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This is a productivity app, and productivity apps are a real hard sell on mobile. Think about it, you're asking someone to embed a particular piece of software

This is a productivity app, and productivity apps are a real hard sell on mobile. Think about it, you're asking someone to embed a particular piece of software directly into their life. It has to provide so much value over not having any app that they have to remember to use to make using it a no-brainer. Your app isn't really competing against other productivity apps, it's competing against the fact that an app is not going to be most people's best approach for improving their lives. The process of integrating a tool with life is not fun, it takes work and there's only so much that things like reminders can do for you. I use two productivity apps on my phone. Reminders and the one I'm building. It's an ongoing experiment in how one can use software to improve life. Right now the only thing I've managed to integrate is spending tracking, and even that took months of back and forth consideration. Do I want to tag individual expenditures? How do I want to categorize them? How do I want to add an expenditure to a category? What should I call the act of spending something and what should I call the category? How do I want my reports to look like? Do I want reports in the database, or should they be generated dynamically? How should I represent common transactions that I do every day in a way that doesn't clutter up the main interface? The whole exercise has left me unenthused about productivity software as a viable product category. Adding an expenditure now is easy as pie, for me, and only me. All of the work I had to do to figure out how I spend money and how I should build an app to manage it essentially has to be redone for every single person who wants to use software to help them manage their life. The domain seems simple, but it's actually incredibly complicated, because it's different for everyone.

junto 11y ago
There is plenty of money to be made in this space. KDS [1] for example are selling their solution into large enterprise clients, each with thousands of users paying per user pricing. Enterprise money and enterprise deals. Expense management is a challenging market with lots of issues that need to be addressed. For example, there are lots of legal taxation rules concerning the digitisation of receipts and invoices, and each country does it differently. Now they've built their new app on top of Slack's API. I can't see that going well long term. Haven't people learned already not to build businesses on top of walled gardens? [1] http://www.kds.com/ http://www.kds.com/
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  Lots of money out there, but you can't make it by fixing your own needs and expecting that design to work for bigcorps. Really it's two different product spaces. You need big money development, meaning big money firms. I'd just prefer to let them do it, and move on to some other promising niche. I'll develop my app for me, because no other app will do it the way I need it done, and not try to productize it, it's a waste of time.
gedrap 11y ago
You touch another important issue here. >>> Do I want to tag individual expenditures? How do I want to categorize them? Friction. There are a lot of apps that might be useful but the friction is so high (a lot of manual entry, etc) that it might overwhelm the value provided. Ideally, you want the app to 'just work' and that's the hard part.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  > There are a lot of apps that might be useful but the friction is so high (a lot of manual entry, etc) that it might overwhelm the value provided. It was an act of faith for me to structure the app around manual entry of transactions. I thought for sure that I'd wind up abandoning it after a few months. Didn't happen, I'm still using it, but I remember for a few weeks struggling to eliminate the friction, and I still haven't gotten rid of all of it. That would require implementing some kind of custom keyboard, as well as the aforementioned interface to put in common transactions that have the same amount each time. There needs to be a streamlined interface for adding these common transactions, because I might have to do it a few times a month. I'm repeating this entire process for a to-do manager, as Reminders just doesn't eliminate enough friction for all use cases. Now I need to figure out how to get transactions to live on the same page as my agenda. When I'm finally done with this three years from now, I'll need to write a book and do a bunch of YouTube videos to teach people how to use it productively, either that or I'll need to spend just as much time making the interface discoverable. What other people will need out of a dashboard is bound to be completely different than what I need out of it. I have a list of transactions for this week, broken down by day, someone else might need the whole month, broken down by category. I don't have automatic recurring transactions show up, someone else might want those. Each of these requires significant design work. I have tried at various points to interest someone else in helping me develop it. Ha. Ha. Ha. Nobody cares.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    You could look at the ecosystem around the Ledger command line accounting program for ideas about simplifying transaction creation. People often bring up Ledger because it uses a text file as input, I don't mean to point at that, I mean to point at all the various heuristics people use to extract meaning from their history of transactions.
ghaff 11y ago
In general, I find that with respect to tracking expenses, if you do something, anything, organized so that you remember it and have the appropriate proof to be reimbursed you've won at least 80 percent of the battle. At least for me, it's not so much about having a properly categorized/filed electronic copy as having something to remind me that I bought a coffee at Starbucks. To your broader point, a number of years back I was looking at software to track consulting activities at our company. One of the things that struck me was that the utility of the software out there depended a lot on the type of activity you wanted to track and how you wanted to share it. Lots of independent and largely discrete events called for a different solution than larger projects with a defined workflow and milestones.
bpyne 11y ago
Your experience is actually the same one I have when writing enterprise software. I always start an enterprise project with a vision of people happily using a good product to achieve a goal. After wading through conflicting user preferences, the Legal Department chiming in, etc, I realize the the application is going to be a Frankenstein monster. At that point, the vision is shattered and I try to produce something that is somewhat useful, to as as many people as possible, and with as little friction as possible. Compromising the vision always sucks the enthusiasm from me.
- GFischer 11y ago
  I feel you... Legal department requirements alone can make software unusable... I maintain an universally reviled application that requires you to print, sign and physically mail any changes to the user's address or other data (because legal), and that people have to use because it's output is a requirement for many bureaucratic procedures, which usually are needed ASAP... it's a usability and support nightmare.
  - bpyne 11y ago
    There really should be a support group for people who have to support systems like you describe. (Sympathetic sarcasm, of course.)
willlma 11y ago
This really struck a chord because I've spent the last couple years working on a productivity app and it took me a few iterations to get people coming back. It uses spaced repetition to help users remember what they read on the web. I feel like I've removed a lot of the friction of apps that did this before (Anki, Supermemo) by making it really easy to add information to it. It would be possible to replicate it with a simple word processing tool, some copy-pasting, some typing, calculating review intervals, and adding reminders to a calendar to review a specific portion of a document. By eliminating that friction, I've appealed to a small but growing crowd of people, like us, who are too lazy for the pen and ledger approach, but are willing to put in some work (in this case, to reread a few lines of text each time they get a notification). The "productivity" designation is an inadequate one. There a few obvious productivity apps that translate well from processes that people are used to in the real world, like note-taking apps, that don't require much education for the user to understand. It's a notebook. Cool, got it. Onboarding is such an important facet of this discussion, and you do mention it below: > I'll need to spend just as much time making the interface discoverable Unfortunately, developers do get so close to their product that they forget that users often don't know where to start, so I think that having to build an onboarding process is something to be expected. Education is the only way to make one UI for many people. I think the questions that need to be asked are: 1. How long is it going to take to make my users proficient at my app? 2. Can I make it fun for them? I don't think the moral of the story is "Don't make productivity apps", I think it's "Don't make an app that's hard to explain to its users" Unless they have an external pressure like: - In the case of B2B, complying to company policy (Slack) - In the case of B2C, it's social and everyone is already on it (Facebook)
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  > This really struck a chord because I've spent the last couple years working on a productivity app and it took me a few iterations to get people coming back. It uses spaced repetition to help users remember what they read on the web. I wouldn't exactly classify this kind of app as a productivity app by my thinking. I would call it a utility app. I'll try to articulate my rationale. A productivity app, in order for it to be useful, has to take something people normally do as a routine task in their lives, like make purchases, somehow better / faster / more queryable / whatever. It aims to make everyday life better. A utility app aims to take something people have already chosen to make a real effort to do, like learn a language, and amplifies their efforts. Once you've chosen to undertake whatever task underlying the app, 90% of the onboarding is already done. Now it's a question of choosing which method or app to help out. Utility apps really do compete with other apps in their space. This is what separates enterprise expense tracking with what I'm building. Enterprises already have the legal and financial need to be aware of what they're spending, enough so they can hire people and pay them money to make it their quest in life. Most people, well, don't. They have this amorphous understanding of what's in their bank account and how much they have to spend and what their bills are, seeing this all down in black and white is likely only going to depress them. Even if their corporate job is accounting and they already have the skill to manage accounts, that won't necessarily translate into the need or desire to do it in their home life. A productivity app, as I've defined them, is categorically interested in changing a person's lifestyle. It's the whole point of the app, without lifestyle change there's nothing. I fully intend the to-do manager I'm building into my personal app to fully overtake how I conduct my work day, my after work time, and weekend time. That's the whole reason I'm building it, the vision in my head of how awesome that would be is so compelling, that it's worth spending 10000x the time I would spend earning the money to buy someone else's app, on building my own. It is for me, by me, can only work for me, because only I had the thoughts and lifestyle that makes building it worth it. I believe that this kind of integration is the desired end point of all productivity apps, if it doesn't accomplish this, then it's really a waste of time, bound to eventually end up in the dustbin. I read GTD awhile back and thought it was amazing. But there's a real reason he never really endorsed any software tools or made a software tool a primary component of his system. My to-do component is heavily GTD-influenced, but it is designed to work with other, physical aspects of my life.

junto 11y ago

There is plenty of money to be made in this space. KDS [1] for example are selling their solution into large enterprise clients, each with thousands of users paying per user pricing. Enterprise money and enterprise deals. Expense management is a challenging market with lots of issues that need to be addressed. For example, there are lots of legal taxation rules concerning the digitisation of receipts and invoices, and each country does it differently. Now they've built their new app on top of Slack's API. I can't see that going well long term. Haven't people learned already not to build businesses on top of walled gardens? [1] http://www.kds.com/ http://www.kds.com/

vinceguidry 11y ago
Lots of money out there, but you can't make it by fixing your own needs and expecting that design to work for bigcorps. Really it's two different product spaces. You need big money development, meaning big money firms. I'd just prefer to let them do it, and move on to some other promising niche. I'll develop my app for me, because no other app will do it the way I need it done, and not try to productize it, it's a waste of time.

gedrap 11y ago

You touch another important issue here. >>> Do I want to tag individual expenditures? How do I want to categorize them? Friction. There are a lot of apps that might be useful but the friction is so high (a lot of manual entry, etc) that it might overwhelm the value provided. Ideally, you want the app to 'just work' and that's the hard part.

vinceguidry 11y ago
> There are a lot of apps that might be useful but the friction is so high (a lot of manual entry, etc) that it might overwhelm the value provided. It was an act of faith for me to structure the app around manual entry of transactions. I thought for sure that I'd wind up abandoning it after a few months. Didn't happen, I'm still using it, but I remember for a few weeks struggling to eliminate the friction, and I still haven't gotten rid of all of it. That would require implementing some kind of custom keyboard, as well as the aforementioned interface to put in common transactions that have the same amount each time. There needs to be a streamlined interface for adding these common transactions, because I might have to do it a few times a month. I'm repeating this entire process for a to-do manager, as Reminders just doesn't eliminate enough friction for all use cases. Now I need to figure out how to get transactions to live on the same page as my agenda. When I'm finally done with this three years from now, I'll need to write a book and do a bunch of YouTube videos to teach people how to use it productively, either that or I'll need to spend just as much time making the interface discoverable. What other people will need out of a dashboard is bound to be completely different than what I need out of it. I have a list of transactions for this week, broken down by day, someone else might need the whole month, broken down by category. I don't have automatic recurring transactions show up, someone else might want those. Each of these requires significant design work. I have tried at various points to interest someone else in helping me develop it. Ha. Ha. Ha. Nobody cares.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  You could look at the ecosystem around the Ledger command line accounting program for ideas about simplifying transaction creation. People often bring up Ledger because it uses a text file as input, I don't mean to point at that, I mean to point at all the various heuristics people use to extract meaning from their history of transactions.

ghaff 11y ago

In general, I find that with respect to tracking expenses, if you do something, anything, organized so that you remember it and have the appropriate proof to be reimbursed you've won at least 80 percent of the battle. At least for me, it's not so much about having a properly categorized/filed electronic copy as having something to remind me that I bought a coffee at Starbucks. To your broader point, a number of years back I was looking at software to track consulting activities at our company. One of the things that struck me was that the utility of the software out there depended a lot on the type of activity you wanted to track and how you wanted to share it. Lots of independent and largely discrete events called for a different solution than larger projects with a defined workflow and milestones.

bpyne 11y ago

Your experience is actually the same one I have when writing enterprise software. I always start an enterprise project with a vision of people happily using a good product to achieve a goal. After wading through conflicting user preferences, the Legal Department chiming in, etc, I realize the the application is going to be a Frankenstein monster. At that point, the vision is shattered and I try to produce something that is somewhat useful, to as as many people as possible, and with as little friction as possible. Compromising the vision always sucks the enthusiasm from me.

GFischer 11y ago
I feel you... Legal department requirements alone can make software unusable... I maintain an universally reviled application that requires you to print, sign and physically mail any changes to the user's address or other data (because legal), and that people have to use because it's output is a requirement for many bureaucratic procedures, which usually are needed ASAP... it's a usability and support nightmare.
- bpyne 11y ago
  There really should be a support group for people who have to support systems like you describe. (Sympathetic sarcasm, of course.)

willlma 11y ago

This really struck a chord because I've spent the last couple years working on a productivity app and it took me a few iterations to get people coming back. It uses spaced repetition to help users remember what they read on the web. I feel like I've removed a lot of the friction of apps that did this before (Anki, Supermemo) by making it really easy to add information to it. It would be possible to replicate it with a simple word processing tool, some copy-pasting, some typing, calculating review intervals, and adding reminders to a calendar to review a specific portion of a document. By eliminating that friction, I've appealed to a small but growing crowd of people, like us, who are too lazy for the pen and ledger approach, but are willing to put in some work (in this case, to reread a few lines of text each time they get a notification). The "productivity" designation is an inadequate one. There a few obvious productivity apps that translate well from processes that people are used to in the real world, like note-taking apps, that don't require much education for the user to understand. It's a notebook. Cool, got it. Onboarding is such an important facet of this discussion, and you do mention it below: > I'll need to spend just as much time making the interface discoverable Unfortunately, developers do get so close to their product that they forget that users often don't know where to start, so I think that having to build an onboarding process is something to be expected. Education is the only way to make one UI for many people. I think the questions that need to be asked are: 1. How long is it going to take to make my users proficient at my app? 2. Can I make it fun for them? I don't think the moral of the story is "Don't make productivity apps", I think it's "Don't make an app that's hard to explain to its users" Unless they have an external pressure like: - In the case of B2B, complying to company policy (Slack) - In the case of B2C, it's social and everyone is already on it (Facebook)

vinceguidry 11y ago
> This really struck a chord because I've spent the last couple years working on a productivity app and it took me a few iterations to get people coming back. It uses spaced repetition to help users remember what they read on the web. I wouldn't exactly classify this kind of app as a productivity app by my thinking. I would call it a utility app. I'll try to articulate my rationale. A productivity app, in order for it to be useful, has to take something people normally do as a routine task in their lives, like make purchases, somehow better / faster / more queryable / whatever. It aims to make everyday life better. A utility app aims to take something people have already chosen to make a real effort to do, like learn a language, and amplifies their efforts. Once you've chosen to undertake whatever task underlying the app, 90% of the onboarding is already done. Now it's a question of choosing which method or app to help out. Utility apps really do compete with other apps in their space. This is what separates enterprise expense tracking with what I'm building. Enterprises already have the legal and financial need to be aware of what they're spending, enough so they can hire people and pay them money to make it their quest in life. Most people, well, don't. They have this amorphous understanding of what's in their bank account and how much they have to spend and what their bills are, seeing this all down in black and white is likely only going to depress them. Even if their corporate job is accounting and they already have the skill to manage accounts, that won't necessarily translate into the need or desire to do it in their home life. A productivity app, as I've defined them, is categorically interested in changing a person's lifestyle. It's the whole point of the app, without lifestyle change there's nothing. I fully intend the to-do manager I'm building into my personal app to fully overtake how I conduct my work day, my after work time, and weekend time. That's the whole reason I'm building it, the vision in my head of how awesome that would be is so compelling, that it's worth spending 10000x the time I would spend earning the money to buy someone else's app, on building my own. It is for me, by me, can only work for me, because only I had the thoughts and lifestyle that makes building it worth it. I believe that this kind of integration is the desired end point of all productivity apps, if it doesn't accomplish this, then it's really a waste of time, bound to eventually end up in the dustbin. I read GTD awhile back and thought it was amazing. But there's a real reason he never really endorsed any software tools or made a software tool a primary component of his system. My to-do component is heavily GTD-influenced, but it is designed to work with other, physical aspects of my life.