HACKER Q&A
📣 damanoman

I'm making a productivity and proj mgmt tool. Worth doing?


Hello. I’ve used many tools over the years to accomplish my job and deliver successful outcomes, and I always felt like many of them were missing some basic things. While they had many features, I feel that those features were quite shallow and limited our effectiveness. This would inevitably lead to adding yet another software into the mix and adding friction in our processes.

I’m not at all familiar with starting a company. I’m working on this product in my spare time for a couple weeks and I’m at a point where I’m using it to help me build the product.

Do you think that for this category of software it is better to just wrap up the GA version of a good enough first version and release it? I know this is a saturated market.

Or should I start talking to potential customers? At the risk of making some of you entrepreneurs cringe.. I spoke to a couple people and they didn’t seem to really get it, or maybe I’m not good at selling them on the merits.

My gut feeling is that I should keep building and dogfooding for myself until it’s ready, and then try again to speak with potential customers. I am worried people will compare it to existing solutions when it’s missing some key features like permissions or SSO which someone mentioned is important to them.

Anyways, I would appreciate your thoughts and advice. Thank you.


  👤 re-thc Accepted Answer ✓
There are many ways to do anything. Some build "in public", e.g. on Twitter/X and blog about every step. Some release early with previews/beta and keep going. There's no hard or fast rules.

I definitely think you can release something and also talk to customers. I mean why not? Try again later. Keep improving as you do this.

I doubt something like SSO is going to be a blocker at this stage. Perhaps something else.

Can't say more without seeing the product though...