Ivy

Today we're excited to introduce Ivy Community.

Burnout can make everyday to-dos feel overwhelming, dull, and fruitless. But when we do manage to knock something off our to-do list we feel great.

And sometimes, all we need is bit of encouragement.

Ivy Community is a public feed of what people have on their to-do list for the day. When you make your to-dos visible in Community, people can react to them with a heart or a thumbs up - giving you the boost you might need to knock off just one more thing.

Learn more at getivy.co

Today we're launching Ivy for Android. After building Ivy primarily for iOS for the past few months, we're excited to make Ivy available to our Android friends!

You can give Ivy for Android a try here https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ivymobile

And if you have any feedback please email us at support@getivy.co !

We recently launched a new version of Ivy at the start of October! Since then, we've converted a handful of free-trial customers to the full paid version of Ivy.

Our launch on ProductHunt really, helped, as well as some experiments with paid acquisition on the App Store as well as Facebook/Instagram.

It's small, but we're excited about the progress we've made!

https://getivy.co/

Excited to share that we have our first few paying customers. We've added a "pre-sale pricing" option for people who love Ivy to lock in discounted pricing. Give it a look at https://getivy.co/premium

Hi everyone!

Today we're excited to introduce the first version of Ivy to App Store!

In 2014 I was diagnosed with GAD (generalized anxiety disorder). I was in school at the time, and I was trying to manage my time at University with two part time jobs. It was definitely a chaotic point in my life, and in order to get through it all, I had to take things one day at a time – keeping my mental and physical health top of mind. I did that by keeping detailed journals and to-do lists.

Fast forward a bit and I found myself dropping out of University to work at Shopify, and then Wealthsimple (both considered to be some pretty exciting Canadian companies!).

So over the ~5 years or so of working at Shopify then Wealthsimple, I (like many) had tried a number of different tools to keep my life and priorities in check. Journaling, Jira, Trello, Github, Email, Slack, etc…but none of them really helped me get a grasp of everything that was going on in my life. Indeed, using multiple tools to try and stay productive is somewhat counterintuitive.

And so that’s where Ivy comes in.

Today it’s a simple to-do list app based on a 100-year old productivity method (The Ivy Lee Method). But in the future we see Ivy becoming a tool that aggregates all the different ways people get things done, with a balance of mental and digital health on top.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments! And thanks to all the folks who have helped us improve the product over the past month.

Since the original beta launch of Ivy at the start of April, I've made some improvements to the product as well as refined the target market for Ivy.

As a result, I've been able to improve day 14 retention from 5% to 14.3%!

Hope to see this continue to improve over time!

We broke 800 waitlist signups! The landing page is now converting visitors at about 24%. Facebook ads are very successful to date, with a new Lookalike audience driving signups at about $0.70 right now. Hoping I can maintain that.

When someone signs up for the waitlist, they get an automated email. The email lets them know that we're rolling beta invites out slowly, and I recently included the option for people to complete a Typeform survey to get earlier access.

The comments from Typeform have been incredibly valuable, as they explain what people not only think Ivy will be, but also what they want it to do for them if they could wave a magic wand.

Excited to be coming up on a launch soon!

We broke 500 waitlist signups today! Currently our landing page is converting visitors at about 14%. Hoping to double this in the coming weeks before launch.

I put together a landing page (https://getivy.co/) and started driving traffic to it in a few different ways.

First, I submitted the landing page to Betalist. That has driven a few hundred signups so far.

Then, I started running Facebook ads to the landing page. That too, has driven a handful of signups so far. I'm paying about $1.50 per signup, which is ok for now, but hopefully I can get it down more with refining the targeting.

Lastly, I created an upcoming project on ProductHunt, which has driven a handful of signups too.

To date, I'm at just about 400 signups. Which is good validation so far, but I won't really know if those signups mean anything until the product is live on the App Store.

I've been fortunate enough to work at two great Canadian companies as a Product Manager – Shopify, and Wealthsimple. Both are high growth with incredibly ambitious missions.

And in that time, I started to perfect (for myself at least) how I would prioritize my work each day. The one method that worked best for me was the Ivy Lee Method – a 100-year-old strategy.

The Ivy Lee method goes back to 1918, when a productivity consultant (Ivy Lee), was hired by Charles M. Schwab to improve the efficiency of his team. Supposedly, Lee offered his productivity tool (what this app helps you do!) to Schwab for free. Schwab was so pleased with the results he wrote Lee a check for $25,000 — which is equivalent to about $400,000 today.

So how does it work?

• At the end of each day, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow.
• Prioritize those tasks.
• The next day, concentrate only on the first task. Work until the first task is finished before moving on to the second task.
• Repeat!

It’s that simple.

And I wanted it to be something that I could take with me anywhere, and thus the idea of Ivy was born! Take the Ivy Lee Method (something that works for me) and turn it into an app.

But not just any app.

I am someone who has struggled with anxiety for many years now. And any time I would use any other to-do apps, I'd immediately get riddled with anxiety. So I see this as an opportunity to find a balance between productivity software, and health and wellness software.