One of my first 10 users became a daily user. The other 9 didn't.
I've been building a productivity tool called Asheeve for the last few months.
When I started, I thought the hard part would be building the product.
I was wrong.
The hard part is understanding why one person keeps coming back while everyone else leaves.
One of my first 10 users has been using Asheeve almost every day for over a month.
The other 9 signed up, explored it, and moved on.
At first, that felt disappointing.
Now I think it's the most valuable thing I've learned so far.
I didn't build Asheeve because I needed another task manager.
Like many people, I already had plenty of tools for capturing tasks, ideas, notes, projects and goals.
My problem wasn't organization.
My problem was staying focused on what actually mattered.
Making steady progress on the important things.
Not getting lost in busywork.
So instead of building a tool centered around tasks, I started building one centered around alignment:
- What are you trying to achieve?
- What are you working on?
- Are those two things actually connected?
The more I observe users, the more I suspect that Asheeve is not for everyone.
And that's probably a good thing.
Right now, I'm trying to understand:
- What kind of person finds this problem painful enough to care?
- Why does the product click for some people and not others?
- What makes someone stick with a productivity tool instead of abandoning it after a few days?
I'd love to hear from founders who have gone through a similar phase.
How did you identify the users who genuinely needed your product?
And if you're curious about Asheeve, I'm happy to share a demo and get your feedback.
The one daily user is not a small sample, it is your entire spec, so I would stop studying the 9 who left and go obsessively deep on the 1 who stayed. Get on a call and find the before: what were they doing the week prior, what triggered them to look, and what they would lose if you shut Asheeve off tomorrow, that is your ICP in their own words. The trap now is widening the product to win back the 9, which usually costs you the one person who actually loves it, so build harder for them and let the wrong-fit users go.
This is a valuable observation. One daily user out of the first 10 may actually be a stronger signal than it first appears, because it shows the product is solving a real problem for at least one specific type of person.
I like the way you framed the question: not “why did 9 people leave?” but “what makes this one person come back?” That feels like the right early-stage lens. The daily user can reveal the real ICP, the real use case, and the emotional trigger behind the product.
For productivity tools especially, I think people only stick when the tool fits into an existing daily pain, not when it asks them to create a new habit from scratch. The key may be understanding what was already painful in that user’s workflow before Asheeve entered it.
I’d probably interview that daily user deeply and map exactly what they were doing before, what moment made the product click, and what would make them disappointed if it disappeared.
The 1-of-10 retention split is actually the most useful data you have right now, more than if all 10 had stuck around. One daily user who fits beats ten lukewarm ones because the one tells you exactly who this is for. Your job now is to clone that person, not convert the other nine.
Concrete move: stop trying to figure out the nine. Go deep on the one. Interview them properly — not "do you like it" but what was true about their situation that made it click. What were they using before. What specifically broke for them that Asheeve fixed. What does their work look like that "alignment between goals and tasks" is a daily pain and not a nice-to-have. The answers are your ICP, written by the person who already self-selected into it.
The pattern I'd bet on: your daily user probably has a specific structural condition the other nine don't. Lots of competing priorities with no boss assigning them — so the alignment question is theirs to answer alone. That's founders, solo operators, freelancers juggling client work, researchers, people with high autonomy and no external forcing function. People in structured roles don't feel this pain because their manager already does the alignment for them. The other nine might just have bosses.
The "not for everyone" instinct is right, and most founders fight it. Don't. The tool that's perfect for a specific person with high-autonomy/high-priority-overload retains. The tool that's fine for everyone gets abandoned in a week. Narrow on purpose.
What does your daily user do for work? That answer is probably the whole positioning.
Your comment helped me articulate something I had been feeling but couldn't quite express.
The user who stuck around is remarkably similar to me: entrepreneur, systems thinker, and prone to exploring many directions at once.
My initial conclusion was simply that I built Asheeve for myself, so naturally it resonates with people like me.
But your framing around autonomy, competing priorities, and the absence of an external forcing function explains the pattern far better than I could.
"Entrepreneur, systems thinker, prone to exploring many directions at once" is your ICP in one sentence. That's sharper than most founders get after months of research, and you got it from one user.
The "I built it for myself so it resonates with people like me" conclusion is actually fine as a starting point. The mistake would be stopping there. "People like me" is a feeling. "Entrepreneurs with high autonomy, multiple competing directions, and no external forcing function" is a targetable segment with specific communities, specific language, and specific places they gather. One is a vibe, the other is a distribution plan.
Next move: take that profile and find 20 more of them. Not broadly. Specifically: solo founders in communities like IH, freelancers managing multiple clients, indie researchers, portfolio entrepreneurs. Post where they are, use the language your daily user uses to describe the problem, and see if the same pattern repeats. If 3-5 more stick the same way, you've got a confirmed wedge. If none do, the sample was too small and the one user was an outlier.
If you want to pressure-test the positioning around that profile before you go find 20 more, HiveMind is built for exactly this kind of ICP-to-positioning work: https://hivemind.myosin.xyz
What I'd be careful with is that the daily user can sometimes create confidence just as easily as the nine who left can create doubt.
Both feel like evidence.
The interesting question is what either one actually earns the right to explain.
That's the part I'd be most curious about.
You're right.
To be honest, I'm not trying to explain anything yet.
I'm still in data collection mode: gathering feedback, evaluating relevance, and trying to understand what signal, if any, is emerging from these early users.
Drawing conclusions now would probably be premature.
That's fair.
The thing I've seen surprise people is that uncertainty doesn't always decrease as more data arrives.
Sometimes it just becomes more sophisticated.
That's the part I'd be watching closely.
That 10% retention is actually a solid signal though — have you figured out what that one user was doing differently? I had a similar split early on, and it turned out they were using it for a completely different use case than I expected.
Arhuman, I feel this pain personally. As I architect my own platform with Ragnarcraft, the hardest gap to bridge is moving from "just another tool" to a daily necessity.
The 1 vs. 9 ratio is actually a strong signal. To break out of the generic solution bucket, you have to lean into being a "pattern interrupt."
Users come in with ingrained muscle memory from using standard task managers. If your tool feels too similar, they will naturally default to their old habits—and then churn when it doesn't solve their specific problems the same way. You have to design the experience to force a break in that pattern, compelling them to adopt your new alignment-based workflow rather than their old organizational busywork.
If you can isolate exactly what that one power user is doing differently to break their old habits, you have found your wedge. Don't try to be for everyone; stay focused on that interrupt.
I am also just in "beginning" phase of course but already "I feel the pain" there :)
Keep going! BR from Tallinn
The alignment problem is real, but I found that part of it starts earlier, at the capture step. When capturing a thought means stopping what I'm doing, opening an app and typing it out, my brain has already switched contexts. The thought I wanted to catch is already degraded. I built DictaFlow to cut that friction: hold a hotkey, speak, release. The thought lands without the context switch. Later, when I'm actually organizing, I've got a clean inbox of real thoughts instead of half-remembered fragments. Different tools for different parts of the problem.
This hit home — I just shipped my 7th Obsidian plugin and ran into the same wall, except mine showed up in the sales split rather than retention. Six of my plugins do basically the same thing technically, but the two that sold were both in one category and the other four sold nothing, even though they got 3x the views.What separated the buyers wasn't the feature. It was whether the product cleared a pile that was already causing them guilt — unread articles, saved-and-never-watched videos — versus asking them to be more disciplined about something they weren't doing anyway. The people who "clicked" already felt the pain as a weight they wanted lifted. The ones who left were people I was implicitly asking to change a habit first.So for your question, the thing I'd watch isn't who needs the product — it's who already feels the problem as pain before you show up. Your one daily user probably had the alignment problem nagging at them long before Asheeve.Out of curiosity: did that one sticky user describe the problem in their own words anywhere, before or after signing up? I've found the buyers and the stickers tend to use very specific language the churned ones never do.
### Update: What my daily user actually values
I interviewed my most active user to understand why Asheeve became part of his daily workflow.
What surprised me is that he barely talked about features.
He didn't mention notifications, automation, journaling, dashboards, or even task management itself.
The things he values most are:
Before Asheeve, he used project notebooks, paper todo lists, and various note-taking systems. Nothing really lasted.
The answer that stood out most was:
The interesting part is that he didn't describe Asheeve as a productivity tool.
He described it as a coherent system for navigating complexity without losing freedom.
That insight is making me rethink the onboarding and whether Asheeve should become more opinionated instead of trying to accommodate multiple working styles.
The 1-of-10 split is the real product. That one daily user is telling you something the other nine can't — not that the product is wrong, but that the fit condition is narrow and specific. The question isn't how to convert the nine. It's what was structurally true about the one that made it click. That answer is your entire positioning.