Living the Llama Life
Diving deep into Llama Life, a new addition to the Black Sheep Capital portfolio.
In a post-COVID world, productivity and collaboration tools have become a hallmark of digital teams. We all have our preferred mix of Slack, Asana, Trello, Google docs, and even draft emails, to manage our daily work. And these tools facilitate a critical function for distributed teams like ours, enabling us to map, assign, collaborate and prioritise tasks across our various projects. But despite their features, and despite the need for them, something just doesn’t connect for me.
I don’t want to live in any of these tools. In fact, I barely want to spend more than 10 minutes in a given productivity tool at a time. The long lists of tasks, the Kanban boards and the Gantt charts — they are necessary to articulate everything happening in the team, but they aren’t the representation of my work that I want to look at throughout my day.
In the ’21 Workgeist Report from Cornell University’s Ellis Ideas Lab, researchers found that workers spend an average of 59 minutes per day searching for information within their suite of applications. Over half of workers surveyed said that their software tools make it harder to find information. Citrix’s Work Your Way Report reported similar findings; 64% of workers are now using more communication and collaboration tools than pre-pandemic, and 71% say that their work is more complex as a result. Too many productivity tools are hampering, not helping, us to manage our workloads.
Cue Llama Life
What is Llama Life?
Llama Life is a hybrid productivity and wellbeing app, with a focus on empowering individuals to manage their daily tasks in a calm way. It’s the tool that is designed for you to use everyday, through your whole day.
At first glance, Llama Life is deceptively simple. The tool encourages you to work on one task at a time. Users input the tasks that they want to work on for the day, as well as how much time they want to spend on them. You can either select from a pie chart timer or a countdown timer, and then progress your tasks in the order they appear. You can create Preset Lists, as shown in the right panel below, that you are able to load automatically each day.
So, why is Llama Life so good?
It’s a productivity app designed to spark joy.
Llama Life’s mission is distinct. The tool aims to empower individuals to manage their daily tasks in a calm way. It’s not about managing time, but instead about managing attention, so that at the end of one’s task list, you feel accomplished and calm about the day’s progress.
Each day, you pick and choose your critical tasks. I’ve found that just by having Llama Life on my computer, silently ticking away in the background, I’m being more diligent and focussed while the clock is on, with the comfort of knowing I’ve prescheduled a few small breaks as tasks.
And… it’s fun to use! Not only is the product visually pleasing, but the animation and sound associated with completing a task gives you a little dopamine hit.
There is one epic founder.
Llama Life’s founder Marie had spent years looking for a productivity solution that helped her to manage her ADHD, and allow her to manage her workflow without switching between tasks and feeling overwhelmed. Llama Life’s focus on calm productivity and time management is specifically geared to help those with attention deficits to approach their workflow differently.
In 2020, Marie decided to go full-time on Llama Life after teaching herself how to code during early days of the pandemic. To date, she has done all technical development on Llama Life herself — as well as marketing and branding. Marie’s experience working across advertising and marketing firms in Melbourne, London and New York have imbued in her how to grow brand awareness and loyalty. She knows how to connect with digital natives online (check her out on Twitter at @threehourcoffee) and she has steadily built a fan base that has translated into fully organic user acquisition for Llama Life.
The tool already has ardent believers.
Llama Life is an incredibly polarising tool. For many people, it just doesn’t suit their workflow. But for those that love it, they really love it. In our initial conversations with founder Marie, we were struck by the evangelising by Llama Life subscribers on social media. People were just raving about how Llama Life had changed their entire mindsets around work. Some were even creating fan art and designs for Llama Life… just because they loved the product that much.
When we dug into Llama Life’s customer numbers, it became really interesting. Of those who trial Llama Life, approximately 90% will stop the trial within one to two days, quickly realising that it isn’t for them. For the 10% that convert from free to paid, they have a retention rate of 94%. That 10% that Llama Life targets are digital workers, often leaders of small teams in start-ups or agencies, who crave calm productivity. Although the product is currently direct to consumer, the fact that Llama Life is meant to be used consistently throughout your work day by nature makes it more sticky than many DTC SaaS apps. The high retention and overwhelming customer love indicated to us that Llama Life is solving a critical problem for its target audience.
Our own experience as a team has echoed this; two members of our team have found Llama Life to be an essential in daily life (spoiler alert; I am one of them). Within a few days of using Llama Life, I noticed a shift in my approach to work. I became more structured, less distracted by email and Slack notifications, and I was able to stretch the amount of time I dedicated to any given task by leveraging the Llama Life countdown timer. Since September 2021, I have used Llama Life every single working day.
A big welcome to Llama Life 🎉
We’re stoked to have participated in Llama Life’s pre-seed round alongside the LAUNCH Syndicate and Jason Calacanis, and can’t wait to continue this journey alongside Marie.
And…if you’ve made it this far and this sounds like the tool for you, Llama Life offers a 7-day, no credit card free trial. Go ahead, live the Llama Life!
