Updatey

@rrhoover - thanks. And you're absolutely right. It is an oversubscribed marketplace, but one that we feel is missing a subtle, but potentially market-changing, trick. Apologies in advance for the long reply! On a high level, Updatey is all about visualising and tracking the progress of your project. This is subtly different from the approach traditional PM tools have taken. We understand that things like tasks are what keep the internal team ticking on a daily basis - but keeping the internal team moving shouldn’t be the only objective. There’s also the wider, largely non-technical, team to consider. A project’s stakeholders (e.g. clients, customers, board of directors, investors etc) want and need a greater level of transparency and understanding. Just look towards the work Joe at Buffer is doing to drive a greater sense of transparency. It’s starting to become an expected attribute these days within both individual projects and businesses as a whole. The story started as a result of the work we do at Raw Jam - http://rawjam.co.uk (a development agency i run). Whenever we’d start a new project we’d hunt for a new tool to use - never quite satisfied that we’d found the right one yet. Time and time again we’d centre in on one and begrudgingly use it. Because although it enabled us to (largely) keep things ticking on a day to day basis internally, it did little to help with the week to week needs of the project - i.e. how the PM takes stock of progress made that week and crucially, how that is then related back to the client and other stakeholders. This is a theme we picked up on so frequently whilst talking to other project managers and business owners (irrespective of the industry and size of the project). They’re looking for a tool that actually helps them communicate the status and progress of a project to their stakeholders. So at the centre of Updatey, lies its ability to keep everyone on the same page - that’s essentially why we exist. The timeline (which is the primary and central device within Updatey) is the key piece of the jigsaw that helps with this objective, but we also have nifty features such as weekly highlight reports (where key team members simply email in a sentence or two on highlights / issues from that week - our systems then receive, process and create a beautiful PDF report that is then distributed to the wider team). Of course, we couldn’t exist if we ignored some of the more traditional PM features (such as tasks) and so we have a healthy dose of these sorts of things as well (with many more being added soon). When adding these features into Updatey though, we try and do so challenging ourselves to think about whether there might be a better, more ‘Updatey’, way to do it. I hope this is useful in some way. It’s a bit of a scatter gun summary of where Updatey was born from and why it exists. Happy to answer specific questions on strategy, approach, features or pretty much anything else.

@AndyGCook. Can you do me a favour and email us at hello@updatey.com. It looks like you may have stumbled upon a weird and wonderful bug whilst signing up, so would just like to clarify a couple of details. Many thanks.