The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2023–2024
Nino answers app chaos: 18 office apps rebuilt on one database and UI, saved offline-first
A solo-built superapp makes doc, sheet, form, chat, site and 13 more modules share one data model, so any block in one module can appear in another.
harrisonlo
What it had to solve
harrisonlo's pitch was that knowledge workers drown in too many tools — even using them becomes work. Google and Microsoft still shipped mostly isolated apps, and integration-heavy startups layered glue on top of that fragmentation. His radical answer was to build the apps themselves from scratch in one place, on the same database and UI, and to keep the option of end-to-end encryption and local-first saves from day one.
How it works
Nino began with a complaint most knowledge workers recognize and few try to fix by building: there are too many tools, and even using them becomes work. Rather than integrating existing services, harrisonlo rebuilt them. The Show HN presented 18 modules — Sheet, Form, Calendar, Board, Todo, Doc, Slide, Notebook, Canvas, Blog, Site, Channel, Chat, Meet and more — all built from scratch on the same database and UI, with pages and blocks that could interoperate with each other.
The differentiator was architectural. In Google and Microsoft suites the apps remain mostly isolated; in Nino the data inside files is available across the ecosystem, which one commenter summarized as Google and Microsoft products working in a system but not as a system. A record in a Sheet could feed a Calendar, a Board or a Site; pages could source other pages; documents could embed records; and publishing turned any module into a web page on a custom domain. Everything saved locally by default, with E2EE built alongside from day one rather than retrofitted.
The launch thread was the real product test. It drew 810 points and 258 comments on 7 January 2024 — praise for engineering and scope, confusion about who the customer was, and a long list of missing parity features. The author answered dozens of comments, fixed the reported letter-'m' bug in version 0.22.7, enabled embedding of single records after several users tried it, and acknowledged that his homepage read like docs for engineers rather than a product pitch. The site was still live in September 2026.
Why it lands
- One database and one UI made cross-module work a property of the system instead of a feature to be bolted on with integrations.
- Saving locally by default and planning E2EE from day one avoided the architectural trap that would make true encryption impossible for incumbents later.
- Because every module reused the same action flow and block model, users had to learn one interface instead of eighteen.
- Publishing any module as a page turned the platform into its own distribution channel, from blogs to sheets to boards.
What it did
The Show HN on 7 January 2024 drew 810 points and 258 comments, the strongest launch in its batch: one user wrote he had never been more impressed by a Show HN, another gave first use 10/10, and reviewers called the single action-flow across modules clever — while skeptics questioned the market and feature depth. The author answered dozens of comments, shipped fixes like the 0.22.7 update the same week, and the site remained live through September 2026.
What you can take
When your answer is everything, the bottleneck is the pitch, not the plumbing: users adopt tools through concrete workflows, so show the use cases before the building blocks.
Since then
The thread split into two camps: engineers impressed by what one builder had shipped, and skeptics who saw a walled garden with pre-MVP features. Commenters invoked Notion, ClickUp, Lark, Coda and Lotus Notes, and asked for self-hosting and open exports; the author offered one-click JSON, HTML and CSV export, called single-tenant hosting doable, and treated the feedback as the roadmap — agreeing that onboarding and use-case marketing came next. The launch remains a rare live test of the superapp thesis: is the problem the number of tools, or that none work as one system?
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