Besides pricing, the differences lie in the details, i.e. we allow for different types of bullets sent in etc. We're also fully focused on providing the best possible experience for teams.
Okay, first I take a little issue with the notion that we're transferring the time spent during a morning stand-up meeting (during work time) to the evening (supposedly non-work time). Is that a selling point? Do we really need to erode our after-hours time even further? Seems the only winner here is the company purchasing the 'service'.
Secondly, isn't this something most people with even basic scripting language savvy could whack together on their own (company) server? Setting up a mailing list with a daily digest (sent out first thing in the morning) and a daily 'reminder' e-mail in the evening isn't exactly hard. If I was so miserly that I'd want to screw my employees out of ten minutes of their time, I'd certainly be miserly enough to set this up myself, not pay 10+ euro a month for it.
I have to say I don't see the added value of your service. Unless I'm mistaking something, the flow is that you email everyone once a day and they have to reply with what they've done, and then everyone gets an update of what everyone has done. This is manual work, and something that could be set up by anyone using cron in minutes.
The thing is, almost all services that people use for tracking projects nowadays have some way of interfacing with the information. So I have tools that know already what I've done. Why would I want to spend my valuable time writing that up again?
Anyone can install and modify a stackoverflow clone in a weekend, which is why the business model is focused on its content and community...
In this case, the customer provides (and doesn't share) the content and community, so what's being sold is the weekend project software hack. And the target audience is already using separate project management and version control tools, and knows how to hack their APIs.
Sure, and you could hack together a CRM in a weekend. And a project management tool. And you can set up IRC instead of Slack. And you could make a mailing list with google spreadsheets and a little script.
One of the most crucial skills when you don't have a boss telling you what to do is figuring our where to spend your precious time.
If a weekend project means, say, 16 hours of work, you need to value your time at less than $6.50 for this to be worth one year at the cheap plan.
You entirely miss the point about dev teams usually logging their activity in other places.
If a whole team is expected to respond to the emails this service sends with new updates on a daily basis and do that in addition to whatever activity planning, communication and and tracking tools they're already using, then using this service instead of making a one time effort to get their existing toolset to spit out daily emails is probably a false economy.
And if they're currently not systematically tracking project activity, and relying entirely on verbal communication or email they're - for good reasons or bad - probably not overly likely to pay for to SaaS-based coordination tools either.
I think when the naysaying is "this is not technically feasible or efficient/too costly/has no revenue model", yet the theoretical idea is good in a "perfect world", you have a real shot at proving them wrong.
When the naysaying is "even if this works exactly as expected, most people would not get a lot of value out of it", assuming their reasoning is correct, then the naysaying can be justified.
It looks like most of the original concerns over Dropbox from sensible and experienced people fall in the first category, not the second.
I'm not a VC or startup/business person so I could be completely wrong, but that's the view I've managed to piece together over time. I think pg's model of "can you envision a small cult following of users who will really love this product/service?" is the best way to look at it. If you can get that initial cult following, then all other problems can (likely) eventually be overcome. If you can't get that, then you're sort of wasting your time.
This is a forum for people, working in technology, hugely familiar with startups. You're going to face tough questions here, which I hope is why OP came to post.
I personally don't see the value in a service that emails a group of people and then gathers their responses when that data is probably already available and retrievable in an automated fashion.
I don't think you can compare questioning the value of Dropbox (which is a huge piece of software, handling sync across multiple platforms, even back then) to this.
What I have done in the past is have a slack channel that everyone puts their status in once a day. No third party system required, and no need to setup chron!
You could think of the manual information entry as forcing people to write things down that they are doing which they are not writing down in the ticketing/workflow system.
I often hear that from smart engineers and like the DIY attitude. However, it's not a no-brainer to build a stable architecture to provide this service. We know, because we build many sw architectures before.
One of the ideas behind is, that we want to provide something using a communication channel people use every day rather than introducing a new one like Slack, Hipchat etc. However, StandupMail is a great addition to teams using those tools already.
Using StandupMail is not about sending in "dones" for every single task accomplished. It's more about a quick recap of what everyone thinks is important for the team to know to stay productive the next day and overlook the big picture of the project.
I'd suggest you look closer at the services that teams are already using and try and add value to those by algorithmically generating what you think is useful for people to know.
I agree simply acknowledging what to-do's people have ticked off in the day isn't that useful (BC can already do this for example) but there is room for intelligent insight here. You could determine people's productivity rate towards a milestone and provide predictions if things are on track for a particular milestone date etc.
I think then you would have a valuable service. Just my 2 cents ;-)
We built this ourselves internally at Streak and I wish something like this had existed at the time instead.
The idea of using tools I already use to say what I did is valuable. In our summary email we send out everyones responses but we also include every commit that was done by each person that day.
If standupmail included other sources of data (manual email, github commits, gmail messages sent, zapier integration) - we'd def switch.
To be honest, this is something I would say to my boss when he brought up that he was going to use a system like this for standups. "Hey, why spend 14 bucks a month when I could build this in a few hours? We'll just write a cron job then cc everyone in the team.."
First off, there is probably a lot more to a system like this then you think. What happens when you need to add people to the team on the fly, or change the format of the email? Do you want to be the person who has to maintain this system for the foreseeable future? Is this what you really want to be working on?
It's a cheap bet that could shave off a few hours a week of work. Our standups can take up to 30 min each morning for our team if there are a lot issues from the pervious day. I rather have a 15 min standup and have time to prepare my questions the night before, or on the way to work.
It's hard to justify new systems like these when as engineers, we are conditioned to build our own tools when we see repetitive tasks that need to be streamlined. Personally I would love a system like this. It would save a lot of time for me each morning. On the other hand, I could see this going to the company graveyard of dead tools after someone finds a new system they read about on HN.
Agile practices can sometimes turn into Show & Tell time when people don't succinctly sum up there issues. Making people think about what they are going to say before they bring up blocks and issues they are having can definitely save time each day.
This is great in many ways: 1) Your boss can skip coming to your desk and interrupting you with "what have you been working on?," 2) Every time you answer that question verbally you forget something important, 3) Using other tools to report on your work makes everything complicated, 4) Email is easy, 5) You get to summarize your day, if not for report for your own good 6) Forget the team, I now have an archive of everything I have done.
Added feature: Perhaps users can send emails throughout the day if they want to, instead of waiting.
The scary part: Your company's information in the hands of a company you do not know much about. It becomes very easy to be kept hostage, I guess unless exporting your data and completely deleting it from their servers is an option.
You seriously need to show an example workflow without having to sign up. If you don't have money for a video, just create a page with a few screenshots and short explanations.
Shouldn't workers be home spending time with their families in the evening? Why is this considered acceptable behavior from an employer?
Maybe there should be a "premium" option for an automated nightly conference call, where employees can call in and confirm that they replied to the nightly status email, and also share any cool stories about what it was like to be away from the office for a few hours. It would be a great team building exercise.
Another productivity booster is chemical castration. Families really eat up a lot of time, which ends up costing the companies. Employees who voluntarily get vasectomies could be given a 15% spot bonus.
Perhaps they understand 'evening' to be a different time to you. In London I'm almost always in the office at 5 or 6pm when it's getting dark outside (except in the summer), and the time could be classed as 'evening'. It's subjective.
You're free to define when the team is expected to answer. It could be in the morning... during the day. Alle-in-one emails but also one email per task finished fitting into existing workflows.
However, the idea is to send a quick answer back, when your accomplishments are still "fresh" in your mind - Shouldn't take you longer than 5min.
And yes, workers should spend time with their families. I'm doing that right now, too :)
You joke, but a fellow PhD student on exchange from Pakistan mentioned that one successful professor in his university (having published ~ 400 papers on fluid mechanics) would refuse to take on married PhD students, because their wives would limit their working hours too much.
I've seen this concept before and thought it might be useful in my organization. The general opinion I got back was that people hate email, and the daily digest would be pretty well ignored. Once I was reminded of this, I fully agreed.
In fact, using tools like slack, asana, phabricator, and github enterprise there's an overall goal to do less and less email and something like this would be a step in the other direction.
What we're looking at setting up is a centralized dashboard to tie our tools together and include status updates. The tool I'm looking at is [anthracite](https://github.com/Dieterbe/anthracite) which bills itself as an event manager ("an event / change logging/managament app").
On the surface, this looks like something you use to track when code is changed or server changes are made. And that is a lot of it. But it's really a way to display events and you can have pre-made filters of events (call them event streams). You can integrate it with your chat system or email to post status updates by hand, you could have task management systems like asana post updates, etc.
Granted, I'm not entirely sure yet if anthracite is mature enough for what we're looking for, but we definitely are angling for that approach.
Right or wrong, many people that I've worked with view the 10-minute morning stand-up meeting as a "starting function" for their day. This would completely break that function of a stand-up.
I'm also not too fond of anything that would cause people to work later in the evening. The one problem I see this potentially fixing is the feeling of forgetting everything you did over the weekend.
StandupMail shouldn't replace your standup. But think of situations when you're working with distributed teams. Many teams are working in this mode... not just development teams. Think of marketing, sales etc.
Interesting, I just built a service sort of like this yesterday and was going to 'beta' test it with my team starting monday. I don't like the "evening" and "morning" emails, as I work on a distributed team and "evening" and "morning" are very subjective.
Distributed and remote employees I think is one of the biggest challenges facing the work place at the moment, with no good solutions available yet.
btw, your ssl cert is broken when visiting non-www.
I built a system like this one that we coined "daily update" and supporting the concept of a non uniform morning was just a matter of using timezones. Each employee had a timezone setting that was automatically detected but could be overridden and our morning email was sent to them at their 9am. Now, obviously what time you start your day is subjective but it seemed to work for those that enjoyed it by being the earliest value.
And I can't drive places without fuel in my car. What's your point? You made a conscious decision to cripple your browsing experience, what did you expect?
My point is: is there absolutely no content that can be displayed without JavaScript being enabled? I'm sure there is.
It's a matter of principles (I shouldn't be compelled to enable JS on a website only to view its static content - or any content at all), it's a matter of accessibility (people with impaired vision who use text-to-speech software will have a harder time with this page)and it's a metter of compatibility (not all devices/browsers run JS)
It's a nice to have, but it's not priced with respect to value.
I'd also be hesitant to route somewhat confidential emails through a one-man band development shop who may or may not be snooping them out of interest.
We use teamsnippets.com. I've a love/hate relationship with them. As a part-time employee and a full-time father, the last thing I want to do in the evening is switch context again and type up what I did during the working hours.
On the other hand: I do like reading what my colleagues did during the day....
Actually we've taken this to the next level with https://teamlens.io/ - and as email may be good way of reporting your progress, it's a bit obsolete + it requires actual "answering" to it, so it (it my opinion) adds extra complecity to the whole process (it's hard to give status "in real time" or whenever you want it during the day). We'll be launching next week or so (hopefully).
I'm not exactly sure what problem standupmail is trying to solve, or if it's artificially creating one. Sending out automatic reminders for status updates and a daily digest doesn't justify the pricing IMO, as it's something that can be done easily via automatic email reminders / calendar events.
StandupMail seems to want to replace daily standups for teams, which I don't think is a good idea.
First of all, standup meetings are essential to start the day. It's the team's huddle before heading out into the field. It's to provide updates on yesterday's play, but also to discuss briefly any topics of importance, making sure everyone's on the same page for the present day. Replacing that with a one-directional email update would hinder all that.
>INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY
I would argue that taking the time to write an email, read each other's update etc actually reduces productivity overall. It's much easier to go to a 5-10 minute standup and hear everyone's update as well as verbally provide your own update. In fact, if I need more clarification from someone's update, I'd have to interrupt that person after I've read the email, or write out more emails.
> Avoid time-consuming status meetings and interrupting the team from accomplishing their tasks.
Standups and status meetings are supposed to be brief. They usually happen at the end of day or beginning of the day where it provides a lot more value (as a wrap up or an anchor to the start of the day) than interruption (if any). If your status meetings are taking a long time, you're doing it wrong.
> NO MICROMANAGEMENT
If a regular standup = micromanagement, then how is an email reminder for standup updates not micromanaging? Keeping the team on the same page about what needs to be done is easier with a verbal standup. IMO whether there is or isn't any micromanagement in regular standups, it wont change with email updates. It's more of a team dynamic than a process/tool issue.
Problem to solve: keeping a team of people working on the same project up-to-date in a simple way - overcoming barriers like availability and distribution of team members.
You might be right with your arguments if you see StandupMail as a tool replacing your Scrum standup. However, it's intended to be a tool for every team out there working on the same topic - most teams don't even know what a "SCRUM Standup" is (ask your sales team for example).
What we have found from running Weekdone (https://weekdone.com/) which has options for both daily and weekly update reports I would say around 5-10% of customers opt for the daily option. For most, weekly updates via e-mail are enough - just like many rune their stand-ups weekly and not daily. Of course, we do have a real-time newsfeed which many use on mobile and web for the updates.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 98.5 ms ] threadIf you like this, take a look at https://github.com/agiliq/worktogether. We use and like idonethis, this app is just experimental at the moment.
Wouldn't anyone making any product ever say this?
Secondly, isn't this something most people with even basic scripting language savvy could whack together on their own (company) server? Setting up a mailing list with a daily digest (sent out first thing in the morning) and a daily 'reminder' e-mail in the evening isn't exactly hard. If I was so miserly that I'd want to screw my employees out of ten minutes of their time, I'd certainly be miserly enough to set this up myself, not pay 10+ euro a month for it.
The thing is, almost all services that people use for tracking projects nowadays have some way of interfacing with the information. So I have tools that know already what I've done. Why would I want to spend my valuable time writing that up again?
Just like anyone can build stackoverflow in a weekend.
In this case, the customer provides (and doesn't share) the content and community, so what's being sold is the weekend project software hack. And the target audience is already using separate project management and version control tools, and knows how to hack their APIs.
One of the most crucial skills when you don't have a boss telling you what to do is figuring our where to spend your precious time.
If a weekend project means, say, 16 hours of work, you need to value your time at less than $6.50 for this to be worth one year at the cheap plan.
If a whole team is expected to respond to the emails this service sends with new updates on a daily basis and do that in addition to whatever activity planning, communication and and tracking tools they're already using, then using this service instead of making a one time effort to get their existing toolset to spit out daily emails is probably a false economy.
And if they're currently not systematically tracking project activity, and relying entirely on verbal communication or email they're - for good reasons or bad - probably not overly likely to pay for to SaaS-based coordination tools either.
Remember Dropbox? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625306 with these comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6625818
I think when the naysaying is "this is not technically feasible or efficient/too costly/has no revenue model", yet the theoretical idea is good in a "perfect world", you have a real shot at proving them wrong.
When the naysaying is "even if this works exactly as expected, most people would not get a lot of value out of it", assuming their reasoning is correct, then the naysaying can be justified.
It looks like most of the original concerns over Dropbox from sensible and experienced people fall in the first category, not the second.
I'm not a VC or startup/business person so I could be completely wrong, but that's the view I've managed to piece together over time. I think pg's model of "can you envision a small cult following of users who will really love this product/service?" is the best way to look at it. If you can get that initial cult following, then all other problems can (likely) eventually be overcome. If you can't get that, then you're sort of wasting your time.
I personally don't see the value in a service that emails a group of people and then gathers their responses when that data is probably already available and retrievable in an automated fashion.
I don't think you can compare questioning the value of Dropbox (which is a huge piece of software, handling sync across multiple platforms, even back then) to this.
I think automatic information distributio is the right idea. idonethis has an API so you can have a ticket completion automatically show up: http://blog.idonethis.com/connect-apps-to-idonethis-with-zap...
You could think of the manual information entry as forcing people to write things down that they are doing which they are not writing down in the ticketing/workflow system.
One of the ideas behind is, that we want to provide something using a communication channel people use every day rather than introducing a new one like Slack, Hipchat etc. However, StandupMail is a great addition to teams using those tools already.
Using StandupMail is not about sending in "dones" for every single task accomplished. It's more about a quick recap of what everyone thinks is important for the team to know to stay productive the next day and overlook the big picture of the project.
I agree simply acknowledging what to-do's people have ticked off in the day isn't that useful (BC can already do this for example) but there is room for intelligent insight here. You could determine people's productivity rate towards a milestone and provide predictions if things are on track for a particular milestone date etc.
I think then you would have a valuable service. Just my 2 cents ;-)
The idea of using tools I already use to say what I did is valuable. In our summary email we send out everyones responses but we also include every commit that was done by each person that day.
If standupmail included other sources of data (manual email, github commits, gmail messages sent, zapier integration) - we'd def switch.
First off, there is probably a lot more to a system like this then you think. What happens when you need to add people to the team on the fly, or change the format of the email? Do you want to be the person who has to maintain this system for the foreseeable future? Is this what you really want to be working on?
It's a cheap bet that could shave off a few hours a week of work. Our standups can take up to 30 min each morning for our team if there are a lot issues from the pervious day. I rather have a 15 min standup and have time to prepare my questions the night before, or on the way to work.
It's hard to justify new systems like these when as engineers, we are conditioned to build our own tools when we see repetitive tasks that need to be streamlined. Personally I would love a system like this. It would save a lot of time for me each morning. On the other hand, I could see this going to the company graveyard of dead tools after someone finds a new system they read about on HN.
Agile practices can sometimes turn into Show & Tell time when people don't succinctly sum up there issues. Making people think about what they are going to say before they bring up blocks and issues they are having can definitely save time each day.
Added feature: Perhaps users can send emails throughout the day if they want to, instead of waiting.
The scary part: Your company's information in the hands of a company you do not know much about. It becomes very easy to be kept hostage, I guess unless exporting your data and completely deleting it from their servers is an option.
Idea is good but I am not convinced with the pricing. I can do it manually anyway by just cc ing the entire team.
I suggest to give it for free upto 5 or 10 users then charge for the members above that.
Maybe there should be a "premium" option for an automated nightly conference call, where employees can call in and confirm that they replied to the nightly status email, and also share any cool stories about what it was like to be away from the office for a few hours. It would be a great team building exercise.
Another productivity booster is chemical castration. Families really eat up a lot of time, which ends up costing the companies. Employees who voluntarily get vasectomies could be given a 15% spot bonus.
However, the idea is to send a quick answer back, when your accomplishments are still "fresh" in your mind - Shouldn't take you longer than 5min.
And yes, workers should spend time with their families. I'm doing that right now, too :)
In fact, using tools like slack, asana, phabricator, and github enterprise there's an overall goal to do less and less email and something like this would be a step in the other direction.
What we're looking at setting up is a centralized dashboard to tie our tools together and include status updates. The tool I'm looking at is [anthracite](https://github.com/Dieterbe/anthracite) which bills itself as an event manager ("an event / change logging/managament app").
On the surface, this looks like something you use to track when code is changed or server changes are made. And that is a lot of it. But it's really a way to display events and you can have pre-made filters of events (call them event streams). You can integrate it with your chat system or email to post status updates by hand, you could have task management systems like asana post updates, etc.
Granted, I'm not entirely sure yet if anthracite is mature enough for what we're looking for, but we definitely are angling for that approach.
I'm also not too fond of anything that would cause people to work later in the evening. The one problem I see this potentially fixing is the feeling of forgetting everything you did over the weekend.
Distributed and remote employees I think is one of the biggest challenges facing the work place at the moment, with no good solutions available yet.
btw, your ssl cert is broken when visiting non-www.
It's a matter of principles (I shouldn't be compelled to enable JS on a website only to view its static content - or any content at all), it's a matter of accessibility (people with impaired vision who use text-to-speech software will have a harder time with this page)and it's a metter of compatibility (not all devices/browsers run JS)
I'd also be hesitant to route somewhat confidential emails through a one-man band development shop who may or may not be snooping them out of interest.
On the other hand: I do like reading what my colleagues did during the day....
StandupMail seems to want to replace daily standups for teams, which I don't think is a good idea.
First of all, standup meetings are essential to start the day. It's the team's huddle before heading out into the field. It's to provide updates on yesterday's play, but also to discuss briefly any topics of importance, making sure everyone's on the same page for the present day. Replacing that with a one-directional email update would hinder all that.
>INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY
I would argue that taking the time to write an email, read each other's update etc actually reduces productivity overall. It's much easier to go to a 5-10 minute standup and hear everyone's update as well as verbally provide your own update. In fact, if I need more clarification from someone's update, I'd have to interrupt that person after I've read the email, or write out more emails.
> Avoid time-consuming status meetings and interrupting the team from accomplishing their tasks.
Standups and status meetings are supposed to be brief. They usually happen at the end of day or beginning of the day where it provides a lot more value (as a wrap up or an anchor to the start of the day) than interruption (if any). If your status meetings are taking a long time, you're doing it wrong.
> NO MICROMANAGEMENT
If a regular standup = micromanagement, then how is an email reminder for standup updates not micromanaging? Keeping the team on the same page about what needs to be done is easier with a verbal standup. IMO whether there is or isn't any micromanagement in regular standups, it wont change with email updates. It's more of a team dynamic than a process/tool issue.
You might be right with your arguments if you see StandupMail as a tool replacing your Scrum standup. However, it's intended to be a tool for every team out there working on the same topic - most teams don't even know what a "SCRUM Standup" is (ask your sales team for example).