Comment by avinoth | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avinoth | Hacker News Reader

Bit of a backstory for how Trackiem came to be.

I've always been obsessed about tracking individual pieces of information in my life and finding patterns for certain activities. Like, activities that lead up to a headache., correlations between number of coffees I drink and number of hours I sleep and so on..

I have tried using specific tracker tools before but they always inevitably becomes not useful as they are targeted towards specific niche or goal (like habit building, budget planning, etc)., whereas I wanted something generic that offers just the right tools and lets me build my trackers to the way I want. Hence, I built Trackiem.

I've built it to be as much un-opinionated as possible, by just offering the components that makes up a tracker and let users customize it the way they want.

This is only the initial version which lets you create trackers with basic "types" and "frequencies" with reminders. I've planned exciting things down the line for though, such as customized dashboard & reminders, more nuanced tracker types - this will allow you to build your own finance tracker, time tracker and so on.

Excited for the launch and any feedback is much appreciated!

As someone who built a habit tracker, I like it. It looks elegant and easy to use and you seem clear on what you are optimizing for.

A couple of thoughts.

I think it's important to be clear whether you building an app that is optimized for tracking for insight or for change. That is what explains why I took a different approach to designing a habit tracker than you are taking. My primary was for change. Yours sounds like for insight.

The reason to be clear is that it can help you filter out feature requests.

There's only one other example of what you're building that I've seen and thought was well done. http://reporter-app.com/

If you are planning to charge, I would want to know that before I sign up for a free version. "Free until 2021, then $5/month."

Thanks for the suggestion and the associated link.

You're right, the primary motivation was to do tracking for insights but down the line I would like if this can be agnostic even from that., like one feature I was planning to do is "Overlay charts" which lets you overlay data from multiple trackers to figure out patterns. On a different line, I've visioned if it could sort of have a "Streak" builder with triggers after certain "value" is achieved, which then allows it to have "goal" based tracking abilities.

Will do a write-up on the "manifesto" of the product, and will ensure the intent is clear from the landing page.

As for the pricing, I really haven't decided on one and when to charge. But rest assured, I've always planned to grandfather users who signed up before any payment plan is launched. Basically, anything you use for free will forever be free.

Thanks again.

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