A Stupid Idea, 1 Year After Launching on HN

http://blog.idonethis.com/post/14510782165/a-stupid-idea-one-year-later

by rguzman • 15 years ago

149 47 15 years ago

blog.idonethis.com

LeonW• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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 :)

leslyn• 15 years ago

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

smalter7• 15 years ago

Thank you!

auston• 15 years ago

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!

smalter7• 15 years ago

thanks so much, Auston!

brianmwang• 15 years ago

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

graysnorf• 15 years ago

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

pardner• 15 years ago

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

rguzman4• 15 years ago

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

aymeric3• 15 years ago

How do you plan to monetize iDoneThis?

smalter7• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

rkalla• 15 years ago

... so I use the service for too long (more than a year) and I have to pay to see my longer unbroken chain, or I get too much stuff done and I pay?

Just not clear on the pay-premium cutpoint.

ScottBurson• 15 years ago

This is cute. If you would let me enter a list of things I want to get done, and include the ones I haven't checked off yet in the daily email, it would be even better... maybe even worth a little money.

lcs• 15 years ago

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

smalter7• 15 years ago

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).

jc4p3• 15 years ago

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?

rguzman4• 15 years ago

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.

jc4p3• 15 years ago

That's exactly why it interested me. At my previous company we had the same problem, we went through everyone of the big names until we found one that was the least expensive and had the least hassle. My wish was to roll our own mail server since the majority of what we did could easily be automated and would save our "marketing team" (one person) a lot of time, but there was just no time for that either.

Mailchimp was the funnest experience though, they say they have absolutely no phone support and everything is "self-service support", our marketing guy e-mailed back and forth with one of their higher-ups until they said "there are no phones in our office!" My co-worker then spent the rest of the day prowling over their Flickr account until he found some phones in the background of a shot of their company holiday party.

I figure since you're doing very simple e-mails (for good reason), you don't have to roll your own over fear of spam detection (HTML e-mails + using an IP that someone else had used maybe inappropriately before can lead to a high spam score) unless cost becomes an issue.

jph00• 15 years ago

Definitely outsource this. I wrote this post comparing prices for some service providers: http://jphoward.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/40month-to-send-my-... . 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.)

Zuzz2• 15 years ago

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

smalter7• 15 years ago

hi Zuzz -- we were able to raise.

Zuzz2• 15 years ago

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

abcd_f• 15 years ago

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?

rguzman4• 15 years ago

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

karlzt2• 15 years ago

20,000 right?

nathanbarry• 15 years ago

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/

aymeric3• 15 years ago

You guys should work together so that your app work with their system.

eps2• 15 years ago

Sentiments of the HN brotherhood aside - why?

lusr• 15 years ago

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 :)

wantrepreneur• 15 years ago

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

karlzt2• 15 years ago

they have 20,000+ users http://idonethis.com/jobs/

matthewj• 15 years ago

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

hkyeti2• 15 years ago

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.

theSuda• 15 years ago

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

gbog• 15 years ago

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.

A Stupid Idea, 1 Year After Launching on HN

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