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Market Research

Ben Warren edited this page Jun 11, 2016 · 5 revisions

TL;DR

There are lots of to-do softwares doing roughly the same thing. There is some paying interest in the market; see Omnifocus. Big extant themes: lists, queues, calendars. Notable absences: explicit staging, trees, graphics, some collaboration. There are dedicated communities that should be easy to tap into. GTD-specific software tends to run at a premium; $20+ licensing, usually more.

Hypothesis so far:

It might be that task duedate scatters & BPER & Markdown->tasks & collaboration are that 10x thing, but we need to test that.

Editorializing: Everyone is doing task lists. The nature of GTD is stage-based flow; "lists" only show up in the execution step, and their use everywhere is an implementational convenience.

Takeaway: There is money here, but we will lose if we try to compete on lists. We need to review Omnifocus personally and engage potential users on social media to validate product hypothesis. Hand-drawing mockups might go well; they have on /r/Dota2. Reported paid conversion rates for similar software are ~2%.*

Important Reading: the GTD Book

We almost certainly need to read this book.

Social Media to track

There are prebuilt communities interested in todo stuff, and several of those communities have relatively low submission rates. Easy fodder for interaction with new users?

  • /r/productivity 100K, but only 10 posts a day in new?
  • /r/timemanagement 3.8K users
  • /r/gtd 4K users

Lists to consider

Major Players

Based on the above and more reading, some of the contenders that look important:

Omnifocus

A review. Recommended by Matt(?) at pycon storytime. This is probably our most obvious contender; we should use this for a few days to honestly evaluate it.

Advantages

Pretty, effective, strong mac integrations including applescript support.

Disadvantages

Expensive at $40 to start. Forums have been requesting better collaboration tools for some time.

Google Keep

Advantages

Simple, free, integrates strong with google. Monetized by google slurping all your data.

Disadvantages

Perhaps a little too simple. A good part of the control system exists in your head, not unlike:

Trello

Advantages

Simple, collaborative. Boards become queues/checklists. Monetized by limited number of boards.

Disadvantages

What is the thing that makes this obviously better than postits? Collaboration. But beyond that, kinda like git: you are the system.

Monetization

Limited number of boards, last I saw. $8/mo or $20/mo enterprise. Revenue ~$1.5M.

Taskwarrior

Advantages

Awesome if you are technical, spend a lot of time on the CLI, and manage it well. Tab completion, projects, task next

Disadvantages

Definitely only for solo hackers and their advanced friends. Collaboration is a chore, multimachine is right out.

Workflowy

Advantages

Arbitrarily nesting trees of stuff, some superuser features in place. Monetizes at $5/mo to go over an item cap

Disadvantages

Hard to explore. You are the system.

Monetization

"Profitable" according to founder.

Wunderlist

Advantages

Simple, inbox-based flow leads to easy onboarding.

Disadvantages

AFAICS, mostly lists (again).

Monetization:

$5/mo, $50/yr. Bought by MS for <=$200M

Big list of contenders:

  • Omnifocus
  • Keep
  • Trello
  • Taskwarrior
  • Workflowy
  • Evernote
  • Wunderlist
  • Ansana
  • todoist
  • Ticktick
  • Any.do
  • Habit rpg
  • Evernote
  • Remember the Milk
  • Wrike
  • Producteev
  • Jira

Common Themes

Like freemium trapps: provide a finite resource that is capped at an uncomfortable level, build buyin off of free. Offer paid version or extra padding based on viral invites. Project segregation, calendar integrations.