iDoneThis – Simple Team Performance Management | Hacker News Reader

iDoneThis – Simple Team Performance Management

idonethis.com

41 pointsc-oreills32 comments

Look guys - you personally might not pay $5/mo because you work alone or in a small team, or you could use App Scripts to recreate the services. Try to look beyond that to the fact that millions of businesses pay tons of money to improve team performance.

If by using iDoneThis you can get a 1% improvement on a team of 5 people that you pay $70k, that's $3,500 worth of value on an annual basis, or $58 per "user" per month. That makes it worth 10x the cost.

Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile has written about how work diaries can help professionals understand themselves and improve their own performance, in addition to the coordination offered by insight into other people. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/04/four_reasons_to_keep_a_work_...

Most managers and business owners are busy with a million things and they want a simple, easy-to-use solution that JUST WORKS without them having to think about it. If they are using no form of team management, iDoneThis is infinitely better.

I admit the name is a little awkward at first, but it's definitely memorable. BTW: I'm not particularly good friends with these guys nor am compensated for supporting them.

Absolutely, Jason. As an additional note, Professor Amabile recommends idonethis and she likes the product so much that she decided to invest. http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/05/06/179072...

feature request.

for software teams.

at EOD write "how you are going to quickly jump back into code". This introduces a business process to enforce a cognitive best practice that leads to much faster "stack load" times.

I've been using IDoneThis for over a year and I really like it, but I guess I'm on their old pricing plan since I only pay like $15 a year. Looks like they're focussing on higher-paying business customers.

For me though, it's a great way of just keeping a little track of what I did that day. I put what I've done on my website, things I did with my kids, my accomplishments in Minecraft, all that stuff that it doesn't make sense to store in some other tracker. It seems like a small thing but just having an email come in and I respond to it is a perfect way of updating this type of journal. Plus it gives you a calendar with checkmarks for every day you update so it's a nice habit former to see all those checks lined up (see Jerry Seinfeld's calendar system).

That makes me very happy to hear. Thanks so much for your comment, Matt.

HN (this thread's commenters in particular), I love you guys on the whole, but you need to learn that just because its easy for you to build doesn't mean it doesn't provide value to someone else. There are probably customers that exist to which $5/user/month is an excellent deal given their specific pain points.

I can't speak highly enough of IDoneThis - we've been using it for months at Buffer and it's absolutely changed the way we work. The reasons IDoneThis is invaluable to us, is that it allows us to track back performance (which easily gets lost in a chat room or an in-person standup). On top of this, if new people come on board, they can look through the previous IDoneThis notes and see what has been worked on. Oh and of course, not to mention that it's amazing to keep in sync with everyone if you are working as a remote team like we do. IDoneThis has changed our productivity for the better.

So this is like an automated standup thing? We get by with just having a chat room called "Standup" where people do likewise, and it's free (or nearly so, given Campfire pricing).

To be honest, I'd rather that Pivotal Tracker, Trello, etc. did this for me. Anything manual that can be automated, should. Why would Bob Developer waste time re-stating what the tools we use already know?

At the risk of sounding blunt, what value does IDoneThis (shudder couldn't you have picked a better name?) provide that an email chain can't? Especially since email is essentially free (or, at the very least, less than $5/user/month)?

Similar idea to 15five, similar pricing: http://www.15five.com/

Can you add more information/screenshots of your fancier features like history reports to your demo?

You're right and we're working on making all that more descriptive.

I am quite interested how idonethis got those quotes from Dan Pink and other well connected people. How did you land all those famous customers? Is that for real?

Looking at archive.org, they launched in mid 2011.

Hi Greg, Dan Pink has used idonethis every day for over 2 years. He loves the product so much that he decided to invest. http://lifehacker.com/im-daniel-pink-and-this-is-how-i-work-...

Many of these prominent people found us via word of mouth and our popular blog.

The name of this product is so grammatically infuriating to me

Sounds like you'll remember it.

I'm sorry you don't like our name! We've kept it because most of our customers and members get a kick out of it.

As a counterpoint, editor of the Oxford American dictionary and founder of Wordnik Erin McKean is a fan of our name because it's memorable, lighthearted and fun. http://blog.idonethis.com/post/16062508107/lexicographer-ext...

Congratulations on living in a cultural vacuum!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_Eng...

While I recognize the phrase "I done this" within the vernacular, I'd not try to quantify it as such.

Let's leave it at fun/quirky.

I think it's disrespectful to call it quirky, especially considering their international customer base.

If you add a LAH, it becomes Manglish. idundislah!.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manglish

Like others here, the cost seems very high for what it does. I would love to hear more on why it is worth $5 per user per month.

You could recreate this entire service in Google for free using Apps Scripts.

Go on then.

Our customers find the service valuable enough to pay for it and many are tech companies like Heroku and Uber.

We've had a few companies who switched from creating something like this on their own to becoming paying customers because it saves their valuable time and they see the love and improvements we put into the product daily. It's the beauty of SaaS, really.

Sweet sassy molassy, $5/user/month?

If this tool doesn't add at least $5/user/month of value to your team, you shouldn't be using it anyway.

That costs money? Huh.

How does this compare/contrast with Trello?

It's... totally a different thing. Did you even read the website?

Why yes, yes I did. Thank you for asking.

This is a way of tracking tasks completion. It appears to have much less structure than even a straightforward tool like Trello. Perhaps my question would have been better phrased as: What value does this provide over a tool like Trello or Basecamp?

It's a daily, high-level summary of what your team got done in a given day, prompted by and delivered to your inbox

It's also easy to look up completed tasks in the web app.

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