Free business idea: clone Pivotal Tracker as a solo dev / small team.<p>People often ask: how do I find business ideas?<p>Well, here you go: many people publicly saying how they love a product that is going away.<p>This is a validated product: people were paying for it. Apparently quite a lot of people. It doesn't get better than this.<p>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.<p>You can research companies currently using Pivotal Tracker and build a database for cold calling / e-mailing when you have the product.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Stay small to keep expenses in check and you can build a profitable company.<p>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.
The thing that I always liked about Pivotal is that it was visibly obvious that there was only one queue.<p>It forced everyone to ruthlessly prioritize and make the hard decisions.<p>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.<p>It avoided the "Everything is a high priority" dilemma.
Unfortunate. Of all the PM tools I've used, I hated Pivotal the least.<p>It made it easy to do the things that were frequently done.<p>It limited customization down to a sane level.<p>And it generally seemed to stay out of the way (significant look at Jira).
Pouring one out for Pivotal Tracker. This was an outstanding ticket tracking and project management system, way ahead of its time.<p>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.<p>"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."<p>Great UI, great vibes, and was just a delight to use. Even as PT dies, its legacy lives on. Thank you, PT team!
RIP PT. I can't tell you how much this piece of software changed my life. Working at Pivotal (the very early days of Cloud Foundry), taught me so much about how to develop software and products. It taught me how to work closely with people (pair programming for the win!). How to iterate and pay attention to velocity. How to write stories. How to polish a turd over time. I use these skills every single day.<p>You will be missed old friend. Nothing else comes close.
Shortcut (<a href="https://www.shortcut.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.shortcut.com/</a>) is a solid alternative to Pivotal Tracker. I work as an Engineering Manager there and helped build an importer for Pivotal Tracker data into Shortcut (<a href="https://github.com/useshortcut/api-cookbook/tree/main/pivotal-import">https://github.com/useshortcut/api-cookbook/tree/main/pivota...</a>).<p>Shortcut as a product is team-oriented with solid GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket and Slack integrations.
Are there any open source self-hostable tracking/project management tools that still have a committed team and forward momentum?<p>I used to self-host a Phabricator instance, which I liked a lot, but the upstream maintainer made the reasonable decision to step away.<p>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.
This is sad to see. I haven't used PT in over a decade probably, but I used it heavily for 3-4 years before that. As a contrast to other "agile" tools, it was a breath of fresh air. So simple, everything was all on one screen, so easy to move things from state to state. My team loved it because they could just open it up in a window and leave it open all day, making changes as needed. I don't think I've ever seen anything since that came close to it.<p>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.
I'm opening my Pivotal Tracker project from 2011... and I'm surprised at how good the UX is/was!!! Visually it looks old, but the UX I think is great:<p>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.<p>When you need to "open" an item, you remain in the same screen (no modal, no context change): metadata, description, conversation. Nothing more!<p>In Linear I'm totally lost with projects, cycles, views, projects...<p>I'm stuck with Github Issues/Projects, but I miss Pivotal simplicity!!<p>I've just exported a 10MB Pivotal CSV...
Wish 37Signals would clone something like this and sell it via <a href="https://once.com/" rel="nofollow">https://once.com/</a> (pay once, install and host yourself).
We have to use Jira at my current workplace and it's so complicated. Pivotal Tracker, which I used at previous workplace, was so simple and focused. Sad to hear it's shutting down!
Pivotal Tracker was the first time I saw a digital kanban board where the workflow was represented as a series of columns you dragged items through. Since then, its become popular paradigm for pretty much every popular project management software UI around.<p>I always wondered, did Pivotal Tracker invent this paradigm? They were surely using it before any of the big players utilized it.
That's too bad. At one of my companies they were using Trello for all engineering development which I found just too casual of an approach. Jira would have been overkill.<p>Pivotal provided a nice middle ground and was so easy to use with just the right amount of customization and power user functionality.<p>But I always felt like there was a small group of users and it just never got a foothold in companies.
I signed up for Pivotal Tracker a month ago, after a ten-year gap. I loved the simplicity then, and I love it even more now. I'm saying this after using multiple different project management/Agile management apps.<p>I still use all the terminologies I learnt from PT — Icebox, backlog, current — across other project management apps.<p>Sad, and you will be missed.
Shortcut.com has it's an importer tool from Pivotal. Give it a go!
<a href="https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Importing-data-from-Pivotal-Tracker-to-Shortcut" rel="nofollow">https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Import...</a>
Checkout Shortcut.com! They have an import tool from Pivotal Tracker.<p><a href="https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Importing-data-from-Pivotal-Tracker-to-Shortcut" rel="nofollow">https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Import...</a>
We love PivotalTracker so much, that we want to build alternative that feels like home. We are looking for support to make this happen. Can you check out <a href="https://litetracker.app" rel="nofollow">https://litetracker.app</a><p>p.s. Yes, we tried all of the alternatives and none works for us.
This has been coming for a while. I feel bad for anyone still building on anything Tanzu these days. I expect we will see a similar announcement about some or all of those products in the coming years. It’s gotta feel stressful to those teams relying on these products.
I briefly worked on the Tracker team until VMWare bought Pivotal. One of the best teams that I have ever worked on that truly cared about the product they were building.<p>While pairing could be exhausting, it built a really incredible culture there that will be hard to recreate.<p>RIP
man, what would I give to have Atlassian shut down - so much frustration, anger, productivity lost and just absolute misery caused by that terrible company and their horrible products<p>I actually liked using Tracker.
Devin from Shortcut here, happy to walk anyone through our API importer capabilities and provide a couple months of our Business plan for evaluation. Details on the importer capabilities: <a href="https://www.shortcut.com/blog/importing-from-pivotal-tracker-to-shortcut" rel="nofollow">https://www.shortcut.com/blog/importing-from-pivotal-tracker...</a>
Shortcut is a good alternative to Pivotal (<a href="https://www.shortcut.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.shortcut.com/</a>)
Its really sad to see the best project management tool ever created fade away. Its not just the best and most intuitive way to do delivery predictions and team capacity planning but also somehow managed to reach peak interface. As development slowed down it felt more like a japanese tea cup that just reached perfection. (except for github integration)<p>would love to make a clone.
If anyone is still lurking in this thread - how realistic would it be to try to buy Pivotal Tracker back from Broadcom?<p>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..?)
I will really miss Pivotal. Looks like my org will shift to Jira. People talk a lot about how Jira is so customizable to the point of it being problematic. But would it be possible to customize it to work somewhat like Pivotal, I wonder?
I always loved Tracker and it sucks it got sold and resold until they shut it down like this. I am using Linear but it doesn't have simplicity of Tracker tbh.<p>Maybe Tracker belongs in different time that we will not go back to, who knows.
They're not migrating users to another VMware company product?<p>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)?
Problem with these trackers is that they are by design super opinionated on how your work flow is gonna be once you get past simple reminders type tracking
Just came to say, I still think this is the best balance between the many factors of running a dev team. I keep trying to recreate it in every tool I use.
I could have called this years ago when I found out they exclusively use and enforce pair programming in-house<p><a href="https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/what-s-the-best-way-to-pair" rel="nofollow">https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/what-s-the-best-way-to...</a>
Pouring one out. I remember using Pivotal Tracker back when working in a Ruby on Rails shop and enjoying directness and how optioned it was of it.<p>Then several years later, after working in large Silicon Valley tech companies, and seeing how they run with Jira, I decided to start <a href="https://linear.app" rel="nofollow">https://linear.app</a><p>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.
These guys were pioneers who set forth a lot of the patterns used in other PM software (Did they invent "Velocity"?). I hated Pivotal in the early days, but after a couple years on the job I learned to really love it especially as the newer flimsier sprint planning tools were popping up in the early web 2 days.<p>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.<p>I guess we can say Pivotal was quite pivotal in the AGILE/sprint/PM software race. RIP
IMO all of these todo list apps are the same - no moat and not useful enough to be critical for anyone or anything.<p>No idea how Asana is still valued at $3B it's literally just notepad with checkboxes.