Developer Tool with No Market Fit?
I built https://qwoka.io because I had a problem tracking source code //TODOs in all of my projects. I have had little to no interest in beta signups and I am not sure if this is a problem that similar developers face (losing track of TODOs)? Any ideas or feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
I think your very much on a grey edge... in some teams I've been they consider TODO unacceptable to be merged into code, this is an indication that you didn't finish, should be just transitional before code is done and if you have anything needing note it should go into the ticketing system in use..
On smaller / less orginised project and before easy ticket systems where opening a ticket was a headace to do needing at least 10-30minutes to write one, or if your just working alone for example or want to put something in context for future use, than you have the TODOs, but you don't normally aim to manage them outside, either your happy to do searches, or they are in context only, like if you ever touch this area again, consider these..
I have a feeling you can find people who would love this, but it's hard to describe the sub group, it's probably going to be smaller teams, like 1-3 or max 5 people on a project.. what else would they have in common? not using ticketing systems? or using old/complex ones? a team just growing and not yet estabilshing procedures?...
Or people that inherit by buying or needing to maintain some code that wasn't there that did use many code comment tasking?
What you need to find is, who would love this? maybe, who is like you? what leads you to love this? what do you love/hate that makes this great? who is this for? what other than putting work in comments is true about them?
Maybe like open source projects? I know the Kubernetes code base has TONS of ignored todos
Sometimes the todos are used as the least important list... like after the backlog of the ticketing system / do it if you fancy but it would never get priority...
That reminds me the wine emulator code, it has many FIXME and not implemented, that are both a user response and marking in the code...
You can use open source projects as your marketing... "here is a compiled list of current ..."
This would be pretty easy to do with github. I was even considering providing public repositories with a certain number of stars free access to the service. Great idea for the marketing!
I don't see this as being a replacement to an issue tracker, but rather a supplementary tool for small code changes or notes that don't need a whole issue devoted to them. Kind of like a "pick it up in another issue" or similar.
that's the thing I'm saying modern ticket system or just organisation and usage makes the tickets simpler and smaller to write/express/organise, and remove the concept of "don't need a whole issue", look at Trello boards for example, you write a word and hit enter and that's a ticket. Decide it's moving from backlog to todo to done, one click or drag..
What code comments have that tickets don't is a link to code lines... maybe you should exploit/refocus on that... Like it's really lame to link tickets to code that won't be worked on in super near future as things mutate...
So are you recommending making the front end secondary and focusing more on an integration to a ticketing system? Like a way to make linking tickets to code simpler?
I don't know honestly. You need to find people who like what you already have and see what they try to do, do they use the interface or the integrations more...
I do think a product that would bridge the gap between ticketing and marking a point in code would be interesting... due I've seen/used before a
# TODO: ticket #123. as a logical link. and I've also have# hack around issue opensource_proj/issue/123Have bumped into stuff like this before that have been solved 12 months or more before and never looked at. (the more I'm trying to be an indiehacker and less an ent. developer the less I'm sure it's an issue...)
IDK if you want to turn your product into a 2 way gateway to ticketing... I don't even know if it's valuable or not, it's just something I think is missing today.
So you came up with the idea for your own use cases... do you find it useful? valuable? who do you think matches your view of it?...
Thank you so much for the valuable feedback. This does seem like a bigger lift that anticipated due to the culture shift required. Can you checkout the most recent post I made in this group? I really like the underlying technology and version control integration I've built, and I think I can shift the idea to still use that underlying technology.
How many people did you show that they demonstrated little to no interest? Bc if 10 people rejected your idea then that is very different than 1000. Also, what types of people did you show? Did you show your tool to the right type of people? How do you define your right type of customer?
Problem is, I don't have a network of people so I have been relying on targeted Facebook ads, reddit, and here. There is a huge gap in the way people use TODOs and it varies so much. I am trying to target developers, so maybe I should reach out to github maintainers? Or are issues the de facto standard? I feel like both could be used together very powerfully, especially if you linked todos to issues you could create context around issues.
it sounds like you're trying to get people to adopt a new working style, which is a big ask. I don't think you can make that ask via Ads + Landing page.
Can you write up your new working pattern as a blog post and submit that post to HN or reddit? Then you can get feedback about your new pattern.
Doing a blog post on the TODO pattern sounds like a great idea. Thank you for that! I have a few blog posts on the landing page.