Launch HN: Kitemaker (YC W21) – Fast alternative to Jira, built for remote teams
We made Kitemaker because in our previous jobs, we were managing distributed teams and we always had a bunch of challenges with the tools we used. It was really hard to find a tool that the whole team was comfortable using. Designers were never happy using GitHub Issues, engineers were never happy using Trello, and no one was happy using Jira. We would often hear grumbles from the team that we used these tools because they were "good for the managers", but as the managers we were completely unhappy with the tools too! We had to bug people just to get them to go into the tool and update things.
Even more of a bummer was the fact that these tools didn't really help us solve the core problems we had working in a distributed team. Things like the fact that discussions often started before anything reached the issue tracker, spread out across a maze of Google docs and slack discussions that often resulted in (at best) a giant mess or (at worst) critical people missing discussions. Or that engineering would have a tough time keeping track of the never ending flow of new designs from our designers. Or PRs that would be created and rot while waiting for someone to review them.
So we built Kitemaker to try and scratch our own itch - to be a tool that can help manage the development process from end to end and connect to all of the other great tools teams use every day. One of our top goals is to make Kitemaker a tool you actually want to use, whether you're a developer, PM or designer. It's flexible without having a lot of fiddly configuration. It's really snappy, you can do everything without lifting your hands off off the keyboard (Superhuman was a big influence for us), and our editor supports markdown and a bunch of different elements (images, Loom videos, Figma designs, code blocks, etc.). The editor is built with SlateJS in case anyone's curious.
Remote teams tend to rely a lot more on written communication, so we made Kitemaker to be a place to gather things that would otherwise be spread across documents and chat threads. Our work items are rich documents where teams can document their plans, break down their work into individual tasks, and have discussions in Slack-like comment threads.
Finally, we wanted to hook into the other tools our teams used every day and connect activities happening in those tools back to the work items in Kitemaker. Our GitHub integration provides the same kind of functionality that you get from using GitHub issues (GitLab is on the way too!). Our Slack and Discord integrations make it easy to link chat conversations to work items so you don't lose things in your chat history, as well as providing access to a lot of Kitemaker's functionality right from your chat app.
We also have a freshly-launched GraphQL API. It's early days but we'd love for people to kick the tires and see how it feels. It has webhook support via Diahooks (that was launched here on HN the other day).
The two of us have been working tirelessly on Kitemaker and we're really excited to share it with all of you. Head over to https://kitemaker.co to sign up and try it out. We're hanging out here all day and would love to hear your feedback, questions and cool ideas!
177 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 243 ms ] threadGood news I don't think it would be super tough for us since we're built using pretty boring tech (i.e. not a lot of dependencies on a particular cloud vendor), don't have a bajillion microservices, etc.
That being said, maybe it's an interesting way for us to stand out from the crowd.
And this HN launch has given us a lot to think about in terms of self hosting!
If you haven't seen a lot of demand for a self-hosted version, you might have beem asking the wrong people. Non-cloud advocates and companies with regulatory on-prem requirements tend to not be the loudest in the room for a myriad of reasons.
It's also unpopular and thus a waste of time to argue for self-hosted solutions in a room (or world) full of cloud-first evangelists with dollar-signs in their eyes.
It's just the fashion right now and fashions rarely care about being practical or affordable or safe for the average person, let alone any edge cases.
Why I am saying this: I want to strongly encourage you (and any software vendor really) to build and offer an affordable self-hosted version of your software. The demand is there, believe me, and if word spreads that your solution is a viable on-prem solution, interested parties will come out of the woodwork, you can be sure of that.
On-prem users tend to think more long-term because they (have to) invest more manpower, organizational knowledge and hardware into an on-prem deployment. So they tend to be less fickle and flighty than cloud customers and think long and hard before selecting a solution. However, as a result they tend to be loyal long-term customers and and such can be worth a dozen or more cloud-based customers. Might be worth considering.
Personally, we've planned to move away from Jira before 2022 exactly because of Atlassian's decisions to in effect kill its on-prem versions (by pricing them out of range for everyone but large enterprises customers with money to burn). So I can guarantee that Kitemaker will get a fair consideration (I just saved your page) if it offers an attractively priced on-prem edition before 2022 :-)
Good luck with your product, I do agree that it looks very slick and I will continue to watch with interest.
They often have regulatory, privacy, or security issues that require on-prem solutions. Even if one can get some sort of certification regarding those issues for a cloud solution, it may not be universal and can make things much more difficult to confirm that the cloud solution meets their regulatory, privacy, or security requirements.
It must be 22 years since I had the misfortune of using that horror show.
If you folks end up doing an integration my group would be excited to give it a try.
Good luck with the venture!
Any idea how popular Phabricator is these days?
It’s pretty opinionated around things like fewer bigger repos, rebase-by-default, trunk-only: basically the stuff that big shops use (because anything else is an NP-hard pain in the ass, literally, once you’re dealing with feature flags or A/B testing or bandits or any of the stuff that you need if you’ve got a consumer-facing product with a lot of users).
Yeah I'm gonna have to heavily disagree with this. Arc is hot garbage, by default decimates your local history, treats everything as mutable. Phabricator leaves so so much to be desired, I could rant for days. Gerrit is a much nicer review tool. Even Review Board is better.
I’d be very interested in how Gerrit is better than Phabricator on the review side, I’ve used it a bit and formed the opposite opinion, but because I’m a Phabricator power user and a Gerrit novice it’s likely I formed a biased opinion.
Waiting for the GitLab integration eagerly :) Congrats on the launch and getting to YC - much deserved!
I'm on slow internet at the moment, and between when I entered my username and the box asking me to set up my organization, a popup flashed saying "that user name is taken" (disappeared 1/2 sec later).
Might want to check your business logic throughout for effects of slow internet. Because sometimes a remote team member can be more remote than you expected.
And thanks for trying it out. We really appreciate it.
We definitely think it’s a huge market and it’s undeniable that products like clubhouse will keep having success. But for us, we’ve set out to build something that changes how teams think about these types of tools. That’s why we’re pushing to get the whole team engaged and really make use of the document-like aspect of Kitemaker (which teams tend to use a bit differently than stories in clubhouse). It’s early days still, but initial feedback has been really positive and quite a few teams are paying us already.
And now "Unable to log in. We were unable to parse the server response. This could be a networking issue, so please try again later."
Trying Kitemaker now and hoping the HN hug of death isn't approaching. First impressions: I appreciate the keyboard-shortcut-first UI.
I thought clubhouse was that audio chat thing, but it seems they don't own an actual domain name for their company.
It is, but project management Clubhouse [0] has been around far longer than audio chat Clubhouse.
[0] https://clubhouse.io/
I have had two truly delightful, joyous SaaS experiences in the last few years: ClickUp and Retool.
For example, you can flip major features on and off without even a hiccup (like Sprints or Subtasks). I just can't begin to imagine the architecture behind that capability.
It’s the first PM app I am actually recommending to people, and we tried so many. Every single one has been just a “lesser evil”.
I am in no way affiliated with ClickUp. I just hope they don’t overmonetize or something like that.
A bit tangential, but I was surprised at how similar Kitemakers offering _sounded_ to Linear (https://linear.app/).
Could you elaborate a bit on that? I'm curious what you discovered in that regard.
And you can bundle those together like "A user should be able to cancel and return to the project screen from any step of the wizard." Alternately, you can separate things by teams like "An API exists to cancel the reservation in progress, releasing the underlying inventory" vs. "A user can cancel the reservation in progress using the API" vs. "Factor out cancel buttons into a UI abstraction" if you want people to be able to pick those up and show progress independently.
But fundamentally all this stems from an underlying plan, that flow chart from which all these stories flow. That plan is the epic. But that plan can't just be a frozen flow chart; it needs to be a living central repository of documentation, ideas, and mockups.
Ideally, you have few enough of these epics that you can maintain things in the tools they're meant to be in: a Clubhouse epic, for instance, could simply link to the top-level Notion table of contents for the planning process for that epic.
But if you're pulled in a billion different directions and have a massive feature surface, having this all in one place, alongside the chat related to that feature, with live references to the ongoing action items, would be incredible. Whether Kitemaker solves it or someone else, there's amazing work still ahead here.
There's no shortcut for organization and I doubt a tool will ever solve it all, but I think the combination of wiki+task manager+interactive chat is utterly begging for a (good) unified tool that makes it easy to document, chat, and work tickets in the same place. I imagine the end result wouldn't be automatic quality documentation, but more like an automated blog of what stuff your company is shipping. People wanting to catch up (for context, new teamates, etc) can kind of peruse recently completed features and pick up a ton of context, or search specific ones and build a good understanding of how it was implemented (and why). It seems it would lend itself naturally to a culture of documented, intentional communication, rather than the splattering of slack messages and random tickets I see so commonly. If anyone has interest in working on this, happy to join up. Its high on my list of "want to" side projects.
What we find is that the document-ish interface of Kitemaker lends itself to people sizing their work items a bit bigger than they would in Jira or GitHub issues, and then breaking them down a bit with todos inside. We have a lot of improvements planned around our todos to make this even nicer.
We also have themes (kinda like epics in Jira) for grouping larger initiatives together.
We've been using Kitemaker for a couple of months now and are loving it. When we started we went with tools we knew from past lives like JIRA and ClickUp but given the freedom of our situation we wanted something better.
I feel like when I go into the tool I am there to focus on the tasks I'm currently doing and what I need to do next. The _lack_ of sprint reporting and fixed time frames is a great feature IMO.
They also put out some thoughtful content (https://medium.com/kitemaker-blog) that we used to help shape our current agile practices. Looking forward to the features ahead!
At the beginning its a little unintuitive because you have to remember all the shortcuts to be faster than for example notion.
But now, two weeks later I am way faster than before.
There's a little toggle down in the profile menu in the bottom left (or do cmd+k -> hotkey hints) if you want Kitemaker to give you more hints to help you learn the hotkeys. Basically it bugs you whenever you use the mouse!
Some feedback from a potential customer:
The first thing I read on your homepage is: "A faster and more engaging way to empower your team."
This means absolutely nothing to me - I have no idea what your product does. Something like "Faster issue tracking for remote teams." would be better.
Hope this helps!
But we'll revisit it!
Their example is a product that is so universally well known that everyone will know what it does. So they do in fact explain what the product does in a single word right at the top: "Colgate". They don't need more. You do.
One of our paying customers uses Mattermost so we've started the process of peeking at their API to see what we're up against. Since we've already got Discord/Slack it probably won't be super tough. That being said, there were plenty of gotchas added Discord after we already had slack since their API was different enough to be a bit annoying at times.
One little nitpick: something about the video on the homepage makes it look weird - very sharp (non-antialiased) while downscaled: https://i.imgur.com/bNWJAIE.png
And thanks for the feedback on the video. We'll check it out. Which browser/os are you using?
macOS Catalina
Firefox and Chrome
How does this compare with https://linear.app?
2015 MacBook Pro with Firefox
That being said, we're trying to be a bit different. Teams using us tend not to split things down into micro tasks, but instead leverage the document-like structure of our work items to bring the whole team into a single workspace, thinking about and working on features/initiatives together. I think we also think about integrations a bit differently, but I don't have a ton of experience with Linear's integrations.
We're also a bit more crazy about hotkeys I think. Seriously, we're pretty obsessed ;-)
So, will there be vi(like) keybindings, or will we have to make our own via the graphql Api and something like neovim/ruby|lua? ;)
There is literally a hotkey for everything in linear.
We have quite bunch of startups and larger growth companies using us, anything from 3 to 500 engineers, with 100 or 20,000 issues. Linear is modeled around our experiences building software at Coinbase, Uber, Airbnb etc, from early to late stage and what we see is a modern way to develop software.
We have support for roadmaps, projects, cycles (sprints), custom views, multiple teams, backlogs, list/kanban, and robust search and filtering. Lot more about the features here: https://docs.linear.app/
Linear is also offline first app so all the interactions are instant, which especially key for keyboard shortcuts.
It took us about half an hour to learn all the shortcuts, but that time has been worth it already.
Everybody hates Jira, but it scales to 100,000+ issues across dozens of teams. Even tiny teams (heh, any team that's live and/or has a PM) quickly generate 1000s of issues and JQL is *godlike* in sifting through this stuff. Engineers tell me about Trello and I say, "great place to start" knowing they'll come to the dark side soon enough.
thoughts?
We definitely have come close to the scale you're discussing but I look forward to finding out! That said, we have had a number of smaller companies drop Jira for Kitemaker.
You might also be the first person I’ve seen use “godlike” to describe any feature of Jira.
Basically you and I clearly have much different experiences with that tool.
However, what is it with these sites today. With a default content blocker you hamburger menu does not work on mobile (Safari on iOS with Firefox Content Blocker).
So I can‘t tell, but do you offer an on-premise solution?
We don’t offer on prem currently but there’s a discussion a few comment threads up.
We were also thinking of chunking up that gif with clear captions so it's obvious what you should be seeing at each stage.
I’m sure you’re aware of Linear, how do you differentiate yourself? I’d be really interested to know. Huge congrats on the launch!
We're very aware of them, tried to capture it a bit here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26542607
I’d be curious to know the feature parity in percentage with Jira features. Jira is for better and worse.. deep and complex to handle a lot of depth and complexity.
We've got a branch where we've switched to dndkit [1] which I like a lot - really nice API with hooks for everything. However, it has some annoying bugs that mean we can't quite switch yet. That being said it seems like the one that's hanging us up the most is nearly fixed [2].
0: https://github.com/atlassian/react-beautiful-dnd
1: https://dndkit.com/
2: https://github.com/clauderic/dnd-kit/pull/140