Day 19: Shipped 4 versions of AgileTask in one morning.

Solo founder update. Working on AgileTask.ai — an AI sprint planner for founders and small teams who hate project-management admin.

Still pre-revenue. Early traction is weak. Instead of waiting for distribution to kick in, I spent this morning attacking the product itself: polish, friction, and the stuff users looked confused about in recordings.

Four versions shipped in ~6 hours. Writing it up here because each one came from a real observation, not from a roadmap.

v2.4.4 — Calmer board

What users were doing: Collapsing every column to see the whole board, then expanding one by one to peek inside. Pure friction.

What I shipped:

• Hover a collapsed column chip for half a second → a little card floats up with the top 3 tasks, priority dots, "+ N more" count

• Soft indigo radial gradient on the board background instead of flat grey

• Replaced the bare back-arrow with a real Workspace / Project breadcrumb

• When every column is collapsed, a quiet coaching line appears: "All columns collapsed. Click any chip to expand it, or drag tasks onto one."

Tiny stuff. All together it made the board feel like a place instead of a spreadsheet.

v2.4.5 — Delight + momentum

I keep seeing "gamification" dismissed as a marketing gimmick. In a productivity tool it's different: users need emotional payoff when they finish work, or the product feels like homework.

What I shipped:

• Sprint progress ring in the board header: 28px SVG ring, indigo fill that grows as you complete tasks, turns emerald at 100%

• Focus Mode (press F or click the maximize icon): dims the breadcrumb, header actions, and Add List button. Remembered per project in localStorage.

• Confetti when a task is dropped into Done (or its status flipped to Done). 18 particles, drops where you dropped. No toast, no sound — just a quiet "you shipped something"

• All of it respects OS Reduce Motion (confetti becomes a halo, ring skips the sweep)

The confetti took 90 minutes. My dopamine-per-done-task went up 10x. That's a win worth 90 minutes.

v2.4.6 — Integrations, redesigned

The integrations page was chaotic — uneven columns, purple CONNECT buttons shouting, no connected counter, no search. Typical early-stage SaaS "we ship features faster than we can organize them" page.

What I shipped:

• One unified grid, consistent card sizes

• Toolbar with instant search + category chips (All, Communication, Automation, Development, Productivity, AI) with live counts

• connected / total counter pill in the page header (small but it reframes the whole page from "list of tools" → "what have I actually set up?")

• Three card states: Available / Connected (soft emerald accent + check) / On the roadmap

• Buttons no longer shout: subtle outline by default, indigo fill only on hover

• Added Perplexity to the roadmap — one-click research on any task. "Notify me when ready" ships via mailto, no backend. Pure signal-gathering without building the plumbing first.

The Perplexity add is a small bet: let users tell me if they actually want it before I build the integration. If 20 people click Notify, I build it. If 2 people click, I don't.

v2.4.7 — The bug that almost shipped

Hour six, a user caught this: clicking the sprint name pill silently set a sprint filter, which lit up the filter icon with a "1" badge, with zero visible explanation. Opening the filter panel showed… a mostly transparent popover (rgba(0,0,0,0.02) background 🤦) floating over the Done column, with the sprint filter section buried at the bottom.

Classic: you ship something, it technically works, and the user has no mental model for why the UI is reacting.

What I shipped:

• Sprint pill now shows it's filtering: indigo border, soft glow, inline X to clear. The link between the pill and the filter icon is now visually obvious.

• Sprint pill is a toggle: click once to filter, click again to clear.

• Filter popover has an opaque background with a real drop shadow.

• Active-filter summary chips at the top of the popover — every current filter is listed as a clickable chip. Click any chip to clear just that one.

The lesson I keep relearning: silent state changes are always a bug, even when the product works. If the UI reacts to a click, the reaction has to be visible at the click site, not three icons away.

What this looked like as a workday

• 4 commits

• 3 new components (Confetti, SprintProgressRing, new IntegrationCard)

• 1 bug caught by a user inside the hour and fixed in 30 min

• 0 new users

Still zero on the revenue side. Still worth it — because every one of these changes came from actually watching someone use the product (including me) and feeling the friction.

Pre-revenue is the one time you can optimize pure product without the distraction of protecting existing MRR. I'm going to keep shipping at this pace until the product stops making me flinch.

Ask

Two things I'd love feedback on:

1. For those running a solo SaaS pre-revenue — how long did you polish before switching full-time to distribution? I feel the pull both ways.

2. The Perplexity "notify me" pattern (ship the waitlist before the integration) — anyone else done this? Did it actually signal demand, or just collect dead emails?

Live at agiletask.ai if you want to poke at it. Happy to answer anything in the comments.