FlowTree: Dynamic personal task coach to maximize your value output

[armando23]

Thanks for any feedback!

FlowTree is an automated todo list maximizing personal effectiveness by suggesting the best tasks to work on
http://flowtree.net

Target audience:
- primary: people working on several different ‘projects’ in parallel, with lots of different tasks coming from several different directions (e.g. small business owners, students, project managers, work-at-home freelancers, lawyers with several clients, etc.)
- secondary: anyone trying to get organized and looking for a tool to help keep on top of things with minimal hassle

What is does differently than its competition:
- User can assign impact, effort, and urgency values to each task, and FlowTree calculates a value from these. Values can dynamically change over time
- The list is kept sorted by value so choosing what to work on next is a matter of simply picking something from the top of the list
- Values change day by day based on urgency and other settings. Distractions will sink to the bottom and important tasks will rise to the top automatically. Also, something due in three days will gradually float up in the coming days
- Thanks to this automation, the manual work needed to maintain the list is minimized

Current stage: looking for early adopters and feedback.

Customer conversion strategy: very early stages, experimenting with approaches at the moment. Mostly reaching out to productivity-related groups and forums and getting out personally to talk about the app with people. The monetization strategy is to do it through in-app purchases of ‘task cards’ (a sort of ‘pay as you’ go model).

Background of idea: I’m a project manager by profession so have spent a lot of time building and tweaking this system of task management for my own use. Have not found a suitable alternative from the apps that are out there so decided to make it into a product.

 

[dsx]

@armando23 Relating the app to the user's problems or life doesn't seem to rank too highly. I'd try changing focus to use.

Copy seems pretty feature centric and benefit weak. There isn't any proof of claims, like a case history. And this field makes a lot of claims without proof to back it up.

Okay. You used it. What happened? Specifics please, no vague hunches something got better.

Based on these flaws the basic premise comes into question. People are going to keep doing time wasting things because their judgement is flawed about impact, and effort involved, and the misperceived urgency of unnecessary tasks.

Like talking so myopically about the app and features you are relatable and don't have credibility. The same flawed judgement is going to assign flawed values that get you right back to zero.

One reason people don't find what they want might just be nothing credibly does what it claims to.

 

[armando23]

@dsx Great points, thanks for the feedback, it's exactly what I'm looking for!

 

[armando23]

Hey AnonJian, thanks again for the feedback. I reworked the landing page to focus more on the benefits. I'm still working on your other comments.

 

[amandal]

@armando23 You rightly identify that everybody has 3 to-do-list apps already and doesn't use any of them, but I don't get how this would be any better.

It says "Simplify your task management", but then 6 inches down I see I have to assign Impact/Effort/Urgency on sliding scales. That doesn't look simplified to me. The last system I threw away had one scale, and half the time even that was too much.

(If you really want to simplify my task management, the one thing you can do is integrate with all the other task systems I have to use. Solving that problem is definitely worth my money.)

For all the other to-do-list apps I've tried, they're an the implementation of an existing system (like "GTD" or "Pomodoro"). I think that's what this is missing. I'm not sure what system this app is modeling, or why I'd want to use it. There is a brief "FlowTree User Guide" but it's more like a list of features and what they do.

You need to sell me on the system first. Make it super clear what the system is, and why I want it. Use hand-drawn sketches or Excel spreadsheets or whatever, to make it as transparent as possible what you're proposing. Give it a cool name, like the "plan/focus system".

Then you can say, hey, I also happen to have an app that implements all this, so pay $X and you won't have to mess around with any icky Excel spreadsheets. You can brag that you're the first (or only) app to implement it. When somebody asks why they should use this instead of an existing product like OmniFocus, there will be a clear answer: "they're GTD, we're plan/focus (and read this other webpage about why you want that...)".

 

[amandal]

@armando23 A couple nits:

• The icon is nice, but thematically and visually it doesn't fit with the rest of the app at all.
• It says "TRY IT OUT FOR FREE" but the app is completely free for all time, it seems. I don't want to put my to-do list in an app where I don't know how much it's going to cost to use next month. I wish it had a clear monetization strategy (I'm happy to pay for good products), and made it possible to export my tasks if I don't like it.

 

[armando23]

@amandal Thanks so much for the detailed feedback!

I think you really hit the nail on the head - I've also been thinking about 'selling' the FlowTree method itself before the app, and I'm already working on compiling a comprehensive guide. It's great that you confirmed the need for this, thanks!
The challenge is how to distill it into a form short enough for a landing page but still totally clear and convincing, as you say - I have ideas for that too though.

I'll make the pricing more obvious - I haven't thought of this effect before, but I surely wouldn't want to confuse anyone or make them feel hoodwinked in any way. I thought the in-app purchases would show up transparently enough on the app page, I'll need to make it more clear.

The icon comment I also agree with, this is just a temp asset since I'm trying to minimize my costs until the product is validated.

Thanks again, really helpful stuff!