We work for a small startup in SF and have been part of its growth from 4 to 40 employees. As it grew, we felt less connected to the company, and had less opportunity to affect various projects and details of the business. We missed that. We went from a single team standup of the whole company to multiple different standups segmented by function. We saw a problem and decided we wanted a solution.
We built a side project within 6 months and got buy-in and usage from our current company. In fact, they ended up paying for it. We couldn't keep up the nights and weekends though and worked on it less and less. While we still had the 1 happy paying customer, we failed to get any more to stick. After a few months of little to no work on it, we decided we wanted to make one more push towards user acquisition. We asked for an 8 week part-time sabbatical and compromised for a 1 week vacation. We are more than halfway through that week and are still struggling to gain traction.
Here is what we have tried:
Cold emailing product managers on LinkedIn
Content marketing with a blog post about a common standup
Posting in related sub reddits about startups and project management / agile
Emailing past users
We don't think we are a simple standup replacement or aid, but most people view us as that. We do support stand-ups and make them better, but does our product do too much? Or did we solve a problem that only exists at our company?
- if you can find a way for just a single user to get value out of the product then you don't need to convince an entire team to adopt a new tool all at once. It could happen organically instead and over time. It would also give you a chance to slowly help/sell that team over time.
- the homepage doesn't really tell you what the product does. After signing up and playing a bit I now understand. Whats your conversion rate like from homepage visit to signup?
- I'd suggest telling users what the process is like. I didn't (and still don't) know whether everyone on my team gets an email every evening to fill out the info for the next day, or is it in the morning? Do you fill out what you did yesterday and what you plan on doing today?
- I think every companys process is slightly different, if you are convincing them to use a tool AND change their process you might run into difficulty. Maybe allow for different processes. We built an inhouse replacement for iDoneThis because we wanted something slightly different.
- The most important question is why do you only have one customer? Do they signup but stop using it? Do you not get enough signups? Do they signup and never invite their team? Have you asked them why? If all of the numbers in your funnel are really small, I would focus on the later steps. Make sure you built a product people want. Once your activation rate is high then start worrying about top of the funnel.
- forget the LinkedIn cold emailing. You're in the highest density startup city in the world, just walk right into any startup office you see and ask them to use the product
- Ask your engineer friends and other startups what they use and how you could get them to use your product instead
- We (Streak) would def use this if you adapted it to our process. I think our needs are very close to what you have. Find more customers like us and build what they need. Ask them to prepay you for 6-12 months for you to custom build whatever they need (we would do this). Reach out to me at aleem at streak.
Thanks for the detailed feedback! We cleaned up the homepage a bit and added a bit more of what the product does, but its probably still missing some details.
We will definitely reach out to you soon, thanks for the offer.
I thought he posted about the current page, which still isn't totally clear. How does one input stuff, when?
It is even possible it was there, but the cards looks mostly like "testimonials" (which they aren't) so it feels really easy to skim it.
There's also loads of "standup" tools already, which I assume this is. And do people like standups to begin with? I don't. Some of my days are just "still working on X".
As mentioned by others, not being able to try it out without signing up is a big impediment when it comes to showing rather than telling people what TakeAim does. A sandbox so people can try it out might be a high return marketing effort.
I'm not sold on the pricing model. It is trying to compete with free rather than on value and even worse it is competing against free internally. In a business context, if it isn't delivering value worth a $500 a month rate, it really doesn't matter if it's $30 or $80 or $5. And if it is delivering value at that rate, then $500 is a good place to anchor the price.
It also sets the expectations about quality and provides the money to create it and helps filter out the wrong type of customer. By which I mean that 500 customers at $30 a month are likely to churn and generate a lot of support work in minimally productive directions. 30 customers at $500 a month will provide serious focus and better feedback for pushing the project forward.
To put it another way, TakeAim is a bit toward the feature end of the feature->product spectrum. In terms of growth that means that it can probably scale better vertically [adding more functionality and user support] than horizontally [running more instances] because the current utility is limited to brief use every day.
The development arc of TakeAim seems to be BaseCamp's origin story. That might be a good model to look at both in terms of creating an ecosystem and pricing.
I think it solves a problem we have (if my understanding of your product is correct): We should focus less on the future and more on the present and past. That will save time and make for better progress evaluation.
In our team, we're managing upcoming work by epics, features, user stories and tasks (TFS style), all ahead of time. For the latter two, ages are spent estimating, in the process having feelings about risks. We're left with a bunch of tasks that only partially describe what we eventually realize needs to be done, leading us to choose between sticking to the tasks, thus producing a nice burndown chart, or doing what's best for the project.
For our team, the devs just want to know if we are spending our time in the best way possible:
1) What are we going to focus on today? Not completing, just focus on. That's mostly enough to align efforts.
2) What did we focus on yesterday, and can we evaluate progress? Steady? Slow? Stuck?
3) What did we actually end up focusing during the past week? Did we side track often or have to change direction?
However, without the future aspect, management probably wont bite, making this a tough sell. So maybe consider something that marries the two: Some high level future planning, breaking work down to epics and features only, and some focus tracking for daily alignment and performance evaluation.
It's possible you solved a problem only your company has. Did you try to evaluate other options in this space and see what you have that is new/different that other options? (If you have distinctions, are you marketing them well enough?)
Maybe your product does too little? If people are looking for a Standup Replacement/Aid there are more dedicated Slack bots. First example in bing: https://standupbot.com/
I realize that in my case at least, what I might use your app for can already/is already handled by Skype for Business. SfB has a "What's happening today?" status message that is easy to fill out as things change. It also has things like OOO and WFH (and busy and available) status information at a glance and pulled automatically from my/my coworkers Outlook calendars... Can you offer some reason to add another application to that equation?
Similarly, .plan is a million year old way of handling some of this; I can't quite see from your marketing how much of an advantage you offer over even a traditional .plan file (other than the fact that no one hardly uses .plan these days).
I've always thought that a performance evaluation system that focused on recognizing strong performance and identifying unrealistic expectations would have real potential. Considering the features of TakeAim, maybe that would be a possible pivot?
I'm afraid I won't be a lot of help in terms of gaining traction, but I can say that here at Big Corp this is a regular problem I have as a team lead. I don't know if the size of the company has anything to do with it, but I doubt it.
I think stand ups are not replaceable by this or much of anything since the face time and active communication are what is most important to me there. But, my memory isn't great and 30 minutes later I probably couldn't recap the meeting for you. Having something like this would help solve that, but I also know that I probably wouldn't keep my own up to date.
I could see something like this having really nice Jira integration, for whatever that's worth.
In remote teams issues with daily accountability are definitely a thing. I've tried a few approaches, full on project management is sometimes a little heavy, especially for non IT workers. I don't like to count bums in seats I just want to know what's going on and whether things are progressing. It seems like you've hit a nice sweet spot here, so definitely think about how you can get this in front of remote teams in particular?
I think your homepage needs some work. You can't see what the product is actually like, what problem(s) it solves and what features it has.
If I want to "Get Started" I need to sign up, I want to see what it is like first. There are no details of what you do with my email address if I sign up; Is there a trial? What can I do if I sign up but don't pay.
Small point: when I hover over the "cards" on the homepage in Chrome, the cards pop out slightly but the text blurs.
Just an idea (I know, I know, ideas aren't worth shit on HN :) but is this use case possible with what you have:
I'm trying to increase my productivity at the moment, so I'm creating 3 most important todos for the day in the morning. Can I set up a 'what I'm working on' card and have it publicly visible through an URL? So I can send the URL to a mentor, friend etc and they can see what I'm doing without having an account? Like a public view option...
Related to increasing productivity and a public view option, one thing that Ricardo Semler brings up in his book, Maverick, that is a big productivity boost for teams is to incorporate regular public mood feedback to allow an individual to communicate how they are generally feeling that day to the whole team. It can put a lot of interactions in context and is something that's been implemented by a number of companies, could be a potentially valuable addition to the product!
Hey, other cofounder here. We love the idea of having more public options like this and considered having a display mode to put on TVs around the office
Mozilla has a somewhat similar home-grown standup tool (Standup) that takes input from an IRC bot. The website lets readers filter by projects, teams, or individuals. I like how TakeAim's cards highlight on people's more recent status, where Standup is more like Twitter, where some people post frequently and drown out others' status comments.
Interesting, thanks for the feedback. The cards pictured are the core of the actual product. Do you think we should make it look more like a screenshot or declare that it is the actual product?
After 30s I figured that all you have to offer is the ability to write a 3x5cm sticky note. Useless. Ain't paying for it. (not to mention redundant with Trello)
I worked in a 50 people company and I understand the issues with following other people's work. That is a real problem to me. A sticky note is of no help, if there is a workflow around that thing, I don't see it and it's not explained.
How do you see this integrating with wider project and issue tracking tools. Most teams already rely heavily on these. Interesting to hear how you see this complimenting already existing project management stacks.
We work for a small startup in SF and have been part of its growth from 4 to 40 employees. As it grew, we felt less connected to the company, and had less opportunity to affect various projects and details of the business. We missed that. We went from a single team standup of the whole company to multiple different standups segmented by function. We saw a problem and decided we wanted a solution.
We built a side project within 6 months and got buy-in and usage from our current company. In fact, they ended up paying for it. We couldn't keep up the nights and weekends though and worked on it less and less. While we still had the 1 happy paying customer, we failed to get any more to stick. After a few months of little to no work on it, we decided we wanted to make one more push towards user acquisition. We asked for an 8 week part-time sabbatical and compromised for a 1 week vacation. We are more than halfway through that week and are still struggling to gain traction.
Here is what we have tried:
Cold emailing product managers on LinkedIn Content marketing with a blog post about a common standup Posting in related sub reddits about startups and project management / agile Emailing past users
We don't think we are a simple standup replacement or aid, but most people view us as that. We do support stand-ups and make them better, but does our product do too much? Or did we solve a problem that only exists at our company?