Three.do

As much as all of us want to keep on working on our products, sometimes the revenue they bring is simply not enough.

Some indies have families to feed, some haven’t been on a vacation for a few past years, and some (like me) desperately want to move out. But we can’t, as our products are stuck in the "valley of sorrow." And the longer it’s stuck there, the less motivation is there to keep on pushing.

That’s when the inevitable happens. 🤐

That’s the moment when an indie hacker starts doing consulting.

Usually this would mean the end of an indie. Consulting is much more rewarding than a stalling product money-wise. And it’s not office slavery either. The more of it you do, the less you want to do anything else.

In my case, however, it’s not so bad:

• I am super lucky to have found a freelance niche where I don’t have to build my cred up through cheap gigs. I already have some authority through "community service," and therefore can charge a good hourly rate right away.
• My country is relatively cheap to live in. This means I can allocate as little as 5 hr/week to consulting and make a decent living. And still have plenty of time for my indie product.
• Besides, this means I will finally be more at ease with reinvesting money into my indie project, hiring subcontractors etc., and finally up my living standards without compromising my personal freedom.

So yeah, that’s about it. Cheers!

Let’s go, in and out. 2 week sprint.

— me on Feb 26

You know how that ended.

🆕 In a nutshell, what’s new:

★ Customize time options — now with more types of “when” settings!
★ Adjust title / tiles split — for tall phones and short fingers
★ Day no longer ends at midnight — Three.do now understands “tonight”
★ Redesigned time selection flow
★ Snooze interval for dismissing a notification is now configurable
★ Notifications now can show creation time for extra context

👉 Full changelog here, or scroll through the latest posts on my Twitter

Sometimes it happens that a superficial product gains more traction than a meticulously labored one.

You launch a product, and boom — a proverbial Pieter Levels launches his pet app, and it easily overshadows yours. And then Elon Musk starts selling flamethrowers and overshadows you both.

Why is that?

The answer is influencer status.
Or how a friend of mine calls it, media capital.

And I bloody love this one.

Media capital is a part of social capital that you earn from media appearances. It is just as much a capital as a regular one. Say you’ve built a product and need to promote it. You can invest material capital (aka money) in ads, special offers etc. Or — if you possess enough media capital (i.e., people are eager to read news from you), you can put that to work instead and get free attention and press. One form of capital substitutes the other.

The good part about media capital is that, unlike money, it doesn’t go away when you use it. Sure, it can expire if you become boring, but it certainly doesn’t drain as fast as money. Also it’s much easier to convert credibility into wealth than the other way around.

The bad part though is that this form of capital is much harder to earn at the start. Our parents might’ve invested some wealth into us, but too few of us are born into famous families where a child gets spotlight merely for existing. For most makers, earning media capital is a grind from square one.

And that’s what I’m trying to do with my participation in Product Hunt Makers Festival this year.

For this Festival, I’ve made and submitted two products, a complex one and an unexpected yet simple one:

• Paul’s Plan — my original habit-building technique with a backstory.
• Tiny chat bot — a simple chat bot engine built with no code.

In total, there are 125 SUBMISSIONS! Obviously, no visitor would go through all of them and upvote thoughtfully. Many makers on Twitter are already asking their followers to upvote their specific product. This is what it’s probably gonna be — another popularity contest where the one with the most followers wins. I don’t have too many followers (or, in other words, I don’t have enough media capital), and solely for that I risk losing.

I don’t really care about the main prize or whatever. It would be nice, but that’s not what I’m after. I’m not even sure if they can ship it here.

All I care is that winning this contest could give me and my app a so much needed media boost.

I don’t think I can win with Paul’s Plan. Not for its technical complexity: many other makers did more complex submissions. And not for its mission either: there’s at least a dozen other goal tracking and habit building apps on the voting list.

Tiny chat bot, however, stands a very good chance. It’s unique. It’s unexpected: making a chat bot engine on Coda is akin to making a chat bot engine in Google Sheets. And it’s simple to grasp and to play with right away.

The full list is here: 👇
https://www.producthunt.com/makers-festival-2019/voting

If you like my submissions, please upvote them there. And if you like someone else’s submissions, go on and upvote them as well — there are some really solid ones!

Thank you!

Oh gawd, this was a mentally heavy update, see my previous post for that.

But I’m happy now that it’s out of the door and I can now focus on the features I think of as important.

I’ve updated the roadmap with a clear and detailed plan, and I’m going to stick to it now.

As for the last update, you can find the change log now here.

Before you assume the worst, let me reassure you:

I’m NOT postponing or abandoning the project — it’s still my primary focus, I’m going to fully commit to it, and I’m not going on any break at the moment.

As you may have noticed, in the last 3 weeks there were little news from me, and little progress on the app. First I tweeted that I wanted to do some maintenance and marketing, then in two weeks I announced the update would be late by a week but with some new features. Now when that week is gone too, I want to explain myself and break the truth before it gets any worse.

And the truth is, I got really torn between trying to bump sales, sticking to the plan, and accommodating feature requests. This crippled me hard. I didn’t have the gut to say I hadn’t planned to implement those requested features asap, and that led to over-promising, lots of pressure, but worst of all — losing control and steering away from the plan. That is why now I need to take a step back, regroup, and get back on track.

Don’t get me wrong. I do value your feedback. It is the most enjoyable part of the whole endeavor. Coding doesn’t bring me joy — the only thing that does is seeing people using and liking my product. A lot of requested features make sense to have. And, to be frank, I understand that to sell my product and be able to make a living of it, I have to give my users what they want.

But that’s where the conflict lies.

Three.do is a visionary product. It was built with a clear vision of a simple reminder app that challenges all those complicated to-do apps, reduces the friction of capturing tasks, and tries to teach the user to stop adding unnecessary details. It doesn’t try to be a fits-all app — if it tried to cater to every request it would end up being just another Todoist clone. Instead, visionary products are based on an “I know better” premise, and users either put their trust into what the developer is doing, or find something else to use.

This is what I want to reinstate here. I know better. For the sake of this project, and for the sake of my sanity, I hereby apologize to you if I promised to deliver your feature request at some nearest future. I’m asking for your patience with regard to those features, and for your trust in what I’m doing.

Here’s the plan:

1. First priority is to work on things that support the original vision: finish all work on custom tiles, improve the UI there, improve app experience overall (mobile first).
2. Then I must implement sync, since it’s the feature promised for Q1 2019 ever since launch, quite a few people pre-paid for it, and it’s relatively low-effort now to add.
3. Along with that I must finally update the pricing. Keeping the early deals this long is unfair towards the earliest adopters who should have been rewarded for believing in the product despite not knowing whether those paid features would ever ship.
4. Only after that I can start working on side features that are definitely nice to have but not detrimental to the vision (e.g., recurrence, improvements to calendar integration, checklists in notes etc.)

What else:

• I’ll reorganize the roadmap. It won’t give deadline expectations, but will be ordered by priority.
• For a while I’ll steer clear of social media and other feedback sources.
• I’ll keep working on the app daily, no excuses. I’ll just do it on my pace, my plan.

That is until I get back on track.

I really need to reclaim control.

And I’ll start by cleaning the piled up mess in my goddamn room.

Nah, obviously I’m not doing that 🤣

However, someone had audacity to post exactly this on Developers of Ukraine forum (in Russian) on Friday:

Looking for PHP/Full-stack junior developers for a developer/co-founder role in a startup. Participation is paid (by you to me), 200 USD/month. Position is part-time, 15 hours a week.

This is presented as a unique opportunity to get experience in a world-changing startup (a goal tracker app) and become a more desirable hire in the future, and even get 1% equity in a venture that will possibly be worth billions — all for a modest $2,400 fee and a year of your labor.

There’s no MVP, no USP, no funding obviously, and the person doesn’t look like a troll. He defends this model in the comments with all seriousness.

I’m really bit sad that I didn’t come up with this myself. Not the idea of exploiting interns, but to post something controversial like that and get lots of hype like he got (10k+ pageviews, 230+ comments). After all, hype is traffic, and I need traffic for my app.

Despite being late to the party, here’s what I did. I created a similar post in a satiric fashion and heavily plugged my app there. This is called situational marketing, I believe. So far I’ve got 140+ visits to my landing page, and god knows how many installs, because Google Play stats lag behind a lot. I think I’ll write a short article about this venture in a few weeks when I’ll have more data accumulated.

The point here is, when you see something getting attention out of thin air, consider jumping on a hype train for some free marketing.

Went live on the local radio last Thursday. 40 min talk about startups and indie hacking and stuff.

Went live on another local radio this Thursday (today). 20 min talk about IT and startups and stuff.

Felt like it was time to do some “content marketing” (aka “write a somewhat tech article on Medium and plug my project”.) Wrote this story, took a day (personal record for writing it fast!), hoping for it to get picked up by a few Android digests this Sunday.

Also felt like my previous app icon on Play Store was shite. Not standing out at all. Hence redrawn it with this. Now need to also redesign everything else (images, posters etc).

Now that's the “Promised before the New Year” features are finally out of the way, I'll take the next few weeks to do some overdue maintenance:

• update Play Store page and the website, which haven’t changed since the launch
• improve UX here and there
• introduce final pricing (so grab a discount while it lasts 😉)
• redesign onboarding (i.e. the welcome tutorial)
• do some marketing and sales, because those stalled and I’ve only made like $125 this month
• maybe throw in some small features but no promises on that

Also looks like I’m finally on the regular 2-week update schedule. Nice.

The first Pro feature has landed, and the update is now LIVE! 🎉

No time to chill though — next big feature is Calendar integration.

Also it’s time to finally update the landing page and Play Store description. They both still say "Just launched on Product Hunt", lol (3 months have passed)

From the very moment I launched there was one important thing missing: the way to inform users and early adopters on current development progress of my app. I left people clueless about what I was working on, and whether I was working on the app at all or just bailed with their moneys. I had a public roadmap board, but it’s too high-level and therefore not updated very often.

The problem became apparent as closer to the New Year more and more people were writing me, asking what was happening to the app.

So I went on and finally created a Twitter: @_ThreeDo

Please go and follow. Or don’t. As you wish.