Ask HN: Startup owners/employees, would you use a service like this?

9 points by tom3k 10 years ago | 2 comments

Hi,

Through my own experience of working in startups I've found that as a startup gets bigger, communication between teams can break down. Monday morning catch-ups can become drawn out and people tend to lose focus after a while.

As an engineer I like to have an idea of what, for example, the sales and marketing teams are working on/towards, and have found that this feeling is often reciprocated. I believe that bridging the communication gap between teams can lead to an increase in focus and awareness of the company as a whole.

I’ve come up with a potential solution for this problem and have created a landing page which gives its general outline [1].

I’d love to hear if anyone else has faced a similar problem and whether they would use the service I’m proposing.

Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[1] http://tomszpytman.com/beanstalk/

gcatalfamo 10 years ago |

Have you checked basecamp or trello out? How does your value proposition differ from them?

tom3k 10 years ago | |

Hi, thanks for your comment. Whilst I haven’t used basecamp before, I’ve used trello quite extensively. Suppose each team in a company had its own board, and each board had lists splitting milestones into ’this week’, ’this month’ and ‘this year’. Sure, you could go through each board and see what teams were up to, but wouldn’t it be easier if you could aggregate all of that data in one place? Wouldn’t trello boards become even more complicated if you wanted to add the concept of individual lists, whilst still maintaining the format ‘this week’, ‘this month’ and ‘this year’? Lastly, I’ve yet to see how trello could provide a ‘timeline’ visualisation of milestones that were achieved in the past alongside those which are still yet to be achieved.

Basecamp, on the other hand, does appear to provide a ‘timeline’ visualisation of a project, but the service seems to focus more on keeping ‘stuff’ to do with a project in one place. My proposal is very different in that it focuses solely on milestones. Users would have the ability to group similar milestones together, for example ‘achieve X sales’ where the value of X could then be plotted on a graphed alongside the date achieved. This would allow, say, a team lead to monitor the progress of an individual or the team itself. I think this is quite different from basecamp’s offering.

Hope that answers your question!