I went silent for 3 days to ship Phase 3. My MRR is still €0. Here's what I learned
Quick context: I'm building AgileTask solo. Day 29 of the public build. 4 signups total. 0 real paying customers. €0 MRR.
Yesterday I shipped the biggest update of the build so far: Cadence v3.0 — a full redesign of the app shell around a new daily rhythm. Sidebar, ⌘K command bar, Inbox + ⌘⇧A quick-capture, Daily Log, morning brief.
This post is half build-log, half honest reflection, because I think I made a real mistake this week and I want to name it before I forget.
What I shipped (72 hours of work)
Phase 3 — new shell
- Persistent sidebar with Today / Inbox / Board / Sprints
- ⌘K command bar — jump anywhere, capture anything
- Dark mode (no
position: fixedtheme toggle, thank you)
[screenshot 1 — Today view]
Phase 3.5a — Daily Log
- End-of-day retrospective that takes 2 minutes
- Three prompts: what I shipped, what blocked me, lesson worth keeping
- "Tomorrow's top 3" field auto-seeds the next morning's brief
- Lives as a dockable side-sheet, not a modal I'll avoid
Phase 3.5b — Inbox + ⌘⇧A
- Global ⌘⇧A quick-capture palette (title only, ↵ saves)
/inboxpage for triage: Send to active sprint / Defer / Delete- Live badge count in sidebar via an event bus
The real insight
Every productivity tool asks you the same question every morning: "what do you want to do today?"
That is the wrong question. When you're a solo founder, choice is the enemy. The right question is: "what is the ONE thing that moves this sprint forward today — and what do I ignore?"
Cadence's Today screen has one dominant element: the active sprint and its progress. Everything else is folded away until you need it. ⌘K to navigate. ⌘⇧A to capture. Daily Log at 6pm. Morning brief at 7am. A rhythm, not a backlog.
What I got wrong
Here's the part I don't want to write.
In those 72 hours I made zero posts. No X. No LinkedIn. No outreach. No DMs. I told myself I'd post when the feature was "ready."
Result: zero new signups this week. Zero new MRR. My charts are flat.
The shell is beautiful. Nobody knows.
Build half, distribute half. Every time I forget this, I lose a week. I'm writing it here so I can't pretend I didn't know.
What's next
Today/tomorrow — distribution mode.
- Post this article + X thread + LinkedIn version
- Reach out to 5 solo founders personally with the Cadence walkthrough
- No code before 13:00 tomorrow
Phase 3.5c — Goals (this week).
Macro goal sits above the sprint. Sprints roll up to it. Everything ladders to a single number you care about this quarter.
Phase 4 — Board view (next week).
Time-lane visualization so the week is legible at a glance.
If you're building solo
The private beta is open at agiletask.ai. I'm looking for 10 solo founders who'll actually use it and tell me what sucks. DM me "cadence" on X (@agiletask_) or comment here and I'll personally walk you through the setup.
What I'd love to know from you:
- What's the ONE thing that kills your solo-founder workflow on a bad day?
- Which tool surprised you by being simpler than you expected?
Thanks for reading. Back to leaving the building.
On a bad day what kills me isn't the work itself - it's the 20 minutes of "re-orienting" every time I switch projects, trying to remember what mattered yesterday and which thread I was mid-thought on. The thing that surprised me by being simpler than expected: writing one sentence per project for what I'm actually driving toward, and pinning it where I'll see it before I open anything else. Sounds dumb, took me two years to actually do it. Most days the question "what should I work on right now" answers itself once that sentence is visible. Phase 3 shipped is real progress though — €0 MRR is a ranking, not a signal, this early.
Thanks for actually opening the app — that's the kind of feedback most threads never get.
Five things from your comment, taking each one seriously:
Starter tasks not editable — that's a real issue in the screenshot you saw, which is the Cadence v3.0 build from a couple weeks ago.
The flow has since been rebuilt (we call it Canvas internally, v4.3.x). The current AI composer lets you rename, remove, reorder,
and change sprint length inline before you commit. If the affordances
still aren't obvious enough on first look, I want to hear it — that's
a UX failure I'd rather catch than ship.
Color codes / how the AI decides — fair hit, and I shipped a fix
for it tonight. As of v4.3.4 (live now), hover any priority dot on
the board and you'll see "Critical priority. Inferred from goal:
'[your goal sentence]'. Click the task to change." Showing the
reasoning is the trust unlock; making the AI legible matters more
than making it impressive.
Higher-level entity above sprints — already exists, called
Initiatives. You can attach 1–5 outcome statements to a sprint
(think: "Get to 50 paying users by July") and tick them shipped at
the end. The honest gap you exposed: they're buried inside the sprint
detail page, so you didn't find them. Fixing the discoverability is
on the list this week. Burndown comes once a sprint completes
and there's enough data to draw one. Gantt is intentionally not
coming — sprints over Gantt is the whole wedge. Different tool for
different mental model.
Stack — Next.js + React on the frontend, FastAPI + Postgres on
the backend, Stripe for billing, Loops for lifecycle email,
Vercel + Railway for hosting, Tailwind + a custom token system for
the design language.
The Jira-board comment made my night. I'm going to print it out.
Your kind of feedback at day 30 is worth
more than 20 cold signups.
It's late for me as I'm writing this, so I didn't have a lot of time to explore, but here are my (constructive) observations I noted as I was using your app.
Honestly, I like it a lot. Very clean site design-- I wish my Jira board at work loaded like this. Keep up the good work, I'm curious to see where you take this!
PS - curious, what frontend stack did you use for this?
"20 minutes of re-orienting every time I switch projects" is the
cleanest description of the problem I'm trying to solve that I've
read from anyone outside my own head. With your blessing, I'm
stealing that line for the landing page.
Your DIY fix — one sentence per project pinned where you see it
before opening anything else — is exactly what AgileTask's sprint
goal is supposed to be. You did the manual version. As of tonight (v4.3.4) the goal sentence pins to the top of every workspace view so you can't lose it on context-switch. You essentially told us
where to put it.
One question back: what kills the manual version for you over time?
Forgetting to write the sentence, forgetting to look at it, or thesentence going stale within a few days? The first two we can solve
with software. The third is harder and I haven't fully cracked it.
And yes, €0 MRR at day 30 is a ranking, not a signal. Thank you for saying that out loud.