In late 2023, the founder of a new productivity app contacted me. I tried it and was stoked: Finally a tool that combined all the usual tactics and habits into one coherent solution!
It had Pomodoro timers, a to-do list, music, breathing exercises during breaks, even some gamification and rewards after each session, like a score leaderboard and inspirational quotes. It also came with a group chat and an AI coach who would encourage you to stay focused and remind you to get back on track when you went on distracting websites. Plus, the standalone desktop app allowed you to keep everything hovering on your interface in one convenient bar as you moved around various browser windows to do your work.
In other words, it was everything you could ever need to be productive. From the moment I signed up, I used it every day. But over the next 1.5 years, the founder and his small team kept making changes. The desktop app was no longer supported, and it all went into the browser, making it harder to separate the tool from everything else. The variety of the AI coach’s messages was toned down significantly. Meanwhile, the founder kept us they were working on version 2.0. It’d all be much better once we got there.
After around 1.5 years of me using the app daily, we finally reached that milestone—and it was a disaster. Instead of a wide, spacious interface, all the widgets were scrunched together in the middle of one browser tab. Our task lists had been jumbled and previous time estimates butchered completely. Everyone’s points had been reset, and the new leaderboard wasn’t working. The AI was now a chatbot interface, not that anyone needed one more of those, but the chat, scrolling through playlists, it was all so tiny, you had to click and move and navigate forever to locate anything. Needless to say, that was a tough week. When people rely on your software to do their work, you might want to give them a proper heads up and, perhaps more importantly, not launch a half-assed version.
The founder told everyone they really wanted to “build in public,” and that they felt they had to launch because at this point, they’d been building by themselves for months. It instantly reminded of a talk from Noah Kagan I heard over a decade ago: “I call it an engineering disease. If you’re an engineer, you guys are smart. What you do is you love to build really cool shit, right? It’s really great to build something—and then you go out with it, and you’re like: ‘Anybody want this? Anybody?'”
My app never had a feature problem. It had a marketing problem. They were charging too little and promoting to too few people. They could have reworked their positioning, gone out to more target customers, and really given it a year of diehard promotion to see if their approach was resonating. Instead, they chose the easy route. They rebuilt the thing from the ground up in their dark garage—without actually changing much at all and, in fact, destroying some of the features they had already figured out more than well enough. A classic case of engineer’s disease.
It’s hard to bring a new product to market. But if you believe in what you’ve made, you need to tell the world about it and give that an honest try. It takes a long time for the world to catch up, even for great new ideas. Of course it’s easier to keep tweaking! But that doesn’t change that, with the right product in hand, marketing is your moral obligation.
I’m not sure I’ll keep using the app. Right now, I definitely wouldn’t recommend it. There are some things even engineers can’t fix—and when it’s time to start talking, more tinkering just won’t do.
