April 8th 2014.
5.5 workdays spent on the one-man startup in just less than 2 months.
The first week of April is over, and I have continued to work on the one-man startup whenever time has permitted. It hasn’t been often.
I decided the two most important things to move the project forward now are:
- Approximate the size of the potential market for my idea.
- Get code working as quickly as possible to validate the idea can work as an app.
Lesson 1:
Learn about virtual assistants.
For figuring out the market, I turned to my virtual assistant Ranjitha at GetFriday. I asked her to compile a list of to-do apps on the market, their Alexa popularity rankings, and their amount of users, if published. While I slept, Ranjitha came back with a list of 46 apps, all the info I asked for, and more:
- By counting just the seven apps that publish their user amounts, the combined number of to-do app users was over 27 million.
- The number of users did not correlate with the Alexa rankings. I would guess this is because mobile app users don’t boost the Alexa ranking of the app’s website.
So which to-do apps have the most users?
Well thanks for asking. I knew you would be interested. Here’s the top 7, ranked by their amount of users in April 2014 (as published by their own marketing, so take with an appropriate amount of salt). Also, I think there are other apps that might have more users, they just don’t publish the numbers:
- Any.do – over 9 million users
- Wunderlist – 6 million registered users
- Remember The Milk – over 5 million users
- Doit.im – over 4 million users for the Chinese contender!
- Trello – over 1.5 million users
- Todoist – over 1 million users
- HiTask – 0.5 million users
If you need time-consuming research, or any other task where the quality of the end result is not a matter of taste, I can only recommend hiring a virtual assistant. I don’t recommend hiring a virtual assistant to search for things you like personally. You will be disappointed.
Have you used a virtual assistant? Please comment here to chime in with your experiences.
Lesson 2:
What’s the minimum product that will prove your idea to yourself?
I knew I wanted to build a minimum viable product (MVP) to get my app to the users as quickly as possibly. But I also knew that because my to-do app will be competing against the hundred of other to-do apps out there, the MVP has to contain the feature that makes this different from all the other to-do apps. Otherwise there would be no point testing the app with users.
So, to first validate the usefulness of the differentiating feature to myself, I started working on the planning flow for my app. I already had a working, albeit crude, to-do app built with Rails, so I could start prototyping the feature that would make the difference.
Lesson 3:
Use the experiment board to illuminate the path forward.
The Experiment Board is a really useful tool created by Javelin. It’s like a canvas for running a lean startup. The app version of the experiment board is even cooler: it’s the same canvas, but the app takes you through step-by-step, from defining your hypotheses to validation and learning. I can only recommend these tools to anyone starting up.
Have you used the experiment board? What were your results?
Lesson 4:
The time is never right.
I set a goal to work 2 full days on the project every week. That’s not much, yet I haven’t met that goal. Everything else from client work to “important routines” seems to get done first, and this project that should be my passion, I work on only “when the time is right”. This is clearly not the way forward.
Nevertheless, when I do work on this project, I’m more excited about work than I’ve been in years.
Extra lesson for developers:
Don’t install new versions of developer tools without first googling for expected results. I simply clicked the innocent OS X Software Update notification, and the result was 1.5 hours of troubleshooting to get my Rails environment working again.
In the next post I’ll tell you about building and marketing the teaser site for my app. Stay tuned.☺
