
A Stupid Idea, 1 Year After Launching on HN - rguzman
http://blog.idonethis.com/post/14510782165/a-stupid-idea-one-year-later
======
nathanbarry
I built an iPhone app called Commit that tackles this very problem. It is in
the review process right now and should be released in the next couple of
days.

You can read a bit about it here: <http://nathanbarry.com/a-little-bit-each-
day/>

~~~
lusr
I had this idea about 2 years ago and didn't bother building it when I looked
at the competition in the space (evidently many people have had this idea).
Now I see these guys have 500,000 users... I guess the space was larger than I
thought :)

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wantrepreneur
They dont have 500k users.Did you even read the article?

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auston
I've been following the iDoneThis story since before it was iDoneThis. Walter
(one of the co-founders) is scrappy & I don't doubt he will find success!

~~~
brianmwang
You should see his Muta Baneling combo as well. Terrifying.

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graysnorf
How does he handle a TLO-style mech. terran?

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LeonW
Wow, this is an amazing story guys. Especially the part on how you hit 152
users on the first day with Hn, just gives to show how powerful the platform
is.

Anyone else got a story on how HN helped them launch their startup?

~~~
ryanwaggoner
We actually launched something similar to this on Nov 1, 2010 at
<http://21times.org>. We had over 1000 people from HN sign up within the first
72 hours, and about another 500 over the next few weeks. We reposted it again
on Nov 1, 2011 and had another 1000 people or so sign up.

The idea of 21times has morphed into a full startup called DailyPath
(<http://dailypath.com>) and we're currently working full-time on it while
doing an incubator in Portland (<http://piepdx.com>)

Hacker News is crazy :)

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aymeric
How do you plan to monetize iDoneThis?

~~~
smalter
Freemium

Edit: All accounts right now are free forever. We're building premium features
for the business use case which we'll charge for. Everything right now is free
forever.

~~~
AznHisoka
Hmm.. I like the service, but don't think I would pay for it. EverNote is
considered one of the elite apps in the productivity space and it's just
$5/month... so something to think about.

~~~
mhartl
Businesses might. They are usually much less price-sensitive. And that makes
sense: if your business gets just a little bit more done as a result of using
a service, it almost certainly pays for itself.

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jc4p
Congrats, looks very interesting! It's even something I would recommend that
my mom start using since it's so easy to get started.

Who else signed up just to see how they were sending out e-mails? What steps
are you taking to make sure o1.email.idonethis.com goes past Hotmail/Yahoo's
spam filters that are notoriously deadly?

~~~
rguzman
email deliverability is a huge can of worms. i didn't know that when we first
prototyped it. we noticed that our test emails were going to spam on walter's
account as we were getting ready to send out the first bunch of emails. so, we
opted for sending the emails by hand from a gmail account using bcc while we
figured out how to tackle the problem.

it became clear very quickly that this would be hard to solve ourselves
quickly, so we tried mailchimp (which is not well-suited at all) and
eventually went with sendgrid.

nowadays there are 4 or 5 similar providers that you can use: amazon,
sendgrid, mailgun, and a couple of others that i can't remember right now.

we haven't had a good reason to start doing that in-house, yet.

~~~
jph00
Definitely outsource this. I wrote this post comparing prices for some service
providers: [http://jphoward.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/40month-to-send-
my-...](http://jphoward.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/40month-to-send-my-emailare-
you-serious/) . The cheapest (FastMail.FM) is orders of magnitude cheaper.
They've been in business since 1999.

(Disclaimer: I founded FastMail.FM, although I sold it a few years ago and no
longer have any financial or operational relationship.)

~~~
jc4p
When at my old company we switched between multiple mail companies we didn't
pay the initial quote that any of the companies gave us. However none of the
big names we used are on your chart.

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hkyeti
Great stuff, am a user.

Is that graph is cumulative tasks done?

Do you have a chart of daily active users? Would be a better indication of
momentum, given each user may do several daily tasks.

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Zuzz
don't get me wrong, it's great and all but... 1 year later, full-time gig, and
what about money?

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smalter
hi Zuzz -- we were able to raise.

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Zuzz
hi! thanks, I read that but doesn't say anything about monetisation: 1 year on
any idea how you might make some money?

UPDATE: read reply above

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brador
Which reply? I'm not seeing a viable monetization method here...

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blhack
Freemium addons that are as of yet undisclosed.

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matthewj
Nice. Really curious how you will monetize it and continue to grow it further.

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pardner
So... next you'll add Twilio support so people can do it by SMS, right?

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rguzman
maybe... smartphone apps would scratch a very similar itch and those will
happen first.

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theSuda
Just signed up. Lets see what happens next :) Waiting for my first evening
mail. Though I would probably reply 'Not much :| '

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abcd_f
So I would guess you guys have few thousand user accounts? How many stay
active after a week if you don't mind me asking?

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rguzman
we have a lot more than a few thousand and ~30% of our users are active.

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karlzt
20,000 right?

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hkyeti
6000 active users max (30% of 20,000 users)

6000 active users sharing 5 items a week (I guess it should be a lot more and
you get more than one thing done each day)

= 120,000 messages in a month, roughly what the graphic implies

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leslyn
Congrats on the success!! It's inspiring to see what might be looked on as a
'stupid idea' to turn out "not so stupid"!

~~~
smalter
Thank you!

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lcs
+1 for iDoneThis and congrats. I've been using it for the past 4 weeks and
enjoying it.

~~~
smalter
Thanks so much. Glad to hear that you've been liking our service. Don't
hesitate to email me if you have some thoughts on how we can improve (walter
at idonethis dot com).

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gbog
I like the simplicity of the idea, but I would not enjoy a daily mail with a
colloquial tone as is used in the website. Maybe because I'm nearing my
forties...

I have a similar reaction when the cigarette paper I buy use "tu" instead of
"vous" to address me (in French).

I suppose one can choose to write something like “What’d you get done today?”
because the normal way “'d be borin'”, but in fact and all things well
considered, the colloquial tone is more boring (to me), after two or three
reads.

