Tried Asana, couldn't stand it. Moved to Airtable, which is vastly superior to Asana and moderately better than Trello. Now I use Notion on recommendation of an HN poster. Far from perfect, but beats Asana out of the park.
All of these services with these massive valuations still somehow struggle to get their core product right, it's like it lacks vision. These products are also mindbogglingly slow-moving. I don't know how Asana can justify a $1.5b valuation though. On paper, maybe, but when we talk about profit or revenue, I'm skeptical to say the least.
What exactly they need $50m for, I'm not quite sure.
> somehow struggle to get their core product right, it's like it lacks vision
My theory here is that todo/work tracking apps are always doomed to end up like this. The problem is that we use the same words to talk about something that varies greatly from person to person, and even more so from organization to organization.
The upshot is that a company will start out with a strong vision, find a narrow segment of users who work perfectly in line with that vision, and make them happy. But then they want to expand, so they start adding features and options that let others groups find a way to work using the tool. Eventually either the tool stops expanding or feature creep and death-of-a-thousand-cuts changes make it an all-things-to-everyone nightmare (hi, Jira!).
Personally, I use Kanban Flow, which is very focused on a Kanban style approach. By the name it's obvious they're targeting a very specific niche. Since I happen to be in that niche, I love it. But I wouldn't recommend it to all comers, because for a lot of people it won't match their tasks or how their brain works.
IMHO, this is what Notion gets right. At heart, it's less of a todo/work tracking app per se and more of a database with user-friendly views, many of which can be tailored to todo/work tracking, and many of which come with reasonable default setups that match common usage patterns.
We're using Notion right now to manage user research, sprint kanban boards, and a wiki for a Code for Canada project. As part of the wiki side, we can embed InVision mocks, RealtimeBoards, Google Drive docs, and many other things directly into our pages, in a way that allows us to interact with (comment, edit, etc.) them. About the only thing I find missing is full-text search across pages; other than that, it's been really quite great as a central place to organize the whole project.
No idea if that will remain true as they scale up, but for now they seem to have found a way to break the "only works for a specific niche" pattern, and they're carving out a meta-niche of "teams whose work isn't easily captured by previously defined specific niches".
Almost every sentence in this reply seems uninformed. Airtable & Asana are not comparable. Asana clearly has vision but possibly different from yours. A company raising Series E obviously would have positive financials. Founder posted hockey stick graph of revenues on Twitter. $50m is not that big of a Series E raise and will obviously go to engineering and sales & marketing.
I wouldn't say they're not comparable, Airtable is commonly used for the same use cases as Asana, much like Trello and Notion. Airtable can also be used for other purposes, but this doesn't make comparisons unwarranted. It even has a Kanban view.
> "$50m is not that big of a Series E raise and will obviously go to engineering and sales & marketing."
I don't find that the product is good enough to warrant investment, and I don't believe it'll be successful in the long run unless changes are made. There's people who will disagree and love Asana.
I think Notion got it right with the focus on rich text content. The tasks you need to get done and the information about your project can all be in the same project. I think Notion could become a serious contender to overtake Asana.
Just for example, I dislike sorting with Asana. You can't sort in Kanban boards. You can't sort by X and then by Y. This is what their core product is. That doesn't instill me with confidence.
I guess mark-as-dependent functionality is nice though?
I must say I am very surprised by the ARR [0], which is much more than Atlassian's $619m last year. I'll admit I was wrong there. Congratulations to them.
I was not in a aware state of mind when writing this reply, obviously if Asana was pulling in $1b+ a year in revenue they'd be valued at an order of magnitude more than $1.5b.
Their revenue would probably still be pretty good since they have 50k+ organizations paying $20+ per user per month [0].
I think Airtable and Notion are focused on tracking manually-generated data (the former does well for structured data, the latter for unstructured data), whereas Asana is more focused on team collaboration / async communication. As a result, Airtable and Notion are great for personal use, but it's not clear to me that they can excel at the kinds of usecases that Asana meets for collaborative work tracking.
All of these services with these massive valuations still somehow struggle to get their core product right, it's like it lacks vision. These products are also mindbogglingly slow-moving. I don't know how Asana can justify a $1.5b valuation though. On paper, maybe, but when we talk about profit or revenue, I'm skeptical to say the least.
What exactly they need $50m for, I'm not quite sure.