Alldone.app pitch and why it’s not just another todo app

Alldone.app is a team collaboration tool which enables all companies to work like the best digital product teams.
It allows everybody in your company — so not only product engineers & designers but also your business or go-to-market-colleagues — to easily manage their tasks, notes, goals & contacts in an agile & collaborative way with great workflows. No configuration or training necessary. It just works and is fun to use. Or to put it in different terms: Alldone.app is an easy-to-use version of JIRA + Confluence + more for everybody.

Now that we have the executive summary out of the way let’s start with the pitch. One of the best tips I have ever got to create a good startup pitch was to spend more time thinking about defining the problem than about describing the solution. So let’s start with the problem Alldone is trying to solve:

The high level problem is that teams & companies significantly lose productivity with an increasing number of employees. This is especially true for any “project business” where a team needs to work together creatively to solve a problem. The good news is that digital product development teams have managed to make significant progress in that area by using agile tools & processes. This is not really news and well accepted within the industry: Consulting companies like my current employer BCG are selling billions of dollars worth of “agile transformation projects” every year to make traditional companies more productive by making them more agile. However becoming truly agile is not easy and a lot of companies have a hard time adapting to the change.

One of the main reasons is that in a lot of cases those companies do a good job in changing their processes but don’t have the right tools to make those new processes a “habit” for their employees. Every new process needs to be easier / better to use for the employee than the one before — otherwise it will take a lot of effort & training to get them adopted. Therefore it does not help that oftentimes companies just use tools made for product companies to work agile. However those tools are way too complex to use for the purpose of normal “business” users. Just to give an example: It’s ok for an engineer to spend a few minutes in Trello or JIRA to create a ticket for a development task because she will likely spend a few hours working on that task. However a business user very likely has a lot of “5 minute tasks” like calling somebody or aligning on a certain approach — if the task takes only 5 minutes to do, then he is not willing to spend minutes to add the task properly into his tool.

This is an example for tasks / tickets but in order to work truly agile you also need to master additional areas: How do you handle your note-taking to make sure knowledge generated can be accessed and contributed by everybody? How do you write down your goals & roadmap to make sure the whole team works in the same direction? Do you have a proper contact management “CRM” in place to make sure to get the most out of your team and all stakeholders/partners remain happy? And probably the most important point: Do you have a proper learnings / iteration cycle by which your team gets better over time and your next project can leverage the learnings of the previous one?

As you can see in the slide above there are a lot of excellent digital tools available for all of these problems — and all of them are way too complex to use for “non-digital-product” people. Therefore most business users use tools made for personal use for those areas: They use Apple Notes or Evernote for note-taking, they use todoist, pen & paper or maybe nothing at all for task management. They use powerpoint to write down learnings. These are all great tools but they do lack all the team collaboration benefits you get from true agile tools. Or how often did you share an Apple Note manually with a colleague? Did you enjoy copy & pasting it in an email .. and the resulting email-overload in your inbox?

Obviously Alldone.app is now the solution to the described problem. It enables all companies to work like the best digital product teams because it is as fast & easy to use as the best apps made for personal use while enabling a truly agile collaboration between all team members with great workflows between its features. Furthermore it encourages to capture & leverage learnings so your next project will be even better than your current one.

While Alldone.app is still evolving the screen above gives a good impression of what to expect. The screen shows the task management part and it should look familiar to you — and that’s the point of it. As mentioned above the design goal is that it is as easy to use as the best apps made for personal use. However if you look closer you can also see that it has been optimised for teams. For example at the bottom of the screen you see the “done” tasks from everybody in your team — not only from yourself.

If we go on to the notes part again it should look familiar if you have ever used a personal note-taking app like Apple Notes or Evernote. However it is as collaborative as a Google Doc with everybody in your project team having automatically access to it if you don’t mark it private. Team collaboration is the default in Alldone.app.

Above you can also see an example of the great workflow integration in Alldone between different features. Let’s imagine you are writing some meeting notes and want to distribute tasks — pretty standard. With Alldone.app all you need to do is to @mention your colleagues to automatically create real tasks which also show up in the task list of your colleagues. This way nobody has to look again into the meeting notes to not forget a follow up.

There are many more examples of how Alldone.app enables teamwork and great workflows — however for now I want to talk about how Alldone.app enables a Learnings & Iteration cycle — probably the most important area to work truly agile. While it is easy to reuse code or design systems, up until now it is really hard to re-use process & knowledge learnings for business users. Writing it down in a PPT is not really actionable and very likely knowledge in a PPT will be forgotten very soon. Alldone.app now encourages its users to curate “packages” of tasks, notes, goals and contacts for certain themes — let’s say to “how to create a brand”. It contains a checklist with the typical tasks, some notes with a list of the best branding agencies to work with, typical milestones and expert contacts within your company. The next project can then easily download such a “branding package” into its own project and just work on it. Even better: Alldone can proactively recommend this branding package if it sees the user having the todo “create brand”. This way companies can finally leverage their scale. I can’t wait to use this myself!

As mentioned above Alldone.app mostly competes with apps made for personal use. It will convince users with its superior team collaboration features and better workflows between the features while being as simple to use as their current tools.

Therefore Alldone will initially target small to medium sized companies or local/country offices between 5 and 500 employees with less than 50% of their workforce working in actual product development.

Pricing will follow the standard SaaS model with a free tier & prices starting at around 10 EUR/USD per user per month with higher prices for bigger or enterprise customers.

Alldone.app will be selling into a fast growing market segment — according to this Gartner study it will almost double to 5bn USD until 2023. However luckily i don’t need all of them since for now Alldone is a side-business :)

I love digital product development. There is nothing more fun than working in a truly agile team who just gets stuff done and builds great stuff. Therefore I am super excited to bring all the learnings from 20 years of digital product development to the rest of the workforce. Let’s get it all done :)

You can find more stories about Alldone.app here.