Upwave

Harness the power of collaboration

1 follower

Harness the power of collaboration

1 follower

Upwave is a productivity platform for collaborating on projects, innovation processes, and daily tasks. Manage your teams, projects and tasks in a visual manner. The intuitive and user-friendly interface makes it easy to get everyone on board

Launch tags:Productivity•Task Management•Tech

Launch Team

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Promoted

SantaHunt

So what's the difference between you and Trello? I see that you are following the Kanban strategy too. Also you need many UI improvements, just a suggestion

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9yr ago

@noxowe Hi Laszlo, thanks for you question. There are quite a few differences between us actually. Firstly, we are specifically a business team tool. Trello has much broader aims, it can be used for shopping lists for example. Our focus on helping teams collaborate and improve productivity allows us to better meet their needs. You could call it a different philosophy. A lot of our paying teams have actually come to us from Trello. They share many of the same complaints: What we hear most often is that Trello is "bloated" with features they don't need, as a result of that the user interface is "clunky" or "too complex" for some low IT skill team members and therefore not easy to use and more importantly, difficult to onboard the whole team. Here at UpWave our focus is on keeping things as clean and easy to use and onboard as possible. We have made a promise to our users that we will never have what they call "feature creep". This is a scenario where an app keeps adding small new features over time and without realising it they end up with a "bloated" interface and (we believe) unnecessary complexity. For our core user base we are often the first step into digital collaboration tools so this "simple" approach, although it might seem trite, has been absolutely vital to our high growth since launch in June 2016. Now, this commitment to an easy simple tool is not for all teams. Some will need deeper functionality than what we provide but we believe we have a core customer base that needs a product like ours. And this user base is growing rapidly, with paying teams in more than 30 countries all over the world, in industries that vary from accountancy firms in France to breweries in Norway, to dentist practices in Brazil.. In my opinion, team task management solution can be compared to a market like the auto industry. All cars can get you from A to B, but what suits your personal taste and lifestyle the best? There is a lot of choice out there and our approach is unique, just like the make up of every team out there is unique. I hope this answers your question, Laszlo. Please get in touch if you have any follow up questions, we are more than happy to answer.

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9yr ago

@danhesketh So what makes UpWave more of a business tool? That you cut out features and promise not to implement new without caution (which is common sense)? I guess you have your audience and I wish you luck but seems like just an another board-lsh PM tool in the line of Trello, Asana and ~10 more commercial solutions as well as tons of free software like Kanbanshi, Kanboard, Taiga etc. But I like Scandinavian aesthetic, that's cool ;)

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9yr ago

Upwave

Maker

@vladzima Thanks. Simplifying things is actually really hard. We daily get feature requests that on their own makes a lot of sense. However, taken together they add clutter and complexity. Our target user is moving from excel, post-it's and even pen&paper. Simplicity of use and ease of onboarding teams is vital for them. Trello as you mention recently said in an interview that 50% of their users are technical and 50% non-technical. We target the non-technical users 100% with dedication. Most workers in both the private and public sector worldwide are non-technical, and they are just now looking for alternatives. In that sense UpWave is a business tool where most teams can collaborate, independent of skill level. We are used by breweries, architects, municipalities, airport managers and some (famous) pubs to name but a few. Our differentiation from other players, in addition to simplicity, is that we concentrate on flexibility of processes. We are on the flipside of structured project- and portfolio management, where you have many tools, and have had for years. Finally, we have the minimalistic Scandinavian design, which we want to keep as another differentiator. Appreciate that you like that!

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9yr ago

Hi, this is Dan, Community Manager and Co-Founder of UpWave.io UpWave is a task management solution for business teams that’s incredibly easy to use, feels simple but has great flexibility and power under the hood. UpWave helps you align your team, track your progress and get more done. We would love for you to sign up, take a look around and let us know what you think. I might be asking for trouble here but negative feedback is arguably more useful than positive. But if you love it you might as well tell us, we won’t complain. At all. I’m sure a few of you are thinking “Trello clone” but UpWave is built from scratch by our in house Dev Team here in Oslo, Norway. We like to think that our stylish, minimalist design is influenced by the Scandinavian aesthetic, but maybe that’s just us being fancy. We see the task management space as being a bit like the auto industry. All cars will get you from A to B, but everyone has their different tastes and needs. We find the customers that like us best are the ones who are making their first transition to digital tools in the workplace. UpWave is simple but flexible enough to help even those team members with low IT skills get on board and start getting more done. So, fire away, we will be here to answer your questions until we fall asleep at the keyboard. Thanks, Dan and the UpWave team.

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9yr ago

@danhesketh cool, but with @MeisterTask (also having a free plan), whats the difference here?

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9yr ago

Upwave

Maker

@ariaitch A full comparison with @meistertask is a bit beyond the scope of a short post, but I will give it a go. On the positive side, MeisterTask has some nice features we do currently not have, such as search in notes (we have that planned), time tracking (which we will never have as that is smoothly solved by others) and more reports. They are in general feature rich, and can serve many purposes for many teams. Our advantages vs. MeisterTask include: - Sleeker design and less clutter - both in general and on notes (design is of course subjective, and minimalism is not for everyone - think Scandinavians vs. Oligarchs) - More team focus from the get-go - Easier onboarding (no annoying confirmation mail - free tip for MeisterTask here) - Simpler UI In addition we have many minor features MeisterTask does not have (to my knowledge) such as drag-n-drop colums, color flexibility, rows for grid system (hidden feature in UpWave to avoid complexity) and more. Lastly, we have full functionality from the start - no free tier. More and more B2B SaaS products are scrapping the Freemium model of yore and moving to 14 or 30 day trial instead.

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9yr ago

@kjetil_molokken_ostvold interesting - thanks! Not as short of a post after all 😉

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9yr ago

Upwave

Maker

@ariaitch No. It is difficult to keep things short and simple when you are having interesting discussions.

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9yr ago

@danhesketh Seems interesting, but I don't see why I can't sign up and use this as an individual user. How would that degrade the experience for teams?

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9yr ago

We have used UpWave in our team in six months now and love it. I scraped Trello in favor of this great tool.

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9yr ago

Upwave

Maker

@odd_moe Appreciate it. And thanks for being an avid user and promoter.

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9yr ago

Looks very interesting and seems like a lot of work have been done here! @run 3

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6yr ago

Sounds Good, I am also going to try this one @ Winter Olympics

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5yr ago

Hi there, how did you first identify a need for a 'better' Trello? How did you go about getting further validation, how did you identify the right people to speak to and did this include asking people to pay?

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9yr ago

Upwave

Maker

Very interesting questions @stinhambo. I will try to answer them separately. 1. Idea. The original idea was not a new version of Trello. It was rather a major improvement to a collaboration platform called Symphonical (now abolished). Two of UpWave's founders worked on it for several years. Symphonical got great traction in sign-ups, had enterprise customers with 1000+ users and was one of the first Google Hangout partners (http://www.infoworld.com/article...). It all looked promising. Sadly, Symphonical got way to complicated and bloated, and user onboarding suffered. Also, the business model (freemium) did not work. We are trying to rectify all this with UpWave. 2. Validation. With UpWave, we have worked closely alongside early pilot users. Intercom is a great tool for engaging users and getting feedback. The people we speak to are self-selecting for the most parts. Some users get very engaged and we love developing the product together with them. Also, our development process is extremely agile. We are constantly pushing out new features and improvements, getting early feedback, and iterating again. 3. Asking people to pay. This is an extremely interesting discussion. Not just for us, but the entire SaaS community. After launching, we were freemium for 4-5 months. We expected this to work out fine, but conversion rates were just to low. So we changed from freemium to trial around summertime. This was crucial for our business. It allowed us to: * Only have the most relevant users providing feedback * No costs associated with people who were never going to pay anyway * Increase revenue! We both hope and believe the freemium craze will end, as it is unsustainable in the long term. Too many companies have free versions with too much offered, while their paid versions are overpriced. Look for example at the recent debacle about Evernote's changes in pricing plans and cutting down on free features. They gave away too much for free. Also, we know that some of our major competitors have insanely low conversion rates, with less than 1% converting from sign-ups to paying users.

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9yr ago

Notion VIP

@danhesketh Does UpWave have keyboard shortcuts? They're critical to my Trello workflow. How about mobile apps?

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9yr ago

@william_nutt Hi William, thanks for the question. We have quite a few shortcuts, you can read about them here - https://upwave.zendesk.com/hc/en... Currently we don’t have a mobile app as such, but we do have a responsive app and we support push notifications through your mobile browser. That means we effectively do have a mobile app but it's not wrapped in an app shell. You can install the home page on your mobile, so it's basically the same thing! https://blog.upwave.io/2016/09/2... We are of course working on it as high priority. Thanks again, Dan

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9yr ago

Stacktical

I'm always in for a good task manager that fits in our SCRUM practices. And that's exactly the issue I'm having right now... You say you're for business? I see no story pointing, no estimates and more importantly, no reporting feature (hello burndown!)... The UI looks great and I like how uncluttered everything feels, but I don't know if this will help my team ship more than Trello does as an ecosystem. Overall, it looks like Trello and Blossom had a baby. But maybe that baby needs to grow up a bit before we adopt it :) I don't think targeting non-technical users mean stripping off ways to measure effort and plan for capacity. Competition is hard out there.

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9yr ago

Upwave

Maker

@wilhempujar You are completely right Wilhem. We are not a dedicated Scrum tool. There are many tools (and plugins to tools) out there targeted at Scrum teams. That is not the problem we are trying to solve and market we are targeting. We believe that problem has been more than adequately solved by others. Scrum teams are typically early adopters. We are targeting non-technical users, and not software engineers like ourselves. That being said, we have some teams using us for agile processes. Those teams, however, are not dedicated to certain techniques and tools such as planning poker, story points, burndowns, stand-ups etc. Rather, they follow the original agile principles, and use UpWave for task management and overview. Often, these teams don't estimate at all, and some also belong to the #noestimates movement. For our own in-house development process, we ditched both sprints and estimates 7-8 months ago. And we have never looked back. We are not the most extreme agilists I know, but we are slowly getting there...

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9yr ago

Saying Trello is complicated and too technical ... I don't get it.All my none-tech friends can enjoy trello. I don't think it should be one of your pitch point.

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9yr ago

Upwave

Maker

Completely agree @_pascalandy. Trello is a "middle of the road" tool many can enjoy. The users we are targeting around the world, however, have in most cases never heard of Asana, Trello and the likes. They have never heard of UpWave either. We pitch ourselves to them as an easy and affordable tool that will help them transition their task management from excel, word, pen&paper or whatever they are currently using. The crowd here at Product Hunt is of a different inclination, and we know that many will compare us with tool X, Y and Z, and we try to answer as forthright as possible. That being said, with the sale of Trello to Atlassian last week, we just had jump at the oppertunity and create a new landing page (https://www.upwave.io/trello) and an import tool (http://bit.ly/2jmr2B3). We have also gotten many support requests since posting here from users wanting to transition from Trello. (On a sidenote, it is interesting that you can export Trello boards, but you cannot import them back to Trello again...)

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9yr ago

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