Another week as a solo-developer. TodoBot is edging forward. Is it a useful tool yet? Or is it a gimmicky toy? Perhaps somewhere in between (gimmicky tool?)

Here’s a link if you fancy taking the latest version out for a whirl: todobot.ai. I’ve also included an image below (I know you people are busy).

A vision for the product

On Monday I had a good think about how TodoBot could be a product. It occurred to me that perhaps people with ADHD might be interested. I read a few blog posts about how people with ADHD do/should make todo lists, and created a landing page, but didn’t get much further than that.

Goblin attack

On Tuesday I almost did a double-take at the whole internet when I stumbled upon this page while reading metafilter. It’s like someone took my project, did it better and released it for free. There’s even some arguably self-righteous wording about how it should always be free (“Keeping the tools freely available in a convenient form is a foundational principle to us.”). And there was me hoping to make some money.

New Features

Spent a fair amount of the week creating a messaging system so that TodoBot can message you about the current state of your tasks. The core infrastructure is built for this now, so responding to more events should be straightforward. This part of the app is potentially the most valuable, but also the hardest bit to build. Creating the sense of a mind on the other side of the screen is not straightforward.

The new feature that it would be good to add would be time: due dates and durations for each task, and calendar integrations. Perhaps I’ll get on to that next week. However, I’m aware that I’ve already spent too long on building the product, and not enough time on showing people the product, so perhaps that will have to wait.

Thinking about the future

According to my initial schedule (a product a month!), I only have two more weeks working on TodoBot before moving on to something else. So, next week I really need to:

• launch it
• get some real users
• talk to some real users

and also:

• have a think about what my next project is going to be, otherwise w/c 5th June is looking pretty empty…

See you next week!