Two-week background: I've been building a day-planning app called Axtra Planner in public. Posted here daily, got some warm replies, ran into the usual cold-DM-doesn't-work problem, and last week started realizing the word "planner" was describing the wrong half of what I was building.
Yesterday I shipped the rename. New home at axtra.app. Posted about it here too, and the responses from people who engaged with that post helped sharpen what the new direction actually is.
Here's the working version of the new direction:
A planner is a tool you fill in. What I want to build is more like the layer above the planner. The thing that catches the missing context around what you've already scheduled. The doctor's lunch hour you didn't account for. The traffic on your route. The parking situation you didn't think about until you were already running late. The features I'm working toward over the next few weeks all aim at this: event location auto-fill, drive-time-aware buffer suggestions, place-metadata warnings when a scheduled event collides with reality.
The rename took a day. Validating the new direction is the part I can't crack alone.
One of the comments yesterday gave me a diagnostic I keep coming back to: "Do users start describing your product as the layer that catches what the calendar misses? If yes, the name carries. If not, the rebrand was premature." That's an honest test, but it takes months of data to play out. I'm trying to figure out how to get earlier signal.
So two questions I'd love your take on, even briefly:
Does the direction resonate? Reading the description above cold, does "a calendar that catches what your planner misses" feel like a real problem worth solving, or am I solving something nobody actually has?
If you had to pick a one-line tagline for the landing page, which of these would you click on?
a) "a calm planner for people who actually execute" (the current one)
b) "a calendar that catches what your planner misses"
c) "a calendar that knows what's outside the calendar"
d) "knows the things about your day you've overlooked yourself"
If you'd write it differently entirely, even better.
axtra.app if you want to see what it actually looks like today. Still day 2 of trying to figure this out honestly.