Donel.ist

Stop tracking TODOs. Start getting things DONE.

No Employees
Founders Code
Solo Founder
Productivity
Task Management

"You know those days when you're running around doing stuff and talking to people and answering emails and form-filling and you get home and you say to yourself: 'What the hell did I actually get done today?'"

August 4, 2021 Two weeks later: 50+ returning users

Two weeks after a middling launch on IH/HN/Reddit/PH, I'm sitting pretty at just over 50 recurring users. Looking at analytics, it looks like almost all of 'em came from Hacker News -- which is no real surprise, since almost all the traffic to the https://donel.ist landing page has come from one Show HN and a couple upvoted comments on productivity-related discussions.

Peeking at analytics, it looks like those 50+ users are coming back daily to log new items to their done lists; a few of them have even set up public lists that are getting non-trivial traffic of their own!

July 19, 2021 Launched on all the things

Product Hunt, Hacker News, Reddit -- and of course, Indie Hackers. Donel.ist is 100% free and right now I don't have any plans to monetise it -- let's see how folks use it and who else finds it useful.

Fingers crossed that someone else finds it half as useful as I do!

July 16, 2021 Added developer API & docs

One of the last things I wanted to get into Donel.ist before launching was a power-user feature for (fellow) web devs: a REST API for reading/writing your own done list. I've already got machine-readable feeds (RSS/Atom/Jsonfeed) but I wanted an API-driven workflow, too.

I finished writing the API (that was the fun part!) last week; this week I finally got off my ass and wrote some documentation at https://donel.ist/developer. First time I've written dev docs in...a long while.

June 15, 2021 Stopped tracking TODOs

I tagged the first item as "done" in Donel.ist today, and launched it silently just so it would be there for me to use. My plan is to use it for a month and see if I stick with it; if so, I'll polish it as I go along until I think it's ready for the world -- and once I've used it for a while I'll be able to say, with confidence, why I find it useful.

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"You know those days when you're running around doing stuff and talking to people and answering emails and form-filling and you get home and you say to yourself: 'What the hell did I actually get done today?'"