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.
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 :)
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!
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?
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)
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
[+] [-] nathanbarry|14 years ago|reply
You can read a bit about it here: http://nathanbarry.com/a-little-bit-each-day/
[+] [-] aymeric|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lusr|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] auston|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianmwang|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smalter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeonW|14 years ago|reply
Anyone else got a story on how HN helped them launch their startup?
[+] [-] ryanwaggoner|14 years ago|reply
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 :)
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aymeric|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smalter|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jc4p|14 years ago|reply
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|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hkyeti|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Zuzz|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smalter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matthewj|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pardner|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rguzman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] theSuda|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abcd_f|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rguzman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leslyn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smalter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lcs|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smalter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbog|14 years ago|reply
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.