Taggle

Inspiration

We love working on whiteboards because it gives us creative freedom. We used to have an analog whiteboard in our office where we planned our work just the way we wanted to. But then the pandemic came and we mostly adapted to working remotely which meant that we couldn't work on the local whiteboard anymore.

What it does

Taggle is basically what would happen if a project management tool and a whiteboard had a child. We carefully chose the best features of both and combined them into a digital tool that feels like a whiteboard but helps you manage your projects with metrics, WIP limits, etc. So it basically removes the boring work from project management and allows creative freedom, because every process is just as unique as the team is.

How we built it

Our core team is a team of three. Two full-stack devs and a UI/UX designer. We chose the lean approach from the book the lean startup and tried to iterate as fast as possible. We kept close contact with project managers, users, and coaches to build a product that people actually want. From a technical perspective, we used Next.js in conjunction with Konva (HTML Canvas simplified). The state is managed with redux because we chose an optimistic approach with our event-driven architecture. As soon as you drag an element, this action is applied locally and simultaneously sent to the server (Node.js, fastify, MongoDB), which sends this event to all other connected users on that board. The live communication is done with websockets using socket.io

Challenges we ran into

Multiplayer / Live collaboration is much harder than we thought. Especially when there are cases like unexpected client disconnects (bad connection, tab up for too long) it's not obvious what you want to do. I think there is a good market for a SaaS which handles this for you.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our event-driven architecture. We built it from scratch and it was the first time for the devs to do that. We actually have a hidden feature to test this event-driven approach which allows you to scroll through your board's events and rewatch how it was built. I'm really proud of this and I learned a lot in the process.

What we learned

A lot! On a technical side, it was the first project for us that featured live collaboration. We are also new to event-driven architectures, which leads to reading and research regarding those topics. On the product side of things, we learned how to build a product from the ground up including all make-or-buy decisions, building a community, doing market research, and marketing. Regarding marketing, we learned that it's much harder than we thought because we tend to overthink campaigns: should we do this? This isn't perfect. We learned that sometimes just giving it a try can lead to unexpected results and sometimes even positive ones 😉

What's next for Taggle

Marketing and collecting more feedback from end-users. We've had some spikes in users and also had some churn and we want to find out why. Therefore we added a live chat, but also want to ask more for feedback and give the users even better chances to give feedback without any effort.