After a Year of Building, I'm Stuck Wondering If It's Worth It

Congrats, 1y on the same side-project (it is one I understood correctly) is already an achievement.

Task management is complicated and very different based on the person/context (Startup vs large org).

I know both universes well, and while reading your first page, I found "Only one task "in-progress" per user for focused productivity." -> I stopped here. As engineer and manager of engineers I don't have one task in mind, I have hundreds, found me a way to visualise and make sense of all that and you would have my interest, not looking for another toggle-like app.

Second feedback: sorry, but I have the same issue; design is key. Based on the home page and lack of screenshots, I am fairly confident that you are a developer and not a hybrid unicorn able to create complete professional software without some help on the design/UX front.

I took a quick look at your app. It's very clean, fairly straight-forward to get started, pretty nice interface. I like that you don't ask for payment details for the trial, thumbs up for that. I'm not currently in the market for a task tracker like this, and Jira is free for me as a single user, so my needs are met at no cost right now.

Some feedback that might be of help: 1) I personally like to be able to see some screenshots/video of a product before I sign up. I prefer to get an idea of whether or not it looks suitable for me before giving away my e-mail address. Screenshots and video also make it easier to get an idea of what the capabilities of the tool are without having to figure it out on my own. My time is valuable to me. 2) A generic Pause button for a task without a specific reason would suit me better than the currently available options. 3) Make it possible to change an existing task to an urgent task and vice versa. 4) Add sorting of the task list by status, due date. 5) Make it possible to move tasks up and down the lists. 6) Add a view showing all tasks, urgent and not, in one place. 7) The price is currently a bit steep for me here in South Africa, especially for limited features provided. I'm also trying to grow my own product user base (Novel Goggles, for writers to plan and write stories), and purse strings are a bit tight.

I've been struggling to get feedback from users myself, so I understand the frustration. I get definite interest, people signing up for trials, but I'm not converting enough of them. Getting those same people that don't convert to respond to an e-mail to tell me why they're not subscribing to my product is something that I haven't quite figured out yet. It's possible that the response rate is for that type of email is so low that I simply haven't had enough people try it to get a meaningful number of responses but I'm still figuring that out.

My strategy right now is to keep getting new eyes on my app and periodically sending out an e-mail requesting feedback. I don't want to spam people, so I don't e-mail too regularly.

My next idea is to add a popup poll within the app itself to try and get feedback while a new subscriber is trying it out. I suspect that this will probably be my best bet for getting meaningful feedback. I already have a feedback section, but a user has to go find it to send feedback, which is probably too high a barrier for entry.

Anyway, I hope you manage to get more traction. Maybe someone else on here has some useful advice for the both of us.

(Don't take what follows as a judgement of your product. i haven't tried it and it may be amazing!)

What you are struggling with is simply a fact of life for any entrepreneur.

Get an idea, work on it, launch and discover if there is a market fit. IF no, move to next idea, start process over. Almost every great business has examples of pivoting from the original product or service and trying other ideas until landing on the one that hits.

You've built a tool. call it a your "prototype". first test case is you. do you like using it? does it truly make your life easier and more productive? IF your answer is meh, then put it aside and move on to other things.

It's depressing to leave an idea for dead. It's your baby and you love it, but it may just not be that idea's time, you may be able to come back to it at a later date with new eyes and find a way. Regardless, the journey of building something is of value to you - you can't help but learn from the experience and apply those lessons to the next endeavor.

Also, I'll state the obvious here... Building a tool for the market and building a company to sell it are two very VERY different things.

The fact that you hit the wall when it came time to take your product to market might be an indicator for you. Maybe your are Woz and you just need to find your Steve.

If this try is a failure, continue to believe in yourself and never give up.

So many successful entrepreneurs are serial failures, until they aren't.

For the past year, I’ve been immersed in building a tool for task management, something I thought could really help startups like mine. It’s designed to solve the overwhelming chaos of juggling too many tasks at once—something I’ve personally struggled with for years.

But now that it’s done, I’m hitting a wall. Building the software was hard, but this? This feels harder. Getting real feedback, understanding whether what I built resonates or just misses the mark—that’s what I’m struggling with.

I keep asking myself:

Am I solving a problem people actually care about? Have I overcomplicated the solution? Is this even something others would want to use? I’m not here to pitch anything. I’m genuinely just looking for people to talk to about this. If you’ve been in the trenches of building something from scratch, how did you get through this phase?

Honestly, I’m feeling a bit lost. Any advice, stories, or even brutal truths would mean the world right now.

Thanks for reading, A fellow founder trying to figure it out