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Comment by mstipetic | Hacker News Reader

A bit unrelated but I wish just once I'd like to see normal calendar items and life activities - drop kids off to kindergarden, go shopping, mow the grass, help friend move - instead of these "mediate, finish presentation, finalize mood board concepts"

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It's the same thing with most tech these days. Just try thinking of examples for voice assistants or any new tech.

Most of it has this weird "Friends" but with a "rich millenial from SF" flavor marketing to it. Everything is made to feel super-important and productive, yet casual.

It feels like they have a single persona:

"[Dave/Alice] lives in SF. After a busy day hustling, they chase their side gig doing [photography/art/music production]. Later on in the evening, they contact all of their friends using [platform] to go downtown for a [coffee/sushi/craft beer]. While on their [Uber/Lyft] ride, they check the [stock market / sport scores / wikipedia trivia].

Back home, they use the voice assistant on [platform] to dim the lights in their studio apartment and watch the newest TV show on [streaming service]"

Before bed, they finish the day by [meditating / reading a self-help book / listening to a self-improvement podcast]."

Perhaps the next business for that set would be “personal assistants, but remote gig worker”.

We considered about this angle, may be giving it a try in our next update

Companies like Apple and Amazon investing heavily in the sex-appeal of consumer electronics didn't help this either.

Best comment I've read for a while, thank you ;)

And to be fair, all marketing is aspirational. But outside of tech, the aspirational image involved running with your dog down the beach before eating dinner with friends and family on a scenic patio, which is somehow tangentially related to a vaguely named pharmaceutical product. And then you going kayaking while grinning ear to ear.

Is this silly? Yes, but it beats aspiring to work all the time.

It’s the market. Normal people doing normal things don’t pay $35.99 for a todo list calendar app.

We found users who use Sorted³ extensively are busy people, both in their personal and professional areas.

busy people with taste*!

We use those examples in our page:

https://about.homechart.app

Homechart is similar to sorted but adds more "household" features like budgeting and recipes. Unlike sorted, you can self host it.

Seems pretty cool, but:

* i don't see a demo, it'd be nice

* is it US specific? seems like it is from the descriptions, but I'm not sure

I can give you access to a demo instance, we'll have a video soon (or would a demo instance be more helpful?). Contact info is in my profile.

We have some localization options available, unfortunately no translation options at the moment. It's mostly US centric, but we have users from Europe using it successfully.

The problem is that your calendar is probably tied to your work email which is tied to your company's Active Directory and the company definitely wants to be able to revoke your access. Email and calendar clients hardly even try to present a single view of contacts, events, and messages from distinct sources in a privacy preserving way. When they do support merging views, it seems like it's way too easy to send an invite to the wrong calendar or schedule over the top of busy block that just happens to be on a different calendar.

The entire idea of multiple calendars is a poor abstraction. People (you, me) have upcoming events that they care about; other people want to schedule events that don't conflict. Some events are public, some are private, and some are so private that they are transparent and nonblocking.

Somehow we made it way harder than it needed to be.

This is something I hope my own work can avoid. I like the idea of building accessible and powerful tools for regular human beings. I don’t want it to be aimed towards some version of themselves people want to be. I suppose the intent is to inspire and motivate, especially in the context of scheduling and tasks.

My fear is that marketing to regular people won’t work, but I suppose the data will eventually reveal that.

To be fair, the biggest pockets might be these biz adopters. See how superhuman angles itself.

May be a mix of personal & professional life?

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