Getting Taskflow into a new layer of the market

and the power of simplicity

Show Notes:

Justin has a work-related trip to Denver coming up and Mark is getting tired of being under the CDC order to wear a mask. He estimates there's a 95% chance the virus will not be contained and 45+ states will have outbreaks.


Mark didn't get the analytics site launched, but he hit his other big goal of starting the email automation done and did some fasting. Justin didn't make it out swimming but made some good progreess and some decisions about Taskflow. (27:00)


Since he already has a sizeable audience, he doesn't really need to follow his own advice for entrepreneurs in the Nugget Academy. He can skip several of the steps and move a bit faster.

The details of Taskflow are a bit complex to work through. Productivity strategies are a big portion of the tool, and different strategies have different "ingredients". Power users can custimize quite a bit. For example, one user pursing a "quick wins" strategy might make small task size 5x more of a prioritzation factor than the financial impact of completing it. Another user might make it a 10x more important factor. (33:40)

Justin's reasoning about why it's valuable to get to a new "layer" of a large market (36:20)

One additional constraint is that this will be a freemium app used by many, many users if things go well and Justin wants to avoid external job queues as much as possible. It's probably going to have to be a SPA eventually, too.

This week's mental model is borrowed from Alan Kay's "The power of simplicity" talk, and we had a good discussion on the trade-offs of building your own widgets versus using other people's. (1:07:12)

Goals discussion at 1:11:02 and 1:22:01

Mental Model: Blue plane, red plane

Justin's goals for next time

  • Go swimming twice
  • Get some help with an algorithm for weighting tasks in Taskflow
  • Finish mockups for most of the major areas of Taskflow

Mark's goals for next time

  • No exercise except pushups at home but do some intermittent fasting
  • Flip the switch on email automation for Alchemist Camp
  • Continue building the site for Reactor and screencasting it
  • Launch analytics app???? (not a realistic goal at this point)

Mentioned

Video version is at: https://youtu.be/PiwcsTcQihY

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