imdone
Keep story work close to the code.
I just changed the free tier for imdone-cli, and honestly, I think the old limit was wrong.
I’m building imdone because I’ve spent too many years watching developers lose time to scattered work context.
The code is in one place.
The ticket is in another.
Comments, attachments, screenshots, and decisions are spread across tabs, Slack, and memory.
That friction adds up.
Not just in minutes spent hunting for things, but in the cost of regaining context and getting back into flow.
imdone-cli is my attempt to fix that by pulling Jira or GitHub issues into a local markdown backlog in the repo, so story work lives closer to the code.
The problem was that the old free tier often stopped people before they could really evaluate whether that workflow helped.
They could try a little, but not enough to reach the value moment.
So I changed it.
Now people can try imdone-cli on real work without creating an account first, keep reading and local workflow free, and only use the allowance when they write changes back to Jira or GitHub.
I’m trying to make evaluation more honest.
If someone is going to decide this workflow isn’t for them, I want that decision to happen after they’ve actually experienced it, not because the free tier cut them off too early.
Still figuring this out.
If you’ve built a dev tool, I’d be curious how you think about this:
when does a free tier help evaluation, and when does it just create friction?
I started off January by committing to one release per week and I've kept it up. In addition, I noticed the growing popularity of markdown based note taking apps and joined their forums and discord groups. After a few days in the discussions I noticed a lot of chats were about imdone, so I decided to start my own discord server. This has been a huge boost. My customers on discord help each other and always have great ideas.
This interview with Licat (one of the creators of obsidian.md) provides some great insights on community and discord.
https://robhaisfield.com/notes/building-community-in-obsidian-with-licat
A while back I decided to use github issues to track bugs and feature request from my customers. It started out slow, but as new customers come on board, I share the link with them so my customers can contribute to the conversation around prioritization. Visit https://github.com/imdone/imdone/issues if you'd like to take a look.
Early in February I started to hone in on the twitter searches that markdown note takers and document editors appear in. I began engaging with relevant tweets about favorite markdown editors and productivity apps. What I noticed was a %350 increase in traffic coming from twitter and highly engaged audience.
I plan to double down on twitter engagement in March and hit a new high. I want to double customer acquisition from 7 in February to 14 in March. Wish me luck!
Once you've built a product that delivers value, you'll start acquiring customers that silently pay the subscription and you never hear from them again. But there are also times that a user will reach out to you with some ideas about how you can make your product a better fit for them. If you can sign these users up as customers, you'll both benefit from the relationship you've formed.
I recently acquired two of this type of customer and it's made imdone a much better fit, not just for these awesome customers, but for all my current and future customers.
I just implemented tag hints in the imdone card editor so you'll never forget how to tag a card in your project.
Special thanks to Alexander Makarov for this codemirror add-on. https://github.com/samdark/codemirror-autosuggest
For those of you who aren't familiar with imdone, it's a kanban board for indiehackers, freelancers and small teams who work in code, markdown and plain text. It's easy to use and 100% portable because the cards live in your text files.
https://app.getbeamer.com/imdoneio/en/tag-hints-in-card-editor
I just implemented a newsfeed in imdone and on the imdone.io website. I'm always adding new features to help with my own workflow, so adding a news feed makes it a lot easier to notify my customers and trial users about the latest features.
In this release... Check the newsfeed! (powered by beamer)
Over the past few months I've been making myself available on Drift 24/7. This has allowed me to follow up on questions immediately.
I've also enabled the "Ask Site Visitors for email" option in Drift. This has been great for allowing me to follow up with leads even if I miss them late in the night.
I'll be releasing an update tomorrow that was requested by someone who left their email address on Drift.
The moral of the story... Get Drift!
I decided to tackle the one feature I've been avoiding because of risk and complexity. Deleting TODO comments in bulk. Sometimes you have to do the hard things to move your product forward.
The way it works in imdone, is the user filters their board and clicks the red trashcan button next to the filter input in the header. After you confirm, imdone finds all the associated TODO comments in your code and removes them.
If you're a developer, you know why this is scary. But it's done and in the hands of users for almost two weeks with no issues so far.
So I dare you to show me how it doesn't work with your code. If it's a valid issue, I'll fix it in no less than a week or you get a free license!
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Just put them in trash with a restore option. Pretty standard pattern. Eliminates all worry or accidents.
I've upped my funnel analysis game this past week and the new dashboard is really paying off https://d.pr/i/M3rNxW.
25% of my site visitors are downloading imdone and at least 15% are starting up the app. Some of the loss here might be related to the app not being signed, but I'm working on getting to the bottom of it. My first thought is maybe providing some help content when they click the download. Maybe a short video clip.
On other news, my monthly revenue improved by 3.5X.
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