
iDoneThis – Simple Team Performance Management - c-oreills
https://idonethis.com/
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jasonshen
Look guys - you _personally_ might not pay $5/mo because you work alone or in
a small team, or you could use App Scripts to recreate the services. Try to
look beyond that to the fact that millions of businesses pay tons of money to
improve team performance.

If by using iDoneThis you can get a 1% improvement on a team of 5 people that
you pay $70k, that's $3,500 worth of value on an annual basis, or $58 per
"user" per month. That makes it worth 10x the cost.

Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile has written about how work
diaries can help professionals understand themselves and improve their own
performance, in addition to the coordination offered by insight into other
people.
[http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/04/four_reasons_to_keep_a_work_...](http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/04/four_reasons_to_keep_a_work_di.html)

Most managers and business owners are busy with a million things and they want
a simple, easy-to-use solution that JUST WORKS without them having to think
about it. If they are using no form of team management, iDoneThis is
infinitely better.

I admit the name is a little awkward at first, but it's definitely memorable.
BTW: I'm not particularly good friends with these guys nor am compensated for
supporting them.

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smalter
Absolutely, Jason. As an additional note, Professor Amabile recommends
idonethis and she likes the product so much that she decided to invest.
[http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/05/06/179072...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/05/06/179072692/when-
it-comes-to-productivity-technology-can-hurt-and-help)

~~~
reaclmbs
feature request.

for software teams.

at EOD write "how you are going to quickly jump back into code". This
introduces a business process to enforce a cognitive best practice that leads
to much faster "stack load" times.

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MattGrommes
I've been using IDoneThis for over a year and I really like it, but I guess
I'm on their old pricing plan since I only pay like $15 a year. Looks like
they're focussing on higher-paying business customers.

For me though, it's a great way of just keeping a little track of what I did
that day. I put what I've done on my website, things I did with my kids, my
accomplishments in Minecraft, all that stuff that it doesn't make sense to
store in some other tracker. It seems like a small thing but just having an
email come in and I respond to it is a perfect way of updating this type of
journal. Plus it gives you a calendar with checkmarks for every day you update
so it's a nice habit former to see all those checks lined up (see Jerry
Seinfeld's calendar system).

~~~
smalter
That makes me very happy to hear. Thanks so much for your comment, Matt.

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thetrumanshow
HN (this thread's commenters in particular), I love you guys on the whole, but
you need to learn that just because its easy for you to build doesn't mean it
doesn't provide value to someone else. There are probably customers that exist
to which $5/user/month is an excellent deal given their specific pain points.

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leowidrich
I can't speak highly enough of IDoneThis - we've been using it for months at
Buffer and it's absolutely changed the way we work. The reasons IDoneThis is
invaluable to us, is that it allows us to track back performance (which easily
gets lost in a chat room or an in-person standup). On top of this, if new
people come on board, they can look through the previous IDoneThis notes and
see what has been worked on. Oh and of course, not to mention that it's
amazing to keep in sync with everyone if you are working as a remote team like
we do. IDoneThis has changed our productivity for the better.

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MattRogish
So this is like an automated standup thing? We get by with just having a chat
room called "Standup" where people do likewise, and it's free (or nearly so,
given Campfire pricing).

To be honest, I'd rather that Pivotal Tracker, Trello, etc. did this for me.
Anything manual that can be automated, should. Why would Bob Developer waste
time re-stating what the tools we use already know?

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jackmaney
At the risk of sounding blunt, what value does IDoneThis ( _shudder_ couldn't
you have picked a better name?) provide that an email chain can't? Especially
since email is essentially free (or, at the very least, less than
$5/user/month)?

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jonathanjaeger
Similar idea to 15five, similar pricing: <http://www.15five.com/>

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sspross
Can you add more information/screenshots of your fancier features like history
reports to your demo?

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smalter
You're right and we're working on making all that more descriptive.

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EGreg
I am quite interested how idonethis got those quotes from Dan Pink and other
well connected people. How did you land all those famous customers? Is that
for real?

Looking at archive.org, they launched in mid 2011.

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smalter
Hi Greg, Dan Pink has used idonethis every day for over 2 years. He loves the
product so much that he decided to invest. [http://lifehacker.com/im-daniel-
pink-and-this-is-how-i-work-...](http://lifehacker.com/im-daniel-pink-and-
this-is-how-i-work-509280806)

Many of these prominent people found us via word of mouth and our popular
blog.

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dchuk
The name of this product is so grammatically infuriating to me

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reaclmbs
Congratulations on living in a cultural vacuum!

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_Eng...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_English)

~~~
flexxaeon
While I recognize the phrase "I done this" within the vernacular, I'd not try
to quantify it as such.

Let's leave it at fun/quirky.

~~~
reaclmbs
I think it's disrespectful to call it quirky, especially considering their
international customer base.

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scottksmith95
Like others here, the cost seems very high for what it does. I would love to
hear more on why it is worth $5 per user per month.

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rmrfrmrf
You could recreate this entire service in Google for free using Apps Scripts.

~~~
smalter
Our customers find the service valuable enough to pay for it and many are tech
companies like Heroku and Uber.

We've had a few companies who switched from creating something like this on
their own to becoming paying customers because it saves their valuable time
and they see the love and improvements we put into the product daily. It's the
beauty of SaaS, really.

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astrostl
Sweet sassy molassy, $5/user/month?

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skrebbel
If this tool doesn't add at least $5/user/month of value to your team, you
shouldn't be using it anyway.

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sdfjkl
That costs money? Huh.

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patrickmay
How does this compare/contrast with Trello?

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quarterto
It's... totally a different thing. Did you even read the website?

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patrickmay
Why yes, yes I did. Thank you for asking.

This is a way of tracking tasks completion. It appears to have much less
structure than even a straightforward tool like Trello. Perhaps my question
would have been better phrased as: What value does this provide over a tool
like Trello or Basecamp?

~~~
kareemm
It's a daily, high-level summary of what your team got done in a given day,
prompted by and delivered to your inbox

It's also easy to look up completed tasks in the web app.

