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A Stupid Idea, 1 Year After Launching on HN
- LeonW 15y agoWow, this is an amazing story guys. Especially the part on how you hit 152 users on the first day with Hn, just gives to show how powerful the platform is. Anyone else got a story on how HN helped them launch their startup?
- ryanwaggoner 15y agoWe actually launched something similar to this on Nov 1, 2010 at http://21times.org http://21times.org. We had over 1000 people from HN sign up within the first 72 hours, and about another 500 over the next few weeks. We reposted it again on Nov 1, 2011 and had another 1000 people or so sign up. The idea of 21times has morphed into a full startup called DailyPath (http://dailypath.com http://dailypath.com) and we're currently working full-time on it while doing an incubator in Portland (http://piepdx.com http://piepdx.com) Hacker News is crazy :)
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- leslyn 15y agoCongrats on the success!! It's inspiring to see what might be looked on as a 'stupid idea' to turn out "not so stupid"!
- smalter 15y agoThank you!
- auston 15y agoI've been following the iDoneThis story since before it was iDoneThis. Walter (one of the co-founders) is scrappy & I don't doubt he will find success!
- smalter 15y agothanks so much, Auston!
- brianmwang 15y agoYou should see his Muta Baneling combo as well. Terrifying.
- graysnorf 15y agoHow does he handle a TLO-style mech. terran?
- pardner 15y agoSo... next you'll add Twilio support so people can do it by SMS, right?
- rguzman 15y agomaybe... smartphone apps would scratch a very similar itch and those will happen first.
- aymeric 15y agoHow do you plan to monetize iDoneThis?
- smalter 15y agoFreemium Edit: All accounts right now are free forever. We're building premium features for the business use case which we'll charge for. Everything right now is free forever.
- AznHisoka 15y agoHmm.. I like the service, but don't think I would pay for it. EverNote is considered one of the elite apps in the productivity space and it's just $5/month... so something to think about.
- rguzman 15y agotrying to sell what we prototyped last year to users is likely a bad idea. the freemium will be for businesses. there is a team version of idonethis in its early stages.
- mhartl 15y agoBusinesses might. They are usually much less price-sensitive. And that makes sense: if your business gets just a little bit more done as a result of using a service, it almost certainly pays for itself.
- rkalla 15y ago... so I use the service for too long (more than a year) and I have to pay to see my longer unbroken chain, or I get too much stuff done and I pay? Just not clear on the pay-premium cutpoint.
- smalter 15y agoNo, clarification in edit above. Premium features for businesses to administer teams and digest information.
- lcs 15y ago+1 for iDoneThis and congrats. I've been using it for the past 4 weeks and enjoying it.
- smalter 15y agoThanks so much. Glad to hear that you've been liking our service. Don't hesitate to email me if you have some thoughts on how we can improve (walter at idonethis dot com).
- jc4p 15y agoCongrats, looks very interesting! It's even something I would recommend that my mom start using since it's so easy to get started. Who else signed up just to see how they were sending out e-mails? What steps are you taking to make sure o1.email.idonethis.com goes past Hotmail/Yahoo's spam filters that are notoriously deadly?
- rguzman 15y agoemail deliverability is a huge can of worms. i didn't know that when we first prototyped it. we noticed that our test emails were going to spam on walter's account as we were getting ready to send out the first bunch of emails. so, we opted for sending the emails by hand from a gmail account using bcc while we figured out how to tackle the problem. it became clear very quickly that this would be hard to solve ourselves quickly, so we tried mailchimp (which is not well-suited at all) and eventually went with sendgrid. nowadays there are 4 or 5 similar providers that you can use: amazon, sendgrid, mailgun, and a couple of others that i can't remember right now. we haven't had a good reason to start doing that in-house, yet.
- jc4p 15y agoThat's exactly why it interested me. At my previous company we had the same problem, we went through everyone of the big names until we found one that was the least expensive and had the least hassle. My wish was to roll our own mail server since the majority of what we did could easily be automated and would save our "marketing team" (one person) a lot of time, but there was just no time for that either. Mailchimp was the funnest experience though, they say they have absolutely no phone support and everything is "self-service support", our marketing guy e-mailed back and forth with one of their higher-ups until they said "there are no phones in our office!" My co-worker then spent the rest of the day prowling over their Flickr account until he found some phones in the background of a shot of their company holiday party. I figure since you're doing very simple e-mails (for good reason), you don't have to roll your own over fear of spam detection (HTML e-mails + using an IP that someone else had used maybe inappropriately before can lead to a high spam score) unless cost becomes an issue.
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- Zuzz 15y agodon't get me wrong, it's great and all but... 1 year later, full-time gig, and what about money?
- smalter 15y agohi Zuzz -- we were able to raise.
- abcd_f 15y agoSo I would guess you guys have few thousand user accounts? How many stay active after a week if you don't mind me asking?
- rguzman 15y agowe have a lot more than a few thousand and ~30% of our users are active.
- nathanbarry 15y agoI built an iPhone app called Commit that tackles this very problem. It is in the review process right now and should be released in the next couple of days. You can read a bit about it here: http://nathanbarry.com/a-little-bit-each-day/ http://nathanbarry.com/a-little-bit-each-day/
- aymeric 15y agoYou guys should work together so that your app work with their system.
- eps 15y agoSentiments of the HN brotherhood aside - why?
- aymeric 15y agoBecause the iPhone developer can start with an existing userbase, and the developers of the web versions can now offer an iPhone app. I run http://weekplan.net http://weekplan.net which is in a similar space and many people ask me for an iPhone/Android app. I have made a mobile stylesheet but a native app would definitely be a Win/Win/Win (iPhone developer / Users / Me)
- lusr 15y agoI had this idea about 2 years ago and didn't bother building it when I looked at the competition in the space (evidently many people have had this idea). Now I see these guys have 500,000 users... I guess the space was larger than I thought :)
- wantrepreneur 15y agoThey dont have 500k users.Did you even read the article?
- karlzt 15y agothey have 20,000+ users http://idonethis.com/jobs/ http://idonethis.com/jobs/
- matthewj 15y agoNice. Really curious how you will monetize it and continue to grow it further.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- hkyeti 15y agoGreat stuff, am a user. Is that graph is cumulative tasks done? Do you have a chart of daily active users? Would be a better indication of momentum, given each user may do several daily tasks.
- theSuda 15y agoJust signed up. Lets see what happens next :) Waiting for my first evening mail. Though I would probably reply 'Not much :| '
- gbog 15y agoI like the simplicity of the idea, but I would not enjoy a daily mail with a colloquial tone as is used in the website. Maybe because I'm nearing my forties... I have a similar reaction when the cigarette paper I buy use "tu" instead of "vous" to address me (in French). I suppose one can choose to write something like “What’d you get done today?” because the normal way “'d be borin'”, but in fact and all things well considered, the colloquial tone is more boring (to me), after two or three reads.