The problem I have with products like Asana has always been context. It’s just too much hassle for businesses with very unique processes, often requiring something more custom built, and of course, a deep introspection of data.
There are way too many "highly opinionated" productivity apps which are not built with enough freedom and "leeway" for anything but a very basic workflow. It's almost like the software is built for how the company itself works or from an idealistic design standpoint than for the messiness of complicated work.
I still think a properly configured JIRA instance is the best framework for a growing software company to build upon. It's very easy to misconfigure or mess up JIRA but done correctly, it's one of the best pieces of software for getting things done at a larger company (50+ people).
Personally I’m not even thinking about software companies, I’m talking about the vast majority of companies out there in countless industries.
It’s just not possible to have a good generic app to serve all of them. There’s just too much variety in workflows and edge cases to capture them all, and few companies will change the way they work to accommodate the opinionated workflow of some productivity vendor.
The best solution is still to build custom applications for each company, molded around the way they work, and owned by them 100%, so they can feel fully confident that the product will not disappear or change in ways they don’t like.
On non-tech setups, such systems are called ERP systems. The its a mature multi-billion dollar market with hundreds of entrenched players. The moment an application like Asana tries to cross that threshold, they get compared to the ERP products that are designed to handle specific workflow.
ERP products lack flexibility and generally have very poor user experience (since the buyers are not the users). I think there is a separate place for both these products and it depends on the organization when the switch from one domain to another.
I think it boils down to tradeoffs.
For example- The best option (custom solution) may cost you 100k and drives max productivity.
But if Asana (a more one size fits all product) costs you 20k and drives about 70% of max productivity - Asana might be the better option if the additional 30% productivity is not worth 80k.
The risk with Asana though is vendor lock in. If your business comes to depend on Asana too much you’re at the mercy of whatever they do, including “shutting down and going out of business”.
The other solution, and a better one IMHO, is to extend the 80% product using their APIs. I'm not familiar with Asana but Trello has fantastic APIs including webhooks all that events in the tool can trigger activity in your integration.
> It's almost like the software is built for how the company itself works or from an idealistic design standpoint than for the messiness of complicated work.
Isn't this a take on Conway's law?
As for your Jira point, so many people abused it to build bad process that it's flexibility is a negative point these days.
Thank you. People love dissing Jira, but the current cloud product is actually by far the best and flexible software project management tool I’ve used in 20 years.
The deep problem is that products like Asana are built around the paradigm of repeatable orchestrations of piecework, while business processes are exception prone choreographies of intelligent actors.
Productivity apps in Silicon Valley startups are out of control. My wife's company has Slack, G Suite, JIRA, Facebook at Work, Zugata, and now getting Asana. If you need to ping someone, you have to ping them in Slack, Hangouts, FB Messenger and hope they respond to one.
Hence tools like Zappier. I've had great success getting all notifications in Slack via Zappier, reducing switching between different tools. But that means that Zappier has access to EVERYTHING, which somewhat scares me from a privacy and intellectual property standpoint.
This does seem to indicate that current methods of communication aren't working (or at least enough people are convinced it's not) since everyone is buying solutions to fix the problem.
>“Asana’s mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly.“
I worked in many companies previously where Asana was used. I can tell you with sheer confidence, at no point did we feel the "help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly." part. Not once, not ever.
Every time we used it, the project managers would love it for the first two weeks and they would simply revert back to email/slack for reminding teams of deadlines or deliverables.
But you know what REALLY helped out the most? Unsexy Excel sheets combined with regular checkin meetings. We would have ONE meeting every Monday morning where we would review our excel sheet for everyone's progress, updates and deliverables.
Heck, I think even Trello works much better than the god awful interface that Asana has. But, Asana has never worked for any of the teams I've worked with in the past, irrespective of the company size. Maybe that's just me.
I tried Asana twice, first to coordinate a couple of "weekend projects" with some other devs, then at work with a larger team. In both cases I have found it very underwhelming compared to other products I used (Atlassian Jira, MS Planner). My last experience was that every time I logged in Asana, I would be redirected to an empty project/team, and there was no way to change that default behaviour (if I remember well it was because my email was on a different domain than the rest of the team, and Asana creates teams based on the email address' domain). I disliked it so much that I ended up asking my manager to change product, to which he agreed.
Same here. We quickly grew to hate Asana, and eventually switched to Trello, then ClubHouse, but I'm personally pretty fed up with these tools. In the end, they become bottomless buckets of stagnating information. We don't need charts or burn rates or estimates.
For projects (like a big new feature with a clear set of tasks), a Google Docs document or spreadsheet works just as well, and usually it's best to have this stuff in the project manager's hands, and not let people mess with it individually.
That said, there's parts of the process that don't have an obvious place. A typical example is a customer issue that arises and needs input and coordination between multiple people, including devs and salespeople and the customer themselves, perhaps including some files that need to be shared. Email is so terrible at this, since adding new people late to the conversation don't let them easily see the chronology, and no email client has yet to make conversations (which sloppy top quoting and huge corporate signatures) readable. A group direct message on Slack, perhaps? I'm thinking Slack is a little too real-time and chaotic. Maybe a private Discourse install?
Managing one's personal queue of tasks (which don't necessarily map to the project's tasks, they could be things like "refactor X") is where I personally seek a better tool. A Markdown file really isn't sufficient. Apple's Reminders app is terrible. Evernote is not good at it. I've yet to find something good.
Never liked it. Omni's apps are generally cluttered, over-complicated and full of bad UX. No iCloud support, clunky iOS app, everything feels like it's 2006 again.
I like Things — both Mac and iOS apps have good UX — but it lacks some essential features, the most critical of which is the ability to add files to tasks. It's an absolutely must-have for development tasks. Its limited notational support (just a tiny, cramped text field) also makes it less useful for anything except basic personal reminders.
The lack of file support also makes Things less useful for other things, such as doing research into things to buy (new sofa, that kind of thing) or places to go. I use Evernote for this, but it's also a terrible app.
I have tried Bear, thanks. It's not good enough for me.
For one, it's tied to Markdown, which I find distracting to work with, especially on mobile. (I don't understand the tech community's current obsession with Markdown; it's fine for documentation or Github comments and so on where there's a clear workflow separation between writing and publishing, but for personal tasks? Ugh.)
Bear also makes the same mistake with regards to files that Evernote (and every other note-taking app for that matter) does, which is to only display them inline. If I dump in a bucketload of images into a note, they're all display as huge images that need to be resized. Actually, Bear doesn't support resizing images at all, all you can do is switch between displaying them full, and as thumbnail (just like Apple's Notes), which is even worse. Evernote's image editing/annotation mode is great, Bear doesn't have anything like that.
No folder support. Evernote is also bad here, but it does allow you create "notebooks" and to "stack" notebooks inside each other.
I like Bear's modern UI much more than Evernote's, but a note-taking app would have to be considerably better than Evernote for me to switch everything over, and it's unfortunately not.
Sorry about the rant, talking about note-taking apps fires me up. :-)
$75M... for what??!
Call me sceptic but I just don't understand how they can raise that kind of money. There is just nothing special about Asana. Is it purely fuelled by amazing growth? And What is the exit strategy here? An acquisition by Atlassian?
Meanwhile, I am bootstrapping and dreaming of launching and making a few $K or hundreds of $K. Maybe I am not ambitious enough when there seem to be so much "free" money up for grabs.
To me personally it is not about negativity (or criticizing their software) but financial realism.
With their amount of paying customers, there is no way they can justify their valuation. I would love to understand the raise from their perspective, and the investors'. Is it to stay afloat? Is it in hopes of boosting valuation for a medium-term acquisition? Why $75M more when their revenue is a sliver of that?
Why can't we do both? I'm happy for them sure, but that doesn't stop people from questioning how they can't be profitable on their own already, why the performance is still one of the worst from all of the PM tools, or why you cannot allow more customization.
I think tone on HN can come across as very derisive or dismissive sometimes. It's one thing to not be unary, but it is another to be able to write down a coherent set of thoughts which critique the platform without sledging it, and congratulating a company on their success.
Overall HNers aren't the most supportive and compassionate bunch, but then again we're here for news and discussion and not back slapping.
I'm happy for Asana as I find the core product useful, but I do wonder how much more growth is possible without branching out into other product areas. Hopefully they've got some interesting stuff in the pipeline.
30,000 paying customers after 6 years. How much do they make from each customer, $100?
That's $3M revenue per year justifying a $30M valuation at the high end. How do they come up with $1B with slow
growth like that? Is it because they have a famous founding team? Seems like a small startup with little growth potential, who can raise any money they want anyway, because their founders are billionaires.
Not hating on that, but how do they think of paying back their investors. Is this an ego thing, that they think they MUST build a billion dollar startup even though their revenue and growth is tiny?
Where did you find that paying customers have 100 users on average? In that case it would also only be 30,000 customers * 100 users * 10 = $30M a year.
900MM according to Business Insider. You would think this should be enough to get a 1B+ especially when they have been around since 2008. My guess is that they have a decent ARR but they are struggling to find more addressable market.
That's really good and above average. How different it is for you in the SME/SMB segment vs enterprise? Churn is much higher for small 5-10 person installations usually, as the switching costs are small and often even initial payments are to continue trialing it. Much different for 1000 users implementation.
“Asana’s mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling all teams to work together effortlessly.“ I’ve tried the product and if that was their mission I couldn’t tell. Trying to force some sort of higher purpose into every company seems disingenuous at best. Seems like a stretch for an impact investment firm.
We can see that individuals value humanistic goals in the tech industry, and companies find it important to claim they fulfill these goals. As Mike Judge shows, often the claim is shallow – only put forth to gain status.
To judge the claim for a company suggesting positive social good, there’s an easy test: would the company claim a positive social good if there were no recruiting, PR, or status gains to come of it? If the answer is no, the company is simply behaving as the mimicking actor and the claim should be ignored. A company who truly has that positive social good as a mission will, simply in stating their reason for existence, claim the social good. As examples: OPower, Stellar, Khan Academy, Mosaic, SpaceX, etc. (note that I don’t work for nor own stock in any of these companies)
Really, their mission could be: "making work more efficient by helping all teams work together effortlessly" or "saving time for humans by making collaboration easier". Those would be decent without the puff.
Either the company needed to have a mission to attract and impact investment firm or the impact investment firm is having trouble finding opportunities and has to convert companies into faux impact startups.
This is a good example what happens when everyone wants to do some kind of "impact investing". Companies have to come up with clever ways to market themselves even if it is disingenuous.
Personally, I prefer a whiteboard kanban made up of post-its over any work organization software. When remote workers are involved, then I reach for Trello.
Communication tools are a different matter, but generally, a mindful email culture seems to work well.
We’re fairly happy with Asana - but it took us a couple of weeks to figure out how we wanted to use it and come up with our own conventions.
I think it works well for mixed teams- jira was too technical for half of our team, and I was opposed to email. It doesn’t absolve you of doing project management though - I wish its reporting tools were more powerful...
Asana reminds me of that saying that there are only software that people love to hate and those that nobody has heard of, Asana has been reliably bad when I used it, this in a humourous way confirms it.
I don't usually complain "what the heck are they doing with that kind of money." But, from a cursory look, Asana seems to be one of the most functionally simple Project Management software I have seen. I know it's trite to undermine the complexity of software, but in this case, I can't find many reasons why they need that kind of money. What are they doing that necessitates a big team (251-500 employees)? The software isn't handling massive amounts of data. Its complexity seems comparable to Trello, which raised only $10M (<7% of Asana's total funding) [1].
How are they burning this amount of cash? Am I missing something?
Customer acquisition. Once you know the LTV of an enterprise customer and you know the cost to acquire them, as well as the channel, you go to the bank, take out as much money as you can, and get as many of them as possible.
I'd bet most of the money is going to their employees. Asana offers great perks. Higher than average salaries, free meals, "unlimited" vacation, paid maternity/paternity leave. New employees also get $10,000 to furnish their desk.
They probably burn $250k/yr per developer, higher than most other tech companies.
I think it's a great product. It saddens me that they need to keep raising funds, in theory this should be a business that works. There's companies offering products that add questionable value and can be highly profitable, especially in finance and around real estate.