[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (do...
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Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form,
site, chat...)
Nino is a radical approach to solve the app chaos problem for
today's knowledge worker. I believe there are still too many tools;
even using them becomes work in itself. I'm building all these apps
from scratch in one place, using the same database and UI, with the
flexibility to eventually support the majority of work from one
"superapp." Currently there are 18 apps (called "modules") on
Nino: - Database types: Sheet, Form, Calendar, Gallery, Board,
Todo, List - Composition types: Doc, Slide, Drive, Notebook,
Canvas, Grid, Blog, Site - Communication types: Channel, Chat,
Meet I want to improve these modules and build more. Your feedback
is important! FAQ: How is it different from Google Workspace,
Microsoft 365, or startups like Notion and Clickup? A: I _think_
Nino has a better foundation to (1) consolidate a lot more apps
than they currently do, (2) drastically improve speed with offline
architecture, and (3) offer unmatched privacy and security with
end-to-end encryption (coming soon) Let me expand on these points:
1. Consolidation In Nino, pages and blocks are interoperable with
each other. Google and Microsoft still have mostly isolated apps.
Nino is one (super)app that supports 18 modules, saving you time
from switching and integrating between different providers. 2.
Offline mode This is actually more complex than it seems, but I
ultimately decided it's worth it, not only for people who need to
work without internet, but also for everyone else who want instant
page load. Everything is saved locally by default. 3. End-to-end
encryption (E2EE) This is just a preview and not open to public
yet, but is something I have been building alongside since day 1.
In fact, it's likely not architecturally possible for existing
products to add later on. Nino is built to offer both E2EE and
cloud features (backup, search, collaboration). One more thing:
pages on Nino are also publishable! There are blog and site
modules, but you can also publish other modules (i.e. sheet, board,
canvas, etc.) on your custom domain or on a free nino.page
subdomain. Give it a try and let me know how it can improve. I
want to hear from you.
Author : harrisonlo
Score : 496 points
Date : 2024-01-07 14:34 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nino.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (nino.app)
| dabedee wrote:
| Congratulations on releasing your product! It looks super
| interesting. Some questions from the top of my head: - Where is
| the data stored geographically? (US, EU, or a specific country) -
| Do you plan on having multiple options for the web version (cloud
| vs self-hosted)
|
| I find that data sovereignty is very important to me (it might
| not be for everyone), which is why I ask about those points
| specifically ;)
| harrisonlo wrote:
| Thanks! Data sovereignty is also top of my mind, but I think we
| should approach it not with the physical location of the
| servers/databases, but with the ability to encrypt, thus own,
| your data.
|
| Currently it uses GCP with data centers in the US, but when
| E2EE is rolled out, I don't think it would matter where it's
| located? There might be legal complications so I'm also
| thinking of moving the physical databases to jurisdictions like
| Switzerland, if it comes to that.
|
| Given the complexity of the backend, I think a self-hosted
| version might not be possible in the short term. However,
| single tenant versions (like GitLab dedicated) is definitely
| doable.
| Vermyndax wrote:
| Unfortunately, it _always_ matters. There 's always someone
| who wants to know where the data is physically located and
| they will always want an answer for it.
| weakwire wrote:
| Very interesting. what is your tech stack?
| redcobra762 wrote:
| Security & privacy are tough selling points; fewer people care
| about either than you may think, and the existing platforms
| provide a lot more than most who do care are willing to admit.
|
| Also the "too many tools" pitch sounds like an unhinged rant.
| There's almost certainly a better way to phrase that, because
| otherwise the idea that the mere existence of a wide variety of
| tools bothers you doesn't stand up to the "so don't use them all"
| rebuttal. Maybe focus in the convenience factor, and the
| integration within your platform instead, as that is a genuine
| value-add.
|
| Good luck!
| harrisonlo wrote:
| On your first point: I think the trend is more will start to
| care. I agree many platforms provide a lot of security
| features, but few allow you to encrypt with custom keys though.
|
| On your second point: That's a good point, bad phrasing on my
| part. Thanks for the feedback.
| swells34 wrote:
| Something to keep in mind about all this (and something that
| my wife reminds me of when I get annoyed trying to write
| product descriptions) is that the _description_ and the
| _product_ are separate. In that, if I struggle to write a
| description that is attractive to _everyone_ , it doesn't
| necessarily mean that the unattracted ones won't like the
| product. And some that are attracted to the description will
| dislike the product.
|
| This is just part of the difficulty of marketing; you can't
| please everyone. You have to figure out what problems the
| _bulk_ of your possible user market are trying to solve that
| your app solves, and present that plainly and concisely.
| Flowery language tends to obfuscate; just plain simple "If
| you have problems XYZ, this will solve those", then link to
| greater detail about how each of X, Y, and Z, are solved.
|
| It's hard to do this because we are so used to seeing mid
| level manager bullshit PR speak on every product page we look
| at; it seems like a requirement. I've had very refreshing
| experiences with product descriptions written by a technical
| writer who just did not give a fuck. Just wrote it up like he
| was sending an email about a bug report, published it, and it
| was fantastic.
| mstngl wrote:
| Congrats for such an profound launch of kind an Army knife for
| office needs. I like this approach of "modules" very much,
| especially compared to MS365 cosmos where you've got the great
| four apps very prominent and new apps / functions hiding their
| potential power behind a lot of new names and rather confusing
| menues.
|
| What is your vision about email? I know, it's not an advanced nor
| modern technology but still the established backbone of office
| communication, especially if you want to conquer the given field.
| Despite MS365 has Outlook as default app working with emails in
| other contexts is still a pain.
| harrisonlo wrote:
| I've thought about email - it'll likely be a module that syncs
| with your outlook or gmail. This is one area that is very hard
| to replace, because the cost of switching email is huge. Once
| the emails are synced to nino, they become blocks and can
| interoperate with other modules i.e. crm type of use cases
| airstrike wrote:
| This is really cool -- congrats on the launch! The productivity
| worker's "app chaos problem" as you called it is a real problem
| and a solvable one.
|
| I'm building something similar after spending 10+ years working
| with those numerous different apps day in and day out in quote-
| unquote "high stakes" white-collar roles. It's early days and I'm
| approaching it from a slightly different angle, but there's a
| certain amount of overlap between the two visions. I'm focusing
| on a smaller set of apps but more fleshed out set of features,
| aiming for feature parity with incumbents + my own features
| (which incidentally is why this is taking a while to build
| well...)
|
| Curious to see how Nino progresses and we should connect later on
| when I have something tangible to show, if you're up for it
| Closi wrote:
| Super impressive app by the look of things, but as you asked for
| feedback, it is (to me) very confusing on the product side of
| things (i.e. what is it and why does it matter to me).
|
| As a business user it's not clear how I would use it, and why I
| would care.
|
| Your front page reads as:
|
| > Nino is a collection of apps that can interoperate with each
| other on the block-level from one uniform interface. It has
| interoperable pages and blocks. It is flexible, extensible, and
| adapting to your needs as you grow, as Nino helps you consolidate
| tools and reduce costs. It has page sourcing so you can view
| pages in a different way. It has page embed, so you can sync page
| to another page. It has sync block to another page, but you can
| also block mirror and sync block on the same page.
|
| A good comparison against your front page would be against
| monday.com or Asana who start with use-cases and practical
| application. See Monday:
|
| > Monday - A platform built for a new way of working. What would
| you like to manage?
|
| > * Work Management - Run all aspects of work
|
| > * Sales CRM - Streamline sales processes
|
| > * Dev - Manage product lifecycles
|
| Then if I click any of those categories, it goes into the exact
| ways it can help me.
| farley13 wrote:
| +1 to this. Focusing on usecases would be great. ex: I wanted
| to see what features were available for your sheets module.
|
| Was willing to spend 5 minutes on a walk. Tried the web app -
| ios safari is not supported :( downloaded the ios app and
| registered. Got a totally blank app - no onboarding, no
| template / samples, no obvious way to import from my existing
| google sheets to see how things scaled. I added a datasource
| and a few fields (which felt confusing) and my walk was over.
| nine_k wrote:
| > _interoperate with each other on the block-level from one
| uniform interface_
|
| Sounds quite a bit like Notion. A comparison would be apt.
|
| Also sounds a bit like OLE / OpenDoc on desktop, embedding an
| Excel sheet into a Word doc along with an Access form. If it
| can do that, it could make quite a demo.
| marwis wrote:
| Microsoft was pushing something like that few years ago under
| the name Fluid Framework: https://youtu.be/tPw5kFkXtt4
|
| But seems to have devolved into generic state synchronization
| library these days.
| wavemode wrote:
| Yep. This is a product in desperate need of a "Showcase" page
| showing off why it's valuable.
| dkarl wrote:
| > very confusing on the product side of things (i.e. what is it
| and why does it matter to me)
|
| My initial thought was, this vision looks like what happens
| when a company realizes that their core product is less
| valuable than everything adjacent to it and starts growing
| their product a dozen different directions simultaneously.
|
| But maybe there's something different about embracing this
| holistic vision from the start, as opposed to trying to be
| focused and then getting forced into scope creep.
| siva7 wrote:
| Ok, so now we got 19 apps competing for our attention?
| airstrike wrote:
| One app to rule them all
| chalst wrote:
| Congratulations on the launch of your app!
|
| Have you thought about what sort of developers would develop
| modules? Have you made any efforts to engage the free software
| community?
| siamese_puff wrote:
| Can this be self-hosted? Is it opensource?
| analog31 wrote:
| I always ask this of new apps: To include code cells in the
| editors via ipython.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Nino is a radical approach to solve the app chaos problem for
| today's knowledge worker ... I'm building all these apps from
| scratch in one place, using the same database and UI, with the
| flexibility to support the majority of work from one "superapp
| eventually."
|
| Maybe I can see some use-case for personal use (big maybe), but
| right off the bat, you can't use this at any company (small
| startup or enterprise), for several reasons: Lack of
| functionality, lack of organization-based group and access
| control workflows, auditing, user provisioning/de-provisioning,
| lack of cross-organization document sharing and collaboration and
| compatibility, plugin support, email integration, domain hosting,
| etc. etc.
|
| I'm not even sure a motivated individual contractor could use
| this professionally due to the need to collaborate with their
| customers. I'm not even sure you could dog-food this while
| managing Nino Inc.
|
| >Nino is one (super)app that supports 18 modules, saving you time
| from switching and integrating between different providers.
|
| Is that even a real problem?
|
| Most places will use either Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace -
| those platforms are very well integrated internally. MS365 has
| all the apps you built except they are feature-rich and some are
| industry standards (like the Office suite), plus much more - and
| everything is very well integrated.
|
| But that isn't enough. Sometimes users may prefer, for example,
| Confluence as a wiki instead of the MS365 Sharepoint wiki - the
| reason why is because they want to choose a 'best of breed'
| solution for their use case .. or it may just be a subjective
| preference. In that case, yes, the integration isn't as great but
| it is workable (there are plugins to allow deeper integration of
| external applications). Your solution won't be able to get away
| from that either. Even if I like your Todo and Notebook apps, I
| may prefer using Zoom for conference calls and Slack for chat ..
| what happens then?
| harrisonlo wrote:
| A lot of features you mentioned are actually implemented (role-
| based permission, cross workspace sharing, domain hosting...)
| and some that will come (audit logs and other enterprise
| things).
|
| I get the best-of-breed argument. Nino's thesis is that people
| will find more value if enough tools are bundled in one place.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >A lot of features you mentioned are implemented
|
| No, they aren't. I'm not trying to be argumentative, but
| there is a difference between true support and a superficial
| check-mark.
|
| >I get the best-of-breed argument. Nino's thesis is that
| people will find more value if enough tools are bundled in
| one place
|
| I'd like to interrogate this a little more. Why would someone
| not go with MS365 or Workspace?
|
| I can see your answer of: >Nino has a better foundation to
| (1) consolidate a lot more apps than they currently do, (2)
| drastically improve speed with offline architecture, and (3)
| offer unmatched privacy and security with end-to-end
| encryption (coming soon)
|
| Taking this point by point: 1) Your ambition is to have more
| apps, but the reality is that TODAY, both MS365 and Workspace
| actually have MORE applications integrated, and those
| applications are much more feature-rich. 2) MS365 certainly
| has deep offline integration. Workspace, I'm not sure what
| their capabilities are. 3) Neither MS365 nor Workspace
| supports true e2e (though I seem to remember Workspace having
| some option to import your own keys for client-side
| encryption) - regardless, I'm not sure that's enough as a
| selling point. Also, e2e has many challenges around the UX of
| key management, rotation and sharing.
|
| By the way, MS365 and Workspace are not the only games in
| town. If you want to see another example of a 'super-app'
| that supports a million 'modules' take a look at ZohoOne -
| they support everything under the sun for a relatively low
| price, and all of it is mediocre (at best).
|
| ---
|
| Another thing I can't gauge from your page is, what it means
| for one of your modules to be very well integrated against
| another. You have a chat app and a slide app .. how do those
| work together that puts MS365 to shame?
| wazzaps wrote:
| What's your business model? Everything seems "free" so far.
| rtcoms wrote:
| What is the tech stack you've used this for ?
| stareatgoats wrote:
| Some thoughts while installing this in order to test (and trying
| to find the pricing page): I believe putting interoperability
| first is the right idea, and we have barely begun to scratch the
| surface of opportunities in this area. The browser based
| technologies can gain an upper hand here because of the platform
| independence and reusability of technologies across
| functionalities.
|
| That said, there is an enormous amount of work required to match
| the functionalities of legacy programs: interoperability itself
| is probably not enough to compete with these. I believe the most
| viable route is some sort of open source solution. The amount of
| VC financing would likely need to be staggering for a solution
| like this to gain any major traction.
|
| (That is, unless an LLM can be made to produce the whole thing
| over a weekend at some point in the near future ...)
| macspoofing wrote:
| >I believe putting interoperability first is the right idea,
| and we have barely begun to scratch the surface of
| opportunities in this area.
|
| Is it really 'interoperability' if it cannot integrate with any
| external applications?
| stareatgoats wrote:
| I'm sure programs like this can achieve the same
| interoperability with external programs as other applications
| that already do this. That's a fairly primitive level of
| integration though, compared to the possibilities that would
| seem to open once you control both sides of the API.
| cabalamat wrote:
| > In Nino, pages and blocks are interoperable with each other
|
| what does a "block" mean in this context?
| YPPH wrote:
| Gee whiz, the scope of features is super impressive at such an
| early stage. It's a very unusual experience to be able to
| integrate pretty much any object in one module into another
| module - a big conceptual shift.
|
| Can I suggest you include a dummy workspace in each user's
| account demonstrating the product to its full potential? Or at
| least give me an option when creating a workspace to make it into
| a demo. This might not only benefit the user, but you too, as
| you'll have to think about the purpose of the product and how it
| can be leveraged in a business context.
|
| Good luck.
| samwillis wrote:
| I would love to know a little more about your tech stack and
| architecture?
|
| You say "Everything is saved locally by default", with full
| office support. Essentially you have built a "local-first" app,
| or about 10 of them!
|
| I would definitely play on that for marketing, the local-first
| place is getting quite a bit of buzz. (I'm biased, but I think
| 2024 if the year local-first is going to go mainstream)
|
| What tech are you using for conflict resolution for offline
| edits, I'm guessing you have generalised this in some way? Are
| you using CRDTs? And any particular local-first database tech?
|
| Have you considered adding any real-time multiplayer features? If
| you've solved the offline edit problems, you are 95% of the way
| to real-time.
| harrisonlo wrote:
| It's on GCP and 99% "serverless" with TypeScript + React
| frontend. Flutter for mobile apps and Electron for desktop apps
| (planning to switch the desktop apps to Flutter too once their
| desktop frameworks are more stable)
|
| Noted on the "local-first" term, thanks!
|
| I thought about doing CRDT in the beginning, but because not
| every block type is text, I simplified the implementation to
| last write wins. Note that every paragraph is a block, so it's
| not like the entire page is overwritten. CRDT is still doable
| though.
|
| There are real-time text cursors and block selections, but I
| intentionally did not implement Figma-style floating cursors
| that people may expect in certain modules. I thought it looks
| cool but doesn't offer much value, especially when you can
| already see what other people selected.
| prismatix wrote:
| Interesting you say that because I've always felt like a big
| drawback of Google Docs is the inability to see the floating
| cursor. It doesn't feel as immersive as, say, Figma editing.
| However, I'm just one person and my opinion doesn't speak for
| them all! It'd be interesting to see an A/B test with this
| sort of functionality.
| localhost wrote:
| For sure this is a super-impressive (solo?) effort and I'm
| certain a ton of work went into this.
|
| Some feedback:
|
| Who is the customer for this? Can you describe what their day
| looks like and how Nino helps them get their work done
| better/faster/cheaper? What are the top 5 problems that they face
| that Nino is clearly better than the competition? Be specific and
| show the workflows.
|
| Where do they work? Who do they collaborate with? What are they
| collaborating on? Do the same exercise - SxS comparison with how
| they do things in existing tools and show how Nino is clearly
| better than their existing solution.
|
| Finally, don't ever underestimate how difficult it is to get
| people to change from whatever they are doing today. Today is not
| 1990 - people have been using solutions to the general
| information worker problem for decades now. Why will they switch?
| pintxo wrote:
| As no one has asked so far, I'll have to do it, how does this
| differentiate itself from Lotus Notes?
| rblatz wrote:
| That was my exact thought. Sounds like a very similar idea.
| Would love to know what they are thinking would be the
| differentiator between Notes and their offering? Specifically
| the hat advantages they have that would lead them to think
| their offering would gain traction were as Notes has been on a
| long slow decline.
| pintxo wrote:
| Maybe NOT using F5 to lock the user session?
| harrisonlo wrote:
| You brought up great history! Shout out to the first ever
| (popular) integrated software Lotus 1-2-3/Symphony/Notes
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_software)
| refset wrote:
| It runs on LotusScript JavaScript. Speaking of, Mitch Kapor's
| 1984 memo is turning 40 this year:
|
| > With the formal commencement of the "Notes" project upon us,
| it seemed appropriate to set down a few brief notions about the
| project, its scope, and its strategic importance to Lotus. This
| material should be regarded as more than highly confidential.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20180225100127/http://www.kapor....
|
| Also discussed previously:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13168969
| toyg wrote:
| I hope, for OP's sake, that it's not a bloated, corruption-
| prone, garbage-pile of junk. That would already differentiate
| it quite well from Notes.
| xyst wrote:
| The problem here is that people are not trained on YOUR
| implementation.
|
| Everything you have listed here is very nice to have (offline
| mode, interoperability, ...) , but MS (with O365) or G (with G
| Suite) are often available for free to students, teachers, and
| professors at critical stages in life.
|
| Just look at Apple with their productivity suite (Pages, Numbers,
| Keynote). The market penetration is probably worse than
| LibreOffice.
|
| The academic setting often carries over to the professional
| setting. Changing workflows is one of the pain points I would see
| in migrating to this.
|
| I do think it looks nice and I do hope you succeed though! Good
| luck.
| blehn wrote:
| You could've said the same about Notion and its current
| valuation is at least 10B. Don't let this kind of feedback
| deter you, OP.
| ozim wrote:
| Valuation cool, but are they profitable or still burning
| money.
|
| As a solopreneur you don't have piles of cash to burn to make
| people use it.
| andai wrote:
| I heard that if you want to convince people to switch from what
| they're used to, you can't just be 10% better, you need to be
| 10x better.
| herewego wrote:
| How is this different than what any new market entrant
| encounters? This is what sales and marketing is for; business
| as usual. I've never launched a product that the world was
| familiar with before I launched it.
| samstave wrote:
| (I know this is out of scope, but I LOVE this - and just some
| other-think:
|
| So - crazy LLM idea for you:
|
| Rather than NEW - give me a prompt box:
|
| "make me a sheet of all my movies and grab the IMDB ratings and
| sort my library amd then give me a publishable page to my blog"
|
| Such comments make your app more powerful.
|
| HOWEVER - Making a new sheet is really FN confusing,
|
| https://i.imgur.com/Pd64RUk.png
|
| Am I supposed to create each FN cell?
|
| What the F am I doing: https://i.imgur.com/U6Gx1nU.png
| harrisonlo wrote:
| Awesome idea. Thanks!
|
| For the Sheet module, when you create a new field in the modal
| view, it'll be available to all other records too within the
| page, as you probably found out.
| xbar wrote:
| Great start!
| chime wrote:
| Great job on the launch. Your pricing is reasonable for small
| biz, but I'm unclear on what "Email" in https://nino.app/pricing
| means. Does that mean you offer email hosting like Outlook/Gmail
| or email support?
|
| For anyone not in the 365 corporate world looking for office
| apps, you're unfortunately competing with
| https://workspace.google.com/pricing, regardless of the unique
| feature set you offer.
|
| For anyone looking for a no-code solution, your pricing is very
| low for one person startup when compared to
| https://www.softr.io/pricing but would get pricey for a team of
| 5-10.
|
| I am someone you should target because I help startups get
| started, with low/no code solutions. I also use many paid
| solutions personally like Cozi.com, Zoom, and ProtonMail for
| managing my life. I can see your tech is great and what you need
| is to figure out your place in the market. Where are you
| positioned in comparison to Zoho, HubSpot, and Zapier? How can I
| integrate you with Shopify? Also, you need a LOT of templates for
| https://about.nino.app/en/site
|
| I applaud you for building what you've already built in such a
| competitive and demanding market. You need a hook - the one thing
| I cannot get easily from any of your competitors, which would
| make it easy for me to suggest you to a founder. I don't think
| offline mode or security cut it.
| lenova wrote:
| > Your pricing is reasonable for small biz, but I'm unclear on
| what "Email" in https://nino.app/pricing means. Does that mean
| you offer email hosting like Outlook/Gmail or email support?
|
| That's under their `Support` section (as in, they're offering
| support via email).
| bitzun wrote:
| This is very impressive, but if I'm going to go through the pain
| of not using gsuite/O365, I'm not going to consider something I
| can't self host or export to one of those quickly if your saas
| fails.
| harrisonlo wrote:
| You can export everything in 1-click! It only supports JSON,
| HTML, CSV for now tho. PDF support will come at one point.
| YPPH wrote:
| I don't mean any disrespect, but I made an incredibly basic
| doc - the JSON export is unlikely to be helpful, and the HTML
| export is essentially broken for a lot of features, such as
| an equation.
|
| I think that getting perfect PDF exports should definitely be
| up there on the priorities. Might help you hone the document
| model too.
| bitzun wrote:
| This is the sort of question I would ask of the export
| route (vs the much preferable self-host route), thanks for
| testing it out. If one could export office formats, e.g.
| docx for docs that'd probably be the best.
|
| The more I look at this app the more I'm impressed, though.
| harrisonlo wrote:
| Noted. You're definitely not the only one asking this, so
| it's top on the list.
|
| Side note: I did start implementing PDF exports, but for
| anyone curious, it's actually a lot more complex than
| imagined. There is no easy way to turn HTML to PDF (if
| anyone knows otherwise, please share) and there are font
| and language complications.
| pbronez wrote:
| Perhaps you could target the PanDoc AST for export (and
| import!). That's probably the single most robust document
| conversion tool available. Plus it's open source so you
| can get some force multiplication on all the edge cases.
|
| Personally, I'd love to do contract management with a
| system like this. Each clause could be a block with its
| own version control history. Easy to query a subset of
| them into a spreadsheet or slide deck. Main challenge is
| that all the lawyers will want it in MSFT Word for
| tracking changes during negotiations, so need to
| seamlessly interoperate with .docx
|
| https://pandoc.org/
| keerthiko wrote:
| Since I haven't seen it mentioned here, our small team adopted
| coda[0] in 2020 which has a similar thesis, as our organization's
| central information hub, and have not looked back. It has the
| simplicity of falling back to plaintext, but whenever we want to
| structure data better gives us tables, charts, publishable forms,
| sites, etc.
|
| It's exciting to have more tools in this space, as I think it
| addresses a major use case across workplaces in today's world of
| remote-centric work: Asynchronous knowledge transfer and
| documentation, especially amongst non-technical workers and
| organizations. Extremely poor documentation of process and
| practices, largely because of poor documentation tools (just word
| docs and the like) is the biggest knowledge-hole I have observed
| within non-tech workplaces.
|
| [0]: https://coda.io
| ramijames wrote:
| I'm not really sure that I see an "app chaos problem". For each
| company/job workflow that I've encountered, there are a set of
| apps that solve for the specific use-case.
|
| For example as the head of devrel at the last company that I
| worked for, we used Atlassian products for internal documentation
| and work tracking, we used Google's docs and sheets for
| collaborative writing with external teams, and we used github and
| markdown for external docs building. It's all text, but the work
| flows were different, had different needs (like permissions), and
| ultimately we found the right tools for the job.
|
| I wish you luck with this endeavor, but I hope that your looking
| for a specific problem. To solve that isn't "app chaos".
| d3w4s9 wrote:
| Exactly, my company have a similar setup and I don't think
| people have trouble figuring out which tool to use or how they
| work with each other. Nino seems to try to solve a problem that
| hardly exist.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Word, Excel, Google Sheets, Access, etc. All of these are
| substantial software titles with massive feature sets. How do you
| propose to offer even a fraction of the capability and at a high
| caliber of quality when your focus is spread so thin across so
| many of them?
|
| I acknowledge I'm coming across as a naysayer, but I almost
| didn't click the link because my common sense insisted it must be
| a toy, and you might need to overcome a similar initial reaction
| from other prospective users.
| nine_k wrote:
| I'd say that most people don't use the massive feature sets,
| they use the basics. For them, this offering may suffice, given
| the other upsides it may have, like self-hosting.
|
| With time, more features will be added, as revenue grows and
| the demands become more sophisticated. If you remember, at
| launch Google Sheets were relatively bare-bones, as were Google
| Docs.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >I'd say that most people don't use the massive feature sets,
| they use the basics.
|
| That's true .. but the problem is that there is a long tail
| of more advanced features than are needed. That is, for any
| given advanced feature only a small number of users care
| about those, but if you aggregate all the 'small number of
| users' that need some advanced feature, that number can be
| quite substantial.
|
| >If you remember, at launch Google Sheets were relatively
| bare-bones, as were Google Docs.
|
| Right, and Google Docs did not make any meaningful traction
| in the enterprise - and it still has issues outside of
| education. What Google Docs did do well when they came out
| was 1) Have great live/collaborative document editing, 2)
| 100% web-based - so it worked great on Macs, PCs and Linux
| systems and 3) even though they were feature-poor, they still
| had a base level of features that was much greater than what
| Nino has today ..
|
| So Google Docs was able to find a nice niche - I was
| finishing up University that around that time, and it was
| great to use that for projects.
|
| Keep in mind, Google Docs was released mid-2000s - it could
| get away with being feature-poor compared to Office and rely
| on its 'secret sauce' of being free and 100% web-based. This
| isn't enough today.
| harrisonlo wrote:
| It's a valid point. From a technical standpoint, I'd say over
| time the number of feature implementations that can be re-used
| across modules increases. You're right for now that nino has
| yet matched all the feature sets, but the path to reach there
| might not be as linear as you think.
| JCharante wrote:
| It looks like Nino Sheet doesn't have the ability for chained
| functions, just applying 1 function to the column. I don't think
| it's a good replacement for Excel / Google Sheets. Can it get to
| that point given enough dev time? Absolutely.
| ska-dev wrote:
| Looks like a mammoth undertaking with endless avenues for
| improvement, how do you decide what is worthy and what to leave
| on the backlog?
| tiffanyh wrote:
| 1st, Congrats on shipping. This is a major milestone 99% of us
| don't accomplish but you have.
|
| 2nd, Unsolicited feedback, the copy needs major editing:
|
| - It's focused on the "how", when it should be about the "who &
| what" (who should buy this and what problem does it solve for
| them). I literally don't know what this is for or if I'm a target
| buyer of needed solution. (Even your intro of the product here on
| HN is better than what I read on the site itself). Notion.com has
| good concise copy you might want to look at.
|
| - focus on problem uses cases it solve, not implementation
| details (like how it can be a building block platform)
|
| - Pricing page is very confusing. (A) There's essentially no
| differentiation between the various price tiers, which is an
| issue and (b) it's way too complex in what it shows.
|
| - Address how your product is different than competition (than
| the all-in-one platforms like Zoho, Notion, - which I assume is
| your competition but still not 100% sure)
|
| Wishing you all the best & success.
| laserDinosaur wrote:
| "Unlimited free trial"
|
| I finally found the pricing page (it's strange only having it in
| the footer and not the top of the site), and I guess you are
| referring to the free tier. Which is both NOT a trial (it doesn't
| expire) and NOT unlimited (there's a 10K block limit).
|
| The copy there is confusing since it's actually the opposite - a
| limited free tier.
| harrisonlo wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out. I actually had "generous free
| tier" but worried some people might not think it's
| generous...I'll think of something better
| felixg3 wrote:
| Looks awesome, but Lego will come after you for your logo.
| AndroTux wrote:
| 100%. They're very protective of their studs. I'd recommend
| changing that logo before gaining enough traction for LEGO to
| notice it.
| HiPHInch wrote:
| Did anyone else tried page embed? My attempt doesn't work.
| crazygringo wrote:
| First of all, I want to congratulate you on what seems to be a
| massive (solo?) technical achievement. I can't even imagine the
| amount of work that must have gone into building all of this and
| making it function. There's clearly a _huge_ amount of
| engineering talent behind this, so a million kudos to you on
| that!
|
| That being said, since you're asking for feedback -- if you're
| trying to turn this into a business, there are three major issues
| that immediately jump out at me:
|
| 1) What is your actual business strategy? It appears like you're
| trying to compete directly against Microsoft and Google, but they
| have literally _thousands_ of engineers working nonstop on the
| long tail of features businesses require. Your spreadsheet app
| looks fine for making lists or simple functions, but I 'm
| assuming it doesn't do pivot tables, or 1,000 other things
| businesses do with Excel that they need to do. You simply can't
| compete against Microsoft and Google unless you have hundreds of
| millions in venture capital at a minimum, and since users need a
| lot of those long-tail features, it's not clear to me who you
| think is your customer?
|
| 2) What makes it better than Microsoft/Google? It's not a pain
| point for me that all my info in Google Workspace is split up
| between apps, because they all interoperate perfectly well in all
| the ways I need (I think). It doesn't matter to me whether I have
| 18 apps on my phone, or 18 icons within a single app. Your home
| page talks about "modular" and "pages" and "blocks" but even
| after browsing for a while, I don't understand exactly what those
| are, nor do I have any idea why I would want them. I would
| suggest that, to start, your home page needs to present 3 clear,
| obvious ways Nino is better in terms of _how it helps the user_.
| E.g. what is a basic common workflow that Nino lets you do in 5
| clicks, that requires 1000 clicks in MS /Google and 100 lines of
| scripting? How is this going to save somebody hours/days/weeks of
| their time? Potential users don't really care about whether
| something is apps or modules -- they care about whether it lets
| them get their work done faster.
|
| 3) Whether it is or not, it _looks_ like a solo project. It doesn
| 't look like a business. It doesn't look like you've hired
| marketing professionals who can explain what it does, it doesn't
| look like you've hired a graphic designer to give the site a
| unique brand identity, and there are even a lot of subtle
| mistakes in the English copy ("by having all tools in one place"
| needs to be "all _your_ tools ", "we only collect metrics on the
| server-side" needs to be "collect metrics server-side", etc.). I
| can see that you know what you're doing _as an engineer_ , but
| none of this inspires confidence that you know what you're doing
| _as a business_. I couldn 't recommend anybody purchase your
| software because I simply don't trust that you'll be around a
| year from now.
|
| Again, I want to congratulate you on such a _truly_ massive
| technical achievement. But it 's hard for me to see this taking
| off as a business the way it looks right now. What I would do is
| suggest two possible directions, depending on your personal
| preferences:
|
| a) If you want to turn this into a large business that competes
| with Google and Microsoft, identify and rank the use cases where
| this is superior. Find a cofounder with more of a
| business/product management background, and an enterprise sales
| cofounder as well, get VC funding, and figure out how you can be
| a "disruptor" by meeting enterprise needs in ways that Google/MS
| somehow can't do.
|
| b) Or if you just want to focus on your awesome engineering
| accomplishments, open-source this as something people run on the
| cloud of their choice -- that way potential customers don't need
| to worry as much about you going out of business. Get other
| engineers interested and turn it into something 100's+ of people
| are invested in maintaining and building features for. And then
| build a consulting business on top of it, where you and people
| you hire visit enterprises, set it up for them, build their
| business logic flows for them, provide phone support and SLA's
| and all that stuff.
|
| Sorry for this super-long comment, but I hope it helps. You've
| really built something incredibly impressive, and I want to see
| you succeed!
| growingkittens wrote:
| I think this has a lot of potential for non-technical knowledge
| users.
|
| At Google and Microsoft, _files_ are available throughout the
| ecosystem. If I understand correctly, Nino makes the _data_
| within files available throughout the ecosystem. This is a
| fundamentally different workflow.
|
| Google and Microsoft seem to have disparate teams working on
| their ecosystem. Their products work _in_ a system, but not _as_
| a system. There 's little to no integration past surface level
| connections.
| csmpltn wrote:
| One of the most important features to get right for tools like
| this is collaborative editing. It's incredibly difficult to get
| this right (live preview, conflict resolution, history
| management, etc), especially given how the vast majority of users
| are non-technical folks (which aren't used to toolks like git).
| Could you expand a bit on how you intend to tackle this problem
| in Nino?
| klabb3 wrote:
| I actually think this hyper-granular realtime collaboration
| like in Google docs is slightly overrated.
|
| I think it's ok to have more a git-like workflow where feedback
| and changes happen over cycles. As a programmer, I don't give a
| shit about your working directory. I do care, however, about
| your commits :)
|
| All I'm saying is this CRDT craze isn't always necessary or
| even appropriate for many products. It adds a lot of technical
| complexity, especially for a small shop.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| > I actually think this hyper-granular realtime collaboration
| like in Google docs is slightly overrated.
|
| Disagree, with the caveat that I understand how it can feel
| overrated if you're not using the new ways of remote
| collaboration that it enables.
|
| The fully-live remote-collaboration UX in tools like Google
| Docs [1] and Figma is magical because you can get on a video
| call with people [2] and co-create, in the moment, without
| having to fumble with all the nonsense of figuring out who's
| "driving" and who's "navigating."
|
| Since you're all looking at _and_ editing the same doc,
| everyone can arrange their windows to have a line of faces
| along the side and the doc in the center. It 's actually
| _better_ than in-person collaboration. There 's no haggling
| over who's got the whiteboard marker, no one sneezing on
| everyone else, no crowding around to make sure everyone can
| see the board...
|
| All the extra nonsense drops away, and you get to be just a
| group of people _making something together_.
|
| [1]: Notably, Google Sheets uses a much more ham-handed idea
| of "realtime." A cell appears "locked" while someone else is
| editing it, and you don't see their work until they hit
| Enter. So you end up having to sit there like a buffoon while
| they type, their work invisible to you, and that friction
| destroys the magic of live collaboration.
|
| [2]: If you don't do much remote work/collaboration with
| others around the world, then none of this matters -- and
| it's easy to miss the world of possibilities that this
| feature unlocks.
| bertil wrote:
| Has Nino integrated Git into their tools? Editing lines of
| code over a GitHub diff window makes sense, but I'm not sure
| how that would work in, say, a spreadsheet: I don't know if
| adding a line =21%*G17 below G17 is a good idea; I'd much
| rather have the changes in the context of a sheet and
| understand that it's computing the VAT on top of the total
| cost.
| pilgrim0 wrote:
| I agree. I haven't yet interviewed a user that views realtime
| collaboration as something desirable in itself. In my
| research, user mostly are forced to do this kind of collab
| because it's still better than coordinating via side channels
| such as email or phone. It has lower friction but at a very
| high usability cost. In contrast it makes people undervalue
| the importance of a structured plan of execution for projects
| with a significant number of collaborators. There are
| practically no polished, in-between, git-like experience in
| mainstream tools. The outcome of real-time for users is
| always remembered as messy and frustrating. I don't even
| agree with the premise of shared control as being an
| effective basis for creative or productive process at large,
| it is useful for brainstorming and exploration in some
| specific cases, or highly specialized and niche settings like
| pair programming. IMHO this is super valued by developers and
| marketers because it's challenging, cool and it makes for a
| good pitch. Not rare to see people who conflate digital
| collaboration with shared control, thinking they're
| synonymous - such is the influence of these modern workflows.
| We can never know how good other collaboration strategies can
| be if alternative experiences are under-developed and people
| default to shared control.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _I actually think this hyper-granular realtime
| collaboration like in Google docs is slightly overrated._
|
| I have to disagree. It's _absolutely_ necessary for a lot of
| workflows, especially when people are collaborating on a doc
| in real time during a meeting (super super common), or when
| you 've got 10 reviewers of a doc all leaving their feedback
| in comments, and comments responding to comments, over the
| course of the same hour.
|
| The model of clean commits works well for code. It doesn't
| work well at all for business team documents that are in-
| progress.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Heh I'm glad that there's disagreement. I think I was even
| surprised myself coming to this conclusion.
|
| > It's absolutely necessary for a lot of workflows,
| especially when people are collaborating on a doc in real
| time during a meeting
|
| Well yeah you included the solution in the problem
| description. I'm not convinced of either the shared
| control, the talking-typing multitasking or even that the
| artifact should be a document. Assuming the meeting
| shouldn't have been an email in the first place.
|
| > when you've got 10 reviewers of a doc all leaving their
| feedback in comments over the course of the same hour
|
| This one is easier for me to argue concretely. Shared
| control with 10 people is awful imo. Suggestions with click
| to accept can make it better (but then you have a
| notification problem). But what I really dislike is this
| perpetual state of work in progress. I think a cyclic
| workflow is better, with drafts and publish and much less
| back and forth.
|
| In summary, I'd say that the promise of async work (which
| is good) ended up being sync instead - for the purposes of
| the human brain. I don't want to context switch because
| Bryan fixed a spelling mistake, or see Janice typing out
| another bullet point right under mine.
| jitl wrote:
| Realtime collab apps tend to kill their competitors without
| realtime collab. See Figma: slightly worse UX and performance
| compared to Sketch, easily killed Sketch. How did Notion
| penetrate the competitive docs/wiki market? Much more
| collaborative than the incumbent Confluence (now confluence
| is iterating on realtime collab to remain relevant).
|
| Realtime is becoming table stakes in any online collab
| system. I think code is the exception, not the rule, because
| it's 100x more brittle than prose or pixels that need to
| convey approximate meaning to humans.
|
| You can implement realtime without using CRDT/OT, Notion is
| paragraph-by-paragraph last write wins, no fancy algo, but
| mostly good enough to remain competitive.
| not_your_mentat wrote:
| This looks really neat!
|
| I'd be interested in giving it a try, but doing so would replace
| existing tools and workflow. As a user, I'm unwilling to do this
| is I can't both own my data and application hosting.
|
| If Nino doesn't pan out and the product gets shut down, how do I
| continue to access my now (trigger warning, words used to
| describe as I understand, not critique) tightly coupled
| proprietary data? Can I self host? Is source code available? Are
| document formats open? How do I not get screwed as an
| enthusiastic adopter in the unhappy case that things don't work
| out? If I put my data in and the product isn't working for me,
| how do I get my data out?
| harrisonlo wrote:
| Thanks. I think the concern about software provider shutting
| down is valid. Heck, I still remember being pissed when Google
| deprecated two products I used within a month (a few months
| back).
|
| Self-hosting might be too complex to setup, but do you think
| single tenant offering helps? I don't know if it makes sense
| for individuals tho.
|
| In addition to HTML & CSV, there is an option to export JSON,
| which supports more formats. In a way, it _is_ an open format
| (.json) but I 'll have to add relevant documentation. PDF
| support will also come at one point.
| buildbuildbuild wrote:
| Self-hosting is key for us as well. Companies working with
| sensitive data really value "on-device" / "on-premises"
| architecture, which it looks like you're close to nailing.
|
| Check out Bitwarden and Gitlab's self-hosting approaches, and
| congrats on the launch. I'm excited to try it.
|
| And regarding self-hosting complexity, start with a "docker-
| compose up" example and iterate from there.
| bertil wrote:
| One great solution for that would be the approach many advanced
| Markdown editors like Obsidian have: the documents remain
| usable. You might lose some benefits (the integration between
| documents in a graph-like structure) that are specific to the
| tool. Still, your work is preserved in a universal format that
| anyone can leverage.
|
| Most elements of Nano have widely accepted standards,
| presumably easy to integrate, so that guarantee should be
| doable.
| callalex wrote:
| Edit: I want to start with something nice since this discussion
| seems like it could be overwhelming you. Nice job on the name,
| it's short, memorable, and works in many languages while not
| already being associated with something else.
|
| If I build my business on your platform but your funding dries up
| next year because you didn't 10x enough times to hold gnat/VC
| attention what happens to all my stuff?
| usernamed7 wrote:
| > app that supports 18 modules, saving you time from switching
| and integrating between different providers.
|
| this is not a compelling pitch. I can tell you this and other
| "problems" you identified have not been real problems in places
| i've worked. you're trying to play the same game that google and
| microsoft are losing at. that's not a solid strategy.
|
| I think you should take a page from basecamp and focus on a
| subset of these that small businesses would be interested in.
| johndevor wrote:
| Small nitpick: Chrome isn't auto saving the password field for
| me.
| D-Se wrote:
| If I were going to make a hard switch from apps I use (docs,
| sheets, todo, meet, ...), I would do so from the conviction I
| don't want vendor lock-in, and want to own my data. I like the
| concept. The Collection module seems powerful. Yet, I question
| the scalability - how long should users wait, for example, for a
| <tab> to be possible in a code block, in a notebook?
|
| Since you're looking for feedback; - support markdown where
| possible, and include links like Obsidian, include Unicode
| completion like Julia REPL. Point and click is nice, but
| shortcuts/common syntax is expected, - support scripting via a
| modern language, - let users write plugins for modules / modules.
| continuational wrote:
| I think there's a lot of potential in this idea! I've been
| pondering how to pull this off for a very long time.
|
| My 5 minute test run:
|
| - For documents, I couldn't figure out how to make anything but
| plain text. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl+/ doesn't work on my
| keyboard (no "/" key).
|
| - For sheets, I couldn't figure out how to write a formula. And
| this isn't a really a spreadsheet, it's a database table, which
| is a related but distinct thing (more structure, but less
| freedom).
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Honest and genuine feedback.
|
| I am concerned that you may be working on something that does not
| have a market in its present form, or possibly ever. I am worried
| as to how much of your life / time / money you might be pouring
| into this. It is difficult for me to be categorical about this,
| as for all I know it's a tiny side venture and you're not
| bothered about adoption. But, based on the marketing copy /
| launch, previous HN posts and your comments here, it does seem
| that you feel this could potentially compete with
| Workspace/Zoho/365/Notion with the USP that it's more tightly
| integrated, plus some local storage and encryption benefits.
|
| I think that's quite a stretch. And that's not to dismiss or play
| down what you've achieved.
|
| What you have created is, measured on sheer volume of
| work/technical accomplishment (and assuming it's a solo project
| completed in around 1-2 years, when you first began posting about
| it) really impressive for a solo dev. I say this as somebody who
| considers themself a fairly speedy full-stack dev. There is a lot
| of complex functionality - an MVP recreation of Docs, Drive,
| Airtable (e.g. Sheets, which appears to be an 'Airtable'-style
| visual database with support for multiple datatypes) and the UI
| is, in many parts, clean, fluid and responsive. All this is
| without even trying/testing the additional 4-5 client apps!
|
| But in my opinion, the difference between your current product
| and something that would gain significant adoption is light
| years. Just some very basic examples: adding keyboard shortcuts
| to the docs module, drag and drop table re-ordering, image
| resizing, multiple fonts, page sizing, tabs, a ruler, text flow
| options and layout. (just the basics here to get it to circa-
| Word-2000 level) The need for a spreadsheet module. File
| permission management, upload progress, account onboarding, help
| and support. The UX of the workspace itself - at the moment it's
| unclear why some modules exist (what is a 'canvas'? Why would I
| need it? Same question for a 'grid'. Don't make me work to
| discover this, tell me upfront. Inline help, or example documents
| would help steer users).
|
| I could write out a ton more examples, but I'm not trying to beat
| you over the head, more just to illustrate that the road ahead of
| you is far longer than you might imagine. If there's just one of
| you developing this, then I'm not sure how long it would take to
| just get even _one_ of these modules up to feature parity with a
| close competitor. This, plus the maintenance, support.. ..and
| that 's before we even begin to discuss the issues around
| marketing and onboarding, which are probably the area where
| you're most significantly falling short. Some of your UI choices
| bely a certain naivety, for example why would you choose to name
| a module 'Sheet's, when this is already the name of a popular web
| spreadsheet, and your module appears to be something other than a
| spreadsheet? This introduces confusion and frustration for users
| and makes me question your ability to succesfully get this
| project to profitability. Much of your main website doesn't do a
| great job of explaining to a layperson what the product is, why
| they'd want to use it, or giving real-world examples. Even the
| screenshots on your Play Store app don't really provide good
| reasons to download, or insights into concrete use cases. Why
| would somebody pay for this in the era of free-Google-Docs or $5
| Zoho plans? How much B2C marketing money would you need to spend
| to market it to them just so they're aware of its existence in
| the first place?
|
| I know how difficult this might be to hear, and I don't want to
| demotivate you, in fact quite the opposite. The thing is, I have
| had several occasions during my career when I was in a similar
| place to this. I have, in the past, obsessively focussed on
| product development, with my head in the sand about market
| potential. It's great that you have now asked for feedback and
| I'd rather risk annoying you than squander an opportunity to make
| you sit up and think for a moment, even if you end up choosing to
| ignore me.
|
| I'm sure that, if you chose to take a different path with this
| IP/product, there would be lots to salvage and some valuable
| learnings to build upon based upon all the code you've created
| and approaches you've refined. As a suggestion, would you perhaps
| be better off here just taking one single component and making
| that world-beating, instead of trying to develop 18 different
| modules to pre-MVP quality.
|
| Whatever you decide, you're clearly a very talented and prolific
| developer. Very best of luck with everything.
| harrisonlo wrote:
| I appreciate this feedback. Thanks for writing it out. You have
| some valid points here and I'll think about them going forward.
|
| You mentioned you were in a similar place to this, I'm curious
| to hear about your experience and the specific decisions you
| made back then, if you're comfortable sharing.
| jv22222 wrote:
| Agreed. As a solo dev I am 1.5 years in to building something
| that represents just one of these apps, and I am still at least
| 6-12 months away from a v1. I guess it's a choice of going wide
| or deep.
| iamcasen wrote:
| Very impressive from a technical perspective. I should know,
| since I worked on a startup for 3 years who attempted to
| productize a similar system. If this can scale, I think you have
| a very valuable foundation.
|
| Did you build Nino Meets using AWS Chime? I'm curious.
|
| Now for the feedback:
|
| Because the use cases are so broad and all-encompassing,
| marketing and onboarding into your system will be a huge
| challenge. Do not underestimate it. At my startup, we hired
| onboarding specialists since most small business owners we were
| attracting were not exactly engineers. They needed a lot of hand
| holding to understand how all the parts went together.
|
| Take notion as an example, they have a huge community dedicated
| to showcasing things you can build. Even then, I don't really
| like notion because it is such a blank canvas. It's a hard hurdle
| to overcome!
|
| I think a valuable next step would be to partner with people from
| different industries to create custom templates that are built on
| top of your more general purpose foundation. Those templates
| should reliably solve specific work flows that those users would
| be familiar with, and they should have no trouble getting up and
| running right away.
|
| If you can solve that, you will really have something!
|
| Your current website looks like docs for other engineers, so I'd
| strongly suggest creating a few more websites, each one branded
| and showcasing specific workflows for the target audience you are
| looking to convert.
| duckman1 wrote:
| So you've made a new tool to solve the excess of tools problem?
|
| Right.
| pbronez wrote:
| Ok, lots of thoughts. I've reviewed the website and started
| drafted this as a Nino Doc. Haven't dug into the more complex
| functionality yet.
|
| # Tactical Feedback
|
| On iOS, my password manager doesn't recognize the Nino app with
| the Nino.app domain, so autofill doesn't work at login. Not a
| problem, just a little friction.
|
| Breaking problem on iOS: I cannot type the letter "m". It appears
| to trigger a keyboard shortcut that toggles a reorder paragraph
| block mode. I had to abandon Nino and finish this write up in
| Notes.
|
| In iOS Nino Doc, it's not obvious how to "Select All --> Copy".
| Moving from Nino to Notes I had to copy each paragraph block
| individually.
|
| Concur that it would be good to have some templates or something
| to orient on first app open. I tried "Notebook" first because I
| assumed it was like "Notepad", a very light text editor. Seems to
| be more like a Jupyter notebook?
|
| Maybe an easy way to address this would be to add a tag line for
| each document type. Just a couple words to orient folks beyond
| the name. Perhaps add a "compare to X" as well.
|
| # Strategic Feedback
|
| First, the "too many tools" problem is real. Lotus Notes was
| good. There is appetite for consolidation in some large
| enterprises.
|
| It's impossible to get a big organization to switch over to this
| directly. You need to target smallish teams (10s of people) that
| can make their own decisions.
|
| Security is everything. Recommend you review Sandstorm's
| capability security model. That was the most promising
| productivity revolution I've seen in a while. It failed in part
| because they expected other people to write applications to their
| security model. If you can deliver the fine grained security AND
| a broad swath of functionality, you have something really
| special.
|
| End to end encryption is excellent. Let me bring my own keys.
|
| Some more specifics on security:
|
| Block level security would be a killer feature. Especially if it
| goes beyond RBAC to ABAC. In my world, you frequently want to
| share a document with someone who is only authorized to view part
| of it. Automatically redacting the parts they aren't supposed to
| see would be amazing. Then allow those blocks to be reused, with
| the same security labels, in many different contexts and app
| paradigms?
|
| Honestly it would be amazing and I could sell it.
|
| Next thing on security is data sovereignty. Absolutely respect
| going single region GCP to start. However, self-hosting will be
| an immediate ask in my world. Several tiers of this, all of which
| you can absolutely up charge for.
|
| First, single tenet instances. Give me assurance that when bugs
| show up, they won't leak my data to other customers.
|
| Second, enterprises will want to run it within their VPC/Tenet
| that they already use / trust / audit. The major cloud vendors
| have regions focused on different industries, you need to be able
| to run there without calling home to your central instance.
|
| Third, direct self hosting. Especially for smaller teams with
| poor connectivity back to the cloud. Can I run this on a NUC out
| of a trailer to help coordinate disaster recovery efforts? Can I
| host it in a VM on dedicated hardware where I understand the
| cost, capacity and backup story? Google and Microsoft can't do
| this, so you can differentiate. See Next Cloud for a good
| approach to this.
|
| Finally, interoperability. You have many different app views into
| the core block abstraction, but there will always be other tools
| and databases in play. Make it super easy for those external
| things to read and write blocks. Don't write the integrations -
| just expose the API.
|
| Good luck!
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| So are you competing with 18 different products at the same time?
| Or is this just a glorified note taking & publishing app?
|
| Either way I am getting strong https://zombo.com/ vibes from the
| description here and your landing page.
|
| Instead of a clear problem statement and user use cases, you have
| this word salad of "consolidation" (of what?), "superapp" (that
| does what?), "unmatched privacy" (to do privately what?) and
| "offline mode" (I still have no idea what I can do with the app,
| but apparently I can do this something offline?).
|
| That said, I am double surprised with all the praise comments
| here on HN. Can someone explain in one sentence what this app is
| supposed to do?
| Solvency wrote:
| "Privately consolidate your multi-app documents offline."
|
| Like a desktop folder!
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| The same thing as Microsoft or Google suites, which is to
| minimize workflow and maximize productivity by allowing apps to
| be interconnected.
|
| I will say however that I agree, the page doesn't sell me on
| much. The apps/"modules" themselves are not well displayed and
| I am not convinced even by its unique points such as its
| (eventual?) encryption, namely due to how opaque it all is.
|
| I wish it was more transparent, between its file formats, its
| encryption standards and implementation, and _how_ it actually
| works.
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| Do you have a practical example of such interconnectedness
| (or lack thereof?)
| monroewalker wrote:
| This must have taken serious effort, congrats! Lots of those
| features seem like huge time sinks
|
| Btw at a glance, this looks pretty similar to Microsoft Loop
| which just came out. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
| loop
| m-p-3 wrote:
| I'll give it a shot, see if that works well for us to manage a
| hobby-project (non-profit) we're running in our spare time. Looks
| quite neat :)
| kkfx wrote:
| Do not take it as a judgment of your work, it's instead a broad
| observation using your work as a catalyzer to state it: I have
| much more integration with a much older app, it's name is Emacs,
| in my case it feature:
|
| - a Windows Manager, module named EXWM
|
| - a very powerful noting tool, org-mode
|
| - integrate to the note module there is file attachments,
| calendar, tasks, ...
|
| - a mail module, notmuch in my case, fully usable inside the note
| tool, so I can link a single message, a thread or a search query
| in a note, something simple as notmuch-search:tag:unread that
| open all my unread messages.
|
| - of course being a fully user programmable environment a mere
| link can execute code, meaning I have a clickable link to
| transform a note into a slide (zpresent, my favorite, but a mere
| zoom might suffice in most cases), a link can open a mail compose
| buffer and so on
|
| - I have various nice file handling goodies like mass renaming,
| regex selection and so on.
|
| This since DECADES. Now ending the joke the statement: classic
| desktop model feature an OS witch is a complete user-programming
| environment, apps are just bits of code, listings part of the OS,
| meaning that if you have a CAS functionality you can solve an ODE
| inside an email you compose, annotating it while composing and
| made a slide out of it. Take a look at
| https://youtu.be/B6jfrrwR10k for Emacs, a demo for Pharo (a
| modern Smalltalk, the oldest of such classic desktop systems from
| Xerox) https://youtu.be/Pot9GnHFOVU and so on.
|
| The statement is simple: for COMMERCIAL REASONS we tried to
| subdivide and isolate software to sell it in pieces, oh, for
| decades people have SUFFERED without knowing the existence of
| alternatives such crappy model, a step at a time, with decades of
| time in between old features are reintroduced selling them as
| news while they aren't, and only when someone have found a way to
| made them anti-user.
|
| Your project actually use one of such step, the modern web, witch
| is a limited and limiting anti-user version of classic DocUIs,
| since the user have essentially no practical control of them, at
| least not a comfy one, and rediscover the power of integration,
| but limited due to the limitation of today tools. Not made do mix
| data and code, not made for end-users programming and so on. I've
| no doubt it can succeed simply because it's a piece of an ancient
| tech we need, but the point remain: modern software is untenable
| and it block an enormous slice of potential innovation and
| computing power just to enslave users.
| swalling wrote:
| I'd suggest making a demo video for your landing page. The
| concepts make sense, but to grok how they can be used, some demos
| (perhaps with SEO landing pages like "Nino for project
| management" or "Nino for documentation") would be helpful.
| eurekin wrote:
| If anybody asks me who do I want to be, when I grow up I'll point
| at this author
| sgarland wrote:
| Single biggest thing you need to nail down fast: the data model.
| It is extremely hard to shift as things grow, and without careful
| thought, it'll turn into a horrifying miasma of JSONB columns,
| duplicated data, orphaned rows, and garbage performance.
|
| Customers are going to store surprisingly large items in Docs,
| where you'd be tempted to inline them instead of offloading to S3
| et al.
|
| Chat practically needs to be its own DB. Discord runs on Scylla,
| Slack runs on Vitess over MySQL. The needs of chat access are
| wildly different from other types of storage.
|
| If you're doing any kind of active-active, have a plan for how to
| move off of that, because it does not scale (at least, not
| without breath-takingly expensive hardware).
|
| Source: DBRE at one of your competitors.
|
| EDIT: The fact that you're doing offline saves (which is very
| cool!) makes me think that you may be using something like Ditto
| [0], which IIRC is MyRocksDB under the hood. I have no experience
| with either, but I do know some super sharp folks working at
| Ditto.
|
| [0]: https://ditto.live
| winrid wrote:
| He's most likely using SQLite per account, because that's the
| easiest way to have an offline DB and sync it, which will most
| likely scale perfectly fine with appropriate indexes as long as
| you are careful about the feature set.
| sgarland wrote:
| That introduces a new problem when it syncs to others in the
| same workspace, if it's large.
| japanman185 wrote:
| No one cares about that. Export to open document format or
| microsoft. You are living in a bubble of "hackers". You are not
| your average user.
|
| Case in point of "engineers are not product people"
| sgarland wrote:
| Product sell lies to customers that engineering struggles to
| produce, because reality is a harsh mistress.
| gegtik wrote:
| if you can dream it, you can type it into a chatgpt text
| prompt!
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| If your selling point is consolidating apps, you absolutely
| have to get the data model right, else you don't solve the
| problem. Just because you don't go in and sell it that way,
| doesn't mean it's not important as hell. The very reason it's
| hard to get apps to interoperate is that each one has it's
| own data model. If they used one giant data model... it
| wouldn't be a problem.
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| Notion might have written something about their journey in this
| regard?
| jsyang00 wrote:
| Microsoft Teams already is this as long as you don't care about
| anything basically working.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| I'm using whatboard.app to do much of this now, but your solution
| has a desktop app which is a nice addition.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| Is this related to Zoho? I ask because many screenshots have the
| same Zoho colors and logos.
| blntechie wrote:
| Wow, I have never been more impressed with any other Show HN
| before. The sheer number of features and platforms you have
| covered and also keeping to some core engineering principles at
| the same time is extremely impressive. I will be trying this
| product for sure and wish you all the best with this app.
| Quanttek wrote:
| To add to what other commenters said: Your app sounds very
| interesting, but the use cases and use scenarios remain a bit
| unclear. Personally, I would love to be able to just try it
| without having to sign up. Right now, the copy leaves the user
| experience very much in the dark
| i13e wrote:
| This looks really cool! I tried to sign up but it doesn't seem to
| be sending out verification emails right now. Will give it
| another go a bit later
| 2024user wrote:
| Is this done by a single dev? If so, that's a massive risk for
| anyone who might start using these tools.
| d3w4s9 wrote:
| This is not the first product of the kind and won't be the last
| one. And they look great in theory but get complicated and very
| confusing and ultimately never find their place. People don't
| need an integrated tool that does everything. People need a few
| _very good_ tools that work well with each other. Confluence
| /Jira is such an example, and to some extent Google's suite and
| Microsoft's, plus a few more. Unless you can do it better than
| them in each category -- doc, spreadsheet and project management
| etc -- people won't choose your product over those. (RIP Google
| Wave.)
| berkes wrote:
| Indeed. The issue I've repeatedly seen, is that ten different
| people, have ten different combinations and alternatives of
| what are "very good tools".
|
| And even then, these people aren't fixed in time. Maybe today I
| need a killer personal time tracker, tomorrow I might need an
| advanced scrum board and in two years I need a way to aggregate
| time tracking of a whole team. And that's just one tiny tool.
| maxloh wrote:
| I tried the "Doc", "Sheet" and "Slide" feature and each of them
| are incomplete and lacks most of the popular features. It would
| be better if the author uses existing solutions instead of
| implement them from ground up.
|
| editor.js [0] for documents and Grist [1] for spreadsheet are
| some good examples.
|
| [0]: https://editorjs.io/ [1]: https://www.getgrist.com/
| feel-ix-343 wrote:
| Personally, I use neovim and markdown for everything.
| exhaze wrote:
| You're describing Unix philosophy basically, right? While I
| like it I think it doesn't scale past certain point - think
| about cases like companies finding they have trouble
| maintaining a system made up of tons of bash scripts (most
| config driven systems e.g. CIs fall into this).
|
| Same applies to SaaS IMO.
|
| > ultimately never find their place
|
| Here's a few counter examples: - Clickup - Notion - Datadog -
| Amplitude
|
| I feel like they have found their place quite well.
|
| In fact there's an industry trend in 2020s of SaaS
| consolidation over to "vertical SaaS" that just does everything
| in one tool.
|
| Happy to be proven wrong and hear some counter examples btw,
| this is just my theory based on what I've observed in b2b saas
| world over past 10ish years
| CrypticShift wrote:
| Not going to counter you. In related examples, I will pick
| ClickUp from your list. It is the closest to this one in
| terms of trying to combine a database, (multi)composition,
| and communication (Notion is more specialized than that.)
|
| I would say that in this arena, the 2010s started with Quip
| and ended with ClickUp. Quip was sold at $750 million, but
| Salesforce never let it bloom. ClickUp is now worth 4 billion
| dollars.
|
| Just one critical thought: Consolidation must transcend mere
| visual modularity and deliver deeper usefull integration to
| compensate for the absence of features of dedicated tools.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| It surely isn't. Before everything had to be online, you had
| Microsoft Works, AppleWorks, BeagleWorks, Symantec Works, Lotus
| Works, Claris Works, a Wordperfect product and a Corel product,
| and probably a solid half dozen other suites that tried to be
| everyghing for all knowledge workers.
|
| The integration story didn't work that well back then, and that
| was when any one of those "integrated suites" cost the same up
| front as any single office tool, so the cost savings was more
| significant.
|
| I still like the idea, but it seems harder to make it work well
| now than it was in the 90s.
| JakeAl wrote:
| This. Salesforce, is a great example of this. I can't tell you
| the number of companies that exist just building a simple
| application that does the one thing customers bought these
| bloated app suites to do that they liked and became burdened
| with the developers ecosystem or constant enhancements they
| make just to justify their dev teams existence. Adobe and
| Microsoft are also notorious for this, as well as just about
| every cloud company.
| agluszak wrote:
| The problem with modern apps is not that they are separate. The
| problem is that they are walled gardens with deliberately reduced
| interoperability, using non-open protocols and APIs.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| The most chaotic landing page I've seen in ages. I've seen it on
| my computer. I can't imagine how it looks on a smaller screen.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| There appears to be a demo thingy under the "The modular
| workspace" header but clicking on things doesn't seem to work.
| yoz wrote:
| Initial impression after a few minutes of use: there may be a
| huge amount of power here, but the app and site seem to be
| completely lacking guidance and I've no idea what to do or how to
| learn.
|
| I've installed it on my Mac and am trying to add a set of records
| representing contacts with a couple of basic fields: name, phone,
| birthdate. I want to query those records elsewhere in other
| modules.
|
| The app is giving no guidance on how to do this. On open, it just
| shows me a blank tab, and I had to try a few different controls
| to work out how to add a module. I don't know which module I
| should use to add queryable records, so I'm trying Board.
|
| Now that I've added a board, I can add a first record but there
| doesn't seem to be a way to add a second. There are columns named
| "None" and "Unnamed"; the one named "None" has the first contact
| in it. Pressing the "+" button in the corner adds another column.
| Eventually, I drag the record from "None" to "Unnamed"; "None"
| disappears, now there's just "Unnamed", and I can add other
| records.
|
| I'll keep playing with it a little, but there's only so far that
| people can be expected to try to work out the usage model that
| you've designed this for. Sure, there are loads of modules, but
| how do they link together? An example setup for a fictional team
| might really help here.
| j45 wrote:
| This is really impressive.
|
| Please keep in mind all feedback here in context with whether
| they have shipped anything this broad and through on their own.
|
| 2 questions:
|
| - I like what you have said about E2EE, is there any chance the
| implementation could become zero knowledge encryption?
|
| - There likely may be interest in the world where users will pay
| to be able to self host this, while you can continue to maintain
| and develop
| dwb wrote:
| There is just no chance you'd hold my attention long enough to
| work out whether this was all width and no depth, or if it was
| actually good. If you're going to propose a new do-it-all system,
| it's got to be a lot more convincing than that.
| mavci wrote:
| Redminds me of CryptPad
|
| https://cryptpad.fr
| FrancoQA wrote:
| nice article!
| justinl33 wrote:
| First experience with the app was 10/10; other than not being
| able to type the letter 'm' in my first Doc. Little things like
| these can make the difference between instant churn and lifetime
| users.
| FrancoQA wrote:
| good insights
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I built something similar many years back. Mine was web based:
| https://github.com/GWBasic/ObjectCloud
|
| What I would tell my younger self is to spend more time reading
| through YC's resources about how to start a business. In my case,
| I built something that I thought there was a need for; but I
| should have spent a lot more time iterating off of tangible
| customer needs.
|
| IE, I should have found a handful of customers who needed tight
| integration among these use cases and let their needs drive the
| implementation.
|
| Why? There are already plenty of applications that do the same
| functions. (MS Office, Google Drive, ect, ect.) These
| applications are mature, and well-understood by the whole market.
|
| I would suggest finding a few customers who are hampered by poor
| interoperability among 3+ applications / use cases, and focus on
| their use cases. It'll take you 15+ years to be as mature as
| products like MS Office, Google Drive, ect; but if you solve a
| niche's tangible, need, they won't care, because they can't
| operate their business without you.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Actually downloaded the Mac app and gave up on the Sign Up
| screen. I just don't want to have another login in another cloud
| service.
| nicbaranow wrote:
| We have similar ideas at Frame (https://frame.so/); but more
| looking into offering a MacOS look and feel and oriented towards
| strictly productivity apps :)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| and then 1 api changes and you go to update that, but find out
| that dependency you ignored the deprecation warning for no longer
| exists, and then you have to refactor your whole codebase, and
| then another api changes, and then another service discontinues
| api access entirely but it happened to be your most sought after
| integration so then you try making a headless scraper but their
| UI keeps changing but then...
| aetherspawn wrote:
| A lot of people are saying to specialise your business or die. I
| think you have a good opportunity here to do what nothing else
| does quite well, and that is to implement a vertically integrated
| document management system for use cases such as ISO 9001 etc.
|
| Use case 1, document management: This basically just means that
| you need to implement the capability to "publish" a document
| version, permanently view that document version (think tag), and
| auto generate a document "identifier" using the companies naming
| convention (and allow this to be embedded automatically in the
| document so the client can use it too). The document ID might
| look something like SOP-2401001.
|
| Once a document is published it should be read-only, and you
| should be able to put artifacts a long with published documents
| ... ie exported PDF copies, or signed copies or something.
|
| Use case 2, document siloing: One of the most difficult parts of
| document management is creating forms for procedures, and then
| teaching everyone how to not ruin the document management of
| these forms once they are filled. I have always wanted a silo
| that automatically copies a form when you start to fill it out,
| allocates it a brand new document ID, and collects it together
| with all the other forms of the same kind.
|
| This could be integrated with an automation platform so that ie
| if you fill out a form it sends someone an email or something
| like that. Or if you wanted to get really fancy, you could allow
| people to define "workflows" for documents and actually visually
| show a business process alongside a document.
| squeezebees wrote:
| This is indeed a clear market gap. Ideally it has the workflow
| features but they can also be swapped out. Enterprise market
| though as opposed to wherever this was aimed.
| autocole wrote:
| If you haven't seen a team using Feishu/LarkSuite, then I'd make
| an effort to see how that works. It's essentially a super office
| app that does the whole "everything is integrated" significantly
| better than Microsoft and Google have with their office products.
| For example, you can share a document during a call and interact
| with others inside the live document.
| q2dg wrote:
| If it can't be self-hosted, I have no interest. Thanks, anyway
| ajvs wrote:
| If you're going to offer an offline-capable Linux app then no-one
| wants to use Snap. AppImage or Flatpak is the way.
| stevage wrote:
| >solve the app chaos problem for today's knowledge worker
|
| I'm today's knowledge worker and I don't have an app chaos
| problem.
|
| Integration between different apps is not really an issue for me.
| Mostly I care about each individual app being as good as it
| possibly can be.
|
| I don't have any need for spreadsheets to integrate with
| calendars, or email to integrate with docs for instance.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Google Wave flahsbacks just from description... but I didn't
| click yet
| tony-allan wrote:
| I notice that you have been working on this for a while [1] and
| announced a couple of modules last year so I expect you have
| already validated the concept with a bunch of users.
|
| I love the idea and played with a couple of modules and didn't
| find it intuitive (e.g. embedding a block from a sheet into a
| canvas using block embed) I also tried to drag and drop.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nino.app
| jitl wrote:
| Next, focus on making something some percent of your users will
| love.
|
| I think you have a good first pass technical implementation, and
| your next task is to polish your UX/UI to the point where at
| least one of your apps will inspire a following of passionate
| advocates. I don't think your current pass will do that - the
| "all in one" interoperability angle alone wont be enough.
|
| The docs market is $100B+ - it's huge, and highly contended.
|
| Notion targeted creative, designer types with great typography
| and minimal UI taste. Coda targeted Product Manager types with
| lots of features for building fluid workflows for complex
| projects. What's going to be your first user story & angle?
| toasted-subs wrote:
| Looks like a great set of starter apps if anybody wants to try
| and revive HP's WebOS.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| It looks good. The problem for me, to use it is that Google
| Sheets and Docs are way more fully featured, even if they aren't
| integrated as neatly as you have done. You will need to find the
| people for who having calendars, docs and sheets in one place
| matters a lot. Maybe it is the kind of people who already use
| notion and obsidian etc.
|
| There are some UX things I think should be looked at:
|
| 1. New sheet asks me 'Create source' or 'select source'. One is
| black and the other blue. I assume they are both links? Looks
| like I need to click "Create source" to do the thing I would
| intuitively expect, which is to show me a blank spreadsheet to
| edit.
|
| 2. First column of a new spreadsheet is called "Name" and I
| cannot rename it, it only has sort options, but if I add another
| column it is called "unnamed" and I can rename it. I am not sure
| why this is. Since all I have been told at this point is that it
| is a "sheet" I am expecting a free homogenous experience like
| Excel. If it is not that, you might think about how to make it
| more obvious what it is. (Do I need training, a quick tutorial, a
| quick highlight-feature/click-next intro etc.?)
| novok wrote:
| I would take your current marketing front page and make it the
| page for developers. Then I would work with a B2B SaaS marketer
| on what you actually need for the people who make the purchasing
| decisions. You made a great construction kit, now you need to
| demonstrate with actual app demos what you can make in an amazing
| way that your competitors cannot.
|
| Developers love making libraries and construction kits as a
| product, but almost nobody buys construction kits unless the
| target market is constructors (like dev tools). You need to turn
| this into an actual product normal people would use. I think your
| pretty close to that although, you just need a few extra steps
| for that.
|
| What your targeting is a next step evolution in the target market
| that microsoft office is targeting. You need to demonstrate with
| demo videos (not workflow diagrams) so this reality is more
| apparent with what you've made. Go talk to users, understand what
| their needs are and then create a message and glue features that
| would make that happen.
|
| Notion kind of languished for years in their 'productivity dudes'
| niche and then exploded relatively recently. Figure out how they
| made that transition. Looking at what you made, it effectively
| looks like a better notion.
|
| I would also look into what makes people transition off notion to
| a more specialized tool. Like you can do task management, standup
| tracking, etc with notion, but it doesn't scale after a while and
| people go on to things like linear and teamplify. What can make
| people scale with your tool? That will probably be a thing to
| think about at a later stage with your company product although.
| voodooEntity wrote:
| really would like to test it but not getting the verification
| email *shrug
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