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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=893239

by jd • 17 years ago

43 22 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

In the past 6 months our service Thymer.com was in Beta, and today we've finally bit the bullet and launched.

No regrets so far!

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.

Our server is feeling the load, but still very stable and responsive -- so we're doing OK on that front too. Crossing fingers.

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).

Thanks so much!

icey• 17 years ago

http://thymer.com

This looks pretty cool, congratulations!

I really like your signup form as well.

henriklied• 17 years ago

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!

jd3• 17 years ago

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

jeroen• 17 years ago

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

andrewljohnson• 17 years ago

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.

gsmaverick• 17 years ago

Love your natural language recognition. Seems very useful.

nudded• 17 years ago

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

percept2• 17 years ago

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.

jd3• 17 years ago

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.

percept2• 17 years ago

Thanks, and congratulations on your successful launch.

raheemm• 17 years ago

Congratulations! Your tag line is great!

tudorachim• 17 years ago

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.

jd3• 17 years ago

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.

fjabre2• 17 years ago

Drafts anyone?

thaumaturgy• 17 years ago

Nicely done!

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

larrykubin• 17 years ago

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.

fjabre2• 17 years ago

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.. =)

taitems• 17 years ago

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!

jamesbritt2• 17 years ago

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)?

ananthrk• 17 years ago

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.)?

philfreo• 17 years ago

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.

jamesbritt2• 17 years ago

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?

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

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