First thought: you've priced it quite ambitiously. A 10 user team would be $90/month, compared to $20 for JIRA + JIRA Agile, $42 for Asana premium, $50 for Trello business (or free for normal trello), $35 for Pivotal Tracker, ...
(Which isn't to say it necessarily should be cheaper, only that it seems surprising to see that price without any attempt to compare or justify why you believe that e.g. it's already, at launch, worth 3x as much as Pivotal Tracker).
What do you pay 10 people in a month? Probably somewhere between $60,000 and $100,000? Is the $90 vs $20 really that big of a difference? Especially if it's a good tool that helps your team be slightly more productive.
I'm not saying that it will, I haven't tried it so I have no idea. I'm just surprised that people really want to shave less than $100 off of the tools they provide their team.
Agree 100%. Additionally, unless you also ship with substantial APIs, you'll be a nonstarter in the enterprise market, which demands interfaces to other systems (perhaps including code reviews, static analysis, source control (Git[hub], SVN, etc), ticketing, labor/time tracking, resource planning & allocation, SQA testing & validation, human resources, and whatever standard auth (SAML, OAuth, OpenID, LDAP)).
Your pricing is also too high for a large org, especially when one could use something like Phabricator for free. This doesn't even get into MS Project or document management (MS Office? Google Drive?).
Long story short, this looks like a good start and may work well for SMBs, but definitely not a big company.
I run a ~15 person startup, and my first thought was "huh, that's reasonable." And didn't think anything else about it. Shit, we pay hundreds for glorified databases for ATS and several other products. I really think pricing it lower will just push you to a less-valuable userbase.
Agreed, Jira is pretty hard to beat for small teams and has a large base of plugins and integrations. This looks really cool but needs something a bit more to really stand out. Maybe at $5/user it could take off.
I think it's totally the right thing to do. They can always adjust their price as the market dictates (where "market" is people who do/don't pay for the product, not HN comments).
Way better to charge and learn about what paying customers want, rather than make it cheap and hope to eventually convert them.
I'm working hard enough for our company to pay $2 per user for HipChat.
$9 per user is very expensive when it comes to these services at scale. I can see this on a team of 10-15 people, but certainly not on a company wide basis.
I completely agree with you. The project management niche already has a lot of players and I don't see why I should pay double the price when the product i'm getting doesnt have the feature set to justify it.
Looks great, very appealing landing page, message is passed clearly.
Feedback stuff:
1) agree with pricing plan, too high for large teams
2) call for action - I saw the "sign in" button immediately, but had to scroll all the way down for sign up, will be nice to have a floating sign up button just next to sign in, and in the sign in page, have a link such as "not registered? sign up here" in case people click the wrong button.
3) this is more due to my personal taste, but no gmail sign up is lowering my will to spend time to test the product. I want to click click, play with it a few mins, and if it's good suggest it to my team. I don't have time to fill a form (I'm exaggerating a little, but this goes through a lot of people's mind, filling forms is annoying for some people)
4) I'd like to see a demo the product. having a dummy project that anyone can see with a "guest" login will be really great. (good if you are not willing to add gmail login for any reason)
5) if not a demo, at least a video. the gif is great, so I think a longer video will be even better, seems like a very slick UI.
all in all looks great, I like the hybrid approach, will give it a look.
Hey, thanks for great advice. Demo is a really great idea, we're planning to expand the landing page with more info but went for an early launch just to test the waters. Ended up with a lot more attention than anticipated :)
I have to disagree with you on 1), benefits of this software kick in way better when you have large team, the price is too much for smaller teams, when you have large team you are happy to pay.
I think free for teams till 3 would be nice, I think pivotal was for long time resisting this and had to cave in, that is the only way I will start using it and be in position to recommend for team.
The rule of thumb with this kind of thing is you try to use plausible data in your screen shots. Having "moar project" and "even more project", and "super project" and "new project" makes it hard to envision what your product is really useful for.
I think your landingpage looks good, but overall I have a hard time seeing exactly how it makes life easier for me.
I have worked in most of the roles you describe, but even after having scrolled to the bottom, I don't exactly understand how it is tailored to the roles.
What I was left with is that you have boards and progressbars. Doesn't really compare to the stuff I already use.
Maybe you could explain even better how each role can tailor an interface to meet their needs, and what you provide better than other software out there.
Great point, we were working on creating a better tour of the product but decided to launch a more stripped down version just to test the waters, ended up getting a lot more attention than we thought we would! Working on presenting a better breakdown of the features and how they solve pertinent issues for each user type's workflow.
The fact that this post has made it to #2 despite the huge number of PM tools out there reveals two things:
(1) Project Management is painful and the existing providers still don't fully grasp what the market needs/wants
(2) Matterhorn must be doing something right to get over the noise, so kudos to your team! For me, it's your realization that not everyone manages their workflow in the same way, so being able to coordinate while giving people their personal preferences is really powerful. I wish I could see a demo!
Thank you! Matterhorn is at its best once you get a couple of projects started and have team members onboard, which is why we didn't go with a demo approach to start with, but hearing from everyone about wanting more details about how it works we're going to try and find a better way to showcase the features.
Disappointed to see it's a saas app with no ability to self-host. For project management I think information is too confidential to be using a third party cloud provider.
I'll keep it bookmarked though, perhaps my attitude in this regard is out of date.
It's not. We've just received a new project which forced us to redo our whole company IT and go back to Selfhosted Solutions in a ISO 27001 Datacenter. (luckily the company that datacenter belongs to is in our building and provides our internet, so we have direct network access to the servers)
Atlassian is so successful in a big part due to their self-hosting option.
Protonet got 3 Mio EUR last year in a crowd funding campaign in Germany for their NAS + collaboration software, with a clear marketing focus on privacy ... so no, it's still a market ;)
This page does a very good job at explaining what this project is about. I'd like to have a comparison of features with the competition somewhere (on another page maybe?), but this is very good.
No visible privacy/security policy. I'm going to trust confidential company information to somebody on the net who doesn't address privacy and security concerns on the very first page? No, I'm not.
The number of people balking at $9/mo in this thread is amazing. $9 is nothing compared to salaries. If it saves you 1 hour of productivity per month, you get 10x return on that cost straight away.
Mixed Content: The page at 'https://matterhorn.io/register' was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure XMLHttpRequest endpoint 'http://api.matterhorn.dev/users.json'. This request has been blocked; the content must be served over HTTPS.app-6c6e7022ec9660d68ebd624054790399.js:3 sendapp-6c6e7022ec9660d68ebd624054790399.js:3 p.extend.ajaxapp-6c6e7022ec9660d68ebd624054790399.js:6467 (anonymous function)app-6c6e7022ec9660d68ebd624054790399.js:3 p.event.dispatchapp-6c6e7022ec9660d68ebd624054790399.js:3 g.handle.h
Looks nice, but was sorely disappointed there was no self hosting option. I would be very interested if I could keep my data on my servers, but cannot move to this otherwise.
This service looks really cool, I like that it's flexible for different preferences. Some guys on my team like Trello's columns better while others like full blown tickets a la JIRA.
Will you offer some sort of micro plan for small teams of 5 or 6?
I like it. Here are a few thoughts:
1. I agree about the price point. If it were $5 I might be a buyer. I know it's insignificant, but it adds up when you have a team of people.
2. I would run this entire site on SSL. There's some good stuff to sniff here.
3. I don't like having to type in the name of a project and clicking the + to get to the form. I would rather just click + and get the form. Didn't seem intuitive to me.
4. When leaving comments on a feature, it was duplicating the comment. My username was there and then the same comment with blank user data.
5. On the "dashboard" or whatever you want to call it, tickets that I have assigned to myself for today aren't showing up. I have to go to the planner.
6. I clicked "Board" and then all of the links died. Refresh got me to the board.
7. When I move things in the Planner, they don't seem to take effect. I can't seem to get a ticket into Today.
Overall, I like what you've done here. I like being able to segment by customer and the board. Simple interface that is good once you learn the workflow.
I've been looking for a long a time for a good PM software that is standalone (personal use) or can be self-hosted (easy setup a must). Cloud hosting is a show-stopper when you're in a large company.
First of all: thank you for not asking for a credit card for the free trail version, thumbs up!
I skipped the demo and played around a bit, there are some things I like a lot:
1. When you go to the Home page, the 'To Do Today' Section is cool, when I start my day and open the page, knowing my ToDos gives me a focus, very helpful!
2. On the project board page, filtering tasks by clicking the buttons is very easy, very easy and efficient!
I've used other similar tools before: Mingle, Jira, Trello, etc. In my opinion, each has pros and cons, you need to know what's best for you within your budget. Jira doesn't have the hottest UX, configuring might be a challenge, but it's good enough for daily usage. Trello is small and less overwhelming, it's very handy and no confusion for most of the time. Mingle is pretty good with sharing visibility of your project, they support different card views (you can create a card for almost everything: feature, bug, etc.) and you can pick up your favorite: cards wall, hierarchy, list, tree. Matterhorn has a neat UI and they put lot of effort on walking your through the product, features look cool too.
Overall the product looks good, and price is fair. Good luck!
Maybe it'd be better to concentrate on one usa-case. Say Accountant. That way you have more focus. Once you talked to 10-100 accountants and made sure the product is good for them, move on to the next use-case.
From a sales perspective I can't tell the difference between this and trello in less than 60 seconds.
When I load the page I see I can "try it" but I don't want to invest the time. Show me exactly why your product is going to be more valuable and worth the time to migrate over.
> You all have slightly different workflows: workflows that enable you to do your thing in the best way possible.
> You could force everyone to track their time and their progress in exactly the same way, even if it doesn't fit their workflow
These lines briefly made me hopeful that this was some clever layer in front of all the various project management systems that would allow them to talk to each other.
I would value this because I vastly prefer the seemingly uncommon terminal-based workflow, and such a layer would presumably be able to talk to Emacs org-mode or whatever, just as it talks to Jira.
As it is, this is just another project management system that doesn't fit my workflow.
[+] [-] SEMW|11 years ago|reply
(Which isn't to say it necessarily should be cheaper, only that it seems surprising to see that price without any attempt to compare or justify why you believe that e.g. it's already, at launch, worth 3x as much as Pivotal Tracker).
[+] [-] tghw|11 years ago|reply
I'm not saying that it will, I haven't tried it so I have no idea. I'm just surprised that people really want to shave less than $100 off of the tools they provide their team.
[+] [-] eitally|11 years ago|reply
Your pricing is also too high for a large org, especially when one could use something like Phabricator for free. This doesn't even get into MS Project or document management (MS Office? Google Drive?).
Long story short, this looks like a good start and may work well for SMBs, but definitely not a big company.
[+] [-] yesimahuman|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] owly|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endlessvoid94|11 years ago|reply
Way better to charge and learn about what paying customers want, rather than make it cheap and hope to eventually convert them.
[+] [-] andy_ppp|11 years ago|reply
Maybe he's not trying to make a billion dollars and instead is planning on making a great product.
If you want outrageous pricing have a go at Slack!
https://broadmargins.slack.com/pricing
[+] [-] markhagan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] estebanrules|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NovaS1X|11 years ago|reply
I'm working hard enough for our company to pay $2 per user for HipChat.
$9 per user is very expensive when it comes to these services at scale. I can see this on a team of 10-15 people, but certainly not on a company wide basis.
[+] [-] sitkack|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whatsthatyousay|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eranation|11 years ago|reply
Feedback stuff:
1) agree with pricing plan, too high for large teams
2) call for action - I saw the "sign in" button immediately, but had to scroll all the way down for sign up, will be nice to have a floating sign up button just next to sign in, and in the sign in page, have a link such as "not registered? sign up here" in case people click the wrong button.
3) this is more due to my personal taste, but no gmail sign up is lowering my will to spend time to test the product. I want to click click, play with it a few mins, and if it's good suggest it to my team. I don't have time to fill a form (I'm exaggerating a little, but this goes through a lot of people's mind, filling forms is annoying for some people)
4) I'd like to see a demo the product. having a dummy project that anyone can see with a "guest" login will be really great. (good if you are not willing to add gmail login for any reason)
5) if not a demo, at least a video. the gif is great, so I think a longer video will be even better, seems like a very slick UI.
all in all looks great, I like the hybrid approach, will give it a look.
[+] [-] Linnea|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] desireco42|11 years ago|reply
I think free for teams till 3 would be nice, I think pivotal was for long time resisting this and had to cave in, that is the only way I will start using it and be in position to recommend for team.
[+] [-] adamgravitis|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahmacleod|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joshcrowder|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dnlmzw|11 years ago|reply
I have worked in most of the roles you describe, but even after having scrolled to the bottom, I don't exactly understand how it is tailored to the roles.
What I was left with is that you have boards and progressbars. Doesn't really compare to the stuff I already use.
Maybe you could explain even better how each role can tailor an interface to meet their needs, and what you provide better than other software out there.
[+] [-] Linnea|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eastbayjake|11 years ago|reply
(1) Project Management is painful and the existing providers still don't fully grasp what the market needs/wants
(2) Matterhorn must be doing something right to get over the noise, so kudos to your team! For me, it's your realization that not everyone manages their workflow in the same way, so being able to coordinate while giving people their personal preferences is really powerful. I wish I could see a demo!
[+] [-] slantyyz|11 years ago|reply
PM is painful, but I think existing providers do grasp what _their_ markets need/want. There is no such thing as one PM tool for everyone.
The reason why there is a proliferation of PM tools -- and why many vendors survive-- is that they tend to cater to different needs and audiences.
[+] [-] Linnea|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apunic|11 years ago|reply
The whole thread with all the upvotes and nobody telling us why exactly this new tool is so great feels strange to me.
[+] [-] eterm|11 years ago|reply
I'll keep it bookmarked though, perhaps my attitude in this regard is out of date.
[+] [-] Roritharr|11 years ago|reply
Atlassian is so successful in a big part due to their self-hosting option.
[+] [-] asp_net|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uniclaude|11 years ago|reply
Interesting project, I'll give it a try.
[+] [-] dsr_|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noodle|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thejosh|11 years ago|reply
Mixed Content: The page at 'https://matterhorn.io/register' was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure XMLHttpRequest endpoint 'http://api.matterhorn.dev/users.json'. This request has been blocked; the content must be served over HTTPS.app-6c6e7022ec9660d68ebd624054790399.js:3 sendapp-6c6e7022ec9660d68ebd624054790399.js:3 p.extend.ajaxapp-6c6e7022ec9660d68ebd624054790399.js:6467 (anonymous function)app-6c6e7022ec9660d68ebd624054790399.js:3 p.event.dispatchapp-6c6e7022ec9660d68ebd624054790399.js:3 g.handle.h
[+] [-] joshcrowder|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bedon292|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stax012|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sergiotapia|11 years ago|reply
Will you offer some sort of micro plan for small teams of 5 or 6?
Here's a good comparison of the various PM tools so you can compare Matterhorn to the established players. http://stackshare.io/stackups/trello-vs-asana-vs-basecamp-vs...
[+] [-] efriese|11 years ago|reply
Overall, I like what you've done here. I like being able to segment by customer and the board. Simple interface that is good once you learn the workflow.
[+] [-] Jun8|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EvaK_de|11 years ago|reply
http://collabtive.o-dyn.de/
Disclosure: I'm one of the lead devs.
[+] [-] nuwin_tim|11 years ago|reply
The ios app should be coming out by the end of this month.
[+] [-] 23andwalnut|11 years ago|reply
It's self hosted and has a super simple setup process. I'm the developer.
[+] [-] stronglikedan|11 years ago|reply
[0] http://thebuggenie.com/
[+] [-] Touche|11 years ago|reply
Why? I know some very large companies that use GitHub (not the hosted version).
[+] [-] xfalcox|11 years ago|reply
www.openproject.org
[+] [-] zjy711_gmail|11 years ago|reply
I skipped the demo and played around a bit, there are some things I like a lot:
1. When you go to the Home page, the 'To Do Today' Section is cool, when I start my day and open the page, knowing my ToDos gives me a focus, very helpful! 2. On the project board page, filtering tasks by clicking the buttons is very easy, very easy and efficient!
I've used other similar tools before: Mingle, Jira, Trello, etc. In my opinion, each has pros and cons, you need to know what's best for you within your budget. Jira doesn't have the hottest UX, configuring might be a challenge, but it's good enough for daily usage. Trello is small and less overwhelming, it's very handy and no confusion for most of the time. Mingle is pretty good with sharing visibility of your project, they support different card views (you can create a card for almost everything: feature, bug, etc.) and you can pick up your favorite: cards wall, hierarchy, list, tree. Matterhorn has a neat UI and they put lot of effort on walking your through the product, features look cool too.
Overall the product looks good, and price is fair. Good luck!
[+] [-] Maro|11 years ago|reply
Maybe it'd be better to concentrate on one usa-case. Say Accountant. That way you have more focus. Once you talked to 10-100 accountants and made sure the product is good for them, move on to the next use-case.
[+] [-] bdg|11 years ago|reply
When I load the page I see I can "try it" but I don't want to invest the time. Show me exactly why your product is going to be more valuable and worth the time to migrate over.
[+] [-] catern|11 years ago|reply
> You could force everyone to track their time and their progress in exactly the same way, even if it doesn't fit their workflow
These lines briefly made me hopeful that this was some clever layer in front of all the various project management systems that would allow them to talk to each other.
I would value this because I vastly prefer the seemingly uncommon terminal-based workflow, and such a layer would presumably be able to talk to Emacs org-mode or whatever, just as it talks to Jira.
As it is, this is just another project management system that doesn't fit my workflow.
[+] [-] fnordfnordfnord|11 years ago|reply
Also subscriptions are really hard to deal with at an .edu, and at 16weeks/semester (14 really) so 4 months x $9.00 x nStudents
[+] [-] benmccann|11 years ago|reply
The create new project button was broken.
It's unclear what the pricing is. The homepage says $9/user/month. When I logged in I think the price was 9£/user/month
[+] [-] joshcrowder|11 years ago|reply