Hello everyone! My name is Bogdan. I'm a software developer from Romania, now living in Singapore. I also have 6 years of entrepreneurial experience running DNN Sharp.
At DNN Sharp we develop and sell software apps and have been doing so for the last few years. But it took us time and a lot of scratching our heads until we did it right. We've learnt our lessons and started Open Traits, which is a platform that hosts communities around product development.
We're currently using it to power our community at support.dnnsharp.com. At first sight, it resembles a forum, making it a familiar experience for many. But it's mixed with all sorts of development tools such as iteration planning, per-feature crowd funding through incentives, statuses and workflows among others.
Open Traits can substitute community, project management, help desk and sales software making it easy for developers to manage everything in one place and stay connected to the community at the same time. It's a lightweight, hassle free, inexpensive solution to do software development.
The Problem
Prioritizing development makes the difference between being the cool guy in town or another struggling company. Open Traits collects feedback from users in a forum-like environment. The feedback is then sorted by popularity and profitability and proposed for development in iterations.
Open Traits also aims to replace multiple software that a company uses, such as project management helps desk among others, or be an integration point with these. The problem with having multiple systems is the obscurity of determining what's really important and measure the impact.
Funding
The target of this campaign is to raise $100,000 to fund development and marketing. We will allocate 80% to development on following features:
- Data Migration from CSV, User Voice and Get Satisfaction
- REST API with documentation and Open Source C# wrapper library
- Access Management per community/topic/post
- Complete Iteration Planning features
- Labels system (similar to GMail)
- Workflows around labels and statuses
- Integrations: Pivotal Tracker, JIRA, desk.com, yammer, facebook, twitter
- Authentication Providers: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Open ID
- Mobile web version
- New file storage providers: FTP, S3
- Reputation System
- Multiple votes per user (based on reputation or manually assigned by admins or via API)
- Reports
- Lots of other minor features
By helping us achieve these goals you can get the on-premise installation or a subscription at highly discounted value. Lifetime subscriptions available!
If we don't meet the funding goal, we are still going to implement some of the features. To determine which ones are most important, we await your feedback and votes in the Open Traits community, also hosted on the Open Traits platform at opentraits.com/community/app.
However, if we do exceed our goal by a significant amount, we're going to also implement iOS and Android apps!
Technologies
We are very passionate about technology and made Open Traits using state-of-the-art.
The backend is implemented using C#, Asp.NET MVC 4 and .NET 4. The architecture is backed by Windsor IoC and NHibernate. The platform is currently hosted in the cloud on Windows Azure - but it can also be installed on single machine or at Amazon EC2.
The front-end we implemented using the popular Twitter Bootstrap library, jQuery and knockout js.
Our Customers
We mainly target software developers, website owners and enterprise organizations. Open Traits automates workflows and integrates feedback from end users into the development process. There are many benefits. The developer saves time and money by having fewer resources allocated to collecting and aggregating feedback. It also brings end users directly into the development process giving them decision power over a subset of features, which boosts trust and could potentially increase sales.
Competitive Advantages
The direct competition for Open Traits is User Voice and Get Satisfaction. But indirectly Open Traits can substitute any support solution such as JIRA or desk.com.
We've studied our competition and know where we can fill the gaps.
Current Features
We currently use Open Traits in production to power our DNN Sharp community. We already have a handful of features and our users made the transition very easy from our previous forum based solution to the Open Traits platform.
Forum Features
We wanted a familiar experience right from the start. So we designed the communities to resemble a forum. There are topics, comments, replies and so on.
Crowd Funding per Feature
Users can place incentives on topics. Incentives are for example money or reviews that the user promises to the developer when the topic is resolved or implemented. We will also add an escrow service around this in the future and also some integration points to automatically detect the incentives.
Iteration Planning
Open Traits automatically plans iterations based on user votes, incentives and developer estimates.
Custom Domains and iframe Integration
Open Traits communities can be setup with custom domains. For example, our DNN Sharp community is available at opentraits.com/dnnsharp but also support.dnnsharp.com.
Also, notice on our website how we embedded the community using iframe at www.dnnsharp.com/Support.aspx. The implementation is solid. The URLs get properly updated based on navigation inside the iframe, so they can be shared and bookmarked.
Responsive Layout
Open Traits uses responsive layout that comes with the Twitter Bootstrap library. Go to opentraits.com and resize the browser window horizontally to see how the content gets rearranged to best fit the width.
This makes Open Traits display nicely on tablets and smartphones, but we still have a lot of work on the details. We'll also have iOS and Android apps down the road to make it a smooth native experience for mobile users.
Statuses and Workflows
We currently support statuses. It's a dynamic open model. A community starts with Open and Closed status and then developers can create new statuses on the fly. When a status is changed, the transition is saved and given as an option in the future.
We plan to implement a workflow builder each state and transition can be linked to events such as sending emails, invoking web services and so on.
Right now, we only have one workflow. When a topic is estimated then the status can no longer be set until the topic reaches the end of the agile workflow. That is Estimated > Started > Delivered > Accepted/Rejected > Closed.
These are the just a few of the most important features we currently support. There are also activity and news feeds, follow communities and topics and limited API support among others.
Thank you for your time and I hope that I managed to make Open Traits interesting. I'm looking forward to having you onboard!