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Killing Timo: Validating our side project
by
Richard Palmer
https://rdjpalmer.com/killing-timo
Really interesting way to think about one's business.
Interesting post!
What is the criteria for termination?
I'd love to hear more on this!
@rdjpalmer what metrics are you tracking?
Our most important metric is daily returning users. Our ideal user is using Timo at least five days a week. What we want to understand is the amount of time tracked, or tasks created which is the tipping point (or the "golden amount") to some becoming a long term user
Excellent choice of metric. That's truly set the bar 💪
For those interested in the means to measure retention, cohort charts are a great way to see which product experiments led to sticky users.
We used Superhuman's approach to assessing product market fit before to decide to start working on v2. At very least, we'd look to do that again for an indicator.
But it's not an exact science. We're working towards a pretty well defined scope now. We'll rollout registration & payments when we hit that milestone and have ironed out any bugs. When we switch that on, we'll go into heads-down promotion mode and see where we get. I suspect if we have no traction in a reasonably short timeframe, we'd consider our options.
I'd be very happy to learn that no one is interested in paying (though not as happy to learn that they are). If we do learn that, then we'll try to understand why. The why will be the guide to whether we continue.
What a great approach! It's so rare to see a well thought out plan ahead of time. Fingers crossed for you guys.
Some unsolicited feedback, I hope this is positive and useful, or at least interesting.
(Background: I've used asana and toggl and trello a lot, in small teams and on my own, but despite raising VC money, we managed to scrape through without paying for them. As is rationally best.)
I suspect, because of free tools out there like toggl and free tools like asana / Trello, people will just battle through with them, because they're locked in: it's mentally too much hassle to imagine migrating tasks to a new task management tool, even if it solves both time tracking and their task management in the one place.
Because those tools are free for small teams, and they only have to pay once they hit > N users, or they only have to pay for features that are only useful for lots of seats, you might need to get organisations / teams on board at the start of their founding, and then wait until they hire enough people, such that you can charge them. Otherwise they'll leave for the (crappier) free tools.
Or it could be that there is a type of customer who would be happy to pay when they're a team of one.
My other 2c: You should just charge for this. Just rip the bandaid off and ask people to pay. You'll stop paying attention to the cheap free tier users, and it'll force you to find the niche of people who would pay for it. That's a much harder search, but it might be the right one.
I find it so frustrating to know that so many humans won't pay $1.99 once-off for useful software, but will gladly pay $6 for a coffee multiple times a month.
In any case I hope the learnings, the validations and the cash are flowing your way soon mate 💪