Pivotal Tracker will shut down

People often ask: how do I find business ideas?

Well, here you go: many people publicly saying how they love a product that is going away.

This is a validated product: people were paying for it. Apparently quite a lot of people. It doesn't get better than this.

All you have to do is to clone the product. You can literally market it as a Pivotal Tracker clone. It's not like VMWare will care.

You can research companies currently using Pivotal Tracker and build a database for cold calling / e-mailing when you have the product.

It's also a product that is doable as a single person or very small team. With modern technologies (React or Svelte, hosted databases etc.) it's relatively simple to clone.

Staying small is important: those businesses topple over when revenues don't justify expenses, especially if VC funding is involved and VCs are pressuring for going big or going bust. Or when a profitable product is acquired with the hopes of growing the profits but they don't grow.

Stay small to keep expenses in check and you can build a profitable company.

This is a bootstrappable business: a $100/mo Hetzner box, backend in efficient language (Go, C#), front-end in Svelte or React and you can serve lots of customers. The rest is your time and hustle.

It forced everyone to ruthlessly prioritize and make the hard decisions.

In this moment, do you want me working on this bug, or this new feature? You have to decide - you get one or the other.

It avoided the "Everything is a high priority" dilemma.

It made it easy to do the things that were frequently done.

It limited customization down to a sane level.

And it generally seemed to stay out of the way (significant look at Jira).

Back when I did contract software engineering, Pivotal Tracker made managing client relationships a breeze by giving the client perfect visibility into the impact of feature requests, and allowing them to make the tradeoffs that made sense for their business.

"Want to add this new feature, and do it right away? No problem, but as you can see, if I drag it into this week, as a 4-point task, it pushes everything else back by two days, which means we'll have to cut something else or change the launch date."

Great UI, great vibes, and was just a delight to use. Even as PT dies, its legacy lives on. Thank you, PT team!

You will be missed old friend. Nothing else comes close.

Shortcut as a product is team-oriented with solid GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket and Slack integrations.

I used to self-host a Phabricator instance, which I liked a lot, but the upstream maintainer made the reasonable decision to step away.

My guess is there is not much of a niche for self-hosted solutions anymore. The GitHub Issues free tier covers most of the low-complexity use-cases, while higher-complexity use-cases are addressed by enterprise SaaS.

I just logged in for the first time in years and found that I still had two side projects in there. Time to download them I guess.

Simplicity is reinforced with a great information density: lots, but not overwhelming. Current design trends make information density super low, forcing you to scroll a lot and spending much more energy/time just to be able to look at things.

When you need to "open" an item, you remain in the same screen (no modal, no context change): metadata, description, conversation. Nothing more!

In Linear I'm totally lost with projects, cycles, views, projects...

I'm stuck with Github Issues/Projects, but I miss Pivotal simplicity!!

I've just exported a 10MB Pivotal CSV...

I always wondered, did Pivotal Tracker invent this paradigm? They were surely using it before any of the big players utilized it.

- https://www.easyredmine.com/

- https://www.openproject.org/

- https://taiga.io/

- https://www.stackfield.com/

- https://zenkit.com/en/

Pivotal provided a nice middle ground and was so easy to use with just the right amount of customization and power user functionality.

But I always felt like there was a small group of users and it just never got a foothold in companies.

I still use all the terminologies I learnt from PT — Icebox, backlog, current — across other project management apps.

Sad, and you will be missed.

https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Import...

p.s. Yes, we tried all of the alternatives and none works for us.

While pairing could be exhausting, it built a really incredible culture there that will be hard to recreate.

RIP

I actually liked using Tracker.

would love to make a clone.

Is the possible purchase cost below the minimum that Broadcom's legal department even accepts to look at? (i.e. they don't get involved with "small" sub-10M deals..?)

https://github.com/Codeminer42/cm42-central

> An agile project planning tool and Pivotal Tracker drop-in replacement

Maybe Tracker belongs in different time that we will not go back to, who knows.

VMware can't sell Pivotal Tracker to some company that will keep it going longer (and perhaps try to migrate customers to their own product)?

https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/what-s-the-best-way-to...

Then several years later, after working in large Silicon Valley tech companies, and seeing how they run with Jira, I decided to start https://linear.app

So much team's time and effort went in to configuring their tools instead of actually working on things. We do more than PT did, but aim to keep the experience straightforward and focused, regardless of the size of your team or company.

Only Trello really "beat it" fairly - Jira was always top-down forced, and Asana only won with designers because it was pretty while Pivotal was more tactical (not to mention they clung to skeuomorphic UI a little too long). The rest is history.

I guess we can say Pivotal was quite pivotal in the AGILE/sprint/PM software race. RIP

No idea how Asana is still valued at $3B it's literally just notepad with checkboxes.