I can see how much effort has gone into this and it looks very well thought out and highly refined. Would like to hear more about why you built it, what didn't you get out of existing productivity products etc and how you managed to get 1000 beta users on board 😄. A wellpolished and high quality product, I am looking forward to putting it through its paces. Good luck.
@leewynne Hi Lee, thanks for posting the comment. Let's go through the story real quick. Back in 2013 I attended many productivity courses and read a lot about this topic. I downloaded hundreds of todo apps (yes there were already hundreds back then) in the search for something that will be able to get the spirit of everything I learnt. Unsurprisingly, I didn't find anything that suited my needs. I decided to sit and create the app's UI and look. I made a few versions and passed them to the entrepreneurs whom I interviewed. After a few interviews, I realized that they are not my target group. They demanded totally different features, the ones that can be found in apps like Asana or Trello. I decided not to get discouraged and showed the app to my colleagues. Their response was fantastic. I decided to retarget the audience and started to develop the app for the normal people. After a year, my friend Kyle told me to open the app for beta testing. Thanks to Angelique, my girlfriend, we gathered almost 900 beta testers when I told her to stop acquiring new users. We were getting hundreds of feedbacks to respond and were running out of places. When TestFlight increased their limit to 2000, we passed smoothly the 1000 beta testers milestone. This was the time when we knew we want to release the app officially. Without the support of such big community, the app would be totally different: not as open and flexible. Right now you can customize almost every feature just for your own needs :).
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@piotrszwach This is a great story. You should bring it to: medium.com
@mjmcclain Thank you Michael! @angeliquetoque is going to post the first blogpost in her life around today. She's explaining her process of meeting all the people and gathering such strong community. We'll post the link to medium.com later on!
@leewynne Lee, initially we planned Apple only but personally I'm pretty disappointed by their policies and attention to details during the last few months. They started to focus on lots of devices instead of doing a few, really well. There were some Android developers contacting me interested in porting the app to Android, but I didn't receive any offer that was appealing to me yet.
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I used to be part of a company called FreeAppADay, a company that shut down after a rise in the freemium model.
As much as it sucked at the time that the company shut down, I'll say that there was good reason. The freemium model gives people a taste of your app before they commit.
$4.99 is a high price tag in app world. And although it may be totally worth it, there are too many free options for many people to want to blindly invest $5.
Just a suggestion, but I think it would benefit you to release this with limited functionality, and in-app purchases to unlock certain features.
I'd recommend having each feature be separate... Such as $0.99 to unlock sublists or $1.99 to unlock the habit tracker. That way people can should which features they value more.
The subscription plans are also becoming more and more popular with developers... Such as $4.99 for a year of all-access with syncing. This works best with a multi-platform product however.
Overall the product sounds awesome, but I have a hard time paying before I know I'll love it, and especially after previously investing in Omnifocus and other great to-do apps. I would be one of those people more easily persuaded by a freemium model as well. 😉
@melissamonteee Hi Melissa, Thank you for your suggestions! We had a hard time coming up with the best pricing model for Proud. After many evenings we decided to go against the crowd and use the Premium model. We saw other todo apps are available for free with in-app purchases. We were strongly committed though that we are releasing a very strong product that people will talk about to their friends. If not, then our product would not be good enough. Freemium is VERY good, but it has a few problems we couldn't solve. We are a small team of two people: my as a developer, graphic artist, ui designer and my girlfriend as a marketing specialist. To maintain a good freemium product you need millions of downloads, a strong team of people analyzing all the data and coming up with updates almost every day (even though we plan updates every week). Obviously we couldn't afford that model. Thanks to @DanCounsell who said in one of the interviews that freemium is only for big publishers, we went premium. If you are unsure if the app is for you, I welcome you to read our PDF about how you can use our app in your life: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.co...
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@piotrszwach@melissamonteee@dancounsell
I agree with Melissa. Either a very restricted "free tour" version of the app (e.g. only one list, no habits, etc), or a vastly more detailed video demo is appropriate. Aside from the beautiful design, I can't really make out distinguishing features.
It's not about valuing your work, it's about understanding what I'm buying.
(Edit: Just found the video demos on the website... that's more like it! Still would love a "try before you buy" version.)
2 years, 1 couple: He is a developer, graphic artist and composer - in one person.
She: a 19 years old girl who took care of marketing. Almost 1000 beta users, 100 iterations, and we are ready to announce our productivity tool: Proud. It helps you in many ways: breaking tasks down to achieve even the biggest goals, timers based on pomodorro technique, de-stress function which helps you to calm down in the stressful moments of your life and many, many more. I hope you will like it! Let us know what you think!
New Year is a new opportunity to step up, step forth and grow! Start 2016 with Proud!
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Holy Cheezitz!!! This is awesome. Finally a: to-do, task reminder, and habit tracker, in one app that leaves NOTHING out.
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@mjmcclain Except the ability to increase font size. Please add this. Haha
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@mjmcclain Oh my god. There is no limit to the number of sub-lists, I love you!!
@mjmcclain Thank you Michael! I really saw a big value in having everything in one place. I agree that it's better to have separate apps to watch a movie, talk to people and buy stuff. But I strongly believe that, things to do, habits, reminders, timers, work, productivity should be in one place, as this is a totally different part of our life and needs one tool to tangle it all together. The infinite sub-lists is a huge thing too. I was having problems finding app that allows you to do that on the mobile while preserving everything you see in Proud. About the font sizes: we might add this feature in next updates. Thanks for pointing that out! We thought about Dynamic Font that is built into iOS. Would that be sufficient for your own needs?
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@piotrszwach I can think of nothing outside of, dynamic font. I like to control individual app's font sizes. That's just my preference.
@mjmcclain Okay, I will write this for the roadmap for 1.2 update. As we think of a major 1.1 release to do something a bit crazy: We'd like to engage our community to record a congratulations with a normal microphone: "you're great", "wow", "superb!" and hear them every time you complete a task. What do you think about such idea? I.e. your own voice encouraging other people using our app?
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Plans for Android? (P.S.; I love your comment about redirecting focus to "the normal people.)
@jimcanto Hi Jim, as written in a few posts above, I didn't receive any appealing offer from any Android developer. Personally I'm very into iPhones and wouldn't like to make an Android app without someone who is a very good programmer. The app has hundreds of features that need to work perfectly to build such experience. And I've heard that making apps for Android is a very difficult process due to hundreds of types of device types, systems etc. That's just something I cannot afford to maintain. If I were a huge startup with millions of dollars, then that could be within my reach. But obviously, I'm not :). I'm sorry for disappointing you here and I know how tempting it would be to see Proud on Android. We are releasing the OSX version soon, so you will be able to feel the experience if you have any type of iMac or Macbook.
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@piotrszwach ...kinda wishing I didn't give the iPad I won in a drawing to my girlfriend. 😳😆 It's for a good cause though... she's fulfilling her life dream of becoming a teacher. I appreciate your reply. Sounds like an amazing product.
@jimcanto Wow, that's really amazing what you did! It's great she will be able to grow and that you could help her with that! She must truly love you for who you are :).
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Did you guys hired Barry White for the video...
Seriously, very nice app. I wish I add way more task to use it and have my productivity 📶
@pierre_vannier You were close! We called Darth Vader's son to do the voice over! ;)
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Like the explanations so far 👍 but couldn't try it out until now - so here is my basic question: Do the app use the iOS reminders db? In other words: Can i use Siri to set reminders in ProudApp?
@llabball Hi Indigo, right now Proud doesn't support such feature yet but we're considering it in the future updates. Probably somewhere around 1.2 or 1.3.
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@piotrszwach Thx for replying. Another feature which you could think about is to support the x-callback-url protocol. This makes GoodTask and Fantastical so useful for me.
@llabball Could you exactly explain why is it so useful? If I understand this more deeply I might increase it's priority on the roadmap.
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@piotrszwach Sure. I use apps like Workflow, Launch, Pythonista, Drafts and Editorial to manage reminders and calendars. These apps fill the gap between the reminders db and other apps or remote sources (including some custom systems). The reminders db is then the central source of data for other task apps which have all their strength in different topics like GTD. The reminders db is also the target of Siri and iCloud Sync. Imagine my current storage strategy as the same as you can access files from every application on desktop computers. I use the x-callback-url protocol not only to create e.g. new reminders - mostly the generated text includes "next-action" links. So, when i want to solve a task i have already direct links to particular apps to which i have to switch to. The nice bonus think is that i can organize inter-app workflows that ending in the preferred task-app to change the status to "done" finally. Hmm, long answer - hope that helps and makes sense to you.
@llabball Hi Ingo, I've just found this website: http://x-callback-url.com/ It seems to describe the whole process. It doesn't seem like a lot of work to do and I can assure you we will add that to Proud as it makes a lot of sense, around version 1.2 (a few weeks). We're preparing for a minor 1.0.1 update and 1.1. major update in the next few days and weeks so that will need to wait a bit. Maybe we will add the initial support faster but full support - later on.
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