You can be very kind and tell him that the idea is awesome and that he will become a millionaire, but please be a bit more realistic and just tell him the truth.
You can be very kind and tell him that the idea is awesome and that he will become a millionaire, but please be a bit more realistic and just tell him the truth.
it continues to amaze how certain members of this community cannot recognize the vast chasm of constructive criticism that lies between the extremes of '[telling] him that the idea is awesome and that he will become a millionaire' and telling him he has wasted his time working on an idea that "isn't even a real idea" (and we won't even address the absurdity of that last sentence...).
Personally I agree in sentiment, if not in tone, with the OP; there's a trillion todo list apps, finding one the poster could have worked with would have freed valuable time for developing something else. Unless of course this was an app done for learning purposes, but the poster doesn't say that.
What you mean here is "I don't think I would use this" - you don't have to tell him his idea is awesome, but the way you put it made it seem like you are the gatekeeper of awesome and this does not qualify, so go ahead start over and move on.
As OP made clear, he's scratching an itch and finds things like basecamp overcomplex. I agree, a trillion percent. We use Phabricator and it's great, but it took literally 3 days to get it all set up. If we were just starting out, I'd love to use something lightweight like this.
Yes the market is saturated but that doesn't mean there is nothing innovative to be done here. I say more power to this person for building something for himself and putting himself out there to see what others think.
But it is not the programmer's fault. Many incubators preach that everyone must have an ideia, no matter how awful it is.
Building out a full app then testing out a hypothesis was probably a waste of time. Putting up a landing page and promoting out to his network would likely have yielded very similar results - people saying "we don't need another todo list". faster, and cheaper.