We have a guess that our product is useful for entrepreneurs, and we need your help validating it!
The organization and productivity tool we built, Dynalist, is a simple list-making app that helps you manage projects and businesses (and anything complex, really).
Please help us out by reading the following pitch and see if you're interested. Comments are much appreciated! If you don't have time to elaborate, simply replying whether you would find it useful would help too.
The pitch
As entrepreneurs, we have a lot of things to manage. I've tried Trello, Basecamp, and JIRA, and none of them really worked for me. For some reason, they all end up being too messy to work with after some time.
Dynalist sets out to solve this problem, with three bits of magic:
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Lists in Dynalist are not flat, but infinitely nestable. Each subtasks can have subtasks that have more subtasks, etc. Theoretically, no matter how big your project is, you can eventually break them down so that each piece is actionable.
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Each list is also a context. You can hide a context by folding a list, or focus on a context by zooming in on a list. Dynalist is your personal workspace, and you can reflect what's on your mind onto Dynalist with a few clicks.
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Get quick access to the info you need. You can: 1. Tags things with # or @ to group them; 2. Bookmark any list item or search result; 3. Switch to any document or bookmark with a few keystrokes.
Some background information (read only if you're interested):
We launched last year and got some users. We have all kinds of users: entrepreneurs, freelancers, researchers, students, writers, software engineers, etc. For the longest time we could not figure out what our targeted audience should be.
Our gut feeling tells us Dynalist would be useful to anyone that needs to organize and keep track of a relatively large amount of information. So housewives who only make grocery lists twice a week don't count; they won't benefit much from Dynalist over apps like Wunderlist and Remember The Milk.
However, without better targeting, marketing was really hard.
Very recently, after coming back from a startup conference, we had a realization that entrepreneurs like ourselves would benefit a lot from Dynalist, and we should try this as the niche market to start with. Guaranteed, entrepreneurs have a lot of manage every day by definition. Lots of things happen even in the smallest startup companies. Also we have a better idea of the pain points of entrepreneurs and how to target them than almost any other group.
That's why I'm posting to get some feedback to validate or invalidate this particular value proposition.
Hi Erica, thanks for posting!
I can really empathize with your troubles. I never found a good target audience with my productivity app, Taskforce. I don't think Basecamp, Asana, Trello, Todoist, etc have much niche appeal, either. The productivity space is full of generalists.
Honestly, it's going to be very hard to compete directly with all of these companies, because they have gigantic marketing budgets and huge user bases. It's good you're trying to gain a foothold with a specific target audience, though. I think that's your best bet. Here's how I'd go about it:
The things that you listed in your pitch (nestability, contexts, and quick access) don't specifically appeal to entrepreneurs. Those are features that anyone might like, and they don't solve the kinds of problems that entrepreneurs tend to have. None of those will make entrepreneurs en masse say, "This is for me in a way that other products aren't."
Here's a feature that would make them say that: pre-built checklists for entrepreneurial topics. For example, you could build a checklist of all the taxes and forms one must file to incorporate and run an LLC in any state. Or an extensive list of all the things to do before launching. Or a list of all the best sites to launch on. Etc. If you make the lists way better than any other resource (always over-deliver!), you could share them on sites like Product Hunt and Hacker News with a decent chance of success.
(I'm not saying you should do this idea exactly. It's just a random example of how to solve a target niche's actual problems using your product.)
Hope this helps!
EDIT: I had a section in here about cloning Workflowy's design and functionality, but then I searched online and it seems you're making some very deliberate decisions. Just be careful!
Thanks for the thoughtful answer. Since you've run a general purpose productivity tool as well, I know you can understand most of our struggles.
The "build useful lists and share them" is another promising marketing strategy we're going after. Having a gallery of them so that people can see the usefulness of the product in action, and we have a better time sharing them without being dismissed as self promotors since we bring some value to the table. Thanks!
Hi Erica.
First off, I think Dynalist sounds like a useful tool. I seem to spend a lot of time every day making lists - on paper, on whiteboards, in Excel or in some app. Trello is the closest thing I've found to a software solution that works for me, but sometimes I find the pure raw simplicity and flexibility of Excel (or just pen and paper!) works best so I end up going back to that.
That's for simple lists - for more complex lists I think it's more challenging. I think your approach of allowing unlimited nesting is good - any time I've run into limitations with similar tools, it has typically been because going several levels deep is either not possible or is very cumbersome. I think the business value in lists tends to be in how they work in a multi-user environment - so many productivity applications get this wrong. If you're trying to sell to individuals it's a long road ahead as most solutions for individuals in this space are free or very inexpensive.
I'm a one-person business at the moment, so I'm afraid I'm not in the market for a tool like this myself right now.
For a bit of inspiration, check out Teamwork.com (disclaimer: I know one of the founders) - they are a 100% bootstrapped business that are competing with the big productivity players like Basecamp and Asana. Like many people here, they started out as a consulting business that built a product part-time at first and slowly ramped it up over time. Now they have over 250,000 companies using their products.
One thing they did very well from a niche perspective (so difficult in such a general purpose product category) was to identify specific weaknesses in their competitors' products, provide solutions and aggressively targeted migrating people over. Check out this page for an example of what I'm talking about.
https://www.teamwork.com/basecamp-alternative
I remember when Basecamp 3 came out and they removed a bunch of features there were some people sending angry tweets about it. The Teamwork founders jumped on this and converted many disgruntled users over to new customers for them very effectively.
Hopefully this helps somehow. Your website is very nice and the product's UI is very simple to use. I look forward to seeing how DynaList develops in the future.
P.S. @csallen's suggestion about pre-built checklists is a superb one. At a previous company I worked for, we saw usage numbers of our new employee performance management product pretty low at first. We then shipped with pre-built templates for managing the performance workflow and usage soared.