One month of Goplan

Fred Oliveira on April 20, 2007, Comments (7)

It’s now been one month since we officially launched Goplan (our collaboration product) built by ourselves, for ourselves (and now for you guys) - we’ve built others in the past since our business is to help companies launch web-apps, but this one’s our own baby. So it makes sense to look at how last month was, and how it’s going to influence our future.

The comparison with Basecamp

The first thing that happened - and we were expecting it to a certain extent -, was that Goplan was compared to Basecamp by 37Signals. It is a valid comparison given how the two solutions serve a similar purpose. However, our goal is not to eat away at 37Signals’s audience and here’s why:

We built our product because existing solutions (Basecamp included) did not fit our needs. Basecamp lacks a few features we need (issue tracking being the obvious one), and somehow their navigation never “clicked” for us. There’s people who share these problems - and thats the kind of people we want to help.

Ultimately web-based collaboration is about using tools that become second nature to you - that help your team’s process (even if the team’s only you). If Goplan’s not the tool for you, find the right one and kick ass with it. But tell us why you didn’t like our product and we’ll make it better with your input.

The reactions and requests

There’s been hundreds of posts on the blogosphere about the product - we’re really happy about that. And there’s been some amazing feedback, both positive and negative. A lot of people sent in feature requests for things they’d love to have, and with quite a few issues we overlooked (it happens, even with 6 months of testing) were found and fixed.

We’ve always had an open attitude when it comes to talking about the things we want to build into the product, and those we don’t. We openly published known issue lists in the past, and the things we were working on. We’ll continue building on top of Goplan in the exact same way - we’ll let you know and listen to you first, and then push it out.

The future

We’re now actively prioritizing the things we’ll add to the application and we’ll publish a list of updates very soon - within a few days at the most -, so keep an eye out for that. We’ve listened to your feedback and things like personalization, global calendaring and better experience are right at the top.

So now, the question: how has your experience been this far, and what could we do better? As always, feel free to send us an email or leave a comment right here. Thanks!

Comments:

I love the features you’ve got in place - this software is pretty much everything I was hoping for and a definite BC killer.

But, I can’t use it for everyday project management work. Why? The site is just too slow.

Page loads take 4-5 seconds to appear, compared with 1-2 seconds for Basecamp. AJAX requests sometimes timeout! Adding 2 or 3 tasks should take a few seconds. Instead, it’s a job which requires a minute or more of staring at the screen while the page reloads.

Don’t get me wrong - the software itself is excellent, I’m just frustrated by how slow it is. I’ve showed it to a client and it was their first comment. I even signed up for a higher-rate plan to see if it would put me on a more responsive server! No joy :(

Please, folks - I’d love to use this service more often.

James - first of all, thanks for leaving a comment. We are concerned that you don’t find Goplan speedy enough - and rest assured we’ll be doing whatever possible to bump the speed up. Right now Goplan is running on Amazon’s EC2 platform and servers, which theoretically should mean “fast” (it does mean “stable”). We’ll look into other options and definitely post something up about this.

Rest assured we’ll be following up on this one. Thanks again!

* Speed, speed, speed. Either more EC2 instances, or a beefier database, or more caching, something.

* Seeing all issues assigned to me, or tickets i’ve created without having to go into each project.

* Down the road, the ability to email tickets would be fantastic. I’d like to setup a [email protected] for customers, and have tickets created, so that Go Plan can be used as a support center.
Lighthouse is doing some interesting things in this regard.

I really like the interface and potential, just please make it usable.

Fred - Thanks for the reply.

Using EC2 does rather explain things - we’ve recently been testing it ourselves. As you point out, it certainly is solid. However, we’ve been disappointed with the speed: latency in particular is poor in all the instances we’ve tested, regardless of O/S. As an aside, what surprised me most is how slow the link between EC2 and S3 was!

Cameron: unfortunately it’s not as simple as throwing more EC2 instances at the problem - I don’t think that processor capacity is the bottleneck, more the general responsiveness of Amazon’s cloud, though Fred will know exactly where the bottlenecks are occurring.

In the end, we went back to a traditional load-balanced cluster for performance reasons. Serves us right for trying to save a few quid…

James

Re: Gantt Charts

I am as adament about using Gantt charts to help with project manangement as Jason Fried (of Basecamp) is about saying they will NEVER make them. Which is why I won’t use Basecamp.

What is your take? Will Goplan offer Gantt chart reporting as a feature in the near future?

Andrew

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