Building in public as the free in freemium
I'm making a task management, and productivity tool for indie makers. A primary focus is on daily check-ins because I think keeping track of what I do day-to-day is important to staying on track. When I have no one holding me accountable, it's easy to lose track of how I'm spending my time. The check-ins help me review my own progress and adjust if I've started going off course. Needless to say, I put in a lot of effort to make the daily check-ins really quick to write.
I think anyone using the tool will compare it to a lot of productivity tools out there with free plans (Todoist, Asana, etc) and so having an offering without free just won't work. I was thinking of a slightly different approach to freemium though where if you want to do your daily check-ins and plan your releases in public, you can do that free. But if you want to have private check-ins or releases, you subscribe to a paid plan. It's the way GitHub started out - free for open repos, paid for private repos.
If I choose to approach freemium this way, it will definitely have a big impact on the feature set going forward as I will have to include some community-related features. But it is early enough to choose one or the other path.
What do you think? The product I'm building is https://logvana.com/
Ravi -- I got some errors while trying to set up a free account. An invalid time error was thrown when I was trying to change the times of my check ins.
A few thoughts:
(1) What's your tech stack (just curious)
(2) I didn't immediately understand how to use the keyboard to change my time (and maybe still don't)
(3) I don't understand how the daily check ins work. Is that a time where I'm supposed to compare my productivity against what I had planned? If so, that doesn't sound like something that would improve my output
@nomadic_drew just wanted to post a quick update to say that as part of the solution for the invalid time error, replaced the component that I was using for the time input with what's hopefully a better one. The existing one was using a native time picker, which had some issues on some platforms. I am instead using a component for inputting text with a mask, which works quite well for times (and dates). You've probably moved on, but I wanted to say thanks for taking the time to point out the error!
Uh oh, ok, thanks for letting me know, I'll check it out and get it fixed up tomorrow if I can figure out what why wrong.
The tech stack is Typescript and React on the frontend with Draft.js as the framework for the main editor used on the site.
The backend is also Typescript on the backend, running on AppEngine with a Node.js environment. I used to be a Java guy on the backend but find life a lot easier with Typescript for backend as well. Using Google Cloud Datastore as the data store. It's a bit of a learning curve when coming in from the SQL world but really nice one you learn how to think in their meta model.
Do you mean changing the time for the entry or changing time when you set a due date? If you're talking about due date time, that's with Ctrl+D. I'm making a change to how the keyboard shortcuts work outside the main (Draft.js-based) entry editing so those are currently disabled. Setting the time for the entry itself is outside the main Draft.js editor so this part is currently not easily available from the keyboard but will be soon, very likely by this Friday.
Daily check-ins are really about noting down what you accomplished and what you plan to accomplish. The focus for me is to have the editor make them really quick to write up, especially when you're just referring to items from your last check-in.
They're not meant to improve the quantity of your output but the quality. This is definitely opinion and it's something I created to do what I wanted for myself. Here's why I wanted the check-ins and why I think they're helpful overall:
It's actually also nice having a list of check-ins to look back to see the work you've put in, and the journey of evolution. I think as creators, sometimes we judge ourselves too harshly and narrowly based on success (and more often failure) in the market, it's ok to appreciate the work we put in and the journey we took.
Can't I do this on evernote or trello?
You can of course. There's quite a few tools out there for this that fit different personalities and styles. So the product is really to cater to a particular style for tracking: mine. I'm just hoping that the style fits the way others want to track their work.
What's that style? It's a keyboard-optimized editor that feels lightweight. I want it to feel like taking notes (my go-to tool before this was Notepad). I want the unit to be a daily check-in because that helps me with my own accountability, and memory. An important feature is being able to refer to other items from other check-ins - because check-ins naturally extend previous ones.
All that to say, yes you're right, you can use other tools but I'm hoping there's space for this approach to tracking your work.
Anyway, I just put up a new version of a landing page (https://logvana.com/overview) that I hope conveys what's different better, and is the start to what I said above in the post: offering a free version for building in the public.
I love the poop emoji, i think this sticks even more. Now that you have niched down to ih and founders, then you can create your space in this. Maybe interview a few founders and understand from them how large this problem is for them?