Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)

[harrisonlo]

Nino is a radical approach to solve the app chaos problem for today's knowledge worker. I believe there are still too many tools; even using them becomes work in itself. I'm building all these apps from scratch in one place, using the same database and UI, with the flexibility to eventually support the majority of work from one "superapp."

Currently there are 18 apps (called "modules") on Nino:

- Database types: Sheet, Form, Calendar, Gallery, Board, Todo, List

- Composition types: Doc, Slide, Drive, Notebook, Canvas, Grid, Blog, Site

- Communication types: Channel, Chat, Meet

I want to improve these modules and build more. Your feedback is important!

FAQ: How is it different from Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or startups like Notion and Clickup?

A: I think Nino has a better foundation to (1) consolidate a lot more apps than they currently do, (2) drastically improve speed with offline architecture, and (3) offer unmatched privacy and security with end-to-end encryption (coming soon)

Let me expand on these points:

1. Consolidation

In Nino, pages and blocks are interoperable with each other. Google and Microsoft still have mostly isolated apps. Nino is one (super)app that supports 18 modules, saving you time from switching and integrating between different providers.

2. Offline mode

This is actually more complex than it seems, but I ultimately decided it's worth it, not only for people who need to work without internet, but also for everyone else who want instant page load. Everything is saved locally by default.

3. End-to-end encryption (E2EE)

This is just a preview and not open to public yet, but is something I have been building alongside since day 1. In fact, it's likely not architecturally possible for existing products to add later on. Nino is built to offer both E2EE and cloud features (backup, search, collaboration).

One more thing: pages on Nino are also publishable! There are blog and site modules, but you can also publish other modules (i.e. sheet, board, canvas, etc.) on your custom domain or on a free nino.page subdomain.

Give it a try and let me know how it can improve. I want to hear from you.

[sgarland]

Single biggest thing you need to nail down fast: the data model. It is extremely hard to shift as things grow, and without careful thought, it’ll turn into a horrifying miasma of JSONB columns, duplicated data, orphaned rows, and garbage performance.

Customers are going to store surprisingly large items in Docs, where you’d be tempted to inline them instead of offloading to S3 et al.

Chat practically needs to be its own DB. Discord runs on Scylla, Slack runs on Vitess over MySQL. The needs of chat access are wildly different from other types of storage.

If you’re doing any kind of active-active, have a plan for how to move off of that, because it does not scale (at least, not without breath-takingly expensive hardware).

Source: DBRE at one of your competitors.

EDIT: The fact that you’re doing offline saves (which is very cool!) makes me think that you may be using something like Ditto [0], which IIRC is MyRocksDB under the hood. I have no experience with either, but I do know some super sharp folks working at Ditto.

[0]: https://ditto.live

[chefandy]

Single biggest technical thing, anyway. IMO, the single biggest thing is focus and clarity in their communication. If people without a working mental model of software development can’t instantly understand the tangible problem it solves in their existing business process, they won’t even scroll past the break, let alone pay for it. Consolidation and modularity are solutions, but people don’t go shopping for solutions without a problem. Have you ever gone out looking for a better commercial version of work-related software you didn’t have any problem with? “App chaos” is way too abstract of a problem for most people to grasp. Do people have trouble sharing google docs over slack? Do companies have trouble with sharepoint and teams not being integrated enough? Does your tool do it better? Does your tool do it approximately as well, but cheaper? More reliably? If so, do people find the existing solutions too pricy or unreliable, or does that not impact them enough to care?

Unless they define, upfront, specific problems people really have, that their unified solution solves, then nobody is going to pay attention.

The second biggest problem is having an interface design team that makes all of those disparate apps consistent enough to be more usable than individual solutions. The fact that nearly no popular user-facing applications are developer-managed FOSS (as opposed to Firefox/blender/signal/et al which are managed by a company that hires professional designers) despite being free, tells you everything you need to know about dev-driven UI/UX. This is coming from someone that worked as a full time developer for years and contributed many thousands of hours of coding to FOSS projects before switching to design.

[winrid]

He's most likely using SQLite per account, because that's the easiest way to have an offline DB and sync it, which will most likely scale perfectly fine with appropriate indexes as long as you are careful about the feature set.

[japanman185]

No one cares about that. Export to open document format or microsoft. You are living in a bubble of “hackers”. You are not your average user.

Case in point of “engineers are not product people”

[valty]

The problem with modern development is having to nail down the data model first.

I wish we would develop software where the data model could easily change.

To do this every data dependency in the system needs to traceable. Nothing does this so far. And everyone just picks a database off the shelf but none are even remotely useful for this.

[dataflow]

If you know people at Ditto, let them know their website looks completely obnoxious if fonts are not loaded. It looks something like this:

> Sync aPPS WItH OR WItHOUt tHE InTeRneT

[daniel_iversen]

Notion might have written something about their journey in this regard?

[Closi]

Super impressive app by the look of things, but as you asked for feedback, it is (to me) very confusing on the product side of things (i.e. what is it and why does it matter to me).

As a business user it's not clear how I would use it, and why I would care.

Your front page reads as:

> Nino is a collection of apps that can interoperate with each other on the block-level from one uniform interface. It has interoperable pages and blocks. It is flexible, extensible, and adapting to your needs as you grow, as Nino helps you consolidate tools and reduce costs. It has page sourcing so you can view pages in a different way. It has page embed, so you can sync page to another page. It has sync block to another page, but you can also block mirror and sync block on the same page.

A good comparison against your front page would be against monday.com or Asana who start with use-cases and practical application. See Monday:

> Monday - A platform built for a new way of working. What would you like to manage?

> * Work Management - Run all aspects of work

> * Sales CRM - Streamline sales processes

> * Dev - Manage product lifecycles

Then if I click any of those categories, it goes into the exact ways it can help me.

[aetherspawn]

A lot of people are saying to specialise your business or die. I think you have a good opportunity here to do what nothing else does quite well, and that is to implement a vertically integrated document management system for use cases such as ISO 9001 etc.

Use case 1, document management: This basically just means that you need to implement the capability to “publish” a document version, permanently view that document version (think tag), and auto generate a document “identifier” using the companies naming convention (and allow this to be embedded automatically in the document so the client can use it too). The document ID might look something like SOP-2401001.

Once a document is published it should be read-only, and you should be able to put artifacts a long with published documents … ie exported PDF copies, or signed copies or something.

Use case 2, document siloing: One of the most difficult parts of document management is creating forms for procedures, and then teaching everyone how to not ruin the document management of these forms once they are filled. I have always wanted a silo that automatically copies a form when you start to fill it out, allocates it a brand new document ID, and collects it together with all the other forms of the same kind.

This could be integrated with an automation platform so that ie if you fill out a form it sends someone an email or something like that. Or if you wanted to get really fancy, you could allow people to define “workflows” for documents and actually visually show a business process alongside a document.

[yoz]

Initial impression after a few minutes of use: there may be a huge amount of power here, but the app and site seem to be completely lacking guidance and I've no idea what to do or how to learn.

I've installed it on my Mac and am trying to add a set of records representing contacts with a couple of basic fields: name, phone, birthdate. I want to query those records elsewhere in other modules.

The app is giving no guidance on how to do this. On open, it just shows me a blank tab, and I had to try a few different controls to work out how to add a module. I don't know which module I should use to add queryable records, so I'm trying Board.

Now that I've added a board, I can add a first record but there doesn't seem to be a way to add a second. There are columns named "None" and "Unnamed"; the one named "None" has the first contact in it. Pressing the "+" button in the corner adds another column. Eventually, I drag the record from "None" to "Unnamed"; "None" disappears, now there's just "Unnamed", and I can add other records.

I'll keep playing with it a little, but there's only so far that people can be expected to try to work out the usage model that you've designed this for. Sure, there are loads of modules, but how do they link together? An example setup for a fictional team might really help here.

[harrisonlo]

Noted on the lack of guidance and onboarding. I can see the confusion you had with the board module and have some ideas on improving it. Thanks for giving it a try.

[0thgen]

I honestly found it pretty intuitive. Every module uses the same basic action-flow, which was super clever UI design on the creator's part

[not_your_mentat]

This looks really neat!

I'd be interested in giving it a try, but doing so would replace existing tools and workflow. As a user, I'm unwilling to do this is I can't both own my data and application hosting.

If Nino doesn't pan out and the product gets shut down, how do I continue to access my now (trigger warning, words used to describe as I understand, not critique) tightly coupled proprietary data? Can I self host? Is source code available? Are document formats open? How do I not get screwed as an enthusiastic adopter in the unhappy case that things don't work out? If I put my data in and the product isn't working for me, how do I get my data out?

[bertil]

One great solution for that would be the approach many advanced Markdown editors like Obsidian have: the documents remain usable. You might lose some benefits (the integration between documents in a graph-like structure) that are specific to the tool. Still, your work is preserved in a universal format that anyone can leverage.

Most elements of Nano have widely accepted standards, presumably easy to integrate, so that guarantee should be doable.

[harrisonlo]

Thanks. I think the concern about software provider shutting down is valid. Heck, I still remember being pissed when Google deprecated two products I used within a month (a few months back).

Self-hosting might be too complex to setup, but do you think single tenant offering helps? I don't know if it makes sense for individuals tho.

In addition to HTML & CSV, there is an option to export JSON, which supports more formats. In a way, it is an open format (.json) but I'll have to add relevant documentation. PDF support will also come at one point.

[localhost]

For sure this is a super-impressive (solo?) effort and I'm certain a ton of work went into this.

Some feedback:

Who is the customer for this? Can you describe what their day looks like and how Nino helps them get their work done better/faster/cheaper? What are the top 5 problems that they face that Nino is clearly better than the competition? Be specific and show the workflows.

Where do they work? Who do they collaborate with? What are they collaborating on? Do the same exercise - SxS comparison with how they do things in existing tools and show how Nino is clearly better than their existing solution.

Finally, don't ever underestimate how difficult it is to get people to change from whatever they are doing today. Today is not 1990 - people have been using solutions to the general information worker problem for decades now. Why will they switch?

[ramijames]

I'm not really sure that I see an "app chaos problem". For each company/job workflow that I've encountered, there are a set of apps that solve for the specific use-case.

For example as the head of devrel at the last company that I worked for, we used Atlassian products for internal documentation and work tracking, we used Google's docs and sheets for collaborative writing with external teams, and we used github and markdown for external docs building. It's all text, but the work flows were different, had different needs (like permissions), and ultimately we found the right tools for the job.

I wish you luck with this endeavor, but I hope that your looking for a specific problem. To solve that isn't "app chaos".

[d3w4s9]

Exactly, my company have a similar setup and I don't think people have trouble figuring out which tool to use or how they work with each other. Nino seems to try to solve a problem that hardly exist.

[airstrike]

This is really cool -- congrats on the launch! The productivity worker's "app chaos problem" as you called it is a real problem and a solvable one.

I'm building something similar after spending 10+ years working with those numerous different apps day in and day out in quote-unquote "high stakes" white-collar roles. It's early days and I'm approaching it from a slightly different angle, but there's a certain amount of overlap between the two visions. I'm focusing on a smaller set of apps but more fleshed out set of features, aiming for feature parity with incumbents + my own features (which incidentally is why this is taking a while to build well...)

Curious to see how Nino progresses and we should connect later on when I have something tangible to show, if you're up for it

[harrisonlo]

We should! Just sent an email to the address on your profile

[gwbas1c]

I built something similar many years back. Mine was web based: https://github.com/GWBasic/ObjectCloud

What I would tell my younger self is to spend more time reading through YC's resources about how to start a business. In my case, I built something that I thought there was a need for; but I should have spent a lot more time iterating off of tangible customer needs.

IE, I should have found a handful of customers who needed tight integration among these use cases and let their needs drive the implementation.

Why? There are already plenty of applications that do the same functions. (MS Office, Google Drive, ect, ect.) These applications are mature, and well-understood by the whole market.

I would suggest finding a few customers who are hampered by poor interoperability among 3+ applications / use cases, and focus on their use cases. It'll take you 15+ years to be as mature as products like MS Office, Google Drive, ect; but if you solve a niche's tangible, need, they won't care, because they can't operate their business without you.

[harrisonlo]

Sorry I replied a little late, but thanks for the advice.

[redcobra762]

Security & privacy are tough selling points; fewer people care about either than you may think, and the existing platforms provide a lot more than most who do care are willing to admit.

Also the “too many tools” pitch sounds like an unhinged rant. There’s almost certainly a better way to phrase that, because otherwise the idea that the mere existence of a wide variety of tools bothers you doesn’t stand up to the “so don’t use them all” rebuttal. Maybe focus in the convenience factor, and the integration within your platform instead, as that is a genuine value-add.

Good luck!

[chime]

Great job on the launch. Your pricing is reasonable for small biz, but I'm unclear on what "Email" in https://nino.app/pricing means. Does that mean you offer email hosting like Outlook/Gmail or email support?

For anyone not in the 365 corporate world looking for office apps, you're unfortunately competing with https://workspace.google.com/pricing, regardless of the unique feature set you offer.

For anyone looking for a no-code solution, your pricing is very low for one person startup when compared to https://www.softr.io/pricing but would get pricey for a team of 5-10.

I am someone you should target because I help startups get started, with low/no code solutions. I also use many paid solutions personally like Cozi.com, Zoom, and ProtonMail for managing my life. I can see your tech is great and what you need is to figure out your place in the market. Where are you positioned in comparison to Zoho, HubSpot, and Zapier? How can I integrate you with Shopify? Also, you need a LOT of templates for https://about.nino.app/en/site

I applaud you for building what you've already built in such a competitive and demanding market. You need a hook - the one thing I cannot get easily from any of your competitors, which would make it easy for me to suggest you to a founder. I don't think offline mode or security cut it.

[2143]

This seems technically impressive, and I wish you good luck.

I personally prefer apps that do one thing well. I don't like "super" apps that does everything. I like separate tools, and not a Swiss army knife.

This is kind of why I detest apps like WeChat; even before taking into account the privacy considerations, from a user perspective it does chat, social media, payments etc, and I dislike it for that reason. WhatsApp too seems to be headed in that direction (atleast where I'm from).

And I also prefer tools that allow seamless data exchange with other tools. Sort of like the Unix philosophy.

> This means we won't do integrations with other services, unless they are under the hood

Not sure how I feel about that.

> your team can eventually conduct all work on Nino

Great! Another walled garden.

I hope this doesn't happen, but what if you go bust? Will the user lose all their data? Or what if, for whatever reason a team decides to move off your platform? Is there data export capabilities? You better have export capabilities if you want commercial entities to even consider your product.

Also, I feel the Free tier has slightly more features than your Pro tier (the former has unlimited members, for example).

Nevertheless, I wish you good luck.

[csmpltn]

One of the most important features to get right for tools like this is collaborative editing. It's incredibly difficult to get this right (live preview, conflict resolution, history management, etc), especially given how the vast majority of users are non-technical folks (which aren't used to toolks like git). Could you expand a bit on how you intend to tackle this problem in Nino?

[klabb3]

I actually think this hyper-granular realtime collaboration like in Google docs is slightly overrated.

I think it’s ok to have more a git-like workflow where feedback and changes happen over cycles. As a programmer, I don’t give a shit about your working directory. I do care, however, about your commits :)

All I’m saying is this CRDT craze isn’t always necessary or even appropriate for many products. It adds a lot of technical complexity, especially for a small shop.

[growingkittens]

I think this has a lot of potential for non-technical knowledge users.

At Google and Microsoft, files are available throughout the ecosystem. If I understand correctly, Nino makes the data within files available throughout the ecosystem. This is a fundamentally different workflow.

Google and Microsoft seem to have disparate teams working on their ecosystem. Their products work in a system, but not as a system. There's little to no integration past surface level connections.

[harrisonlo]

That's correct. Thanks for coming up with a new way to explain it!

[stareatgoats]

Some thoughts while installing this in order to test (and trying to find the pricing page): I believe putting interoperability first is the right idea, and we have barely begun to scratch the surface of opportunities in this area. The browser based technologies can gain an upper hand here because of the platform independence and reusability of technologies across functionalities.

That said, there is an enormous amount of work required to match the functionalities of legacy programs: interoperability itself is probably not enough to compete with these. I believe the most viable route is some sort of open source solution. The amount of VC financing would likely need to be staggering for a solution like this to gain any major traction.

(That is, unless an LLM can be made to produce the whole thing over a weekend at some point in the near future ...)

[macspoofing]

>I believe putting interoperability first is the right idea, and we have barely begun to scratch the surface of opportunities in this area.

Is it really 'interoperability' if it cannot integrate with any external applications?

[rkagerer]

Word, Excel, Google Sheets, Access, etc. All of these are substantial software titles with massive feature sets. How do you propose to offer even a fraction of the capability and at a high caliber of quality when your focus is spread so thin across so many of them?

I acknowledge I'm coming across as a naysayer, but I almost didn't click the link because my common sense insisted it must be a toy, and you might need to overcome a similar initial reaction from other prospective users.

[harrisonlo]

It's a valid point. From a technical standpoint, I'd say over time the number of feature implementations that can be re-used across modules increases. You're right for now that nino has yet matched all the feature sets, but the path to reach there might not be as linear as you think.

[nine_k]

I'd say that most people don't use the massive feature sets, they use the basics. For them, this offering may suffice, given the other upsides it may have, like self-hosting.

With time, more features will be added, as revenue grows and the demands become more sophisticated. If you remember, at launch Google Sheets were relatively bare-bones, as were Google Docs.

[novok]

I would take your current marketing front page and make it the page for developers. Then I would work with a B2B SaaS marketer on what you actually need for the people who make the purchasing decisions. You made a great construction kit, now you need to demonstrate with actual app demos what you can make in an amazing way that your competitors cannot.

Developers love making libraries and construction kits as a product, but almost nobody buys construction kits unless the target market is constructors (like dev tools). You need to turn this into an actual product normal people would use. I think your pretty close to that although, you just need a few extra steps for that.

What your targeting is a next step evolution in the target market that microsoft office is targeting. You need to demonstrate with demo videos (not workflow diagrams) so this reality is more apparent with what you've made. Go talk to users, understand what their needs are and then create a message and glue features that would make that happen.

Notion kind of languished for years in their 'productivity dudes' niche and then exploded relatively recently. Figure out how they made that transition. Looking at what you made, it effectively looks like a better notion.

I would also look into what makes people transition off notion to a more specialized tool. Like you can do task management, standup tracking, etc with notion, but it doesn't scale after a while and people go on to things like linear and teamplify. What can make people scale with your tool? That will probably be a thing to think about at a later stage with your company product although.

[harrisonlo]

Thanks for the advice. Appreciate it.

[quickthrower2]

It looks good. The problem for me, to use it is that Google Sheets and Docs are way more fully featured, even if they aren't integrated as neatly as you have done. You will need to find the people for who having calendars, docs and sheets in one place matters a lot. Maybe it is the kind of people who already use notion and obsidian etc.

There are some UX things I think should be looked at:

1. New sheet asks me 'Create source' or 'select source'. One is black and the other blue. I assume they are both links? Looks like I need to click "Create source" to do the thing I would intuitively expect, which is to show me a blank spreadsheet to edit.

2. First column of a new spreadsheet is called "Name" and I cannot rename it, it only has sort options, but if I add another column it is called "unnamed" and I can rename it. I am not sure why this is. Since all I have been told at this point is that it is a "sheet" I am expecting a free homogenous experience like Excel. If it is not that, you might think about how to make it more obvious what it is. (Do I need training, a quick tutorial, a quick highlight-feature/click-next intro etc.?)

[harrisonlo]

Thanks for the feedback. You would click the select source option if you want to use data from another page. Good catch on the name field not being rename-able, that feature will be added soon.

[d3w4s9]

This is not the first product of the kind and won't be the last one. And they look great in theory but get complicated and very confusing and ultimately never find their place. People don't need an integrated tool that does everything. People need a few very good tools that work well with each other. Confluence/Jira is such an example, and to some extent Google's suite and Microsoft's, plus a few more. Unless you can do it better than them in each category -- doc, spreadsheet and project management etc -- people won't choose your product over those. (RIP Google Wave.)

[maxloh]

I tried the "Doc", "Sheet" and "Slide" feature and each of them are incomplete and lacks most of the popular features. It would be better if the author uses existing solutions instead of implement them from ground up.

editor.js [0] for documents and Grist [1] for spreadsheet are some good examples.

[0]: https://editorjs.io/ [1]: https://www.getgrist.com/

[exhaze]

You’re describing Unix philosophy basically, right? While I like it I think it doesn’t scale past certain point - think about cases like companies finding they have trouble maintaining a system made up of tons of bash scripts (most config driven systems e.g. CIs fall into this).

Same applies to SaaS IMO.

> ultimately never find their place

Here’s a few counter examples: - Clickup - Notion - Datadog - Amplitude

I feel like they have found their place quite well.

In fact there’s an industry trend in 2020s of SaaS consolidation over to “vertical SaaS” that just does everything in one tool.

Happy to be proven wrong and hear some counter examples btw, this is just my theory based on what I’ve observed in b2b saas world over past 10ish years

[JakeAl]

This. Salesforce, is a great example of this. I can't tell you the number of companies that exist just building a simple application that does the one thing customers bought these bloated app suites to do that they liked and became burdened with the developers ecosystem or constant enhancements they make just to justify their dev teams existence. Adobe and Microsoft are also notorious for this, as well as just about every cloud company.

[hoistbypetard]

It surely isn't. Before everything had to be online, you had Microsoft Works, AppleWorks, BeagleWorks, Symantec Works, Lotus Works, Claris Works, a Wordperfect product and a Corel product, and probably a solid half dozen other suites that tried to be everyghing for all knowledge workers.

The integration story didn't work that well back then, and that was when any one of those "integrated suites" cost the same up front as any single office tool, so the cost savings was more significant.

I still like the idea, but it seems harder to make it work well now than it was in the 90s.

[berkes]

Indeed. The issue I've repeatedly seen, is that ten different people, have ten different combinations and alternatives of what are "very good tools".

And even then, these people aren't fixed in time. Maybe today I need a killer personal time tracker, tomorrow I might need an advanced scrum board and in two years I need a way to aggregate time tracking of a whole team. And that's just one tiny tool.

[feel-ix-343]

Personally, I use neovim and markdown for everything.

[xyst]

The problem here is that people are not trained on YOUR implementation.

Everything you have listed here is very nice to have (offline mode, interoperability, …) , but MS (with O365) or G (with G Suite) are often available for free to students, teachers, and professors at critical stages in life.

Just look at Apple with their productivity suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote). The market penetration is probably worse than LibreOffice.

The academic setting often carries over to the professional setting. Changing workflows is one of the pain points I would see in migrating to this.

I do think it looks nice and I do hope you succeed though! Good luck.

[blehn]

You could've said the same about Notion and its current valuation is at least 10B. Don't let this kind of feedback deter you, OP.

[herewego]

How is this different than what any new market entrant encounters? This is what sales and marketing is for; business as usual. I’ve never launched a product that the world was familiar with before I launched it.

[andai]

I heard that if you want to convince people to switch from what they're used to, you can't just be 10% better, you need to be 10x better.