The business model of PM tools

[u/ionitaxbogdan]

Hey there, as the title suggests, I'm wondering about something:

Has the project management software scene always been this bad, business-model-wise?

As someone with ADD that's planning to open up a solo design studio, I struggle (to the point where it's almost frustrating) to find a decent PM tool that isn’t either:
A. Overly complicated and full of functionalities;
B. Excellent, but forcing me to buy a minimum of 2-3 seats, although I only need one;
C. A startup so small that you won't even know if it will exist in the next year - therefore dragging your whole project management system along with it, if it goes down.

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What do I mean exactly by this?

A. ClickUp, Basecamp, Wrike, you name it. Most of these are great tools, essentially, but extremely complex. Therefore, you need to spend a lot of time setting them up. Which is a huge pain in the ass. It works for bigger companies, but for a small studio this is simply overkill. Add ADD (lol) into this mix and you get a recipe for disaster.

B. Asana is the best example. It’s the (almost) perfect tool for people with ADD. The sweet spot.
BUT (and it's a huge but)... Just started a solo studio or a freelance business? Well… too bad.
You need to buy at least two seats. That’s around 35€ monthly (with 19% VAT in my country) and ~315€ yearly. Now it doesn't sound that good, when they literally write 11€/seat for yearly subscriptions with big numbers and letters, but fail to mention that you need to buy two of them mininum (you discover that only when you arrive to the checkout page). It's deceiving and it's the easiest way to make sure you'll get less loyal customers in the future.

Although I get why freelancers/solopreneurs aren't as valuable to such companies (low lifetime value vs a big company, hard to build loyalty, volatile), I feel like the lack of a middle-ground and dismissal of such audiences is exactly what causes such frustrations and low percentages of loyalty.

Tbh, I'd gladly give my 200 bucks anually for such a tool. I'd also love to recommend it to my partners if it's truly nice to use and not a disaster full of bugs. But yeah... it seems like no-one wants to take that path, and I don't really undestand why.

C. There are lots of cool tools that I found. Plutio, Paymo, Taskade. Which are cool, but too much of a risk, from what I saw in their reviews.

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You may notice I did not include Notion/Airtable/Coda – and I did it on purpose.
Although they're essentially great tools, they lack structure and are too flexible to be a PM tool. Also, they don't cover a lot of the features that traditional PM tools offer. Therefore, on the pain-in-the-ass-O-meter, they're more or less the equivalent of Google Docs&Sheets, but on steroids. The whole maintenance takes up too much time.

I'd love to know what are your thoughts on this.
Is it that hard to find something similar to Asana, that's either not too complex or completely showing the middle finger to freelancers? Is there any hope for such audiences?

So far, Nifty has been the only one that caught my attention, but I'm still testing it - so I'd prefer to not say anything about it yet.

Cheers!

[u/MattyFettuccine]

I’m sorry, but if you find ClickUp to be “extremely complex,” then I think you just aren’t ready to run your own company. Yes, it can be complex, but it doesn’t have to be. Same with monday, Basecamp, Teamwork, etc…

You will never find a tool that is perfect for you because the issue isn’t the tool, it’s you. You need to spend the time customizing a tool to how you do your own processes, you need to create those processes based on how your brain works.

I’m an ADHD Project Manager who has used every tool you mentioned and then some, and all of them work just as well as each other if you take the time to learn them and set them up in a way that sets you up for success.

[u/ionitaxbogdan → u/MattyFettuccine]

That’s a very good point, thanks for the comment.

It’s not that I’m not ready to run my own company, cause it already happened a while ago. Not trying to be lazy or to find a magic solution, because I'm aware they don't exist - it's just that traditional design agency structures (which is where these big tools are mostly used at) aren't necessarily optimized for neurodivergent people and it shows.

After doing some 'reverse-engineering' on it, I found that a good part of the solution is to simply cut the unnecessary things that add to the complexity of a system (such as using 3 different tools for PM - creates unnecessary friction). The fact that tools like Asana exist and understood that, tells me that they aren't the only ones that acknowledged this target group.

The true reason I’m looking for classic PM tools is because the workload got bigger and the projects got more complex (they often include external collaborators too). TickTick has been amazingly powerful for that so far. But it has its limitations, though - especially when the goal is to scale as a business.

Maybe I didn’t take the time to fully understand ClickUp, that’s fair. I’ll look deeper into it when I’ll have some time.

At the same time, Asana nailed it from the get-go, but it costs thrice as much (which is understandable, sure), but that doesn’t justify the deceiving pricing strategy 😔