Roast My Idea: A Task Management App for Solo Founders

Hi Andrei, it's great to see you sharing your startup idea.
Firstly, your problem statement seems valid and relatable to many solo founders out there. However, there are already many task management apps available in the market. So, you need to differentiate your app from existing solutions and offer unique features that cater specifically to the needs of solo founders.

The features you've listed are a good start, but it might be helpful to provide more details on how your app is different and why it would be the best choice for solo founders. For example, how do your custom work routines differ from the existing task management apps? How would your scheduling algorithm work to prioritize tasks effectively?

I didn't understand why we should use Notescribe instead of Notion. The latter has at least 3/4 of the features mentioned.

Could you explain why we should choose Notescribe over its competitors?

I am subscribed and would love to see it in action! 😃

Hey Andrei, look i think that is a nice idea and if you like it go for it. I use mostly Notion to organise myself, before that using Jira, see if there is something better i would definitely use it.

I believe Basecamp can achieve all this... plus for a single person, it's free now. My question now is, why would I use your product?

Hey Andrei, Great to see another fellow indie hacker in business.

I use task managers a lot and have tried a lot of those. SO sharing couple of thoughts on your idea

1. To effectively communicate with the target audience, the messaging on the website needs to be more specific and tailored towards founders. For instance, using a tagline such as "Task Management for Founders" would help to resonate with the intended audience.

2. One of the key features that sets this product apart is the automatic creation of scheduled tasks. However, it would be beneficial to also have a calendar view that allows users to schedule tasks within specific time slots. Integrations with other tools could help to achieve this.

3. When considering the acquisition of existing users, it is important to have a strategy in place for how to transition them from their current task management tools. A gradual approach, starting with new users and then gradually acquiring existing users, could be a viable option. It is important to consider the needs and preferences of these users in order to effectively make the transition.

Great idea and love the name Andrei!

My few thoughts:

There are a lot of other task management solutions out there

• validates that the general problem of task management exists and is huge
• indicates that no existing solution perfectly serves the mainstream; from my own experience everyone has a unique way of managing their tasks, which even varies over time
  → building a highly specific solution to task management will probably only reach a limited set of users & the dynamicism of workflows will probably clash with a rigid implementation

Task Management is the core component of everyone's stack

• your solution needs to be dependable & comprehensive just to be satisfactory. Add to that the true differentiating solution that makes it exciting to adopt
  → I'd suggest you consider whether the differentiating solution you envision is at least 10x better than existing alternatives → adopting a new tool, especially such a central one like Task Management requires such a convincing proposition
• migrating to a new tool is the biggest pain standing in the way of adoption

Tasks typically imply cooperation

• even Solo entrepreneurs either won't stay solo forever or have to collaborate with others

My general recommendations for a way forward:

• try to be as specific as possible to get started. Find a group of people who subscribe to a very specific way of task management who currently are not well served and build exactly the solution they love.
• find ways to reduce the migration effort required - ship your secret sauce first - e.g. if your secret sauce is the way you display tasks, create an extension to an existing task management tool which people use already and use it to change the way tasks are displayed
• aim for delivering a 10x better solution than the competition for your specific target niche - if you can only be <10x better, the typical cost of adoption for users will be too high (setup work + workflow adjustment) as to convince enough users to adopt.
• gain awareness for people's willingness to pay, potential margins, potential market size, and customer acquisition costs: Test whether the solution you're building can profitably serve the customers you can attract for it. => How many solo-entrepreneurs are there, how many face exactly the problem, how many pay for a task management solution, how can you cost effectively reach all of them, etc.

I'd really recommend you read Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore - it explains super well why a niche targeting approach works but also what to watch out for.

Wishing you a lot of success, whichever path you take.

Good idea it will help every founder

@andreiterteci I see the value... I've been kicking around a similar idea (one of many) that's more geared toward (primarily) technical (co-)founders.

One nitpick: The first screenshot image has a dynamic width while the height is fixed, leading to horizontally stretching or squishing the image (w-full and h-96 classes are fighting).

you're answer is in the amount of subscribers you're getting. You are on the front page of indiehackers, did you get >20 subscribers today?

if yes, people like it and it may be worth pursuing. If no, kill it and move on.

If you're a solo founder bootstrapping and looking to make profit, you have no time for long slogs. if an idea doesn't have real instant traction and you don't have vc runway, come to terms and move on. if you're getting a bunch of signups post it on reddit and facebook groups to see if you get traction there as well. if you get more signups just as easily you have something interesting. run that as hard as you can.

if you're finding out it's not working you may want to use market research platforms to find out new niches that are rapidly growing that you can capitalize on. basically if you find something that coincides with your interest build fast and test in the same manner described above. I like to use trends.co ($200/year) and explodingideas.co (free) for this. both send out weekly research reports on new niches and business opportunities.

that's my 2 cents. good luck.

Hey there Andrei,
I have gone down the road that you are looking at and let me tell you what happened. I was scratching my own itch of wanting "the perfect to-do list" and I ended up building Toodledo.com and accidentally stumbling into a business that grew to 8 employees and 100k+ customers. I did this for 11 years before selling the company a few years ago. So I know what Im talking about.

Here is my advice. Tons of VC money went into the productivity category and there is sooooooo much competition now in the task management category. This is partly why I got out of the business. I mean, the "to-do" app is the new "hello world" for learning web programming. Unless you have a really new and innovative angle to bring to the space, its going to be really hard. From reading your landing page, I can't really see anything that differentiates you from Toodledo or Notion or Asana or Trello or Todoist or Any.do or Apple Tasks or Microsoft Todo (Formerly Wunderlist) or RememberTheMilk or Monday or Obsidian or.... get what Im saying?

Another thing to consider, think hard about if this is the business that you want to run for the next decade of your life. Do you want the stress of managing the data of all of your customers and managing perfect uptime? (Toodledo is down as I write this. LOL!) Because when you have server issues and are offline for 1 hour and you have 100k paying customers who can't do their own work because they cannot access their todo list, you will be under a lot of stress. I mean, a lot of stress. That is the second reason why I sold my business. Make sure that you are ready for this burden of data management and customer support. Make sure you can handle the liability/risk of controlling all that private data.

So I would say this. If this really is just "an itch", experiment with one of the above mentioned services and see if you can mold it to work for you. You probably can. If you have an innovative idea that you are passionate about, and you think can carve out a profitable niche and you can accept your role in owning the company, then go for it!

I hope this is not too discouraging, that is not my intent. I just think that it's important to consider where the road will lead before you start walking down it.
-Jake

Hey Andrei,

I'm gonna be brutally honest with you - everything else isn't helping you :)

IMO the productivity space is rather crowded and super competitive with players (that you sure know as well - ClickUp, Asana, Monday, Jira, Notion, the list goes on and on...) with big financial resources.

From the solution that you're describing above I can't see a convincing USP. On top, I'm close with the founding team of ClickUp and I can tell you: these guys are shipping new features crazy fast.

I'd love to learn more about where you see the differentiating factor

What is a recurring task? Maybe you can give an example of this

Best of luck! Its a good idea...

I’m literally a year or so into building something with a similar goal to this! So thanks for saying it as lots of interesting responses from people.

This is mine www.forzeit.com

It is a good idea to target solo founders. This group of people is open to using new products and comfortable paying money for value if a solution meets their needs.

I understand you got this idea from a problem that you were having. I think it's a good start.

You should also be aware that the path you choose may differ from your initial expectations. You may end up developing the time management app as you originally intended, or you may end up developing something else that you think your target customers would find more useful.

Now it's time to talk to your customers. Take the time to listen to their problems and determine if there are any unmet needs they still have.

Eventually, you'll come up with a better solution.

I've been reading this and seen that in several other comments you've mentioned that other task management apps target teams rather than individuals. I think you might be confusing marketing and product functionality. Most task management apps work well for teams and individuals, but make their money from teams. It is also generally more complex to coordinate for teams rather than a single person.

I use Notion just for myself and it works great. Other than recurring tasks, it meets all of my needs. I'm also certain there are other task management apps out there that could meet many of my needs.

I think task management is a bit of a trap for solo founders.

I really like your LOGO :)

Sounds like linear, a calendar app and a virtual assistant AI bundled together. Sounds tough but curious how it turns out

I like your app idea, can't wait to see how it turns out!

I jump between multiple project repos and laptops during my daily work life. I have tried so many different todo tools over the last 10 year, and I have just ended up with a TODO.md file in the root directory of each project I am working on.

I have hardcore ADHD, and I get super focused on my coding and work. But when I have to stop for a second, I often lose focus and have a hard time picking back up where I left off coding.

To overcome this, I always make a progress note at the top of my TODO.md file of where I left off, and how to pick back up.

You can see me actively doing this workflow in my open-source side project: https://github.com/elegantframework/elegant/blob/v1.1-alpha/TODO.md

Hey Andrei, good on you for seeking some validation before building. I'll give you my stream-of-consciousness thoughts here as a fellow solopreneur who has tried just about every task management solution under the sun at some point (Asana, Trello, ThingsApp, Evernote, Notesnook, Basecamp, Sprintly, PivotTracker and Podio).

• As a few others pointed out, this is a really crowded space which just means you have a lot of inertia and noise to overcome to break prospects out of whatever system they're currently using. It has to be compelling and credible why your system represents a 5x improvement over their current approach to justify the switching costs. It's not clear to me what the killer feature is here that would win my patronage to this app. That's my immediate impression.
• I've tried all the above tools over the years and settled upon a mix of Trello for tactical feature dev, ThingsApp for personal todo's and just copy/pasting weekly a template in Notesnook for implementing a productivity system called "The Art of Living" that cobbles together aspects of GTD with Gary Keller's "The One Thing." I'm probably an edgecase for you in that I know what I want out of my systems. I'm probably not your target customer and there is likely a group out there who is but I think you would be well-served to alter your current CTA of "get notified on launch" -> "do a 15min discovery session" and in exchange offer those early supporters some kind of steep discount or even grandfathered lifetime pricing for helping shape the product/messaging.
• It sounds like the crux of the problem you're solving is this idea of having to replicate the same tasks week after week. I just don't find that painful. My current process is copy/paste on a weekly template and I just edit from there- done in 2min. Your UI looks really slick and I'm sure you can - by collecting enough input - eventually zero-in on a valueprop that will be compelling to a group of folks. But that will likely emerge quickest by having those conversations above ^^ as soon as you can.

anyways just some random thoughts. Good luck man.

I reckon there's potential in this idea so not really a roast but just a couple of thoughts.

Feels like it will be important to solidify a point of differentiation vs. something like trello. I see that the idea behind this is to kinda choose your tasks for you based on priority, which is cool but maybe not enough for someone to use an unknown alternative?

On that note, it could be cool to lean in to the fact that you are catering to indie hackers more with pre-made tickets and project phases. (e.g. when your project enters 'launch phase', you could have 20 websites that you should post your product to, all as to-do tickets). Also things like 'create landing page', 'set up domain' etc.

I have a question have you tried trello ? it simple and works well for me, I like the UX of trello.

Offline Raw Book can do better