qiyuxuan96

It's just a MVP... version 0.01 of their vision. The fact that they have paying users who use them daily is a very, very good signal - that's a hard thing to do! It's so much easier to add additional features to that group of users later.

I see so many negative comments and can't help but think of this (first comment on DropBox's HN launch): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Hey HN!

We built a chrome extension that lets you load your calendar from any website quickly without switching context (i.e. switch to another tab or app).

I personally have a busy calendar, and didn't like jumping in and out of GCal 30 times a day: every 20 minutes, I'd go in to GCal to check my upcoming events, create a meeting, or do some other simple action. Each of them doesn't take long - always under a minute. However, the annoying part was that I'd forget about what I was working on before - the cost of context-switching.

That is why we built a non-immersive calendar experience. An user would hit a shortcut to load up their calendar nearly instantly on the page itself. From there, Motion makes actions like creating events or sharing availability easier with better UX and built-in workflows. For example, to share your availabilities with someone, Motion automates that workflow (by using your personal preferences and running a logic on existing events to maximize maker's time). Once you are done using the calendar, just hit escape to get rid of it. You haven't left the page at all.

We are also working on a desktop app, as we'd love to use the calendar inside apps like Zoom and PyCharm.

We believe this kind of non-immersive approach can apply to all actions that take less than a minute - such as checking the email you just received or viewing a Jira ticket. For longer tasks that require deeper focus, an immersive experience is necessary - such as note-taking or coding. Here's our vision: in the future, whenever you need to perform a quick action in another app, instead of switching over to that app, Motion would bring to you the only component you need (an input form, a message, a textbox...etc).

We'd love to hear your feedback, and let us know what other apps would benefit from this non-immersive approach.

Hey HN!

We built a chrome extension that lets you load your calendar from any website quickly without switching context (i.e. switch to another tab or app).

I personally have a busy calendar, and didn't like jumping in and out of GCal 30 times a day: every 20 minutes, I'd go in to GCal to check my upcoming events, create a meeting, or do some other simple action. Each of them doesn't take long - always under a minute. However, the annoying part was that I'd forget about what I was working on before - the cost of context-switching.

That is why we built a non-immersive calendar experience. An user would hit a shortcut to load up their calendar nearly instantly on the page itself. From there, Motion makes actions like creating events or sharing availability easier with better UX and built-in workflows. For example, to share your availabilities with someone, Motion automates that workflow (by using your personal preferences and running a logic on existing events to maximize maker's time). Once you are done using the calendar, just hit escape to get rid of it. You haven't left the page at all.

We are also working on a desktop app, as we'd love to use the calendar inside apps like Zoom and PyCharm.

We believe this kind of non-immersive approach can apply to all actions that take less than a minute - such as checking the email you just received or viewing a Jira ticket. For longer tasks that require deeper focus, an immersive experience is necessary - such as note-taking or coding. Here's our vision: in the future, whenever you need to perform a quick action in another app, instead of switching over to that app, Motion would bring to you the only component you need (an input form, a message, a textbox...etc).

We'd love to hear your feedback, and let us know what other apps would benefit from this non-immersive approach.

Totally get your friend's concern. Google is kinda bad in that they bundle a bunch of permissions into one (i.e. - all data read and changed...etc); we only need a small subset of that, and we have a very strict privacy policy not seen in other extensions, but users usually don't dig into our policy and get scared by that dialogue (which is totally understandable and I would be too).

Thanks! Love to hear what you think

Thank you! Definitely.

Thank you! Would love to learn your thoughts :)

Thanks for the suggestion. I see, that's very valid. I've added it to our todo list - don't block if it's not the active tab.

Thanks for recommending that. We actually do one better - we not only count time when browser tab is active, but also stop counting time when we don't detect activity or video playing for longer than 5 minutes :)

Firefox coming soon!

Thank you!

That sounds very valid - when we built this, we had the working mentality, but unwanted distraction when relaxing would definitely be useful for ourselves.

Thanks for sharing! Agreed that both of these solutions are helpful, and I've seen many friends using them. For me personally, I wanted a more all-in-one solution, so we actually built hiding things like the Facebook newsfeed and Youtube recommended videos into our extension.

The vision is definitely much broader :) The immediate steps are desktop and mobile.

Thanks so much for this! I've saved this analysis and will keep it in mind as we decide to move toward this direction. Agreed with all three of your points; we can definitely have better execution on all these fronts.

That's a very interesting thought. Yes agreed - StickK has a lot of user complaints so we would need to execute much better. A lot of these complaints arise from the fact that StickK literally puts you in a binding contract to pay the money - which may be necessary to enforce their kind of product, but also gets a lot of users angry and confused.

Yes! It's on our roadmap. Android is easier than Apple due to developer API constraints, but we plan on tackling the mobile problem very soon (in the next 1-2 month).

Agreed; it's definitely not trivial. We will definitely tackle mobile very soon, and this is a potential solution. Thanks!

That's actually similar to what my other co-founder told me when I tried to make this! It turned out, however, that our own willpower can be supplemented by tools. For example, sometimes I don't realize I've been on Twitter for 30 minutes - and as soon as I'm made aware of that, I leave. I think often times, it's about awareness rather than being forced by a piece of software.

We fully agree with this! Thanks!

Thanks for the suggestion - yes that is definitely something we've thought about and will possibly implement. We'll be tackling the mobile problem soon, and we hope to use our learnings from desktop to find the most effective solution in mobile.

Thanks. Yes - it's definitely an area we will tackle very soon. We just recently got our extension to a state where people are finding it useful; we plan on using our learnings on desktop and apply them to mobile.

Thank you! Really glad to hear that.

Thanks!

Thank you for raising this concern. I believe YC sees value in our work not because they see money in us selling data; but rather they realize how big a problem we are solving, and, if we solve it correctly, how much value and time we bring to each person. A paid product can certainly generate much, much higher revenue than a product that sells data - Grammarly and LastPass are perfect examples of this.

Thanks for the heads-up!

That's awesome! I have a question (we ourselves have been thinking very hard on this) - when you are about to start something distracting, and you catch yourself, how do you find and get yourself into a more productive alternative?

That makes sense; I know people who've tried out this app called StickK where you donate to anti-charity if you don't follow habits. Definitely something on our minds.

We have an informal manual list of emails of people who have requested Firefox. Please email harry@inmotion.app and I'll add you to the list. Thanks!

Thanks for voicing your concern. I don't believe we need an acquisition. As mentioned, we plan on monetizing either through a premium tier with productivity tools built for power users or charging a very low amount from every user. We are confident in our ability to generate revenue without selling user data.

Thanks! Please let us know your thoughts :)