Background: I am CTO of a small software company focused primarily on financial space. For project management I/we've used all of Jira, MS-Project, GitHub, Asana, Trello, Basecamp, and more at some point.
After many years of this, I really came to want a tool that could do one simple thing where it just estimated when something would be completed based on the current completed progress.
A lot of PM tools are setup where you have a dedicated PM and/or regular meetings/standups/scrums. I'm not opposed to any of that but to me I've always thought that if people are executing well and they're going to hit their delivery dates... why bother having meetings or making them jump through hoops?
But the tools are mostly not well setup for that. So back in probably '20 or '21 we built an MVP that we have used internally. We call it 'projjer'. It's great and it's gotten a lot better over the years, to the point where we don't even use any of those other tools unless there is a specific customer reason.
It's command-line-only project management.
It's UX is pretty similiar to git, and it even let you sync w/your team using git underlying.
The basic workflow is: minimalistic. Devs plan something out to whatever standard is appropriate for them or their team. They submit updates as they work. It's designed to have fewest keystrokes needed to use it. The tool generates estimates for each project, sub-project or OKR based on whatever has been submitted to that point. Then it's up to the person/team what if anything can be done beyond that.
There's more the tool can do, including regular pre-mortems against your projects, critical path and other reports. But minimalism is basically the main appeal for us internally.
Over the years more than a few have suggested I also sell it. I actually hired some interns to research this a couple of years back, but they didn't really think selling a tool w/a command-line interface was a great idea :). But occasionally when I speak to a devs or Product Manager and projjer comes up and they're interested. Just a week or so ago I was on a call w/PM at JetBrains and it happened again. So in true YC fashion I'm just gonna screw more research and just do a test.
If you wanna share feedback on if this is a horrible idea, feel free but please state what doesn't work for you. Or if you have wanted something like this and want to use it, we're gonna see if we get 10 signups this week. You can do this via the gumroad link. Or if you have another tool that does it better, would love to know more about that. Or anything else in between.
So that's pretty much it. If we get 10 signups by end of July 7th we'll sell it to public. If not, we'll refund any signups and we won't sell it.
Also this is again my first HN post and while I did read the news-faq and news-guidelines, if you feel I interpreted them wrong please lmk.
Thanks for your time.
feynmanrocks•7mo ago
not sure i used this site properly, but zero comments.
it will stay internal then.
feynmanrocks•7mo ago
Background: I am CTO of a small software company focused primarily on financial space. For project management I/we've used all of Jira, MS-Project, GitHub, Asana, Trello, Basecamp, and more at some point.
After many years of this, I really came to want a tool that could do one simple thing where it just estimated when something would be completed based on the current completed progress.
A lot of PM tools are setup where you have a dedicated PM and/or regular meetings/standups/scrums. I'm not opposed to any of that but to me I've always thought that if people are executing well and they're going to hit their delivery dates... why bother having meetings or making them jump through hoops?
But the tools are mostly not well setup for that. So back in probably '20 or '21 we built an MVP that we have used internally. We call it 'projjer'. It's great and it's gotten a lot better over the years, to the point where we don't even use any of those other tools unless there is a specific customer reason.
It's command-line-only project management. It's UX is pretty similiar to git, and it even let you sync w/your team using git underlying.
The basic workflow is: minimalistic. Devs plan something out to whatever standard is appropriate for them or their team. They submit updates as they work. It's designed to have fewest keystrokes needed to use it. The tool generates estimates for each project, sub-project or OKR based on whatever has been submitted to that point. Then it's up to the person/team what if anything can be done beyond that.
There's more the tool can do, including regular pre-mortems against your projects, critical path and other reports. But minimalism is basically the main appeal for us internally.
Over the years more than a few have suggested I also sell it. I actually hired some interns to research this a couple of years back, but they didn't really think selling a tool w/a command-line interface was a great idea :). But occasionally when I speak to a devs or Product Manager and projjer comes up and they're interested. Just a week or so ago I was on a call w/PM at JetBrains and it happened again. So in true YC fashion I'm just gonna screw more research and just do a test.
If you wanna share feedback on if this is a horrible idea, feel free but please state what doesn't work for you. Or if you have wanted something like this and want to use it, we're gonna see if we get 10 signups this week. You can do this via the gumroad link. Or if you have another tool that does it better, would love to know more about that. Or anything else in between.
So that's pretty much it. If we get 10 signups by end of July 7th we'll sell it to public. If not, we'll refund any signups and we won't sell it.
Also this is again my first HN post and while I did read the news-faq and news-guidelines, if you feel I interpreted them wrong please lmk.
Thanks for your time.