kevsim

Kitemaker (YC W21) | Fullstack engineer | Remote | Full-time Kitemaker just recently completed the W21 batch at YC and now it's time to start growing our team. We're looking for founding members who can not only help us shape our product, but also shape the company itself. We're building everything in TypeScript top-to-bottom (Node, React), our API uses GraphQL and we're working on a bunch of fun integrations (GitHub, GitLab, Slack, etc.).

Fully remote but should have some decent workday overlap with GMT+1 timezone.

Find out more at https://careers.kitemaker.co

We launched on HN a few months back ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540692

You sure it's not month.day.year? And therein lies the problem.

Fully agree. When we launched our service, we used really simple plain text mails and we had users complaining that they looking unprofessional and spammy. We didn't go crazy with our email design, and we're certainly not pushing the limits of what's possible to use in an email, but just adding a bit of color, a log and some text formatting made a big difference. Haven't heard a complaint since.

Kitemaker (YC W21) | Fullstack engineer | Remote | Full-time Kitemaker just recently completed the W21 batch at YC and now it's time to start growing our team. We're looking for founding members who can not only help us shape our product, but also shape the company itself.

We're building everything in TypeScript top-to-bottom (Node, React), our API uses GraphQL and we're working on a bunch of fun integrations (GitHub, GitLab, Slack, etc.).

Fully remote but should have some workday overlap with GMT+1 timezone.

Find out more at https://careers.kitemaker.co

We launched on HN about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540692

This is pretty decent advice. I'd also suggest that prettier should be in your setup in 2021. Let's stop fighting about formatting once and for all.

Anyone know what the rationale is here? I use yarn every day but I can’t understand the logic of having two different package managers in the node project. Replacing npm with yarn might be reasonable but I don’t get why you’d want two.

Kitemaker (YC W21) | Fullstack engineer | Remote | Full-time

Kitemaker just recently completed the W21 batch at YC and now it's time to start growing our team. We're looking for founding members who can not only help us shape our product, but also shape the company itself.

We're building everything in TypeScript top-to-bottom (Node, React), our API uses GraphQL and we're working on a bunch of fun integrations (GitHub, GitLab, Slack, etc.).

Find out more at https://careers.kitemaker.co

We also just launched on HN the other day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540692

We used this extension the other day for our LaunchHN [0] where we got 175ish comments. It was super useful, both to get notifications in macOS, but also to people able to page through the comments and see the read/unread ones. Definitely keeping this extension installed!

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26540692

I think you probably have a valid point that many companies have invested a lot in customizing and tweaking their Jira installs and then built a lot of value on top of that customized and tweaked Jira installation, and convincing those companies could be a real challenge.

But we've also talked to many, many teams that use a relatively vanilla install of Jira just because it's what people are used to doing ("no one ever got fired for picking Jira"). In quite a number of cases, we've convinced these teams to switch to Kitemaker. As we mature the product, improve our developer offering and build out our ecosystem, we're confident we'll convince even more.

Thanks! Can't wait to see that API project ;-)

Thanks for the feedback! We're always working on making the landing page better, so I think adding some clearer videos is something we'll look into.

We were also thinking of chunking up that gif with clear captions so it's obvious what you should be seeing at each stage.

Exactly! That’s one of the main goals we have with Kitemaker.

Thanks for the feedback!

An app marketplace is something we absolutely aspire to. Our API is a modest start in that direction.

Self-hosting is very interesting and something we hadn't thought much about but all the feedback here on HN has really gotten us thinking. Also interesting in light of the fact that Jira is pulling back from its own on prem offerings.

Regarding being for managers vs. engineers, we're very much determined to be for the whole team. As managers ourselves we want to be 100% extra careful to not make yet another tool that the team thinks is "for us managers". We've never gotten much value from such tools ourselves.

Thanks for the feedback! Pricing is always a challenge and we set the price based on surveying other products in this space. So far our paying customers have had no complaints about the price. But that being said, we'll for sure keep thinking about it as we move forward and grow.

Thank you so much for this insightful comment. You (and the many others commenting) have given us a lot to think about in terms of on prem!

Hard to say in terms of % but we’ll be adding some Kitemaker vs X comparisons to our landing page soon!

Can I ask a probably naive question - is self-hosting the main requirement? Or are there other certifications that are required in addition to ensure, for example, that it doesn't phone home with your data? Or is all of that covered by the fact that you self-host and are in control of outbound traffic?

Thanks! I think splitting the bundle is a great idea but something we haven't had time to dig into yet. We'll also get it compressed ASAP.

Thanks for the feedback!

And sorry you experienced long loading times. It should definitely not take that long to load so maybe we were getting hugged hard when you tried. Would you mind trying again to see if it's better at all?

Thanks for the feedback. The guide is a bit of an experiment we're trying at the moment to make it super easy for our team to update the content there easily. We may need to rethink it a bit it seems!

Thanks for the feedback!

We'll definitely add much more of a feature by feature comparison with some of our competitors.

With regards to complexity, we have a principle that we try to hide as much complexity as possible from users until they need it. So rather than big forms with loads of dropdowns or a lot of boxes that need filling in, we try to keep the UI pretty sparse. We tuck things behind buttons or in the cmd+K menu so they're out of they way. Some examples of stuff that's not in the UI til you need it:

* Added team members to work items

* Setting effort/impact of work items

* Adding a backlog to a space

* Etc

These are all things that some teams but not all teams need, so we don't want to give teams the feeling they're doing something wrong just because they're not using them.

No immediate plans, sorry. But we're definitely going to have a chat about self hosting since there seems to be some demand there.

Thanks! Really appreciate it

Thanks very much! We've gotten some requests to "lift" the feed up to each level of the tool summarize what's been going on. Something we've thought about quite a bit but haven't had time to get to just yet.

Thanks for the tip on the pricing! We'll add it to our menu.

At the moment we're quite focused on teams' internal development process and we're a very small team (though we'll be growing a bit soon). That being said, we're having a lot of discussions with teams on how we can make it even more useful. One area that comes up a lot is capturing user feedback/feature requests/etc. Another is support tickets. Let's see what comes next!

We're actually in between drag and drop libs at the moment. We currently use react-beautiful-dnd [0], but it has some major shortcomings and doesn't feel very well maintained. That being said, it's a pretty impressive lib that probably works for a lot of people as-is.

We've got a branch where we've switched to dndkit [1] which I like a lot - really nice API with hooks for everything. However, it has some annoying bugs that mean we can't quite switch yet. That being said it seems like the one that's hanging us up the most is nearly fixed [2].

0: https://github.com/atlassian/react-beautiful-dnd

1: https://dndkit.com/

2: https://github.com/clauderic/dnd-kit/pull/140

Ouch! Sorry about that. Still seeing it?

Thanks!

We're very aware of them, tried to capture it a bit here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26542607

We’ll checkout out our webflow setup to see if there’s anything we can do there to prevent the burger menu from getting messed up. Thanks for the tip.

We don’t offer on prem currently but there’s a discussion a few comment threads up.

Apart from the little video on the landing page, I made a voiced over demo video for our launch on product hunt the other day that shows off a lot of the core stuff: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/kitemaker-2