29 Seconds
Be accountable to yourself by recording daily micro-reviews
I made two videos for an upcoming Product Hunt launch. One long, one short.
If it was up to you, which one would you use?
Neither is also an option if you have some ideas to share.
Short: https://youtu.be/ABMeHDdMaiU
Long: https://youtu.be/HEUVLR4v39I
Thanks!
P.S. I'm using the short one at the moment on the PH Ship page. https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/29-seconds
For years I have been using a system of daily micro-reviews to keep myself accountable.
I would review the daily micro-reviews every Sunday and write a weekly review.
At the end of every month I would read the weekly reviews and write a short monthly review.
I was doing it using text but thought that it would be so much easier through audio recordings.
I decided to build the system into a product.
It's called 29 Seconds. I wanted to limit the time that you spend recording the reviews so that you would be more likely to stick with it.
iPhone: https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/29-seconds/id1610863668
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.seconds29.android
-
2
Great app! Looks good, on ip12mini some UI elements ale small but passable, and animations get excessive over time, I would prefer to show them once, not always when switching back and forth between pages. But those are minor things, great idea and execution!
-
1
Hey Artur, thanks for the feedback. Were there any specific UI elements that you think should be bumped up? I'll have a look on an ip12mini simulator and see what I can do.
Interesting observation about the animations. I see your point. I could add in a setting to switch them off. I'll have a think about that one.
Thanks!
-
1
I'd say fonts in general, I have standard font size and they were pretty small. You mentioned you scale them, is it factored by screen size or just a breakpoint?
-
-
-
1
What a cool app! Your visuals are absolutely stunning and the idea seems really valuable. I couldn't get through the tutorial - after clicking on a day, I click on how the day went and nothing happens (except for a quick vibrate).
-
1
Ah I just came to find this thread to give the exact same feedback - Installed and opened on my Galaxy S21 Ultra. Enjoyed the visuals but also got stuck at the same point - when tapping on 'Today' I can see the emoji-based day summary. When I touch one, the animation runs but nothing happens. I'm running Android v 12 and One UI (Samsung skin) 4.1. I liked the visuals though the animations were a little slow for my taste - if you're selling speed as a key metric,
I like the concept though. I currently do a check-in like this on Notion (been going about a year now..). I'd be willing to try an audio-format though I am not sure it'll be able to entirely take over my written process. I'll post further thoughts when I get it working.
-
1
Hi Eli and Rahul,
If you get a chance would you mind reinstalling and giving another go?
I updated the Android version and think I isolated the issue that you both had.
Thanks!
@finereli @Rahux-
1
That part works now and I was able to get through the tips.
Tried to register with Google but got an error: PlatformException (sign_in_failed...)
Also the sample text-to-speech recordings were pretty off putting. I'd much rather hear your voice or just not have that step in the tutorial at all.
Was very pleasantly surprised to see the stacked nature of the recaps - daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly. It's a very cool idea and I was just thinking this morning that I don't remember what I did or how I felt earlier this week.
I'd probably appreciate to have transcriptions of my recordings for quicker review. But maybe not. I'll need to use this for a couple of weeks to see how it feels.
A final note - do you have Twitter? I'd love to connect there and to keep talking about this.
-
1
Thanks so much for the feedback Eli!
Very sorry about that google login error. It has been working fine for me but I'll look into what could have caused it. I'm getting close to launching so I need to squash all of those types of bugs. I need to spend more time on the Android version.
My plan was to pay for a voice actor to do the onboarding recordings but I didn't want to pay for it until it was released. I didn't think it would be that off-putting but I'll have a think about whether I should invest in that now.
The stacked nature of reviews is the key idea of the app. I am struggling on how to communicate it well though. A few people worry that summarising their weekly reviews into a monthly ones will be hard, but it's really not. It's surprisingly easy when you get to that stage. If you do all of your daily reviews, it's simple to do all of the other timeframes later on. Daily reviews are the core building block of the system.
I am keeping an open mind about transcriptions. I personally do not see a strong use case for it yet because of the additional information that you get from audios including your tone of voice etc. But if enough people want it, then I'll invest in building it.
I am not a big twitter user. But I am happy to chat there about 29S. I have a new twitter handle for the project @29SecondsApp which you can get me on. Or you can email me at kevin@29seconds.app too.
Cheers!
-
-
-
-
1
Hi Finereli, really sorry about that. Nobody has mentioned something like that before. Do you mind if I ask what model phone do you use?
-
-
1
Love this! Especially the color-coded one button play weekly recap.
Great job with tour and in-app tips! And the "fake reviews" are really helpful.Suggestions:
- Rename the "fake reviews" to "demo" or "sample" to avoid the bad connotation.
- On an iPhone, the UI doesn't follow Apple's UI guidelines. I don't mind the pill look thought it takes too much vertical real estate, and on the weekly summary, not enough horizontal. Also some fonts are too small and the cog config icon is tiny.
- I just installed it so this might be built-in, but adding a color to the background of previous weeks would show a trend.
Keep up the good work!
-
1
Ah thanks very much Victor! It's still very early days so I have very little feedback, so any that I get is gold...
- I hadn't considered the bad connotation of "fake" in that scenario. I'll keep a close eye out for similar feedback.
- You're right. It's a mix of Apple and Android stuff because I was building for both whilst keeping the UI the same. I'm hoping that it is not off-putting for either. Do you mind if I ask what phone you have to check the resolution? The font sizes do change based on the screen size.
- Yup, the week backgrounds do change to show a trend as you create your weekly reviews. That trend is shown more clearly whenever you tilt your phone to horizontal mode.
Thanks again!
-
1
Wow, this looks amazing and the system itself is chef's kiss. :).
-
1
Glad you like it! Love the "chef's kiss" visual 😂
-
10 Comments
Clearly prefer the short one.
Thanks for feedback ToPe. I've been kinda edging towards the longer one. Do you think you understood the product just from the short version?
I saw it 7h ago. Here my recollection in a nutshell:
Every day you record a 29 second aufio file what you did and achieved that day. On the weekend you get a summary with all the recording combined. This should help you to focus on your main tasks.
(If that's what you want to do, you're good.)
The longer video seemed to be a rather unexcited screencast where to click when. I quit rather quickly. It may be good for people who know what you do and want to dig into details. Sorry to say, the long version was not very dynamic, I lost interest after a few seconds.
I think producthunt readers have a short attention span, so I'd clearly go for the short version.
Cheers for the follow-up! Ya, your understanding was correct from the shorter version.
Unexcited screencast is one way of putting it 😂... Making videos is not really my area of expertise. I noticed a trend with a lot of recent launches that they were doing longer videos with voiceovers, so I thought I'd give it a try. But you're probably right.
Thanks!
Just to be sure, it is intentional that you did not write any comments or an intro statement for today's producthunt launch?
(And, you took the long video ;-) ..
I've contacted Product Hunt support but no response yet. Hopefully they will reschedule it.
Not at all :(
I didn't know that the launch even happened. I had it scheduled for next week and it went early for some reason. I am just seeing this morning that it actually launched. I'm pretty annoyed about it.
"Making videos is not really my area of expertise"
I think your short video is great. The long is fine, just not an explainer video... This said, making video is not my expertise: My tentative minimum viable explainer video (made with canva) for my planned producthunt launch. (compare workflow automation solutions)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaZkH4jOoZ0
There's a lot going on in that video. It goes a bit quick for me, I had to pause it a few times to read things, especially the graphs.
You're probably right using something simple like Canva. I spent a few days learning DaVinci Resolve. I guess it will be useful for other things in the future but at this stage it should probably be counted as over-engineering.
Thanks again, I made it a bit slower, should launch on producthunt on Thursday. The idea is that users get the taste, not that they look in detail at the graphs in the video.
When will you launch?