Launch HN: Dart (YC W22) – Project management with automatic report generation

[miladmalek]

Hi HN, We’re Zack and Milad and we’re building Dart (https://itsdart.com). Dart is a fully-featured project management tool that can automatically create reports, fill in task properties, generate subtasks, detect duplicate tasks, and more. Here’s a quick demo of some of the highlight features: https://youtu.be/CMsBAv9CCyU

Like many others we grew frustrated with the constant upkeep in creating and organizing tickets in Jira and other PM tools. We routinely wasted as much as seven hours a week on repetitive PM chores like cleaning up the backlog or drafting changelog updates. At Zack’s previous company he even built a system to try to automate some of this work. In conversations with other founders and engineers we learned that he was far from the only person doing this.

We started Dart when we realized we could bring a new approach to this problem through techniques enabled by generative AI. There are of course a lot of project management tools out there, but none have the ability to automate most of the busywork without having to configure long sets of rules.

For example, one of the most helpful functions is summarizing work that was accomplished over some time interval, by automatically creating a changelog update for it that can be pasted into company blogs or elsewhere. Another highly used feature is giving Dart a large task or PRD and generating a recommendation for how to break it up into more manageable subtasks.

Over the last two years we’ve continued to build a broad set of PM functionality in Dart (task management, docs, roadmaps, etc.) along with what we hope is a neatly vertically integrated application of gen AI that adds value.

Dart is built with Vue on the frontend, Django on the backend, and uses various gen AI models such as GPT-4. We embed almost all of the content that goes into the app for later retrieval and search. Over time we build up context for users, workspaces, working patterns, etc. and are able to provide this context to do situation specific few-shot prompting or RAG, depending on the situation. For better or worse we’ve implemented most of our LLM infrastructure internally and are largely calling OpenAI APIs directly.

While Dart improves its recommendations as users work on more tasks, ultimately it’s not quite ready to replace your product manager. You’ll probably still need to evaluate if the recommendations make sense for your team, and make any adjustments before confirming them. By having a helpful companion offering suggestions as you go we’ve still found that this process ends up net saving time–about 12% of time spent in PM tools according to our users. You can think of it like a helpful tool for generating ideas as opposed to a product that will fully strategize and do all of your work for you (at least for now!).

Our current users come from a wide range of backgrounds including other founders, developers, writers, small business owners, consultants, researchers, etc.

You can try out Dart for free at https://app.itsdart.com/sign-up. We’d really appreciate any and all feedback or ideas in the comments!

[TheFragenTaken]

Even if I am probably not going to use it (too heavily/deeply invested in Azure Devops), I just wanted to give kudos to your product demo. By itself it's straight to the point, doesn't ramble, and calmly highlights whats important about your product. Compared to your other videos on the YouTube channel, it's a dramatic improvement. Congrats on the launch.

[miladmalek]

Thanks! Yeah going through the process of making this demo efficient was definitely a good exercise. It's always harder than I think it will be as my default is admittedly kind of rambly.

[eightnoteight]

* changelog feature is pretty great

* one other feature I have always wanted at my previous company is about transparency of how many tasks a person is doing, that way I don't have to bother him multiple times on whether a certain task is picked or not

* similarly for monthly planning or weekly planning, the stakeholders involved in planning is often the team itself and humans are not that great in remembering what all promises they made over the last week. i wish there was some way for all stakeholders even outside teams to be notified of planning events and add items to the planning event agenda

[miladmalek]

Thanks for the ideas!

- Having more information on team workloads with suggested opportunities for rebalancing is something we're already thinking about. I suppose this is a related idea to have general visibility on amount or total volume (with sizes included) of tasks a person is doing in team/public spaces.

- We'll think harder about this other idea on involving outside stakeholders more. More opportunities for sharing lists and docs with external stakeholders is already something we're tinkering with so I can definitely see this fitting in as well.

[bendecoste]

This looks very cool. In every company I've worked at the biggest hurdle with these tools is getting the entire team to use them and keep them up to date. I think that gen AI could provide tons of value with that problem (because most teams have members that don't update their tickets)

A while ago I had the idea that gen AI would probably be able to maintain a jira/kanban board of choice without people in your company being required to update it. You could track this based off what was going on with other company activity. E.g., looking at what people are saying in Slack, what commits a developer has pushed to GitHub, etc, what someone said they would do on a zoom call, etc.

Have you guys thought about any similar features in this space?

Congrats on the launch!

[zswaff]

Yep, keeping tickets updated is one of the biggest problems with PM today and was part of the genesis for how I got started working on this. We do already have an integration with GitHub that will automatically sync updates, as well as an integration with Slack that helps users turn messages into tasks. The Slack one doesn't really do anything automated though, just helps the two systems talk when you want them to. The vision to connect all workspaces for seamless and automatic updates (like from Zoom calls as you mention) is something we’ve thought about and is quite appealing.

The biggest challenge with that is that every time we make an integration based on feedback or requests we see far less usage out of it than pretty much any other feature in the product. It turns out that people like to suggest tons of integrations but rarely take the time to set them up in practice. We can probably do a better job with that, and with giving more value to users sooner from the integrations.

Big picture, though, your vision totally aligns with ours: minimize (or zero out) the time that ICs need to spend updating stuff while maximizing the info available for PMs etc. in the tool. We plan to do a better and better job with this over time.

[leoqa]

I went in pessimistic but the demo was pretty good- every AI-based feature was solving a real point of friction and seemed reasonable.

[zswaff]

Thanks! At this point AI is obviously a bit of a buzzword, so we've paid extra attention to only applying it when it actually adds value

[lifeisstillgood]

I think project mgmt software suffers from the same problem as project managers - they think they should be in charge, visible and front and centre

I disagree (esp about the human ones)

I want project management that fills itself in based on work people do, not work people tell the tool they have done.

I am dubious that putting ticket numbers in commit messages is needed - let alone IRC, emails, phone calls meetings, vendor orders placed etc

I am not even sure how to do this - I think it’s to do with defining the outcomes via automated tests (Are there five servers available for use by the X team, as opposed to does the blue button send onclick)

I wish you luck but honestly saving the PM time filling in a report that simply “announces” things are done without being measuring actual results is ok but not the quantum leap. But I am grumpy today so perhaps I am Being too pessimistic

But still - solve “achieve these automated testable goals” might be the right answer - but way harder as you don’t control any of that surface area

[zswaff]

Really appreciate the feedback, doesn't come off grumpy at all. In fact I think it's pretty well in line with our vision. Beyond automated reports, we're just generally focused on saving users time/headache. The conflict between the people doing the project and the project manager is very, very common: the former doesn't want to spend time updating the tool, and the latter wants/needs centralized updates/status. In the future we absolutely plan to solve this better than we do now.

It's super compelling to hear about different pain points like this. The idea of automating acceptance criteria is indeed tough but absolutely possible to imagine. This is outcome-oriented in the best possible way!

[rnts08]

Spot on, hopefully apps like these can reduce the number of and/or completely replace overbearing PMs.

[account-5]

Is Dart written in Dart? If not you should do that.

[zswaff]

Haha we'll work on it

[mrcwinn]

"We grew frustrated with X." And yet every one of these AI features is coming to Linear, Asana, Jira, etc. So what would justify the switching cost?

[miladmalek]

I guess it would be justified if the particular implementations we focus on (like AI roadmap planning or duplicate detection) are of interest to you. I'd agree that they are probably coming to other tools that want to adapt eventually, but by and large they aren't there yet! I think we take a markedly more AI-forward philosophy than other tools so I'm honestly not 100% sure that they even will fully adapt in a timely manner- especially the large incumbents. Most of those are still focused on finding different creative ways to put chatbots in their products instead of meshing useful AI features in a more streamlined way.

Also admittedly this isn't a product-reason, but at least for now as a relatively small startup we're able to offer a lot more custom support and strategizing with any team that switches over. I can't promise we won't eventually run into the same bottlenecks as the large companies eventually, but for now I'm confident our service is better and some of our users have expressed that as one of the primary motivators for keeping with Dart.

Ultimately, if you're happy with your current system and don't see your team becoming more efficient on Dart then it's probably not worth the switch. However it doesn't take long for any extra hours saved each week to start adding up.

[debarshri]

Best project management tool, IMO, is the tool that has no projects to manage.

We tried JIRA, Linear, now we are using Github projects. It is too much effort to keep it up to date when things are fast moving. Everything becomes stale.

At first look, it feels like this too will suffer the same.

The best tool in this space should eliminate the need of specialized PM.

PS. Github project has become surprising better in recent times.

[eightnoteight]

> The best tool in this space should eliminate the need of specialized PM.

exactly this, having a project manager drive tasks just erodes the sense of ownership in the team. the sense of ownership that comes from giving the responsibility to devs to manage their tasks directly is immense, especially during the initial years

I think the for fast moving teams, the eventual winner in this space is going to be someone who can transparently bring in product requirements and timeline requirements to devs directly than via some middleman

[waldothedog]

Also had a good exp at my last startup using GitHub projects. Very dev driven/dev friendly. Easy to highlight over-work, easy to have multiple views (sectioned lists for prioritization, columns for limiting WIP) There’s a decent parent/child relationship for splitting up large tasks across hands (though I try to avoid this). Dart looks interesting, but give GH projects a whirl

[hoskdoug]

Was it a deliberate decision to go with a name that clashes with a top 20 programming language?

[jack_riminton]

Even as a dev I hadn't really thought about it clashing with a programming language, therefore I doubt most other people would care

[e12e]

Looks interesting. Does it do progress forecasting based on historical task velocity, without the need for manual estimation?

(See eg: https://screenful.com )

Ed: Does it support importing historical data, and/or external data sources like GitHub, Jira, Trello etc - for current projects and to set a baseline grounded in data? Like historical velocity?

Ed2: I guess so? From the welcome email:

> Once you're logged in, you can import your tasks from most other apps and let us know if you need support with that

[miladmalek]

Dart will help you with forecasting based on historical task velocity, yes. See AI timelining features for example, and also with task property filling if you use sizes or date ranges. That being said forecasting is notoriously difficult and like humans, AI isn't perfect there today.

There's definitely a lot more we can do here though and we have some plans to dive in more. I haven't looked into screenful before, thanks for sharing!

Ed: just saw your edit, yes you can import from other tools at https://app.itsdart.com/?settings=import

[democracy]

>> progress forecasting based on historical task velocity, without the need for manual estimation?

Yeah give managers another topic for quick one-hour weekly sessions )))

[esafak]

I expected the integration links to tell me what each integration can do rather than take me to a login form.

The ideal project management tool for me would integrate with the tools I use to do the work being tracked, and ML to automatically log everything in the project management tool. Kata lets you send updates from your other application using special comments, but I would prefer not to even have to do that.

[miladmalek]

Yeah, the integration links currently send you into the product. We are planning on adding an integrations page to the website in the very near future though so you can see the info without needing to sign up first. Just haven't gotten to it yet.

We're also planning to continue adding more integrations over time so more of your work can be logged automatically- we talk about this a bit more in some other comments here. It does take time and effort to get (and keep) those functioning though and half the time we make an integration it gets less usage than you might expect. Still, we're always interested in learning about more tools that our users would find value in integrating.

[rexreed]

How are you going to reach the market of project managers? Have had some experience with this in the past to mixed results.

[miladmalek]

Most of our users today have just been word of mouth, so we need to work harder on flexing our marketing muscles. I'd love to hear more about your experiences reaching PMs specifically.

Early on we reached out to various PMs on Linkedin and set up some calls that way but that was more for feedback and direction-setting than anything else. I think most of our growth with larger teams has started from the founder or C-level as opposed to PMs but that might be a sign we need to improve more here.

[rgblambda]

>repetitive PM chores like cleaning up the backlog or drafting changelog updates.

This is something PMs are supposed to do?

[miladmalek]

Sometimes yeah, but we more just meant that part as repetitive project management chores that someone often has to do- might be different people in different organizations.

[codeAligned]

You're differentiated from the competition primarily by generative AI? Or are there other things that make Dart stand out.

Out of all the project management tools I've worked with Linear seems to be the best. But I'm always interested in innovation in this space.

[cjdewar]

Is dart currently down?

[greatNespresso]

I would have thought it was built in... Dart! Congrats for the launch

[ftkftk]

If you are using different versions of GPT, in particular GPT-4, how are you controlling costs once users' projects/backlogs grow in complexity?

[zswaff]

Great question. We're taking an unorthodox approach here.

I don’t know of too many tools that are offering unlimited free calls to OpenAI, which means that all cool LLM-enabled features are price-gated or premium or otherwise limited. It's a bummer to restrict that value. Our bet is that LLM pricing will follow a Moore’s Law-style pattern, at least for a while, that will mean that we can offer better and cheaper LLM-enabled features over time. So in short, we're subsidizing some of the costs now on a longer-term bet.

That said, we can be smart about how we do things technically. We embed, compress, and omit stuff as much as possible to minimize tokens.

Also, we actually just completely fail to handle some things (something like reprioritizing a backlog of 10k tasks just wouldn't work for us right now) so we do hard cap some actions.

[bestlauren]

I really like the duplicate detection feature; that would save me so much time and prevent pain down the line with product backlog refinement.

[zswaff]

Yep, this is one of our most popular features. That's exactly our goal--catch problems like this ahead of time. We're actually also working on other stuff for automatic backlog refinement but not ready yet.

If you get a chance to try, we'd love to hear how the duplicate detection stacks up against your expectations

[bx376]

Great pricing model when compared with Linear.app. If I have a budget of $8 I’d love to subscribe Dart rather than Linear.app

[dewey]

What's the difference to Linear? The only difference I could see is the $2/month cheaper pricing on the largest plan.

[infocollector]

Anyone who has used this and notion - any pro/con for using this vs. notion for PM? (Notion these days also has an AI component)

[miladmalek]

We've used Notion as well pretty extensively and actually have an integration in Dart with them. From my current experiences Notion AI is mostly helpful for brainstorming, document editing, and search (for example to help with finding relevant info across your company docs). Their PM tool is more of an open-sandbox approach that doesn't always have the most robust features in any particular direction but is very flexible and easy to try out different templates for.

We have a bit of a stronger emphasis on personal and team task management with less of a sandbox-feel and more of an opinionated-PM feel, and our AI features are in line with that with stuff like task property filling and roadmap suggestions. We also have similar capabilities in AI doc editing (although Notion and other tools are definitely more fleshed out there if your use case is primarily writing).

That being said it's a very quickly evolving landscape and I wouldn't be surprised if things change in the near future. Would love to hear anyone else's perspective as well who've either tried both or used our integration.

[brooksbp]

Do you use it to project manage Dart itself?

[miladmalek]

Yep- we use Dart at Dart. It's kind of fun since improvements to Dart means that Dart does a better job at helping us develop Dart, which then feeds back in again. Dogfooding has been great- highly recommend.

[ck_one]

Can you share some insights about your dev process? App locks pretty slick! Congrats!

What allows you to ship quickly and in high quality?

[zswaff]

Yeah, great question. This is something that I have spent a lot of time thinking about. Honestly probably worth a whole blog post/PG-style essay at some point. Shipping and iterating at top speed is honestly paramount for a startup.

Probably the biggest thing we've done has been to focus on hiring for people that can and will move quickly, and building a company culture around that. Our team is very strong, works unusually hard, and ships quickly at all costs. For a startup, I would recommend hiring startuppy people rather than engineers with 20y experience at the magnificent 7.

One of our most counterintuitive/provocative/potentially wrong practices has been to deemphasize automated tests. I'll probably catch a lot of flak for this but I think that spending a bunch of extra time writing thorough tests for something that will change next week when we iterate and improve is a waste of time. In my experience you can make up for this with thorough manual testing by someone (e.g. founder, product owner) that really, really cares about the product and UX. This is part of the overall "do things that don't scale" ethos and as the product has matured we have started to evolve to a higher level of test coverage. tl;dr I recommend less time spent engineering tests pre-PMF.

Otherwise we generally follow established best practices. Review fast, ship fast, roll forward. Extreme ownership and responsibility to ICs. Use Dart for project management to save time ;)

Overall, I think the first thing is most important: build a team and a culture that moves uncomfortably and unusually fast and breaks things (then fixes them immediately).

[trollbridge]

Do you have any free or discounted plans for nonprofits? Monday offers this and one of our nonprofit partners uses it.

[miladmalek]

Yes, and we've done some great work with nonprofits before. We still need to make that visible somewhere on the updated website but shoot me an email: [e-mail]

[arnold0912]

AI feature list seems incredible, going to check it out today!

[zswaff]

Sweet, let us know how it goes if you give it a try!

[lmsh7]

Cool!

[anh690136]

congrats on the launch! what do you think about taskade?

[keeptrying]

The problem with this kind of system, is it takes away the interesting parts of the job for employees.

I mean, who the hell wants to do a list of tasks created by an AI?

[sidcool]

Congrats for launching!

[navane]

That's a lot of software for 50 minutes per week

[zswaff]

I guess 7h * 12%? The 7h and 12% are different numbers though.

We believe that for folks like me in my previous life Dart can save about 7h/wk. For example I spent several hours/wk writing changelogs, which I mostly don't have to do any more.

Separately, our users have reported an average of 12% savings, but I don't have the net number.

Either way, it will vary a lot by user--different people are going to have more/less time saved depending on how much their existing workflows overlap with what Dart can do for them!

[Heidaradar]

Cool idea but maybe naming it after a commonly used word (thinking specifically of the programming language) was a bad idea?

[samstave]

This would be great:

* Resource loading, availability, tasks summary, personal task completion reports..

* Maintain history of task time, cost, resource, as assigned by tasks, and resources completing their tasks.

* Templates of tasks, or projects where if you say have completed a common project that have tasks you do (as if your a consultant with various clients with similar projects you can pull a gant, resource load, historic times as a template - then use them across your Program - and have a report on how similar task groups etc across your program vary.

* Typical completion resources required so that if you simply say the name of a task, it will say "To do this, it usually requires ABC - but right now you only have AB available - so your costs and resource availability for this task on this project is X based on current loadout to resources.

* Track what external resources were needed in historic tasks "To do this - you'll need these external resources, here is a summary email proposal to that external consultant to get costing and availability - effectively using your project plans to generate mini RFPs to the subs/trades/disciplines/departments needed on that task and have it make it easier for not only them to responde, but when they do - have it automatically give you the diff impact to the project/program/task/schedle/cost....

* as you build out project portfolio, you just throw bullets in and it will pull from previous projects and put in the "project-lets" and allow you to build them in a more automated fashion.

* in construction/deployment/commissioning/go-live/acceptance testing (in DCs and Health, and tech), if you can give it a primavera/ms proj/whatever - even a PDF - and have it read what some EXTERNAL PM assigned to you as a sub on the project and have it adjust your section based on your available inputs and effectively import your tasks from some external PM

* have it provide your company with a really well written portfolio completed projects.

* self-service reporting capabilities to external stakeholders... ESPECIALLY CFOs.... with a little dashboard widget that you can just point people to "dart.MYCOMPANY.COM" which could be a status-page like dash for whomever you allow to see highlevel report on demand for your program/projects/departments/budget/etc...

* give scheduling reminders for upcoming resource requirements. - like status checking delivery dates from vendors with simple automated requests for "is component X still scheduled for delivery on DATE" - conversely - sending alerts to delays that will affect subs/trades who need access to a site/area whatever (like concrete guys are two weeks behind, so your delivery area for materials is affected, mr steel guy...)

EDIT: I forgot about the BANE of any large project: CHANGE ORDERS.

Usually these come from project owner/designer -and can have significant impacts on a project sched/cost/resource avail...

If you can track and manage change orders, construction manages/TPMs/any stakeholders will find value in it enough if you can show a report on the history of the projects' intent (budget/end-date) especially because change-orders is usually a two-way street on the negotiations btwn a subs/owner on who pays for what in change order...

example: arch designs "thing" - sub implements it. now three scenarios happen:

1. All good.

2. Arch/owner F'd up intent to sub, sub has to fix at certain costs (the owner will say "your job to know my intent" - subs/trades say "nope, show me the money")

3. sub f-d up and they have to eat all/some portion of cost.

REDUCING CHANGE ORDERS through such comms that I mention above is a golden goose in and of itself - but only you can prevent dumpster fires!.

Finally it ties back to portfolio "reduced change orders by % across N% of our portfolio etc...)

(change orders from a sub, obv comes out of their fees/profit - so change order mtgs on big ticket issues are REALLY fn painful mtgs because its a "who communicated what where when with whom" battles...

====

Attempting to build a project based on this comment:

https://i.imgur.com/ZYsTSk2.png -- this is weird, it just adds checks at bottom of text input - should collapse orig input prompt.

I cant click anything - https://i.imgur.com/LXn2RVU.png

Am I only supposed to have one task in this box? https://i.imgur.com/O3bY286.png

OH I get it... you should have it auto suggest "extract" from each bullet... https://i.imgur.com/2yFXiqd.png -- the UX on this box is confusing...

Or trigger a "would you like to extract/whatever - and have it cycle through each bullet. https://i.imgur.com/2yFXiqd.png

Also - need tool tips. Why the stop-sign? https://i.imgur.com/Kp1FGI7.png

"I'm posting too fast" - so Ill have to just write you guys a separate post later I guess - but the weird UX halts, no exp on what "/ for AI" means out the gate was clunky, but still dope.

(might be better to have your system have an-onboarding example, where you do ALL THE THINGs - and ask the user to reject your examples - kinda like Scenario has prompt chunks with an X if you want to kill that action...)?

What do from here: https://i.imgur.com/HhVU8vK.png - deleted all text, kept "tasks" and cant click anything but X? -- I clicked X - it asked me to DISCARD/KEEP Draft... I KEEP - Where drafts? https://i.imgur.com/1Pb4UMM.png

I'll build a an email to you guys, from this....

[zswaff]

Loving the detailed product feedback, thanks so much. We'll process and take action to improve asap. Email also sounds great, support@ or zack@ whenever you like.

Sounds like HN was rate limiting you from posting all of your feedback? That's awesome hahaha

In short term, some quick thoughts

- Right now you only have one draft, and you can access it through the 'Resume draft' button in the top left

- We're planning to overhaul this accept/reject system for subtasks soon--a lot of the issues you're experiencing are very common, so we need to do better

- Also planning to improve onboarding flow there, thanks for the suggestion

- Not actually sure why you're being prevented from making that task, sorry for the trouble! We'll check it out right away. Tooltips are a great idea, we'll need to do more there

edit: formatting

[zswaff]

Just thinking some about your note about change orders. Honestly super interesting. We have been working on detailed audit history which I think can start to help here but really only scratches the surface of what you need to improve.

Also thinking more about

> show a report on the history of the projects' intent

This is a really interesting one and is actually part of where we started with Dart. When I was leading engineering at my last job I was in the habit of taking screenshots of our gantt every week or two so that I could manually flip through the photos and see how the timeline had evolved. Obviously there's no way that's the best solution there. We don't solve this right now but we plan to.

[zswaff]

Wow, really appreciate the detailed list here.

Some of the reporting, history, dashboards, templates, etc. that you mention is covered now but Dart probably isn't quite ready to solve some of your more advanced needs. It's all pretty aligned with our vision in the long run though. We're particularly excited about all of the ideas around resource tracking and allocation--we'll get there! Very curious to hear how it works for you.

What's your use case for

> a really well written portfolio completed projects

? Haven't heard this much before. Useful for an agency to showcase work?

edit: formatting

[lopsrerfan]

Why just not use clickup AI?