My First Product Positioning Failed. One Feature Showed Me Why
I initially built Reminders as a broad document-expiry and persistent-reminder app.
The obvious feedback was: “Why not just use Google Calendar?”
I was leading with features instead of the problem, supporting too many unrelated use cases, and spending too much time strengthening the backend before proving that people understood why the product should exist.
The part people actually found different was what happens when a reminder is ignored:
Set a care reminder. Get email or SMS follow-ups. If nobody responds, a trusted backup contact can be notified.
I am now focusing the product on important family-care dates: parent checkups, post-surgery follow-ups, children’s vaccinations and health forms, pet-care dates, and similar situations where one person should not carry all the responsibility.
The product now supports external recipients, email acceptance, SMS consent, acknowledgement, backup-contact opt-out, delivery-status visibility, and repair when a recipient becomes unreachable.
I am looking for around 10 people with a real upcoming family or pet-care date. I will help set up the first reminder personally and want honest feedback on the experience.
I will provide free Plus access: https://reminders.verysimple.systems
Which feature was it — the one users actually came for, or the one that revealed you'd been describing yourself in a category people don't shop in?
Asking because I keep catching myself explaining my product in terms of the mechanism instead of the outcome. Technically accurate, completely unmemorable. The moment I described it as a contrast against the thing people already hate, it clicked for people. Same product, different sentence.
The backup-contact escalation is the real wedge, but it also creates the trust risk. For the first 10 testers, I’d pick one category, probably post-surgery follow-ups, and measure two things: whether the primary person acknowledges before escalation, and whether the backup finds the timing helpful rather than intrusive. Which category currently has the clearest “someone else must know” moment?
"One feature showed me why" — that's usually the whole game. What surfaced it for you: talking to users, or watching where they described the pain in their own words? I ask because the sharpest positioning signal I've found is Reddit/forum threads where the ICP complains in their language, not yours. Been building a discovery tool around that. What's your channel for finding those conversations right now?
What stood out to me is that the differentiation wasn't another reminder—it was what happens when the reminder fails. I'd keep validating whether customers are buying reminders or shared accountability. Those are very different products, even if they look similar on the surface.
What part of your approval process takes the most time? Trying to understand if this is a universal pain.
Hi, I am not sure I understand. What do you mean by approval process?