vcidev

This looks awesome, thank you!

Thanks for trying it out!

The main use case is for more focused discussions / information sharing. It started as a threaded chat app but evolved over time. I used the GitHub Issues analogy because you could use the app to make a customized generic version of a GitHub-issues-like bug tracker.

For that analogy, you can think of each board in ThinkBase as a repository of issues, while the cards are like issues.

Each board that you create in ThinkBase can have its own "card template" to focus the cards/conversations on that board, just like GitHub Issues has templates.

When it comes to tracking the status of your cards, you can create your own tags like status:open, priority:10, asignee:mike, and then perform queries on these custom tags (e.g.: segment engine status:open priority>1) to segment the cards to your liking.

The main power (I hope) of the app is that you can focus each board on whatever type of discussion or information sharing use case that you'd like depending on how you craft your templates and tags. Boards don't have to be "issues" focused but they could be.

To be honest, at this point in time I'm still refining the different possible use cases. Perhaps there is a better analogy to use. Once I'm able to hone in on one or a couple solid use cases I'd like to build out more features to better support them.

You bring up a great point about columns. I've been thinking lately of a feature that would allow you to choose which tags you want to use as your columns if you prefer a column view. So for the GitHub Issues analogy, you would create the tags - status:TODO, status:doing, status:done, and designate those as your "columns".

Appreciate the feedback.

I've often felt that quality of communication depends on a company's cultural norms (e.g. being respectful of your coworkers' time), having shared context, and standardization of processes.

That thought inspired me to build this app with features that encourage focused work, efficiency and modularity.

I just opened up free registration for the public today so that I can gather some more feedback. Let me know what you think!

The scenario you describe seems worrisome, but I would consider that not getting feedback on your product is a huge danger of its own. Unless you have a big private network that you can share discreetly with, but that has its own problems in that you're getting feedback only from people that know you.

Also, I think that the probability of this happening is possibly lower than you think, as it assumes that your posting is wildly popular AND popular enough that someone at a big tech co. thinks it's worth building AND that person is convincing enough to convince his team to build your product AND they're able to move as fast as you're saying AND they execute well enough AND there is not room enough for more than one co. in the market you're after.

Even if you do manage to keep things a secret and choose a different path, who is to say that the alternative path doesn't somehow end up exposing you even more due to the large number of unknowns that you'll encounter as a founder?

You may even be able to move faster than Zoom as a solo dev depending on the circumstances. In the long run, I really don't think that a posting to HN will destroy a co. Most of the time it will be something else like lack of motivation, time, resources, etc.

Thanks so much for the feedback everyone. It was fun and engaging hearing your thoughts. Just wanted to let future readers know that I likely won't come back and read this thread any time soon, so that I can actually go and get some work done ;) Of course if you'd like to discuss without me, feel free..

Thanks for the interesting thoughts ian0. I honestly think Google has a good shot at all the things you describe with their AutoML tables, _if_ they spend a lot of time on the UX. The problem that I'm guessing most services run into though is how to tune (up or down) the informational/educational aspects of the app depending on the prior knowledge of the user. IMO us hackers don't spend enough time on UX, maybe because of time constraints, or maybe because it's not something that's widely taught at university.

Seems like it! Very nice product.

Maybe initially it involves humans if you are just validating the idea. Nice tool!

Followed you on twitter, though I have to admit I'm not much of a Twitter user! Feel free to email me at the address in my profile if that's easy.

> Then you need to set up systems for extracting any 'insight' from what they have and continuously managing and processing data from multiple sources, and so on and so on.

Agreed, this is quite tricky. The solution I described lends itself much better to one-off analyses, thus limiting its usefulness.

> No one is really sitting with a single csv file open in front of them, thinking "Hmm if only someone would tell me what I can do with this".

Yea, most people don't do this. I think the target user would likely be someone who has an ok idea of what they might want to do with their data, but needs some guidance as to what the latest and greatest techniques can actually do, given what they have. There may be a gap between what they think they can do, and what is actually possible. Or they might discover new things that they didn't think of. Perhaps this is more of a personal frustration that I've had in the past.

The "single csv" issue is a concern I have as well. Many data-science-type problems of course cannot be reduced to a single csv.

Thanks for the feedback!