Free business idea: clone Pivotal Tracker as a solo dev / small team.
People often ask: how do I find business ideas?
Well, here you go: many people publicly saying how they love a product that is going away.
This is a validated product: people were paying for it. Apparently quite a lot of people. It doesn't get better than this.
All you have to do is to clone the product. You can literally market it as a Pivotal Tracker clone. It's not like VMWare will care.
You can research companies currently using Pivotal Tracker and build a database for cold calling / e-mailing when you have the product.
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.
Staying small is important: those businesses topple over when revenues don't justify expenses, especially if VC funding is involved and VCs are pressuring for going big or going bust. Or when a profitable product is acquired with the hopes of growing the profits but they don't grow.
Stay small to keep expenses in check and you can build a profitable company.
This is a bootstrappable business: a $100/mo Hetzner box, backend in efficient language (Go, C#), front-end in Svelte or React and you can serve lots of customers. The rest is your time and hustle.
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.
The best way to pull this off is to bet the tool will end up shutting down and build the replacement before it does. A good example of this is Pinboard: Maciej knew the product inside out, and he knew what being acquired by Yahoo meant. So he started building Pinboard in 2009, caught the various exodus waves from Delicious in the later years (esp. 2011) and ended up acquiring it for $35k in 2017.
> And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch.
Unless people somehow figure out a way of hosting stuff somewhere else than Amazon/$host_that_charges_per_mb_transit (Hint: they exist)
Considering it would have to be a lean operation (assuming bootstrapped), then figuring out basic stuff like "We don't want to pay per MB sent" should be a pretty high requirement.
The real reason this won’t work is that Pivotal obviously isn’t making good money if VMWare is cool with shutting it down.
If it was some kind of excellent business to be in it wouldn’t be shutting down.
An analogy would be to say that it would be a great business model to clone Redbox now that it’s gone. But it’s not because its competitors ate it alive.
Sure, there are a bunch of Redbox customers that liked the product, but that number was declining.
> 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.
You don't need to capture all of them, just enough to get to profitability. That might be a very small number, for the right minimal viable replacement.
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!
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.
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.
I also loved that it was adamant about having specific, defined states with no customization. The issue is todo, in progress, done, delivered, accepted… that’s it. Custom issue states are a special kind of hell in JIRA.
60% yes, but 40% no, because there was nothing after "accepted" - so no way to track "in production" and "validated with users", which are the most important states. You could abuse the earlier states to do that, but then you have trouble tracking internal acceptance. Ultimately, reality just has more significant states than Tracker recognised.
Yes - 100% of the people I saw be annoyed after switching to GitHub projects were the people whose projects were perennially late but also had a roughly 1:1 ratio of PM overhead rituals to actual work. I’ve come to think of it like giving a toddler TikTok – there’s a certain type of person who cannot resist thinking that one more workflow state / custom field will be the secret trick for productivity.
I LOVED Pivotal tracker for just this reason- it was way more focused. It was hands-down my favorite task tracker. Since most of my projects were code related, we eventually moved to Github Projects which is honestly very similar in being focused. The downside is that non-technical people may need to get a Github account, but it wasn't that much of an obstacle in practice.
An alternative to one big queue is a separate queue for each client (external customers, internal teams, the dev team's own tech debt, etc) as described in "JIT selection from independent streams: An alternative to the “big backlog” of work":
Each client manages their queue order, so the dev team just needs to focus on the head of each queue. (Of course, the dev team should also work with clients to clarify the requirements for the next few tasks in their queues so the head task will be shovel-ready). The dev team can then choose which queue heads to prioritize and maintain a balance, such as always have one tech debt task and X bug fix tasks in progress in addition to client work.
I was on one team that used it and it always felt overly simplistic. But I have to admit that we generally delivered what we committed to each sprint. It was pretty clear when we were overcommitting.
I know managers love Jira — a poster child for customizability — esp product managers, but I have yet to meet a software engineer who does.
It simply slows everyone down, but when it's your only tool for tracking work, it's still better than nothing.
Now, the problem with Jira is not necessarily customizability but that it's dog slow, complex, integrations suck, and permissions system is chaotic. Still, I have yet to see fully customizable work tracking system that's better made than Jira.
But also, a fixed set of features does not force you to ascribe the same meaning to them like the authors intended: I've used "bug" tracking systems to manage large projects with great success (including big features, enhancements, but also big and small fixes).
I hear that the dirty secret of Salesforce is that it’s easier to change your company processes to match Salesforce defaults than to change Salesforce to match your company process.
> I’d rather have a tool that’s more customizable.
You think you would, until you do, and by then it's too late.
It's important to have good processes, but the point of all those processes is to help you make things more efficiently. Anything that leads to you spending extra time serving the process directly reduces the amount of real work you can do.
A past job used Pivotal for several years until a new employee asked if we'd ever heard of Linear. I think we started the migration maybe a month later.
This is like Excel - nobody needs more than 20% of all its features... but a different 20% for everyone. Project Management/Tracking needs can vary a lot between orgs or even people.
Agreed, and I suspect part of what made it great is that it was being ignored. I love all the dubious new features it doesn't have, and the complex larger platform offering it isn't a part of.
I agree. I have been on Pivotal Tracker for over a decade. Still am. Tried Jira and a few others, usually feeling like they are too taxing on the management part.
What are alternatives that are light on the customization and day-to-day management?
I help build Shortcut (https://www.shortcut.com/) and I think it fits the bill of light—but not spartan—on customization and day-to-day management.
To set up a new Shortcut workspace:
1. Sign up
2. Invite teammates, group them into teams if desired
3. Activate the GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket integration, so as engineers work via VCS their work in Shortcut progresses automatically
4. Set your workspace's timezone
5. Turn on/off Iterations (sprints) based on your process. Unfinished stories can be set to automatically roll from one iteration to the next.
6. Turn on/off point estimation based on your process
Then start writing Stories (tickets/issues) to track work.
Going further: Stories can be grouped into Epics. Epics can be grouped into Objectives (with associated Key Results if that's your thing). You can put Epics on a Roadmap to "share out" what your team is planning to work on. All optional, based on how you work and the size of your org.
I’ve been using Github Projects.
It’s not as advanced and complex as Jira though, but its simplicity and closeness to code and documentation is a blessing for my hyperactive geek brain
I have never understood the VMWare/Pivotal thing, to the point where I assumed there must be two different companies named that for VMWare to have bought a company called Pivotal.
We found https://www.shortcut.com less opinionated than Linear and a closer 1 for 1 to Pivotal. They're all getting a little bloated, wish one would dial it back vs keep adding (which feels like the inevitable future for Linear).
Out of curiousity, what do you dislike about spreadsheets/google docs? This has been my primary means of tracking progress historically. I've tended to find that all other mechanisms just add unecessary overhead.
Collaborative/online spreadsheets can work. Carefully designed, with appropriate field constraints and filters and sort templates... especially for smaller lists or smaller groups, they can be OK.
A few areas where they break down though:
- No attachments to stories (test cases, screenshots, etc)
- No comments/history view or threaded discussions
- Poor usability of notifications on @mention
- Inflexible UI/data formatting (cells instead of layout)
I'll often start a project using a spreadsheet, because one big advantage is that you can edit several "stories" at once. So it's a good rough draft. Inevitably, the missing features become more important and I move the data over to a more appropriate tool.
Sometimes I keep the spreadsheet for internal stakeholder issue reporting. It's a business-familiar tool for gathering input, which then gets synced to the more purpose-built tool for action.
Pouring one out for Pivotal Tracker. This was an outstanding ticket tracking and project management system, way ahead of its time.
Back when I did contract software engineering, Pivotal Tracker made managing client relationships a breeze by giving the client perfect visibility into the impact of feature requests, and allowing them to make the tradeoffs that made sense for their business.
"Want to add this new feature, and do it right away? No problem, but as you can see, if I drag it into this week, as a 4-point task, it pushes everything else back by two days, which means we'll have to cut something else or change the launch date."
Great UI, great vibes, and was just a delight to use. Even as PT dies, its legacy lives on. Thank you, PT team!
RIP PT. I can't tell you how much this piece of software changed my life. Working at Pivotal (the very early days of Cloud Foundry), taught me so much about how to develop software and products. It taught me how to work closely with people (pair programming for the win!). How to iterate and pay attention to velocity. How to write stories. How to polish a turd over time. I use these skills every single day.
You will be missed old friend. Nothing else comes close.
Same. Out of 15 shops I worked for this was absolutely different (2017-2018) and the only place I've seen pair programming and TDD done right. Once we managed to deploy first version of a trading product with no bugs at all.
When I tried to explain other people afterwards how to do this, they just shrugged, as if I told a fairy tale. I had a chance to demo it maybe a couple more times while migrating other systems, and very successfully (and with very low mental and emotional effort) - itemizing the tests cases first, building fakes, frequent commits, trunk-based development, small stories, incremental improvements.
But it's never been perceived as a designed success, they are typically so prejudiced that they saw it as a fluctuation in the monkey circus of software development they got used to.
Now I'm at the stage we need a support group for ex-alumnis.
No, I mean taking a turd, which was the Cloud Foundry codebase that Pivotal inherited (aka purchased), and polishing it to be something that actually worked.
It is arguable if it was ever sufficiently polished, but at least we tried our best.
I worked on a tool more crowded than this and of late I’m coming around to the idea that these tools are all built for management which is why they get deployed. These drag and drop views aren’t that helpful for engineers. And they just make it easy for someone else to accidentally fuck up the status on your tasks.
The task list in Jira is good enough for finishing or marking one task as blocked and starting another. If anyone is using the interface like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, dragging things around at pace, it’s because people aren’t keeping their tasks updated and a tool can’t and probably shouldn’t try to fix that. You fix that by orienting the UI so devs benefit from using it, not by guilt tripping or lecturing.
It was, and at that time it suddenly became much harder to do a web search on how to do anything in their UI! Turns out, Shortcut is not the most Google friendly name.
Are there any open source self-hostable tracking/project management tools that still have a committed team and forward momentum?
I used to self-host a Phabricator instance, which I liked a lot, but the upstream maintainer made the reasonable decision to step away.
My guess is there is not much of a niche for self-hosted solutions anymore. The GitHub Issues free tier covers most of the low-complexity use-cases, while higher-complexity use-cases are addressed by enterprise SaaS.
I was also very fond of Phabricator (all though my team preferred GitHub style pull requests) but I haven't had a need for it recently, so I haven't tried phorge myself.
> Are there any open source self-hostable tracking/project management tools that still have a committed team and forward momentum?
Taiga.io?
> My guess is there is not much of a niche for self-hosted solutions anymore. The GitHub Issues free tier covers most of the low-complexity use-cases, while higher-complexity use-cases are addressed by enterprise SaaS.
Especially with the presence of free SaaSes such as Trello, and integrated project management in self-hosted GitLab, yeah.
This is sad to see. I haven't used PT in over a decade probably, but I used it heavily for 3-4 years before that. As a contrast to other "agile" tools, it was a breath of fresh air. So simple, everything was all on one screen, so easy to move things from state to state. My team loved it because they could just open it up in a window and leave it open all day, making changes as needed. I don't think I've ever seen anything since that came close to it.
I just logged in for the first time in years and found that I still had two side projects in there. Time to download them I guess.
Readit News
People often ask: how do I find business ideas?
Well, here you go: many people publicly saying how they love a product that is going away.
This is a validated product: people were paying for it. Apparently quite a lot of people. It doesn't get better than this.
All you have to do is to clone the product. You can literally market it as a Pivotal Tracker clone. It's not like VMWare will care.
You can research companies currently using Pivotal Tracker and build a database for cold calling / e-mailing when you have the product.
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.
Staying small is important: those businesses topple over when revenues don't justify expenses, especially if VC funding is involved and VCs are pressuring for going big or going bust. Or when a profitable product is acquired with the hopes of growing the profits but they don't grow.
Stay small to keep expenses in check and you can build a profitable company.
This is a bootstrappable business: a $100/mo Hetzner box, backend in efficient language (Go, C#), front-end in Svelte or React and you can serve lots of customers. The rest is your time and hustle.
I think the biggest challenges are that a) the vast majority of solo devs capable of pulling this off quickly are well-employed, and b) the timeline for MVP++ is effectively January 1st, else the migrators will make different decisions.
And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch.
Unless people somehow figure out a way of hosting stuff somewhere else than Amazon/$host_that_charges_per_mb_transit (Hint: they exist)
Considering it would have to be a lean operation (assuming bootstrapped), then figuring out basic stuff like "We don't want to pay per MB sent" should be a pretty high requirement.
If it was some kind of excellent business to be in it wouldn’t be shutting down.
An analogy would be to say that it would be a great business model to clone Redbox now that it’s gone. But it’s not because its competitors ate it alive.
Sure, there are a bunch of Redbox customers that liked the product, but that number was declining.
Dead Comment
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.
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
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.
Previous user of Pivotal Tracker - I'll tell you everything that I loved and hated about it.
I know a couple other devout users as well that I could introduce you to.
It forced everyone to ruthlessly prioritize and make the hard decisions.
In this moment, do you want me working on this bug, or this new feature? You have to decide - you get one or the other.
It avoided the "Everything is a high priority" dilemma.
The nth circle of hell looks like a Jira workflow. https://i.imgur.com/dQE9vWn.png and https://medium.com/@daitcheson/you-can-do-better-than-jira-1...
https://longform.asmartbear.com/jit-backlogs/
Each client manages their queue order, so the dev team just needs to focus on the head of each queue. (Of course, the dev team should also work with clients to clarify the requirements for the next few tasks in their queues so the head task will be shovel-ready). The dev team can then choose which queue heads to prioritize and maintain a balance, such as always have one tech debt task and X bug fix tasks in progress in addition to client work.
A good productivity tool doesn’t dictate how teams work.
I’d rather have a tool that’s more customizable.
It simply slows everyone down, but when it's your only tool for tracking work, it's still better than nothing.
Now, the problem with Jira is not necessarily customizability but that it's dog slow, complex, integrations suck, and permissions system is chaotic. Still, I have yet to see fully customizable work tracking system that's better made than Jira.
But also, a fixed set of features does not force you to ascribe the same meaning to them like the authors intended: I've used "bug" tracking systems to manage large projects with great success (including big features, enhancements, but also big and small fixes).
You think you would, until you do, and by then it's too late.
It's important to have good processes, but the point of all those processes is to help you make things more efficiently. Anything that leads to you spending extra time serving the process directly reduces the amount of real work you can do.
It made it easy to do the things that were frequently done.
It limited customization down to a sane level.
And it generally seemed to stay out of the way (significant look at Jira).
For now. Looking at the competition it's only a matter of time before it becomes bloated to justify valuations.
https://linear.app/
This is like Excel - nobody needs more than 20% of all its features... but a different 20% for everyone. Project Management/Tracking needs can vary a lot between orgs or even people.
What are alternatives that are light on the customization and day-to-day management?
To set up a new Shortcut workspace:
1. Sign up 2. Invite teammates, group them into teams if desired 3. Activate the GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket integration, so as engineers work via VCS their work in Shortcut progresses automatically 4. Set your workspace's timezone 5. Turn on/off Iterations (sprints) based on your process. Unfinished stories can be set to automatically roll from one iteration to the next. 6. Turn on/off point estimation based on your process
Then start writing Stories (tickets/issues) to track work.
Going further: Stories can be grouped into Epics. Epics can be grouped into Objectives (with associated Key Results if that's your thing). You can put Epics on a Roadmap to "share out" what your team is planning to work on. All optional, based on how you work and the size of your org.
linear.app seems ok
It was clear the VMWare was going to gut the company, and Broadcom only made that clearer.
It was once a great company... (Pivotal Labs)
Now it's toast.
Collaborative/online spreadsheets can work. Carefully designed, with appropriate field constraints and filters and sort templates... especially for smaller lists or smaller groups, they can be OK.
A few areas where they break down though:
I'll often start a project using a spreadsheet, because one big advantage is that you can edit several "stories" at once. So it's a good rough draft. Inevitably, the missing features become more important and I move the data over to a more appropriate tool.Sometimes I keep the spreadsheet for internal stakeholder issue reporting. It's a business-familiar tool for gathering input, which then gets synced to the more purpose-built tool for action.
Back when I did contract software engineering, Pivotal Tracker made managing client relationships a breeze by giving the client perfect visibility into the impact of feature requests, and allowing them to make the tradeoffs that made sense for their business.
"Want to add this new feature, and do it right away? No problem, but as you can see, if I drag it into this week, as a 4-point task, it pushes everything else back by two days, which means we'll have to cut something else or change the launch date."
Great UI, great vibes, and was just a delight to use. Even as PT dies, its legacy lives on. Thank you, PT team!
You will be missed old friend. Nothing else comes close.
When I tried to explain other people afterwards how to do this, they just shrugged, as if I told a fairy tale. I had a chance to demo it maybe a couple more times while migrating other systems, and very successfully (and with very low mental and emotional effort) - itemizing the tests cases first, building fakes, frequent commits, trunk-based development, small stories, incremental improvements.
But it's never been perceived as a designed success, they are typically so prejudiced that they saw it as a fluctuation in the monkey circus of software development they got used to.
Now I'm at the stage we need a support group for ex-alumnis.
You mean iterating and pivoting.
It is arguable if it was ever sufficiently polished, but at least we tried our best.
Shortcut as a product is team-oriented with solid GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket and Slack integrations.
Pivotal Tracker - ice box, backlog, or current iteration.
I see companies in Trello Hell - well meaning, but often conflated, grey area states. There's like 10-15 columns on their boards.
It's a hot mess.
The task list in Jira is good enough for finishing or marking one task as blocked and starting another. If anyone is using the interface like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, dragging things around at pace, it’s because people aren’t keeping their tasks updated and a tool can’t and probably shouldn’t try to fix that. You fix that by orienting the UI so devs benefit from using it, not by guilt tripping or lecturing.
I used to self-host a Phabricator instance, which I liked a lot, but the upstream maintainer made the reasonable decision to step away.
My guess is there is not much of a niche for self-hosted solutions anymore. The GitHub Issues free tier covers most of the low-complexity use-cases, while higher-complexity use-cases are addressed by enterprise SaaS.
Redmine:
- https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/repository/svn/show...
- https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/Download
RequestTracker:
- https://github.com/bestpractical/rt
- https://github.com/bestpractical/rt/releases
A bit like Phabricator, these are almost frameworks that can do a ticketing UI.
// But really, probably something mentioned elsewhere in the thread, Taiga:
- https://community.taiga.io/t/taiga-30min-setup/170
I was also very fond of Phabricator (all though my team preferred GitHub style pull requests) but I haven't had a need for it recently, so I haven't tried phorge myself.
Deleted Comment
Taiga.io?
> My guess is there is not much of a niche for self-hosted solutions anymore. The GitHub Issues free tier covers most of the low-complexity use-cases, while higher-complexity use-cases are addressed by enterprise SaaS.
Especially with the presence of free SaaSes such as Trello, and integrated project management in self-hosted GitLab, yeah.
I just logged in for the first time in years and found that I still had two side projects in there. Time to download them I guess.