TaskMeUp

Deciding the MVP for TaskMeUp was not simple.
The foundation is quite simple, it’s just a todo app. So I wanted to deliver what makes it different.
Now by this point I had a bunch of ideas that I considered “essentials” to the app: I want the items to auto clean up, I want the items to auto arrange based on the moment of the day, I want all tasks to be replicated among your devices, offer a restful API so you can build your own workflows around it, etc.

At some point I got the auto clean up feature working quite well and a bit of every other feature. Some friends and family were using it but I still wasn’t proud of it.
So I decided to focus on the features that these people actually use without me telling “can you test this insert particular use case here?”

Then I started to scratch the current website for TaskMeUp, while highlighting its main features I realized that I already have what I’ve originally wanted.

Sure, it still doesn’t look like I want and feature wise I think it still deserves a bunch of love. But any of those were a reason to delay the launch of an MVP.

It was a silent launch since I still working on some basis features but now I’m able to quickly show it to anyone beyond “just the idea”.

As a software engineer, I have always had to balance between my day job, my side projects, my learning goals and of course every interesting article read on Hacker News, Reddit or Twitter.

Also, at that moment, I was designing a video game as a side project. Which led me to read and learn a lot of new stuff, so I wanted to keep track of every idea or resource that helps me through each of the steps of the game.

I have used other similar or even more robust tools like Trello or Microsoft Todo, but the end was always the same: at some point I had too many “todo items” on a list that keep growing, or an insane amount of unread items in pocket.

So, what if they can clean up by them selves? What if the app is smart enough to understand I’m working on my day job on or a side project and prioritize according to the moment of the day?

Those were some of the ideas that lead me to start building TaskMeUp.