Show HN: TakeAim – Expose your team's daily aims

A few thoughts:

- if you can find a way for just a single user to get value out of the product then you don't need to convince an entire team to adopt a new tool all at once. It could happen organically instead and over time. It would also give you a chance to slowly help/sell that team over time.

- the homepage doesn't really tell you what the product does. After signing up and playing a bit I now understand. Whats your conversion rate like from homepage visit to signup?

- I'd suggest telling users what the process is like. I didn't (and still don't) know whether everyone on my team gets an email every evening to fill out the info for the next day, or is it in the morning? Do you fill out what you did yesterday and what you plan on doing today?

- I think every companys process is slightly different, if you are convincing them to use a tool AND change their process you might run into difficulty. Maybe allow for different processes. We built an inhouse replacement for iDoneThis because we wanted something slightly different.

- The most important question is why do you only have one customer? Do they signup but stop using it? Do you not get enough signups? Do they signup and never invite their team? Have you asked them why? If all of the numbers in your funnel are really small, I would focus on the later steps. Make sure you built a product people want. Once your activation rate is high then start worrying about top of the funnel.

- forget the LinkedIn cold emailing. You're in the highest density startup city in the world, just walk right into any startup office you see and ask them to use the product

- Ask your engineer friends and other startups what they use and how you could get them to use your product instead

- We (Streak) would def use this if you adapted it to our process. I think our needs are very close to what you have. Find more customers like us and build what they need. Ask them to prepay you for 6-12 months for you to custom build whatever they need (we would do this). Reach out to me at aleem at streak.

As mentioned by others, not being able to try it out without signing up is a big impediment when it comes to showing rather than telling people what TakeAim does. A sandbox so people can try it out might be a high return marketing effort.

I'm not sold on the pricing model. It is trying to compete with free rather than on value and even worse it is competing against free internally. In a business context, if it isn't delivering value worth a $500 a month rate, it really doesn't matter if it's $30 or $80 or $5. And if it is delivering value at that rate, then $500 is a good place to anchor the price.

It also sets the expectations about quality and provides the money to create it and helps filter out the wrong type of customer. By which I mean that 500 customers at $30 a month are likely to churn and generate a lot of support work in minimally productive directions. 30 customers at $500 a month will provide serious focus and better feedback for pushing the project forward.

To put it another way, TakeAim is a bit toward the feature end of the feature->product spectrum. In terms of growth that means that it can probably scale better vertically [adding more functionality and user support] than horizontally [running more instances] because the current utility is limited to brief use every day.

The development arc of TakeAim seems to be BaseCamp's origin story. That might be a good model to look at both in terms of creating an ecosystem and pricing.

Good luck.

I think it solves a problem we have (if my understanding of your product is correct): We should focus less on the future and more on the present and past. That will save time and make for better progress evaluation.

In our team, we're managing upcoming work by epics, features, user stories and tasks (TFS style), all ahead of time. For the latter two, ages are spent estimating, in the process having feelings about risks. We're left with a bunch of tasks that only partially describe what we eventually realize needs to be done, leading us to choose between sticking to the tasks, thus producing a nice burndown chart, or doing what's best for the project.

For our team, the devs just want to know if we are spending our time in the best way possible:

1) What are we going to focus on today? Not completing, just focus on. That's mostly enough to align efforts. 2) What did we focus on yesterday, and can we evaluate progress? Steady? Slow? Stuck? 3) What did we actually end up focusing during the past week? Did we side track often or have to change direction?

However, without the future aspect, management probably wont bite, making this a tough sell. So maybe consider something that marries the two: Some high level future planning, breaking work down to epics and features only, and some focus tracking for daily alignment and performance evaluation.

It's possible you solved a problem only your company has. Did you try to evaluate other options in this space and see what you have that is new/different that other options? (If you have distinctions, are you marketing them well enough?)

Maybe your product does too little? If people are looking for a Standup Replacement/Aid there are more dedicated Slack bots. First example in bing: https://standupbot.com/

I realize that in my case at least, what I might use your app for can already/is already handled by Skype for Business. SfB has a "What's happening today?" status message that is easy to fill out as things change. It also has things like OOO and WFH (and busy and available) status information at a glance and pulled automatically from my/my coworkers Outlook calendars... Can you offer some reason to add another application to that equation?

Similarly, .plan is a million year old way of handling some of this; I can't quite see from your marketing how much of an advantage you offer over even a traditional .plan file (other than the fact that no one hardly uses .plan these days).

I'm afraid I won't be a lot of help in terms of gaining traction, but I can say that here at Big Corp this is a regular problem I have as a team lead. I don't know if the size of the company has anything to do with it, but I doubt it.

I think stand ups are not replaceable by this or much of anything since the face time and active communication are what is most important to me there. But, my memory isn't great and 30 minutes later I probably couldn't recap the meeting for you. Having something like this would help solve that, but I also know that I probably wouldn't keep my own up to date.

I could see something like this having really nice Jira integration, for whatever that's worth.

In remote teams issues with daily accountability are definitely a thing. I've tried a few approaches, full on project management is sometimes a little heavy, especially for non IT workers. I don't like to count bums in seats I just want to know what's going on and whether things are progressing. It seems like you've hit a nice sweet spot here, so definitely think about how you can get this in front of remote teams in particular?

Thanks for the feedback. We agree the homepage was a bit mysterious and have updated it with some text about our feature set.

PS - We also fixed the hover :)

Related to increasing productivity and a public view option, one thing that Ricardo Semler brings up in his book, Maverick, that is a big productivity boost for teams is to incorporate regular public mood feedback to allow an individual to communicate how they are generally feeling that day to the whole team. It can put a lot of interactions in context and is something that's been implemented by a number of companies, could be a potentially valuable addition to the product!

Hey, other cofounder here. We love the idea of having more public options like this and considered having a display mode to put on TVs around the office

Interesting, thanks for the feedback. The cards pictured are the core of the actual product. Do you think we should make it look more like a screenshot or declare that it is the actual product?

  transform: scale(1.01);

Looks terrible in Chrome. Also looks bad in Firefox, but less so.