This is driven by a very simple thing - pension funds and insurance.
Back in the day (and in poor countries with no pension funds) people knew that they had to have children because otherwise nobody would support them when they were old and they'd die. Right now people are confident that they will get a pension when they are old, so there is no reason for them to have kids.
They consider children as an inconvenience, miss out on the marvel of parenthood, and basically make the nation die off gradually.
Plus of course - lowering wages and women having to work, thus making having a child a huge problem.
I'm 36, started in tech 20 years ago. And the only things I regret was working for someone too long, focusing on the wrong startups for too long (and yes, you can tell which ones are the bad ideas - mainly if they're too big and not focused).
The main driver of building your own stuff is necessity, pressure. And the main fuel is time to strategise and think. So by quitting your job you basically have all the needed tools.
And then you just need to get involved with things to find the right idea - talk to people, do things, try this, try that, until you find something that works and validate it. Watch different industries, see where tech could reinvent things. Take your time until you find something worthwhile, make sure it can be profitable in a short amount of time. And consult with people who've done it.
Yes, you can go ahead and just use tasks, projects, time tracking. It won't be ideal because you lose a lot of the benefits of integration, and the ease of moving information between email and tasks/projects.
thanks for the extensive writeup. We do have time tracking exactly in the sense which you mentioned - while someone works on a task, or when he completes it - he gets a bubble asking 'how long did it take you and what were you doing?' - then he just inputs the time taken and optionally a comment - and BAM! you can see the history of work in his profile. Plus you can see the total time/cost of each project, plus estimated time of completion for each task and project.
We do have a kanban-like board where you can specify in what exact order an employee should work on tasks.
The reporting part is not fully fleshed out yet but we will work on it as soon as we launch.
Regarding CRM - it's the first big item on our TODO list once we launch, and stabilise the system. And it will base on our internal task/discussion engine so we won't have that much work to do.
We share your opinion about the need to fully onboard users and collaborate with their existing tools. Right now we are finishing up desktop file synchro, and mobile contacts/calendars synchro. The stuff you mentioned will come next. We have a really small but very talented team and it's about time to launch at last after so many years - so we can't have everything in version 1. But we already have enough to interest people and it's comprehensive enough to satisfy all their basic needs (except CRM :).
Please sign up on our beta site and please contact me directly via contact at dynado.com if you have any additional questions. I will be very grateful for your ideas now and feedback once we launch. If you are not worried about bugs and would like to look the product sooner than we launch - please let me know.
There was an internal beta for over a year now. And our approach changed twice over those 3 years.
A product which is so complex and aimed at businesses can't be 'bootstrapped' in 3 months and launched. The result would be that nobody would care about it because it would be incomplete and wouldn't cater to their needs. There are a lot of such products and nobody remembers about them. I hope our effort will pay off, and that's what our current testers are telling me :)
The advantage over zoho is:
1. looks
2. simplicity of setup/use
3. integration between the subsystems
4. integration between companies - if you run multiple companies you can manage them from one account and one inbox without logging into each one separately
Our idea is to give a time limited trial, with unlimited users but with some storage limits.
Plus everyone will be able to cooperate with external contractors for free - you can add as many of them as you want and their accounts will be fully functional but with a few limitations.
For example instaed of sending an email to someone - you can send a task (the form is nearly the same), automatically creating a free account for that target user. This way you can keep track of the request and ping him if he forgets, store it in your project hierarchy, etc. And the recipient gets it through email and can reply only via email without even registering.
Simplicity was one of our main goals when building Dynado. It has to be usable from day 1 not only by tech-savvy people but also by everyone else in the company.
So all the advanced features are hidden behind a simple interface.
And an example of integration between the calendar and tasks: if one of your support consultants goes on vacations, the workflow managing support tasks automatically stops assigning tasks to him so that they don't pile up while he is away.
We still haven't decided on the pricing, but the main idea we have is $19/user/month, with some volume discounts. We want to offer top notch support, and we replace a number of apps plus add a lot of value on top of them through the integration and polish. So I think that our customers will see that the value is far higher than the $19/month.
Yes it should, we didn't hook it up yet - I couldn't sleep and just had to share it. Sorry about that, will put up some soon and mention it on our Twitter/FB.
I'm glad to hear it fraXis. It's been a long and bumpy ride but we are finally here, I'll be happy to blog about it as soon as we push out the public beta.
This story repeats with most such startups:
- indextank - was a great cloud full text indexing service, acquired by linkedin
- mailgun - acquired by rackspace - still functioning but they stopped expanding into interesting directions and are winding down some of their more advanced APIs
So bottom line is, if you want to be sure about your data, set it up on your servers instead of some hot cloud providing startup..
The sexes are different by definition. Girls in bras are very entertaining, and I see no reason not to be happy about them as a man. I wouldn't be so happy to see guys in bras.
I've been working on a product also in this direction but it's more full featured and mature. It's called http://dynado.com and we're launching within a month (don't look at the design - the final main site isn't up yet).
It's basically a webmail where you can decide to either send somebody a task or an email. Everything goes through email though and you can send a task to anyone, even people from outside the system. They can then either collaborate via email or register to use the system themselves.
Of course it's integrated with an IM, file storage solution where you can attach those files, browse a stream of sent/received attachments. It also has a project tree and reports per-user or project, with really simple and integrated time tracking. AND it has a built in calendar with an innovative twist.
Basically it's an all-in-one business management tool tightly integrated with email in order to let you use the tools you know (email) but still capture all the knowledge and track all the tasks without switching to 10 different apps.
Yes I've managed a senior marketing person before (I had a big startup which was successful and then flopped - but on European market). We don't have a customer base, we are going to talk to some non-competing companies which do have that base to cross-sell our product. But besides this we are on our own.
Online communications software - dynado.com. The website is outdated, we have a completely new and beautiful design and we're launching around March. The company is aimed at US customers but we are based in Europe.
Back in the day (and in poor countries with no pension funds) people knew that they had to have children because otherwise nobody would support them when they were old and they'd die. Right now people are confident that they will get a pension when they are old, so there is no reason for them to have kids.
They consider children as an inconvenience, miss out on the marvel of parenthood, and basically make the nation die off gradually.
Plus of course - lowering wages and women having to work, thus making having a child a huge problem.