Comment by kjksf

Ah, I do love the smell of fresh optimism in the morning!

I think the biggest challenges are that a) the vast majority of solo devs capable of pulling this off quickly are well-employed, and b) the timeline for MVP++ is effectively January 1st, else the migrators will make different decisions.

And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch.

> It's also a product that is doable as a single person or very small team. With modern technologies (React or Svelte, hosted databases etc.) it's relatively simple to clone

The core product is relatively simple. But software packages like Pivotal aren't sold on their core functionality, they are sold on their value-adds like integrations, automations etc which take much longer and much more manpower to build.

The biggest risk: people are going to flock to Linear, which is the next best thing.

It just went out of business for… reasons. There are better tools out there nowadays, apparently. Why emulate a sunken ship?

Challenge accepted!

I've built a bunch of web apps for big companies, and I love the hell out of Pivotal Tracker and am crushed that it is gone. I immediately fired up my editor and took some exports from my pivotal tracker account and am working on building a data model to import them into and move from there to the UI.

The base product is pretty straight forward, but there is a lot of nuance to how some things have developed in it.

I will likely not capture everything in an MVP, and I am wondering if there are some key pieces that might be not thought of for an MVP, but you absolutely love about Pivotal Tracker that would be sorely missed in a new product trying to fill it's nitch.

I also see some things that could be broadened and improved that are common in other project trackers. What are some thing you feel pivotal tracker was missing that really made it a difficult sell in businesses?

Feel free to comment on this thread your feedback. I'll be watching it, and also, if any other competitors want to lock horns on developing it, they can have at your feedback too!

If you want to be alerted to when I release this, as well as other things from me, sign up to my email list: https://mailchi.mp/73f113e474f1/robert-kohrs-blog or just follow my blog's rss feed at https://robkohr.com

This genuinely is an opportunity as you're saying lol

As someone who's built and launched something this big in a few months once upon a time, it feels like way too many technologies, it increases cycle time in ideation land.

This would need to just be a postgres server, extended maybe by things like hasura and supabase, and a single codebase front end for all platforms. If postgres can't do it, don't do it.

Front end... might be flutter. Could be svelte.

Still, being a polyglot agnostic, for the dollar, in speed of development and more importantly iteration, per feature or update, in not needing to create an entire build, environment, nothing really seems to be as complete or as fast as Laravel, as much as it can shock to hear (I am not a heavy user, but considering it).

Different strokes though, its just about speed of iteration.

Given that it's impossible to sign up, it looks like most prospective cloners will have to learn all the features by watching videos and learn about the exported CSV format by asking former customers for their CSVs.

Well, we took your approach and we'll see where it will take us. We are a company, so we made similar products before in our past, we should be good.

This happened when Mint shut down and a lot of other companies started advertising themselves as a Mint alternative. I'm building something similar too for my own needs (but open source, self host able); sadly it's still very early on so I didn't quite catch the migration wave.

Great idea! If you're reading this and want to connect about a clone, I'm joel@joelparkerhenderson.com.

Don't people just use Trello instead?