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Show HN: Crocagile – Web-based agile development tool

croc.is

13 points by shaynbaron 11 years ago · 16 comments

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pan69 11 years ago

I'm just a nobody but these are my 2 cents for what it's worth.

1) I like the name.

2) Your pricing seems strange. I would make it $15 per month which includes 5 users and charge $2.50 for every extra user.

3) Regardless of the features you have, your product doesn't feel polished enough for me to take it serious.

4) I will be holding this up to a Jira, why should I use your product instead? I.e; who is your audience?

hayksaakian 11 years ago

It'd be nice if you included some "dummy data" instead of requiring me to fill everything into the demo

http://i.imgur.com/cqOaSKY.png

jlarocco 11 years ago

Wow, rough crowd.

I like the interface. It's like a mix between Jira and Trello. More focused than Jira, with more structure than Trello.

I don't really like Jira because of its kitchen sink approach. It tries to be everything to everybody with endless customization and options. It gives fifty ways to do everything and there's a different way to do any particular thing on every single page. As a developer, it annoys the hell out of me by making me spend way more time than I want to navigating through project management software. Not having all of the features of Jira isn't necessarily a bad thing, IMO.

I'm not sure what people are expecting when they say the site doesn't feel "polished enough." It works fine for me, and is as polished as any web app, AFAICT.

On the negative side, I think I get what you're saying about the pricing, but it is a little confusing. One idea would be to make it free for personal projects, but charge for collaboration, similar to how BitBucket does it.

  • noelbaron 11 years ago

    Thanks. I think you nailed exactly what we're trying to do in your second paragraph, but the trouble is we have had a hard time walking people through the product. And yes, very rough crowd

pbreit 11 years ago

Hate to say it but, it's not very good. I can't imagine anyone using it. At first it sounded like it might be full blown project management like Basecamp, Jira, etc. But it's actually just really really basic To Do lists. Project/task management is such a crucial tool for a company/organization that there's just no way they are going to opt to run their business on this. All the Learn and Share stuff is a major distraction with little value. The user experience is very rough both aesthetically and functionally. The "no email required" callout is odd as that makes very little sense. There's just an overall lack of focus and quality.

My advice would be to pick a much narrower use case and really nailing it. Instead this looks like the lowest of lowest common denominators and I would advise anyone to stay away.

Edit: the videos seem to show a lot more stuff than what I was able to find. Perhaps because I wasn't able to update? (error message said I have to "PUT" to a URL). I didn't see where the Trello-style post-it board was.

Edit: It looks like you're trying to be Jira, Trello, Yammer, Dropbox, Slack? It looks like sort of a Winchester Mystery House of endless cranking on product features with no real rhyme or reason or cohesion for any of it. That is a clear recipe for failure.

  • shaynbaronOP 11 years ago

    Thank you for your brutally honest feedback, this is great stuff! We're trying to work out all the kinks before we launch.

    Our goal is to provide an all in one solution that will bring teammates together in one place. Using 5 different tools/logins wastes time, money, and stalls productivity.

    Your feedback tells us that our onboarding has quite a long way to go ;)

    Thank you so much for taking the time.

aaronrau 11 years ago

Interesting concept. I was actually thinking about building something similar. Now I see just how hard it is. The problem is trying to take a complex system of tools; messaging, wiki, project management, dropbox, integrating it into a simple solution and more powerful solution.

Mobile Apps & Mobile Games are good examples to look at for their onboarding process. You have to win the user in 1.5 minutes.

dandanisaur 11 years ago

When looking at pricing, you've got 'Croc is $5' and 'Croc is free' in your subheadings. It's contradictory and seems weird. Would be nice to clean that up.

Here is a fairly good example from bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/plans

daken 11 years ago

I find it a bit frustrating to have to request a free trial before seeing anything at all about your product. Any videos out there? Or images?

reilly3000 11 years ago

The demo site isn't usable for me on iPhone 6 Plus. I think the issue is the top bar breaking the lightbox pop-ups.

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