

Tell HN: We just launched Thymer - Task and Project management service - jd

In the past 6 months our service Thymer.com was in Beta, and today we've finally bit the bullet and launched.<p>No regrets so far!<p>We got our first sales minutes after going live, and now we're dealing with the many emails we get in our inbox every minute. A good portion of those have a GMail tag "gotpaid", indicating that we just got another sale.<p>Our server is feeling the load, but still very stable and responsive -- so we're doing OK on that front too. Crossing fingers.<p>The point of this post? Not much. It's just that this kind of post inspired us to put in unreasonable ours ourselves. Just wanted to say thanks for all the advice and encouragement we've gotten on this board (under various aliases).<p>Thanks so much!
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percept
If you don't mind, how did your beta testers and first customers find you?

Such a crowded market makes SEO difficult, and I think the AdWords rates in
that area run $10+ CPC.

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jd
We had roughly 10k beta testers, many of which found eachother (we have team
features and you can create accounts/invites for other people in your team),
we used beta keys, invite codes, all kind of things. Twitter and blogs also
played a big role. Big ones (mashable and such) gave us spikes in new signups,
but other blogs (lifehacking.nl) and other more targeted sites gave us higher
quality subscribers.

We haven't done any adwords at all, even though I have a bunch of free $50
adwords vouchers. It just didn't seem worth it for a private beta.

We plan to talk about this in more detail in a future blog post, when we're
fairly certain that our approach was successful.

~~~
percept
Thanks, and congratulations on your successful launch.

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icey
<http://thymer.com>

This looks pretty cool, congratulations!

I really like your signup form as well.

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fjabre
Very unique and thoughtful approach. Nice work.

I love how it isn't a blatant basecamp rip like so many other project/task
management apps out there.

Also, I would get a woman to do the voice over. No offense.. I just think your
85% male target market will appreciate it more.. =)

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larrykubin
Played around with it a little bit. I think you should move the Green "Today"
line above the tasks planned for today. Right now, the tasks are all above it
and I find that awkward for some reason.

I'd rather it be more like:

[ Today ] -------------------

task 1 for today

task 2 for today

[ Later ] -------------------

Oct 21 task X for later

Oct 26 task Y for next week

Also, I'd prefer for the later dates to be on the left, since "Today Oct 20"
is on the left. I'd just like to scan down the left side column and see all of
the dates for the tasks.

The sign up form is interesting and it made sense to me, but I think some
people I have dealt with would be confused by the password is _____; yes
really ______.

Didn't notice anything about invoicing or leveraging the @billable. Is it
possible to write "coded web interface @2hr @$75 for @someclient". It'd be
cool to log my time + a dollar amount, then be able to send an invoice to
@someclient that totals the $ amounts for tasks logged in a date range.

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henriklied
Looking very good!

One thing, I'd try to eliminate all typos before launching. "Get projects
dones" should be "Get projects done". To be quite frank, I don't quite feel
the dynamic in that sentence.

Run over your copywriting, and you've got a great starting point!

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jd
Ack, good catch. Fixed it. In fact, rewrote the sentence altogether. Thanks!

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jeroen
Some more: "It's a huge time-saver and gives you peace of mind and feel
organized.", "a dozen of menus", "distracting bells and whistle", "search to
find back", "solving a single problem at the time".

And in the code: <http://vldtr.com/?key=thymer.com>

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taitems
Just some pieces of constructive critcism; the flow of information on the
homepage is very confusing. I can't quite make out what you want the user to
look at first, nor what is the most important information on the page.

Your call to action button is also the same colour as the YouTube caption
label.

You also jump from centred to right aligned text a lot. I can see what you're
trying to go for, but this doesn't seem to work on this occassion.

Hopefully you take my comments in the right light!

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gsmaverick
Love your natural language recognition. Seems very useful.

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thaumaturgy
Nicely done!

The tag line -- "Project management and task planning for people who hate
project management and task planning" -- really got my attention.

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philfreo
Congrats! When I read the first tagline I thought great... just another clone
of Basecamp/Harvest/Freshbooks/Tickspot/etc. But it looks like you're doing
something really unique and I like it.

I also love your signup form. Everyone should geo-target like that.

One note: the CSS of the app in Safari 4 has some problems, particularly
around the top menu bar.

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nudded
In your signup form: when you try to signup for more than 25 users, it just
says "mail us". I suggest making that clickable.

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andrewljohnson
I think the name is a bit... random.

Thyme is a spice, and it seems like you chose it because it sounds like time.
Unfortunately, what it looks like is a lot more important than what it sounds
like on the internet.

Your name is going to confuse both potential customers and probably the search
engines as well.

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jamesbritt
I just started using it, and it seems prety basic (in a mostly good way), but
the reliance on dynamic HTML drives me nuts.

How can I link to a specific item? How do I pass URLs to specific items in,
say, irc?

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jamesbritt
I plan on giving this a whirl, but I'm wondering: Is there a REST API so I can
push and pull data from handy scripts and not have to pop open a browser (for
example, to get a list of open items)?

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tudorachim
It's very slick. It would be nice to have a task automatically save its
changes once you click somewhere else on the screen, instead of having to
click on the "Save" button.

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jd
We thought about that, but often pressing Esc, or clicking away is associated
with "undo, oops, I didn't want that". We figured when Thymer would
save/overwrite user data without explicit permission it would result needless
frustration for our users.

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fjabre
Drafts anyone?

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ananthrk
Congratulations on the launch.

If I may ask, why such a prolonged Beta period (6 months?) and what did you
learn during this phase (in terms of features, etc.)?

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raheemm
Congratulations! Your tag line is great!

