Show HN: Ambra – Task Management Reinvented
Me and the team are super excited to launch Ambra - https://ambra.app – a collaboration tool enabling teams to organize tasks in a natural way by using only tags and mentions, all in a single box.
Ambra removes the necessity of having multiple fields for creating a task – there is one single box to rule them all. We empower writing tasks naturally.
Defining a fully descriptive task in traditional tools is not a simple process. You’ve to start writing the task title, description, and additional form fields for task status, priority, assignee, etc. It means there are some ceremonies to be followed.
Working for many years with different remote and office teams, I saw that every team develops its own ubiquitous language. This is more emphasized especially when it comes to daily tasks description language. This level of understanding helps the project team to communicate quickly while eliminating inaccuracies and contradictions; and that’s an attribute of a – smart team.
Describing a task in a natural way using one single box, without the need for multiple form fields, makes the task data entry process trivial and helps the team focus on delivering – what’s most important for an agile team – values.
A flat team is responsible enough to focus on productivity and move the tasks to #done. However, they should have a proper tool to achieve that – that’s where Ambra comes.
An example: Hey @ troy we need #todo a #presentation of the website to the customer #urgent. You immediately know the status of the task, who's in charge for and when it's needed.
Ambra is offered as freemium, you can go now and create your first project, invite your teammates, or just start assigning tasks to yourself and feel the simplicity.
We love to hear your feedback.
25 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 64.6 ms ] threadThat also lets you do a one-field quick task entry that includes +collaborators or an arbitrary number of @tags, Those appear to be the two pieces of data you capture beyond the descriptive text. You get a few more than ten projects too, which is the max number you support for the most expensive plan.
The big obvious difference is the pricing model. You're $80 a month for unlimited users on the annual startup plan, vs. $5/mo/user for Todoist Business. For an org of any size, Todoist would get more expensive for sure.
But under that 16 team member break even point, it sure looks like you're implementing a pretty sharp subset of standard features. And when you consider Todoist Premium is $3/mo/user (so now a 27 person break even) and can be used for simple workgroup collaboration as long as you don't need centralized billing or a team admin interface--which seems squarely like your target based on the simplicity pitch--you're very much on the high side of pricing, but with a minimum of features.
I'm not saying there's no advantage here, but I certainly can't tell what it is from your landing page. Once you're at enough users where the pricing makes sense, I'd think you'd really miss a lot of other standard functionality. Unless there are queries, due dates, the ability to attach a comment chain (or at least a notes field!) to the task, etc, I wouldn't think this would cut it. If those features do exist, they're too well-hidden before signing up.
I think that's intended to be: "Be more productive by organizing your work in a fun, transparent, and unceremonious way."
However, I'm confused by the language on pricing. It says Free has 3 projects for first 15 days...but what happens after that. Also, I think you are missing the asterisk in the free panel, cause there is nothing linking it to the message on the left.
Respect your potential user's time. Speed up the animations across the board. There's no way to disable it, and I have to sit there and wait continuously for content to fade in as I scroll. This applies to your abstract demo animation too. It's slow.
"Featured on ProductHunt" and "Used by these teams!" both don't convey what you think they do to me: what I see is it's used by teams I've never heard of and is featured on a site that I no longer give much credibility to. Those bits are above the fold and add to my annoyance that I have to scroll further down to understand your value proposition.
I may not be your target demographic. I loathe experimenting with new, unproven products, especially with something as important as task / project management, and I'm very tired of CRUD start-ups competing solely on UX with buzzwords.
If I am your demographic, give A/Bing my suggestions a shot:
- Reduce drastically (or remove the animations) the delay in your animations
- Move your signaling to below the fold into its own section further down the page (both featured on Product Hunt and who's using you)
- Quickly give me an idea of what the tool does and how it's different above the fold both in text and via a demo
In addition to ctvo's points:
- there is a lack of good and real examples on how to use the product. "@joe please start working on the #design #todo", "@ed admin training", and "@someone write a report on last project #research" are not good task examples in my mind.
- the tags are not explained well, are they grouping the tasks? if so why is #todo and #ongoing tags? these are not groups, they are states.
- the process is also not explained. what do I see when I open the app? how do I mark something as done? does that remove the #todo tag the author added? what are other statuses I can add?
- "They are fully encrypted using asymmetric algorithms connected that depend on your data (like a password, for example) - this really doesn't make much sense to me. You are holding the keys and the encrypted data, so what's the point?
As per encryption, gdpr is becoming a norm, at least in europe and we wanted to highlight that because we have users in many european countries.
I still think the parent comment was a bit too sensitive over nothing. The original poster didn't seem to mean anything by it.
Otherwise, not a bad site.
Just wondering if you can have comments on tasks? As once it's assinnged to someone, how do they post updates etc...
We do have support for sub-tasks that are actually tasks itselves, by having just task-number as a tag :) (inception huh :D).
If I mention a tag on an item, how can I later remove that tag?
The blog link in the footer is broken.
The page was empty for about 2 seconds while it loaded the animations. I almost clicked away. Could you make the static content load right away and show a spinner in place of animations that haven't yet loaded?
I looked for an About Us page and didn't find one.
How about making comparison pages, "Ambra vs Trello", "Ambra vs Jira", etc?
As per animations on landing, we're working to smooth them and more friendlier - while we're fully concentrated on product by leaving that part a bit behind. Yes, a static page would work way better.
We're working on about us page as well - we're a team of ~10 working on Ambra for a year almost.
Maybe in near future we will do the comparison with other players, but we have completely different philosophy on task management - we want to make a task manager completely trivial by invoking natural language and remove all dropdowns and lists and pre-configuration other (almost all) current tools asks.
Thanks for the feedback! Really appreciate the support.