13
8 Comments

Don't Build a Productivity App

If you're working on a productivity app or thinking about starting one, I would like to offer my first-hand experience. I have also spoken to quite a few founders in this space. And their experiences resonate as well.

Below is a summary of the main points. And here is the full article.

I spent months working on Rumin, a tool that I had thought would amplify intelligence, accelerate intellectual discoveries, and unleash creative potentials for humankind. Now I have put it in maintenance mode. I failed. And I'm ready to move on.

I don't wish to find excuses or blame the circumstances. After all, failures tend to be overdetermined. But the challenges from my experience can hopefully be instructive to others.

"Solve a Problem You Have"

Conventional startup wisdom says that your product should solve a real problem, preferably one that you have. Your productivity app will pass that test, easily.
But here is a hidden pitfall — other people may not care about that same problem to the same extent you do. Once you have a working-ish solution for yourself, bringing that clunky solution to others can be harder than you think.

"Pick an Existing Market"

Many people advocate starting with a market that already exists because it ensures that you are not working on a made-up problem. Your app idea checks this box too.
There appears to be a real need. And all you have to do is to carve out a piece for yourself, right?

### User Expectations in a Competitive Market
Competition in productivity software is intense. Most users expect free apps. And these free apps are good. Damn good. Like feature-rich and polished good. Like 10x better than your crappy prototype good.
And it is hard to charge enough. For instance, bookmark managers tend to charge $2-3/month. To make just $5,000/month in revenue at that price point, you would need 1500-2500 paying customers. With a freemium model and 5% of your users paying, that's 30,000-50,000 users.

Switching Cost

There is always a switching cost for someone to adopt a new tool. But in the case of productivity apps, the switching cost is even more pronounced.

User Retention

You may find that getting sign-ups isn't too difficult. People may sign up to try it out based on a flashy demo or well-articulated promise on your landing page. But getting them to stay can be an order of magnitude harder.

Unique Insights & Table Stakes

Due to the expectations mentioned in previous sections, your unique insight is often not enough. In order to bet on your insight, you likely need table stakes — functionalities that are essential to a workflow, that all of your competitors have, and that your users expect.

User Education/Onboarding

From articulating the unique value to getting new users up to speed and form habits, user education turned out to be harder than I had expected.
People won't use your innovative solution unless they first understand it. And if it takes too long for them to get to the "aha" moment, they will just leave. It is much easier to just leave (and never come back), than to power through the confusing mess (and let's face it — non-existent or outdated tutorials).

Bag of Doorknobs

If you're not careful, there is a natural tendency for your initially minimal prototype to sprawl. It can sprawl into "a bag of doorknobs" — loosely-related products and features that don’t add up to a coherent whole.

Spamming Your Friends Isn't a Distribution Channel

Your friends may try your app and politely give you feedback, along with a few words of encouragement. But they are most likely not your users. Besides, it's annoying to keep pestering them to use your clunky app.

Similarly, posting on Hacker News or launching on Product Hunt isn't much of a distribution strategy either. These days, it is closer to a lottery. If you rely on this, you are banking on hope. And hope is not a strategy.

Parting Words

It's clearly not possible to start a successful productivity app. There are plenty of successful examples.

If you're anything like me, you would nod to the above points but do it anyway. This time it's different, you might say. Your insights are unique. The stars are aligned for you.

If you do decide to work on a productivity app, drop me a note and let me see where I can help. I'll also make more of my code open source over time, so you don't end up building the same thing.

All the best.

  1. 2

    Upvoted before I even read your post. Solid points.

  2. 2

    I've made some productivity apps before. It's tough for many of the reasons you mention, but I would consider them challenges to be worked around rather than barriers that are impossible to overcome.

    For example, retention is tough. People aspire to be productive and organized, but wanting to do something and actually building up a habit are two different things. Most productivity apps don't account for the fact that they're fighting against the very potent forces of human laziness and procrastination. So what can be done?

    First, live where they live. People check social media every day. They see their new tab page every day. They check their email every day. They use Notion and Slack every day. Etc. Put your app somewhere users already have a habit of going instead of trying to get them to develop a new habit to open your app directly.

    In the same vein, build for teams, not individuals. Teams hold each other accountable and assign each other work, and of course they need ways to communicate because they can't read minds. They're also doing real digital work, not personal chores. So they need products like yours more, will pay more, and will churn less.

    Another tip is to align with specific, incoming work. A salesperson needs a CRM for all their leads. A founder needs an inbox for all their emails. Build something that aligns with work people are already doing and can't just avoid. I met Justin, the founder of Asana once, and he told me he envisioned everyone using it, even home cleaners friends planning trips. BS. He was super wrong about that. They make their money selling to people who have incoming digital tasks driving their behavior, not people going out of their way to develop an unnecessary productivity habit.

    "Productivity apps" is a vague term. Most are called that because they solve some fake non-existent problem. They don't know who their customer is, so they try to be for everyone. The ones that do well are specific. They're called email clients, CRMs, bug trackers, applicant tracking systems, etc.

    Janel just built a great one called Newsletter OS. It's specific and targeted. She knows her audience and their problems. It aligns with a regular daily or weekly work habit they already have. And she started small, with basically just an opinionated Notion document, instead of jumping in to build a ton of software. I believe she's made tens of thousands of dollars in just a month or two.

    That's the right way to do it imo. You can make people more productive, you just have to be very thoughtful and strategic about it.

    You should avoid the stereotypical programmer approach where you jump in and try to build a SaaS from day one, and it ends up being a long slog of random features that barely stand out from the competition, because it wasn't designed with a specific enough customer in mind.

    1. 1

      Thanks for sharing the tips! Very much agreed.

      If I came off as overly pessimistic, it's because I was playing a counter-melody to balance the likely overconfidence in one's idea.

  3. 2

    Like any business, you need an exit strategy. I once made an productivity app in 3 hours, with over 400k installs back in the days. So anything is possible

    1. 1

      Can you talk more about it? What's your app has been doing? Was it mobile or web?

      1. 2

        Very simple niche productivity app on mobile. This was earlier days of mobile so less competition and barriers were low. I also used airpush back then for monetizing cuz I was lazy. After a while I just made it free without ads. Took down completely few years back

  4. 2

    You make incredibly reasonable points. But, everything is a productivity app. A no-code landing page builder = productivity app. A digital canvas or collaborative tool = productivity app. A time-tracking billing software for online courses = productivity app.

    The points you make a universal to just about any app category and the term "productivity" is kind of broad. Do you mean project management? Personal productivity? Task Management? Time Management? Industry-tools that aggregate functions (like mine), note-taking or writing tools? I mean, at the core, I think you could say "don't build an app." The internet is saturated with tools that have raised staggering amounts of money in every category under the sun.

    I think, if you've got it stuck in your head that you're offering something unique, you're going to build it.

    I came at this from: My firm needs practice management tools that are more concerned with improving and streamlining processes and less concerned with tracking billable time. A lot of firms are not like mine as the billable hour is still predominant, and so there's a natural tendency to not streamline workflows to do more in less time. But, what I've found is there are firms like mine. I've also learned that there's a subset of other types of people who really like the idea of aggregating tasks onto a single personal board. The feedback I've gotten is "hey this would be awesome if I could sync my jira or trello boards" which I hadn't thought of, but am now working on. 100+ hours working on Document automation, and users are telling me to move more into productivity and task management.

    I think the lesson is not to not make the app you believe you and people like you need, but absolutely make it. Find other people using similar tools and be ready to refine your core ideas without being tied to your original belief or your original problem.

    I say all of this, largely agreeing with you. When I built my app, I looked at the cost in time and energy and compared that to the cost of using existing tools for my practice. I made the decision that even if nobody else ever used dendri it would still be better and more affordable for my own business to build rather than rent. Most makers aren't in that position, and so my experience and choice may be unique.

    1. 1

      Yeah you're right. "Productivity app" is a very broad category. Thanks for sharing your experience!

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 47 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 27 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments