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Comment by rrdharan | Hacker News Reader

The author of this blog has been the head of PM at Asana for nearly 9 years, during which they've completely failed to come up with a sustainable product strategy and have been bleeding money for years.

"... the world would be a better place if people spend less time on failed projects and more time working on things that make a difference."

Asana was founded in 2008. It seems destined to fail, and will have largely wasted a large number of people's time, and seems very unlikely to be a "thing that ma[de] a difference".

https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-bubble-has-popped-for-unprofit...

"Asana lost an incredible $285m in 2021, $210m in 2020, and $118m in 2019. They're on track to losing even more with over $370m in losses booked for the trailing twelve months. That's closing in on a billion dollars in losses over the last four years. Madness."

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There’s a joke in the first episode of Silicon Valley where some mundane startup oversells their mission as something about enabling humanity to thrive. I saw an interview with Mike Judge where he said it was just a copy of an actual experience he had where a founder was telling him all these grand visions about how he was going to lift up humanity and Mike thought it was some sort of charity. But when he asked again what the company was, it was a todo app! Mike didn’t name the company, but I Googled the mission statement he mentioned and it was clearly Asana.

Not to mention asana just isn’t amazing either. It’s such an elementary pm tool given how long it’s been around and how much money they’ve spent, it really makes you wonder where it’s all gone.

What would you’d hugest instead? My org likes the flexibility it provides.

Honestly if you get a very skilled atlassian operator you can do massive scale project management pretty easily. Everyone loves to hate on jira, but it’s crazy powerful. It’s just easy for it to go to shit unless you have someone who is both highly competent and highly opinionated running it all.

If you’re a dev team try Linear or Height

At my last startup we tested a number of options and decided to go with ClickUp. I personally preferred the philosophy of Linear, but ClickUp can do way more and it’s quite good. Their feature velocity is really impressive too. And we did run into bugs and performance issues, but support was responsive and helpful.

Asana needs document support. Nothing complicated, just a simple wiki or doc editor that lets us capture and link notes, findings, requirements, etc.

We ended up moving to ClickUp over this.

I wouldn't really bring up them losing money as a reason why they are going to fail.

You can count on your two hands how many small to mid size SaaS/tech companies actually make money. Almost all of them are money burning machines.

> You can count on your two hands how many small to mid size SaaS/tech companies actually make money.

I think you’ll see this change slowly in the next 2-3 years.

I’ve been running a small/medium company for 7 years now, bootstrapped but with a small $1 million seed round in 2015.

During the 2020/2021 bubble, our seed investors were very angry at us for being profitable. (Angry isn’t an exaggeration)

After the bubble bursts, those same investors are now praising us for being so “cash efficient” and profitable.

Founders are heavily influenced by the recommendations of advisors around them. Now that the entire VC community is condoning/punishing high cash burn companies, you’ll start to see more conservative ways of operating a business become more common, since that’s now what VC, PE, etc all want to see right now (and for the foreseeable future, at least until interest rates go way down)

Having investors doesn't sound like fun!

>During the 2020/2021 bubble, our seed investors were very angry at us for being profitable. (Angry isn’t an exaggeration)

That's nuts. Interested to hear more.

You’re a profitable SaaS. Would you take out a loan for 100MM if you can use it to make n * 100MM?

That’s what SaaS shops are doing. many (not all) could show profit. But instead they e reinvested all profits and then some to get accelerated growth.

If you grow merely sustainably and profitable, many VC won't fund you, as track record doesn't show the curve they need to offset all the fails and/or market you to the underwriters for IPO.

// disclaimer: ymmv

I believe she left Asana a few years ago.

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