Day 30: I went silent for days. Turns out shipping is louder than tweeting about shipping.
Hi. Remember me? Probably not, which is fair, because the last time I posted here I think the iPhone was still 2 generations behind.
Quick lap of honor before I lower expectations: AgileTask is at day 30, 24 signups (16 of which are me testing my own checkout flow with different cards because apparently I don’t trust myself), and 0 paying customers. Real ones. Not the ones my Stripe dashboard kept counting as “active paying” until I noticed it was lying to my face.
That was actually one of the things I fixed this week. My admin endpoint was returning “MRR: 456 EUR” for two days straight and I almost believed it. I almost wrote a tweet. Imagine the screenshot. Imagine my dignity. The numbers were real. The customers were not. I now have real_* fields that subtract test accounts, which is a deeply humbling feature to write at 11pm on a Tuesday.
I also reversed a decision I had been very public about: the trial used to be card-free. Sign up, do nothing, bounce, no harm done. Beautiful funnel. Beautiful zero conversion. After 30 days of watching people sign up, never create a sprint, and disappear forever, I added the card requirement back. 14 days free, but you have to commit your card on day zero. Lower top of funnel, higher intent at every step after. The growth playbook says “reduce friction.” The data on my dashboard says “your funnel had no friction and also no customers.” So I picked the data.
We will see in 30 days whether this was clarity or cope. Place your bets.
What else have I been doing instead of posting here, you ask. Mostly the kind of work that nobody on the internet rewards but that you also can’t avoid forever:
I had three different services emailing my (theoretical) customers about their (theoretical) failed payments. Stripe was sending one. Postmark was sending one. Loops was sending one. All for the same event. A non-existent customer would have received three emails for one payment failure. I fixed it. Stripe handles billing now, the others handle their actual jobs, and the imaginary customer can finally rest.
I gave Stripe its own subdomain (billing.agiletask.ai) which required logging into Cloudflare, which required first remembering I had a Cloudflare account, which required resetting a password the agency I worked with had set and never told me about. My security posture is impeccable.
I rebuilt the top bar in the app because the logo had “AgileTask” with the word “Task” in blue for reasons I can no longer explain to a sober person. The four buttons in the header were four different heights. Four. The search field was a pill in a sea of rectangles. I noticed all of this in the same week, which suggests I was either having a lucid moment or a crisis, possibly both.
Dark mode was failing accessibility contrast on raised surfaces, which is a sentence I now type fluently and which would have meant nothing to me 6 months ago. The card titles were ghosting into the background. I fixed that too. The Board view was rendering Priority columns as flat grey rectangles instead of using the priority colors I had literally already defined. Two-line fix. Eighteen months of staring at it.
Between all this I shipped v4.3.2 and v4.3.3, which is the kind of version-number escalation that suggests progress and also that I have not had a single conversation with a paying customer because there isn’t one.
Which, fine. The lesson part:
Polish is a comfortable place to hide. So is “no card required.” Both feel generous. Both are also extremely good ways to never find out whether anyone actually wants to pay you. The product is good enough. The funnel is what’s broken, and the funnel is broken because I keep choosing CSS over conversations and frictionless signup over frictionless honesty. Tomorrow I have to do the thing I have been avoiding for 30 consecutive days, which is talk to actual humans about whether they want to pay for this. Cold DMs. A real launch post on this very site. I will probably hate every minute. I will definitely do it anyway.
If you’ve ever opened Notion on Monday with the noble intention of “planning the week” and closed it on Friday having shipped exactly nothing: I made AgileTask for you. It turns one sentence about what you want to ship into an actual sprint with the actual tasks. It is currently the best-designed product nobody is paying for.
If that resonates, two things you can do for me:
1. Tell me, brutally, what’s stopping solo founders like you from trying something like this. The card on day zero, specifically: dealbreaker, fair, or “finally, someone serious”? Reply here, I will read every comment with a level of attention that is mildly unhealthy.
2. Or just try it: agiletask.ai. 14 days free, card required, Pro is 15 EUR a month after. If it doesn’t fit, cancel before day 14 and tell me why so I can stop building the wrong thing.
I’ll be back next week with either good news, worse news, or a third version bump nobody asked for. Probably all three.
