentation of process and practices, largely because of poor documentation tools (just word docs and the like) is the biggest knowledge-hole I have observed within non-tech workplaces.

[0]: https://coda.io


So are you competing with 18 different products at the same time? Or is this just a glorified note taking & publishing app?

Either way I am getting strong https://zombo.com/ vibes from the description here and your landing page.

Instead of a clear problem statement and user use cases, you have this word salad of “consolidation” (of what?), “superapp” (that does what?), “unmatched privacy” (to do privately what?) and “offline mode” (I still have no idea what I can do with the app, but apparently I can do this something offline?).

That said, I am double surprised with all the praise comments here on HN. Can someone explain in one sentence what this app is supposed to do?


The same thing as Microsoft or Google suites, which is to minimize workflow and maximize productivity by allowing apps to be interconnected.

I will say however that I agree, the page doesn’t sell me on much. The apps/“modules” themselves are not well displayed and I am not convinced even by its unique points such as its (eventual?) encryption, namely due to how opaque it all is.

I wish it was more transparent, between its file formats, its encryption standards and implementation, and how it actually works.


Do you have a practical example of such interconnectedness (or lack thereof?)


"Privately consolidate your multi-app documents offline."

Like a desktop folder!


There is just no chance you'd hold my attention long enough to work out whether this was all width and no depth, or if it was actually good. If you're going to propose a new do-it-all system, it's got to be a lot more convincing than that.


Looks like a mammoth undertaking with endless avenues for improvement, how do you decide what is worthy and what to leave on the backlog?


Congrats for such an profound launch of kind an Army knife for office needs. I like this approach of "modules" very much, especially compared to MS365 cosmos where you've got the great four apps very prominent and new apps / functions hiding their potential power behind a lot of new names and rather confusing menues.

What is your vision about email? I know, it's not an advanced nor modern technology but still the established backbone of office communication, especially if you want to conquer the given field. Despite MS365 has Outlook as default app working with emails in other contexts is still a pain.


I've thought about email - it'll likely be a module that syncs with your outlook or gmail. This is one area that is very hard to replace, because the cost of switching email is huge. Once the emails are synced to nino, they become blocks and can interoperate with other modules i.e. crm type of use cases


Gee whiz, the scope of features is super impressive at such an early stage. It's a very unusual experience to be able to integrate pretty much any object in one module into another module - a big conceptual shift.

Can I suggest you include a dummy workspace in each user's account demonstrating the product to its full potential? Or at least give me an option when creating a workspace to make it into a demo. This might not only benefit the user, but you too, as you'll have to think about the purpose of the product and how it can be leveraged in a business context.

Good luck.


Very impressive from a technical perspective. I should know, since I worked on a startup for 3 years who attempted to productize a similar system. If this can scale, I think you have a very valuable foundation.

Did you build Nino Meets using AWS Chime? I'm curious.

Now for the feedback:

Because the use cases are so broad and all-encompassing, marketing and onboarding into your system will be a huge challenge. Do not underestimate it. At my startup, we hired onboarding specialists since most small business owners we were attracting were not exactly engineers. They needed a lot of hand holding to understand how all the parts went together.

Take notion as an example, they have a huge community dedicated to showcasing things you can build. Even then, I don't really like notion because it is such a blank canvas. It's a hard hurdle to overcome!

I think a valuable next step would be to partner with people from different industries to create custom templates that are built on top of your more general purpose foundation. Those templates should reliably solve specific work flows that those users would be familiar with, and they should have no trouble getting up and running right away.

If you can solve that, you will really have something!

Your current website looks like docs for other engineers, so I'd strongly suggest creating a few more websites, each one branded and showcasing specific workflows for the target audience you are looking to convert.


Nino Meet is built on LiveKit, shout out to them!

Thanks for the actionable feedback regarding marketing and onboarding. You're spot on that the home page is being like docs for other engineers, I didn't even realize I was doing that.


I notice that you have been working on this for a while [1] and announced a couple of modules last year so I expect you have already validated the concept with a bunch of users.

I love the idea and played with a couple of modules and didn't find it intuitive (e.g. embedding a block from a sheet into a canvas using block embed) I also tried to drag and drop.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nino.app


Thanks for trying it out. Yeah sorry for the confusion, embedding a record was not allowed but I think enough people tried to do it so I'll enable it.


As no one has asked so far, I’ll have to do it, how does this differentiate itself from Lotus Notes?


It runs on L̶o̶t̶u̶s̶S̶c̶r̶i̶p̶t̶ JavaScript. Speaking of, Mitch Kapor's 1984 memo is turning 40 this year:

> With the formal commencement of the "Notes" project upon us, it seemed appropriate to set down a few brief notions about the project, its scope, and its strategic importance to Lotus. This material should be regarded as more than highly confidential.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180225100127/http://www.kapor....

Also discussed previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13168969


That was my first thought as well - and also I had to reminisce about how sad it was that two of the biggest powerhouse technology companies from the early 1990s are no longer: Lotus and Novell. It would have been hard to imagine in the networked PC environment of the early to mid 1990s that those two companies are no longer around, one swallowed up (and spit out) by IBM and the other decayed into pieces. I wonder which of today's technology powerhouses we'll be reminiscing about 30 yrs from now.


That was my exact thought. Sounds like a very similar idea. Would love to know what they are thinking would be the differentiator between Notes and their offering? Specifically the hat advantages they have that would lead them to think their offering would gain traction were as Notes has been on a long slow decline.


Maybe NOT using F5 to lock the user session?


You brought up great history! Shout out to the first ever (popular) integrated software Lotus 1-2-3/Symphony/Notes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_software)


I hope, for OP's sake, that it's not a bloated, corruption-prone, garbage-pile of junk. That would already differentiate it quite well from Notes.


I think there's a lot of potential in this idea! I've been pondering how to pull this off for a very long time.

My 5 minute test run:

- For documents, I couldn't figure out how to make anything but plain text. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl+/ doesn't work on my keyboard (no "/" key).

- For sheets, I couldn't figure out how to write a formula. And this isn't a really a spreadsheet, it's a database table, which is a related but distinct thing (more structure, but less freedom).


>solve the app chaos problem for today's knowledge worker

I'm today's knowledge worker and I don't have an app chaos problem.

Integration between different apps is not really an issue for me. Mostly I care about each individual app being as good as it possibly can be.

I don't have any need for spreadsheets to integrate with calendars, or email to integrate with docs for instance.


1st, Congrats on shipping. This is a major milestone 99% of us don’t accomplish but you have.

2nd, Unsolicited feedback, the copy needs major editing:

- It’s focused on the “how”, when it should be about the “who & what” (who should buy this and what problem does it solve for them). I literally don’t know what this is for or if I’m a target buyer of needed solution. (Even your intro of the product here on HN is better than what I read on the site itself). Notion.com has good concise copy you might want to look at.

- focus on problem uses cases it solve, not implementation details (like how it can be a building block platform)

- Pricing page is very confusing. (A) There’s essentially no differentiation between the various price tiers, which is an issue and (b) it’s way too complex in what it shows.

- Address how your product is different than competition (than the all-in-one platforms like Zoho, Notion, - which I assume is your competition but still not 100% sure)

Wishing you all the best & success.


If you're going to offer an offline-capable Linux app then no-one wants to use Snap. AppImage or Flatpak is the way.


Curious what the argument is against Snap? They allow very easy updates


It doesn't work on various distributions, lots of people disable it because of various issues like it being much slower to start, it can only connect to one backend at a time (which is Canonical's proprietary one) unlike Flatpak, and generally the Linux community has settled on Flatpak and AppImage as the preferred universal packaging formats.


Really liking it so far!

An offline-first platform that lets you store your information in a central way and provides multiple forms of use and access is exactly what I've been trying to find, without much success until now.

I'm not sure I've understood how to fully realise the promises of it though. I created a board, and added some records to it, alongside fields for additional data.

It's not obvious to me how to use the calendar module using that board as a source. I don't have a way to see the existing records. I can create new records inside the calendar view, but when I look at that new record using the board, or using a sheet, the "Time" field disappears. The "Time" field appears only to be visible when looking at the records via that calendar.

Similarly, the to-do lists don't seem to map the "checked" nature of the boxes to any field on the record.

I would also like to be able to link to the record or embed its content in another page somewhere, but don't seem to see how.

It would be nice to be able to immediately link to (or embed) blocks/records by using `[[` or `@` instead of just documents. In particular, it would be nice for the quick search to yield blocks/records as you type, and not have to fall back to the advanced search.

Also, as an offline-first application, I would like to be confident the app is always fully synced - but after creating a few documents on my computer, then opening the first of them on my phone, I tried putting my phone into airplane mode, and once I'd done that I could open the other documents I'd opened before (great!) but when trying to open one of the others I'd created (that the app clearly knew about whilst it was online), it said "You're not connected to the internet".

But well done on a really awesome implementation of an awesome idea so far! I think it's very cool, and has a lot of potential.


You raised an issue that I plan to fix soon. Currently certain fields (i.e. time range) only show on specific modules (i.e. calendar) but I'm planning to allow them everywhere.

Could you share your use case on embedding a single record? I disabled that for now because I imagined people would usually embed all records together in a certain view.

Hm I'll think about searching for blocks in autocomplete, or perhaps some way to use advanced search inline.

Your experience in offline mode was actually expected. I assume you never opened the other pages on your phone, so they weren't saved on your device. Nino's not syncing all pages all the time, but only the ones you open, for performance reasons. Do you think having some sort of mechanism to pre-sync certain pages is necessary?


Thanks for the response :D

Use cases for embedding a single record - in a bunch of kanban board use cases that involve shuffling a "unit of work" across various pipeline stages, I'd like for pages and blocks (discussion documents, etc) to be able to either link to that record (ideally with a link back as well) or be entirely represented by it. This speeds up workflow, and reduces ambiguity during communication. I'd expect, e.g. that one might create a Board representing a project and work to be done for it, and a Channel in which participants might want to write messages like "Do you need any help for @Task1 ?".

The offline mode bit - that's correct, I didn't open the other pages on my phone before going offline. I imagine it does come down a bit to what the overall impact on performance would be, but in terms of reducing the mental overhead of using a particular tool, having online devices completely sync means that if I close my laptop to jump on an underground train, I only need to quickly open my mobile app, wait for a "tick" to appear to indicate it's synced, then I'm ready (and importantly, I feel reassured that I'm ready). By contrast to the current system, I'd need to mentally try and keep track of which files I've edited recently, and which files I've already opened on which devices, and try and manually calculate what I need to open on my phone and tablet in order for me to not discover halfway through doing something on the train that I don't have access to the new resource I just made. It makes a big difference in terms of how much work and mental energy a tool is saving you, and how much it still requires of you.


Ah that makes sense. I think what you're looking for is the ability to mention records rather than to embed them, or both.

As for the switching to mobile scenario, it also makes sense. I'll think about this, it might be a button that allows you to "force sync" everything.

Thanks for the detailed explanations :)


Seems like a cool idea, and presumably for a closed source solution with a single host, trust would need building up, and the argument for switching needs to be higher than the switching costs, or people just need to be blinded by love, which may be possible! Other than the single host problem and close source, what is the situation with normal interoperability, e.g: import / export? It's also cool you seem to have clients on mobile and even Linux desktop clients.

In the open source world, there is AppFlowy, Anytype, NocoDB, and APITable too so that's some strong competition. Is there a better argument for using your tool over one of those?


Do not take it as a judgment of your work, it's instead a broad observation using your work as a catalyzer to state it: I have much more integration with a much older app, it's name is Emacs, in my case it feature:

- a Windows Manager, module named EXWM

- a very powerful noting tool, org-mode

- integrate to the note module there is file attachments, calendar, tasks, ...

- a mail module, notmuch in my case, fully usable inside the note tool, so I can link a single message, a thread or a search query in a note, something simple as notmuch-search:tag:unread that open all my unread messages.

- of course being a fully user programmable environment a mere link can execute code, meaning I have a clickable link to transform a note into a slide (zpresent, my favorite, but a mere zoom might suffice in most cases), a link can open a mail compose buffer and so on

- I have various nice file handling goodies like mass renaming, regex selection and so on.

This since DECADES. Now ending the joke the statement: classic desktop model feature an OS witch is a complete user-programming environment, apps are just bits of code, listings part of the OS, meaning that if you have a CAS functionality you can solve an ODE inside an email you compose, annotating it while composing and made a slide out of it. Take a look at https://youtu.be/B6jfrrwR10k for Emacs, a demo for Pharo (a modern Smalltalk, the oldest of such classic desktop systems from Xerox) https://youtu.be/Pot9GnHFOVU and so on.

The statement is simple: for COMMERCIAL REASONS we tried to subdivide and isolate software to sell it in pieces, oh, for decades people have SUFFERED without knowing the existence of alternatives such crappy model, a step at a time, with decades of time in between old features are reintroduced selling them as news while they aren't, and only when someone have found a way to made them anti-user.

Your project actually use one of such step, the modern web, witch is a limited and limiting anti-user version of classic DocUIs, since the user have essentially no practical control of them, at least not a comfy one, and rediscover the power of integration, but limited due to the limitation of today tools. Not made do mix data and code, not made for end-users programming and so on. I've no doubt it can succeed simply because it's a piece of an ancient tech we need, but the point remain: modern software is untenable and it block an enormous slice of potential innovation and computing power just to enslave users.


If I were going to make a hard switch from apps I use (docs, sheets, todo, meet, ...), I would do so from the conviction I don't want vendor lock-in, and want to own my data. I like the concept. The Collection module seems powerful. Yet, I question the scalability - how long should users wait, for example, for a <tab> to be possible in a code block, in a notebook?

Since you're looking for feedback; - support markdown where possible, and include links like Obsidian, include Unicode completion like Julia REPL. Point and click is nice, but shortcuts/common syntax is expected, - support scripting via a modern language, - let users write plugins for modules / modules.


Next, focus on making something some percent of your users will love.

I think you have a good first pass technical implementation, and your next task is to polish your UX/UI to the point where at least one of your apps will inspire a following of passionate advocates. I don’t think your current pass will do that - the “all in one” interoperability angle alone wont be enough.

The docs market is $100B+ - it’s huge, and highly contended.

Notion targeted creative, designer types with great typography and minimal UI taste. Coda targeted Product Manager types with lots of features for building fluid workflows for complex projects. What’s going to be your first user story & angle?


I’d suggest making a demo video for your landing page. The concepts make sense, but to grok how they can be used, some demos (perhaps with SEO landing pages like “Nino for project management” or “Nino for documentation”) would be helpful.


> I want to hear from you

Since you asked - I‘m going to be a grumpy old man and yell at the clouds - I hate superapps. With a passion. I really hope we start to move away from them, I would much rather use 18 different apps and uninstall the ones I don’t need than dig through the noise of the superapp, which inevitably becomes cluttered, hard to navigate and impossible to customise. I understand why big companies do it, since it gets foot in the door and makes it easier for the user to try other services even if they intended to only use one, but as a user I despise the experience 100% of the time.


First experience with the app was 10/10; other than not being able to type the letter ‘m’ in my first Doc. Little things like these can make the difference between instant churn and lifetime users.


The letter 'm' bug is fixed on version 0.22.7, sorry about that!


(I know this is out of scope, but I LOVE this - and just some other-think:

So - crazy LLM idea for you:

Rather than NEW - give me a prompt box:

"make me a sheet of all my movies and grab the IMDB ratings and sort my library amd then give me a publishable page to my blog"

Such comments make your app more powerful.

HOWEVER - Making a new sheet is really FN confusing,

https://i.imgur.com/Pd64RUk.png

Am I supposed to create each FN cell?

What the F am I doing: https://i.imgur.com/U6Gx1nU.png


Awesome idea. Thanks!

For the Sheet module, when you create a new field in the modal view, it'll be available to all other records too within the page, as you probably found out.


I've been messing with this for a bit and as a single person, I find this a lot more intuitive than something as complex as Notion and something made for a large business like monday.com and Asana. Only issue I have is Flutter. As much as I love it being cross platform everywhere, on the iPad app, I have a lot of touch sensitivity issues. I have to double click a lot of buttons for them to react and a lot of the feel of the app in general is somewhat unpolished and finnicky.


The double tap thing is a known issue on iOS. It's in the backlog and will be addressed at one point. Thanks for trying it out.


This sounds like a pretty cool idea. I'm assuming it isn't open source, but do you plan on allowing data sync without any sort of cloud offering? E.g. either sync to a local directory, webdav/etc, or allow self-hosting a sync service.

Even with e2ee, I don't really want to store my documents somewhere I don't control. And if you're targeting businesses, some businesses won't even look at the product if they can't control the data completely.


Can I have formula (the Excel kind of formula that do computation) from everywhere in doc, slide, notebook, form, site, etc.?

It's similar to the demo in the home page of https://patera.io/


My favorite parts are site and blog. Had some requests for websites and blogs and I like the idea, that it comes with a lot of other stuff integrated. I could offer this to my clients as a solution, but... It needs an e-commerce and a payment solution, at least with debit/credit cards. I saw you don't want to integrate external services, but this would make it a lot easier to sell the platform to businesses.


Delete account option?! I checked it out but not interested, what now? This should be the first "feature" made available.


This looks really cool! I tried to sign up but it doesn't seem to be sending out verification emails right now. Will give it another go a bit later


If you haven't seen a team using Feishu/LarkSuite, then I'd make an effort to see how that works. It's essentially a super office app that does the whole "everything is integrated" significantly better than Microsoft and Google have with their office products. For example, you can share a document during a call and interact with others inside the live document.


Nice app. May I suggest one change? Instead of sending a link to verify the email to create workspace, consider sending an OTP. This way, you don't need to manage the headache of opening the app post verification as you can accept the OTP on the same screen that accepted the email. In my case, after verification, the app is just a white screen.


OTP is a good suggestion, thank you. Sorry that you're seeing a white screen, are you maybe on iOS? Anyhow I'll look into the issue.


Thanks, I am on Android.


This is really impressive.

Please keep in mind all feedback here in context with whether they have shipped anything this broad and through on their own.

2 questions:

- I like what you have said about E2EE, is there any chance the implementation could become zero knowledge encryption?

- There likely may be interest in the world where users will pay to be able to self host this, while you can continue to maintain and develop


This seems like the logical direction to go. Many of these apps have to be opened up to each other -- they are "modules" in a system that each company has to cobble together -- because integration is part of how any work gets done with them. The effect is a sprawling and uncertain security and access story. Hopefully Nino can bring some harmony to all this. The simplicity of the end-to-end story -- from authoring to collaboration to content delivery -- is amazing.

One thing I wonder about, though, is the effect on the engines of innovation. Something that works well about the current system -- where chat, spreadsheets, &c, are all disaggregated from each other and we have a big mess of access click-throughs -- is that many different firms can enter the space and bring new energy and ideas to these problems. Say all the apps were consolidated from the get-go -- would we ever have gotten the amazing profusion of capabilities we have now? I imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.

Even when the new generation of knowledge worker apps integrate plugins, they don't seem to integrate them in a way that is amenable to commercial enterprises. For example, Obsidian does not have paid plugins, to the best of my knowledge. Without the commercial incentive, how far can that really go?


Your app is installed as a snap, and has no other form. This is basically a recent Ubuntu only app. https://mxlinux.org/wiki/applications/snap-packages-and-mx-l...


Honest and genuine feedback.

I am concerned that you may be working on something that does not have a market in its present form, or possibly ever. I am worried as to how much of your life / time / money you might be pouring into this. It is difficult for me to be categorical about this, as for all I know it's a tiny side venture and you're not bothered about adoption. But, based on the marketing copy / launch, previous HN posts and your comments here, it does seem that you feel this could potentially compete with Workspace/Zoho/365/Notion with the USP that it's more tightly integrated, plus some local storage and encryption benefits.

I think that's quite a stretch. And that's not to dismiss or play down what you've achieved.

What you have created is, measured on sheer volume of work/technical accomplishment (and assuming it's a solo project completed in around 1-2 years, when you first began posting about it) really impressive for a solo dev. I say this as somebody who considers themself a fairly speedy full-stack dev. There is a lot of complex functionality - an MVP recreation of Docs, Drive, Airtable (e.g. Sheets, which appears to be an 'Airtable'-style visual database with support for multiple datatypes) and the UI is, in many parts, clean, fluid and responsive. All this is without even trying/testing the additional 4-5 client apps!

But in my opinion, the difference between your current product and something that would gain significant adoption is light years. Just some very basic examples: adding keyboard shortcuts to the docs module, drag and drop table re-ordering, image resizing, multiple fonts, page sizing, tabs, a ruler, text flow options and layout. (just the basics here to get it to circa-Word-2000 level) The need for a spreadsheet module. File permission management, upload progress, account onboarding, help and support. The UX of the workspace itself - at the moment it's unclear why some modules exist (what is a 'canvas'? Why would I need it? Same question for a 'grid'. Don't make me work to discover this, tell me upfront. Inline help, or example documents would help steer users).

I could write out a ton more examples, but I'm not trying to beat you over the head, more just to illustrate that the road ahead of you is far longer than you might imagine. If there's just one of you developing this, then I'm not sure how long it would take to just get even one of these modules up to feature parity with a close competitor. This, plus the maintenance, support.. ..and that's before we even begin to discuss the issues around marketing and onboarding, which are probably the area where you're most significantly falling short. Some of your UI choices bely a certain naivety, for example why would you choose to name a module 'Sheet's, when this is already the name of a popular web spreadsheet, and your module appears to be something other than a spreadsheet? This introduces confusion and frustration for users and makes me question your ability to succesfully get this project to profitability. Much of your main website doesn't do a great job of explaining to a layperson what the product is, why they'd want to use it, or giving real-world examples. Even the screenshots on your Play Store app don't really provide good reasons to download, or insights into concrete use cases. Why would somebody pay for this in the era of free-Google-Docs or $5 Zoho plans? How much B2C marketing money would you need to spend to market it to them just so they're aware of its existence in the first place?

I know how difficult this might be to hear, and I don't want to demotivate you, in fact quite the opposite. The thing is, I have had several occasions during my career when I was in a similar place to this. I have, in the past, obsessively focussed on product development, with my head in the sand about market potential. It's great that you have now asked for feedback and I'd rather risk annoying you than squander an opportunity to make you sit up and think for a moment, even if you end up choosing to ignore me.

I'm sure that, if you chose to take a different path with this IP/product, there would be lots to salvage and some valuable learnings to build upon based upon all the code you've created and approaches you've refined. As a suggestion, would you perhaps be better off here just taking one single component and making that world-beating, instead of trying to develop 18 different modules to pre-MVP quality.

Whatever you decide, you're clearly a very talented and prolific developer. Very best of luck with everything.


I appreciate this feedback. Thanks for writing it out. You have some valid points here and I'll think about them going forward.

You mentioned you were in a similar place to this, I'm curious to hear about your experience and the specific decisions you made back then, if you're comfortable sharing.


In my time I have had a roughly 50/50 split between projects that failed and ones that took off.

The ones that failed tended to be 'passion projects' where I was led by what I wanted to do, or what seemed cool, and became obsessed with 'finishing' them to a high standard rather than releasing (or abandoning) them. One failure was a puzzle game for early iPhone (iOS 5 I think) - it took 6 months, but ultimately was far more fun to build than to play. Looking bad, I was kidding myself - it looked average at best, and there were far better people and games out there than the one I was building. I learned some fun things but I probably should have stopped after a couple of months, whereas I think I threw 6 months at that one.

The success stories were the ones where I was led more by a sense of market demand - e.g. there was a problem that needed solving, and I had some awareness that existing solutions either did not exist, or weren't a good fit.

I built one of the very first apps in the transport tech space and that was a big success, both in terms of adoption and profitability. That was a combination of skill and luck - i.e. 'right place right time'.

While I have now had 2-3 'success stories' in terms of products that took off / gained significant adoption, I must say I haven't fully learned my lesson and I do still have the same obsessive tendencies! Coding is addictive huh. I recently spent 3 months building a full stack React app that I just did because I wanted to "finish" it, and I'm not really sure if there is a market for it. But I had the time available and I think the older I get, the more I can self-police and know when it's time to step away.

Also, if you only spend a small amount of time on something, even if it doesn't get used, as long as you've learned new skills or experiences, then it might arguably have been worth it.


Agreed. As a solo dev I am 1.5 years in to building something that represents just one of these apps, and I am still at least 6-12 months away from a v1. I guess it's a choice of going wide or deep.


"Unlimited free trial"

I finally found the pricing page (it's strange only having it in the footer and not the top of the site), and I guess you are referring to the free tier. Which is both NOT a trial (it doesn't expire) and NOT unlimited (there's a 10K block limit).

The copy there is confusing since it's actually the opposite - a limited free tier.


Thanks for pointing that out. I actually had "generous free tier" but worried some people might not think it's generous...I'll think of something better


Clicked link above. Went to site that pointed to me iOS app. Downloaded. Tried to sign in, but I have to register. It sent me an email verification link, which I clicked. Got to a web page that had a button to open the app again. Which I did. And was taken back to the sign in/sign up form. Can't get past that.


I believe especially for the sheets part, there is long way to go. There are strong players like Airtable, Retable, Baserow etc - all having a good base, and it will be hard to catch up (and there are 17 more apps to do the same). But all in all, I am impressed - good luck with your journey!


Can this be self-hosted? Is it opensource?


To add to what other commenters said: Your app sounds very interesting, but the use cases and use scenarios remain a bit unclear. Personally, I would love to be able to just try it without having to sign up. Right now, the copy leaves the user experience very much in the dark


Got an account... Seems pretty good, I've been using Monday for a while but I think it's too convoluted, potentially way too much for my needs. This looks clean, cross-platform just works, pricing is fair and the features are pretty good.


> In Nino, pages and blocks are interoperable with each other

what does a "block" mean in this context?


it's nice that everything is integrated into one system! I have always been searching for similar solutions. But one thing that bothers me email. If I use an email provider from Google workspace or Microsoft365, then sooner or later I was forced to use their calendar, and soon docs because the preview and integration.

The closest I found is larksuite[0] which they recently added email hosting. But I am still paying microsoft so I haven't switched email. I just use lark's IM as email client as well.

While I am trying the product, I am curious what's your thought about add email hosting.

[0] https://www.larksuite.com/


Contacts and calendar are nice to have in the same place as email, because of needing to email contacts and because of calendar invites. Then again, if you use an email client you can use a mix of providers even for those features.

I'm not sure I see the need for any other additional apps next to email. Let alone the feeling of being forced to.


For example, when sharing a google doc in Gmail, the experience is more feature rich. And if an organization is already paying for gmail, it's hard to stop people from using gdoc and gsheet. In real work, I can't just reply a gdoc share with "use nino or I refuse to read".


It's doable. Just curious what's stopping you from switching email? Is email forwarding possible in your case?


For my particular cases there are features like shared-mailbox and distribution list that requires additional setups. I don't see a clear advantage to move over a critical provider so I kept things the same. If from dayone I have a choice, I would go with all-in-one.


Microsoft Teams already is this as long as you don't care about anything basically working.


It looks like Nino Sheet doesn't have the ability for chained functions, just applying 1 function to the column. I don't think it's a good replacement for Excel / Google Sheets. Can it get to that point given enough dev time? Absolutely.


We have similar ideas at Frame (https://frame.so/); but more looking into offering a MacOS look and feel and oriented towards strictly productivity apps :)


If anybody asks me who do I want to be, when I grow up I'll point at this author


A map module would be greatly appreciated by me.


This is very impressive, but if I'm going to go through the pain of not using gsuite/O365, I'm not going to consider something I can't self host or export to one of those quickly if your saas fails.


You can export everything in 1-click! It only supports JSON, HTML, CSV for now tho. PDF support will come at one point.


I don't mean any disrespect, but I made an incredibly basic doc - the JSON export is unlikely to be helpful, and the HTML export is essentially broken for a lot of features, such as an equation.

I think that getting perfect PDF exports should definitely be up there on the priorities. Might help you hone the document model too.


Noted. You're definitely not the only one asking this, so it's top on the list.

Side note: I did start implementing PDF exports, but for anyone curious, it's actually a lot more complex than imagined. There is no easy way to turn HTML to PDF (if anyone knows otherwise, please share) and there are font and language complications.


Perhaps you could target the PanDoc AST for export (and import!). That’s probably the single most robust document conversion tool available. Plus it’s open source so you can get some force multiplication on all the edge cases.

Personally, I’d love to do contract management with a system like this. Each clause could be a block with its own version control history. Easy to query a subset of them into a spreadsheet or slide deck. Main challenge is that all the lawyers will want it in MSFT Word for tracking changes during negotiations, so need to seamlessly interoperate with .docx

https://pandoc.org/


This is the sort of question I would ask of the export route (vs the much preferable self-host route), thanks for testing it out. If one could export office formats, e.g. docx for docs that'd probably be the best.

The more I look at this app the more I'm impressed, though.


Seeing this, the advice: "do one thing really well" comes to mind.


Looks good in the landing page, but the app didn't let me sign in using the magic link on Android. I'm not sure if it's safe to use it on iOS, else I would have gladly tested it.


Google Wave flahsbacks just from description... but I didn't click yet


Very appealing product.

I tried to add/link a "List" item from inside a "Notebook", but couldn't find a way. Am I missing something or isn't it really possible?


Looks great!

Unfortunately I couldn't manage to log in. I signed up, pressed on "create workspace" and for a verification link. Where do I set a password to log in?

Also, did you create this using Flutter?


You can setup a password upon clicking on the verification link. Someone here suggested OTP and I think it's a good idea, might have that in the future instead. Yeah the mobile apps are built with Flutter.


Probably it is, based on the platforms it supports this early.


Any chance you can add a link to download for Windows but NOT on MS Store? I (and perhaps many others) have the bridges to the mothership torn down, so not MS Store.


Can you elaborate? Are you not able to access MS store for some reason?


Yes. I have been using the Windows Firewall Control (bought a license around v4.x)(before it was sold off and became free - and worse at v5) and have been using it in all my Win machines.

I play hard ball, use "allow" approach (block everything except Outlook, FF, and a few more apps). I have also used plenty of Win10 privacy tools and have cut all paths to MS. I use "WuMgr" and/or "WAU Manager" for some very few security updates.

And also regarding the Store, I have uninstalled all (if memory serves well) the "default/stock" modern/Win10 apps (I am using an older version of Calculator, the XP version of MS Paint, and so on). I've used SysInternals and killed all auto-tasks, most services, etc.

I like me OS the way Steve Gibson describes it. Boot it and that's it.


Congratulations on the launch of your app!

Have you thought about what sort of developers would develop modules? Have you made any efforts to engage the free software community?


and then 1 api changes and you go to update that, but find out that dependency you ignored the deprecation warning for no longer exists, and then you have to refactor your whole codebase, and then another api changes, and then another service discontinues api access entirely but it happened to be your most sought after integration so then you try making a headless scraper but their UI keeps changing but then…


Looks awesome, but Lego will come after you for your logo.


100%. They're very protective of their studs. I’d recommend changing that logo before gaining enough traction for LEGO to notice it.


I'll give it a shot, see if that works well for us to manage a hobby-project (non-profit) we're running in our spare time. Looks quite neat :)


I spent a few minutes looking at this and just want to point out how impressive of an effort this looks like the result of. Kudos.


The most chaotic landing page I've seen in ages. I've seen it on my computer. I can't imagine how it looks on a smaller screen.


Provide an API with https://www.baseql.com/


I love the idea. Will try some of it this week. Is there plans to have a linux offline client too ? (I use both linux and windows).


Offline mode should work on linux too. I only have ubuntu so that's what I tested. It's just service workers underneath, so if it's the first time you open the app, you do have to wait for a few minutes for it to download.


Actually downloaded the Mac app and gave up on the Sign Up screen. I just don't want to have another login in another cloud service.


There appears to be a demo thingy under the "The modular workspace" header but clicking on things doesn't seem to work.


> app that supports 18 modules, saving you time from switching and integrating between different providers.

this is not a compelling pitch. I can tell you this and other "problems" you identified have not been real problems in places i've worked. you're trying to play the same game that google and microsoft are losing at. that's not a solid strategy.

I think you should take a page from basecamp and focus on a subset of these that small businesses would be interested in.


Sounds a bit like Office + Google Wave. Will check it out later. Does it have task automation via some macros?


I'm using whatboard.app to do much of this now, but your solution has a desktop app which is a nice addition.


Very interesting. what is your tech stack?


Edit: I want to start with something nice since this discussion seems like it could be overwhelming you. Nice job on the name, it’s short, memorable, and works in many languages while not already being associated with something else.

If I build my business on your platform but your funding dries up next year because you didn’t 10x enough times to hold gnat/VC attention what happens to all my stuff?


Redminds me of CryptPad

https://cryptpad.fr


Is this related to Zoho? I ask because many screenshots have the same Zoho colors and logos.


Nope, but I guess the fake logos in the demo screenshot might remind you of them. Google also has these rainbow colors tho.


Looks like a great set of starter apps if anybody wants to try and revive HP's WebOS.


Curious if you could share which component was the most surprisingly difficult to build.


I always ask this of new apps: To include code cells in the editors via ipython.


I am not receiving the confirmation email.

Are you having issues emailing iCloud accounts?


What's your business model? Everything seems "free" so far.


First of all, I want to congratulate you on what seems to be a massive (solo?) technical achievement. I can't even imagine the amount of work that must have gone into building all of this and making it function. There's clearly a huge amount of engineering talent behind this, so a million kudos to you on that!

That being said, since you're asking for feedback -- if you're trying to turn this into a business, there are three major issues that immediately jump out at me:

1) What is your actual business strategy? It appears like you're trying to compete directly against Microsoft and Google, but they have literally thousands of engineers working nonstop on the long tail of features businesses require. Your spreadsheet app looks fine for making lists or simple functions, but I'm assuming it doesn't do pivot tables, or 1,000 other things businesses do with Excel that they need to do. You simply can't compete against Microsoft and Google unless you have hundreds of millions in venture capital at a minimum, and since users need a lot of those long-tail features, it's not clear to me who you think is your customer?

2) What makes it better than Microsoft/Google? It's not a pain point for me that all my info in Google Workspace is split up between apps, because they all interoperate perfectly well in all the ways I need (I think). It doesn't matter to me whether I have 18 apps on my phone, or 18 icons within a single app. Your home page talks about "modular" and "pages" and "blocks" but even after browsing for a while, I don't understand exactly what those are, nor do I have any idea why I would want them. I would suggest that, to start, your home page needs to present 3 clear, obvious ways Nino is better in terms of how it helps the user. E.g. what is a basic common workflow that Nino lets you do in 5 clicks, that requires 1000 clicks in MS/Google and 100 lines of scripting? How is this going to save somebody hours/days/weeks of their time? Potential users don't really care about whether something is apps or modules -- they care about whether it lets them get their work done faster.

3) Whether it is or not, it looks like a solo project. It doesn't look like a business. It doesn't look like you've hired marketing professionals who can explain what it does, it doesn't look like you've hired a graphic designer to give the site a unique brand identity, and there are even a lot of subtle mistakes in the English copy ("by having all tools in one place" needs to be "all your tools", "we only collect metrics on the server-side" needs to be "collect metrics server-side", etc.). I can see that you know what you're doing as an engineer, but none of this inspires confidence that you know what you're doing as a business. I couldn't recommend anybody purchase your software because I simply don't trust that you'll be around a year from now.

Again, I want to congratulate you on such a truly massive technical achievement. But it's hard for me to see this taking off as a business the way it looks right now. What I would do is suggest two possible directions, depending on your personal preferences:

a) If you want to turn this into a large business that competes with Google and Microsoft, identify and rank the use cases where this is superior. Find a cofounder with more of a business/product management background, and an enterprise sales cofounder as well, get VC funding, and figure out how you can be a "disruptor" by meeting enterprise needs in ways that Google/MS somehow can't do.

b) Or if you just want to focus on your awesome engineering accomplishments, open-source this as something people run on the cloud of their choice -- that way potential customers don't need to worry as much about you going out of business. Get other engineers interested and turn it into something 100's+ of people are invested in maintaining and building features for. And then build a consulting business on top of it, where you and people you hire visit enterprises, set it up for them, build their business logic flows for them, provide phone support and SLA's and all that stuff.

Sorry for this super-long comment, but I hope it helps. You've really built something incredibly impressive, and I want to see you succeed!


Thanks for writing this out, I appreciate the super-long feedback.

1. Nino competes with a better foundation and architecture. It is true MSFT and GOOGL have more engineers, but I'd say startups don't compete with thousands of them, just a dozen or fewer actually working on the product. Btw, pivot tables are supported, check out the "Widgets" button at top right corner.

2. You have good points here. The communication on the use cases can definitely be improved. As you and others have pointed out, Nino's landing page does feel like a documentation page for other devs right now...

3. It is solo and I view it as a life's work in progress. It is precisely because I want it to stay for the long term that I've resisted seeking any VC for now, to not dilute and lose too much control in the beginning.

Thanks for the recommendation on the possible directions going forward, I'll think about them!


Small nitpick: Chrome isn't auto saving the password field for me.


If it can't be self-hosted, I have no interest. Thanks, anyway


Did anyone else tried page embed? My attempt doesn't work.


So you've made a new tool to solve the excess of tools problem?

Right.


Ok, so now we got 19 apps competing for our attention?


One app to rule them all


What is the tech stack you've used this for ?


There seems to be no way to delete my account..


If you want delete your workspace after testing it, you can go to Tools > Workspace > Scroll down to the bottom, click "Danger Zone", type in password to delete it


Is this done by a single dev? If so, that's a massive risk for anyone who might start using these tools.


beautiful project, congrats for bringing it up there with this quality.


really would like to test it but not getting the verification email *shrug


Great start!


Ok, lots of thoughts. I’ve reviewed the website and started drafted this as a Nino Doc. Haven’t dug into the more complex functionality yet.

# Tactical Feedback

On iOS, my password manager doesn’t recognize the Nino app with the Nino.app domain, so autofill doesn’t work at login. Not a problem, just a little friction.

Breaking problem on iOS: I cannot type the letter “m”. It appears to trigger a keyboard shortcut that toggles a reorder paragraph block mode. I had to abandon Nino and finish this write up in Notes.

In iOS Nino Doc, it’s not obvious how to “Select All —> Copy”. Moving from Nino to Notes I had to copy each paragraph block individually.

Concur that it would be good to have some templates or something to orient on first app open. I tried “Notebook” first because I assumed it was like “Notepad”, a very light text editor. Seems to be more like a Jupyter notebook?

Maybe an easy way to address this would be to add a tag line for each document type. Just a couple words to orient folks beyond the name. Perhaps add a “compare to X” as well.

# Strategic Feedback

First, the “too many tools” problem is real. Lotus Notes was good. There is appetite for consolidation in some large enterprises.

It’s impossible to get a big organization to switch over to this directly. You need to target smallish teams (10s of people) that can make their own decisions.

Security is everything. Recommend you review Sandstorm’s capability security model. That was the most promising productivity revolution I’ve seen in a while. It failed in part because they expected other people to write applications to their security model. If you can deliver the fine grained security AND a broad swath of functionality, you have something really special.

End to end encryption is excellent. Let me bring my own keys.

Some more specifics on security:

Block level security would be a killer feature. Especially if it goes beyond RBAC to ABAC. In my world, you frequently want to share a document with someone who is only authorized to view part of it. Automatically redacting the parts they aren’t supposed to see would be amazing. Then allow those blocks to be reused, with the same security labels, in many different contexts and app paradigms?

Honestly it would be amazing and I could sell it.

Next thing on security is data sovereignty. Absolutely respect going single region GCP to start. However, self-hosting will be an immediate ask in my world. Several tiers of this, all of which you can absolutely up charge for.

First, single tenet instances. Give me assurance that when bugs show up, they won’t leak my data to other customers.

Second, enterprises will want to run it within their VPC/Tenet that they already use / trust / audit. The major cloud vendors have regions focused on different industries, you need to be able to run there without calling home to your central instance.

Third, direct self hosting. Especially for smaller teams with poor connectivity back to the cloud. Can I run this on a NUC out of a trailer to help coordinate disaster recovery efforts? Can I host it in a VM on dedicated hardware where I understand the cost, capacity and backup story? Google and Microsoft can’t do this, so you can differentiate. See Next Cloud for a good approach to this.

Finally, interoperability. You have many different app views into the core block abstraction, but there will always be other tools and databases in play. Make it super easy for those external things to read and write blocks. Don’t write the integrations - just expose the API.

Good luck!


Thanks for finding the letter "m" bug, an embarrassing one for sure! Also thanks for bringing up the issue of select all on mobile, I'll think about how to improve that. Adding a tag line for each module is also a good idea.

Interesting that you mentioned fine-grained security. Currently block-level access control can be achieved with block embeds, but it has to be done one by one. I looked into enforcing access based on a query for page embeds (so allowing only portions of the page), it turned out to be non-trivial! Might try to implement in the future.

Thanks for breaking down the different levels of self-hosting. I'll keep them in mind.


good insights


nice article!


>Nino is a radical approach to solve the app chaos problem for today's knowledge worker ... I'm building all these apps from scratch in one place, using the same database and UI, with the flexibility to support the majority of work from one "superapp eventually."

Maybe I can see some use-case for personal use (big maybe), but right off the bat, you can't use this at any company (small startup or enterprise), for several reasons: Lack of functionality, lack of organization-based group and access control workflows, auditing, user provisioning/de-provisioning, lack of cross-organization document sharing and collaboration and compatibility, plugin support, email integration, domain hosting, etc. etc.

I'm not even sure a motivated individual contractor could use this professionally due to the need to collaborate with their customers. I'm not even sure you could dog-food this while managing Nino Inc.

>Nino is one (super)app that supports 18 modules, saving you time from switching and integrating between different providers.

Is that even a real problem?

Most places will use either Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace - those platforms are very well integrated internally. MS365 has all the apps you built except they are feature-rich and some are industry standards (like the Office suite), plus much more - and everything is very well integrated.

But that isn't enough. Sometimes users may prefer, for example, Confluence as a wiki instead of the MS365 Sharepoint wiki - the reason why is because they want to choose a 'best of breed' solution for their use case .. or it may just be a subjective preference. In that case, yes, the integration isn't as great but it is workable (there are plugins to allow deeper integration of external applications). Your solution won't be able to get away from that either. Even if I like your Todo and Notebook apps, I may prefer using Zoom for conference calls and Slack for chat .. what happens then?


A lot of features you mentioned are actually implemented (role-based permission, cross workspace sharing, domain hosting...) and some that will come (audit logs and other enterprise things).

I get the best-of-breed argument. Nino's thesis is that people will find more value if enough tools are bundled in one place.


>A lot of features you mentioned are implemented

No, they aren't. I'm not trying to be argumentative, but there is a difference between true support and a superficial check-mark.

>I get the best-of-breed argument. Nino's thesis is that people will find more value if enough tools are bundled in one place

I'd like to interrogate this a little more. Why would someone not go with MS365 or Workspace?

I can see your answer of: >Nino has a better foundation to (1) consolidate a lot more apps than they currently do, (2) drastically improve speed with offline architecture, and (3) offer unmatched privacy and security with end-to-end encryption (coming soon)

Taking this point by point: 1) Your ambition is to have more apps, but the reality is that TODAY, both MS365 and Workspace actually have MORE applications integrated, and those applications are much more feature-rich. 2) MS365 certainly has deep offline integration. Workspace, I'm not sure what their capabilities are. 3) Neither MS365 nor Workspace supports true e2e (though I seem to remember Workspace having some option to import your own keys for client-side encryption) - regardless, I'm not sure that's enough as a selling point. Also, e2e has many challenges around the UX of key management, rotation and sharing.

By the way, MS365 and Workspace are not the only games in town. If you want to see another example of a 'super-app' that supports a million 'modules' take a look at ZohoOne - they support everything under the sun for a relatively low price, and all of it is mediocre (at best).

---

Another thing I can't gauge from your page is, what it means for one of your modules to be very well integrated against another. You have a chat app and a slide app .. how do those work together that puts MS365 to shame?




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