Fans of Microsoft Project, rejoice! There’s now a way to recreate the fun and pleasure of creating Gantt charts in your browser, bringing that age-old managerial trick of “making another chart” to the Internet. It’s called TeamGantt and if you’re a project manager, it behooves you to make a Gantt chart about checking it out in the near future, setting milestones that include “launch browser,” “type teamgantt.com into browser,” and “nod sagely.” Then add “go golfing” and you’re set.
In all seriousness, though, TeamGantt is project management for the post Office set. Built by Nathan Gilmore (29) and John Correlli (22), the system is entirely web-based and hand-coded.
Their origin story is pretty cool. “We started working Saturdays in my basement at the end of 2009. I worked on the design and John would build the app. We started gaining interest and traction right away. We had a beta out in the spring of 2010 and launched officially in November of 2010. By August of 2011, the business grew to the point where we knew that if we really wanted to take things to the next level we would need to quit our jobs and go full time with TeamGantt. Since then, the business has taken off.”
“We’re completely bootstrapped and profitable,” said Gilmore. “We have had interest from investors, but haven’t needed it yet.”
They have 1,000 paid subscribers from the ranks of the Fortune 500 as well as creatives, event planners, and startups.
There are plenty of alternative ways to make Gantt charts, including Office itself, but this is one of the more interesting online systems. You can share projects, chat with your team, and the UI has been streamlined to reduce noise and improve simplicity. “Design and usability are extremely important to us and has played a big role in the success of the app,” said Gilmore.
The pair just added a daily email feature that reminds your team what they’re supposed to do at what time. The app also adds events to Google Calendars, iCal, and a number of other calendar systems.
A 30-day free trial is available for lookie-loos and $10 a month gets you 5 users and 5 projects. A $79 a month business plan gets you unlimited projects and unlimited users, which is considerably cheaper than picking up a copy of Project for everybody. I, for one, have put a pin into planning on building a Gantt chart about upgrading our Gantt charts to TeamGantt ASAP before COB Christmas Day, 2015, after the blue-sky imagineering meeting we’re having in the Rhombus Conference room with the thought leading stakeholders from HQ.
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