liberty7732
New member
Product
Spatial calendar. Like a regular one, but uses the human spatial perception to show what's close and what's far in time. Rich with color schemes for mood and better recall.
Use case: Currently, fit for casual personal planning for single-occurrence events and as a nicer view for your Google Calendar, and also syncs with it. Can display recurrent events and invitees. Can't edit recurrence, and the event's end time. I aim to add these shortly, they only lack because it was initially intended as a project management tool, and then I pivoted, as people have shown interest in the unusual view.
For who. Fact is different kinds of people like it – from creatives to chief operations officers. Many seem to be uncomfortable with existing calendars and they find this refreshing.
Market
I fail to establish even a market research methodology for this case.
Size: can't estimate properly. There must be tens of millions of people who use calendar apps for self-organization. A report (n = 1000) by Deloitte measured Australians smartphone usage for work habits. 67% of respondents use smartphones for work. Out of which 29% use it for calendar management. 0.67*0.29 = 0.1943,
so ~19% of respondents use it smartphone for calendaring. I expect numbers of the same magnitude for the laptop/PC users.
By platform [2]: Desktop apps (23.3) / Mobile apps 46.7%, Paper 26.9%
Google Calendar boasts 500M downloads, but it's not a DAU metric, and it's a free app. Same-ish 400-600M calendar users we get if we count 3Bn devices and take 20% from Australian data. I fail to make sense of those numbers as of yet.
Competition: ECAL’s user statistics for 2017 claim that the most popular mobile calendars are: Apple (25.38% of all users), Google (25.11%), and Windows Live (4.52%). The most popular desktop calendar programs in use are Google (15.44% of all users), Apple (7.77%), Outlook (5.15%), and Windows Live (4.76%).
Apple-ecosystem calendars like Fantastical 3, which may be the most prominent paid calendaring product. Also Calendly.
Other: Any.do, Timepage, Vantage (12k ratings in App Store). Upcoming – vimcal, cron.app, useMotion.
Alternativeto.net lists 110 alternatives for Google Calendar.
Dynamics: smartphone penetration is growing. New calendar apps are emerging, and some are going down (Woven (VC-funded, bought out)). Google and Apple calendars are slowly getting better, subjectively.
Product analysis
Users enjoy the design and colors. After playing for a few days they usually leave. I blame bugs and lack of critical features. There were a couple of deal-breaking bugs, hanging around for months, so they managed to kill a lot of interest. Since the launch on PH in June 2020 I've been fixing bugs and implementing critical features. It's just 3 tiny features away from being a 99% use cases alternative to Google Calendar.
Ambition is to become a personal intelligence and intents platform, allow to manage projects and knowledge.
I think a huge UX drawback might be a lack of native mobile clients. Lightpad is a PWA, so it can look and work LIKE a native app, but with some limitations (lack of background sync, for instance).
Fantastical seems like a pro app, that has more features or more use-cases covered, and polished mobile clients. I think Lightpad covers most of the popular use-cases. Some would argue that separate apps are better. Also, a disputable statement as some people prefer to have all knowledge/intent data in one place. Don't have any data to prove either claim. I'd say separate apps are good if they're a family, so intents and knowledge should be inside the same platform.
Stage and needs
Bootstrapped. I've made 11 sales, 2 subscribers are still paying $5/mo. Lazily raising. Considering working atm. Looking for a sales partner, tho. I'm sitting on 3k+ emails from signups doing nothing to convert them (was fixing bugs).
Customer conversion strategy
Product Hunt and consequent two mentions in Fast Company best apps of the year lists brought 15k visitors to the site who then converted into 3k signups. Don't have an actual working strategy. Thoughts are:
- Email dripping. A better newsletter to bring those who left back.
- Explore mindful entrepreneurship influencers on Instagram. Don't have the resources for real ads.
- Add social components – allow users to bring friends proactively – let them invite friends and share their events.
Why you?
I'm a frontend-centric full stack web dev with 10 years of experience. I can imagine user interfaces that frontend developers don't want to implement. And I can implement interfaces that designers didn't know were possible. I'm studying the related topics – thinking patterns, brain science, psych, and I like building these tools for thought for myself.
Overall thoughts
I enjoy the ride and I enjoy my product myself. E.g. this text was written in Lightpad. I also love when other people are enjoying it. I'm reaching out and asking for feedback but maybe I should do this even more. I'm a bit tired of living cheap, out of my own living space. Not sure if I should raise though. I'm certainly looking for a sales partner, I can provide a great level of transparency.
Why so low. Many people seem to like or even love the concept, but still leave. I working across the funnel to identify and fix the bottlenecks. For some time there was an issue with accepting payments. Most of the sales came in December after I've fixed a few bugs and improved the payment experience. A couple of pesky ones were fixed after. Returning users count has stabilized around 20, and I'm devising the next set of promotions and feedback sessions before the next product iteration.
I'm also not sure about the subscription model. Maybe it's too early to guess, as I didn't have a proper amount of data. But maybe it should be e.g. an eternal version purchase? Fantastical had this model – eternal copy for $40. Then they switched to annual subscription and many users complained on Twitter.
I would love to make it a local-first / box version, so you could install it and use separately from the cloud, it's just that a web version is simpler for me to make at the start.
Critique requests
Hey, roast me brutal. Wholistic critique is welcome, but also don't be shy to tell that you don't like the product's name, logo, font or color choice, etc.
[1] - https://landing.deloitte.com.au/rs/761-IBL-328/images/tmt-mobile-consumer-survey-2017_pdf.pdf
[2] - https://ecal.com/70-percent-of-adults-rely-on-digital-calendar/