#1 - Categories
Categorizing SpaceTime
Welcome to the FIRST SpaceTime weekly update!
In each newsletter, we’ll share the following:
Storytime - a story/decision/lesson/unanswered question from last week
Metrics
Highlights
Lowlights
Miscellaneous
Alright, let’s get started!
Storytime
A couple weeks back, we launched (quietly!) to the Apple App Store 🎉 (Thank you to anyone who has given us a look ❤️)
During launch, we reflexively placed ourselves under the Productivity category. However, upon further evaluation, we had to reconsider.
For starters, Productivity is fiercely competitive. The top apps are built by massive companies with ubiquitous appeal (i.e. Gmail, Outlook). Furthermore, the most popular Task Managers out there, such as Todoist (rank 85) and Any.do (rank 94), are buried far down the list. If those apps represent the best case for a product like ours, Productivity felt like swimming against the current.
But more importantly, is Productivity even the right category? SpaceTime is not a Task Manager. It is not just about getting more stuff done. We want to build a tool that reduces anxiety, clarifies your day with visualizations (hence, “Map your day”), and overall, helps people have days worth remembering.
Productivity is a crucial component to all of this. You cannot feel relaxed with important tasks left unmanaged.
But a day worth remembering is filled with more than just tasks. We believe it should have a bit of adventure and fun. We want a product that allows us to plan our work, build adventure into our lives, capture brilliant ideas, and record memories, such that they can all be savored later.
That’s not a Productivity app.
So, we choose to classify ourselves under Health and Lifestyle.
Today, SpaceTime is working on features to help with Productivity, but our north star is bigger than that. The new categories are a simple nudge to help us remember what we’re aspiring to - a reminder that “we have bigger fish to fry”.
Metrics
Weekly Active Users: 10
(The day isn’t quite done, but it looks like we’ll experience some dropoff by day’s end)
Number of records created (a record is either a task or note): 18
(Again, the day isn’t quite done, but looks like we’ll also see a dropoff today for this metric)
Highlights
Last week, we launched a few features.
“Tutorial”
Navigation
An experimental UX for creation: Drag to create tasks, tap to create notes
Neither the Tutorial (#1), nor the new creation UX (#3) had quite the impact on users as we liked, but we learned a lot. Watching users play around with the new creation UX, and then reviewing, Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug - we’ve built a more intuitive creation experience. Early feedback has been much better and we’re excited to ship this (currently In Review with Apple)!
Here’s a preview:
Lowlights
As our metrics show, our Weekly Active Users (WAUs) count has been falling. This isn’t particularly surprising, but confirms that we need to work on two things: increase the number of people who try SpaceTime (duh!) and improve retention (double duh!). On getting more people to try, we’ll be sharing SpaceTime in more channels (like this Substack!) On the retention front, we’ve heard lots of feedback about Notifications.
We’re actively working on both, and will be shipping the first version of Notifications very soon (prototype done!)
Miscellaneous
As of last Friday, we’re both FullTime on SpaceTime! Thank you to Uber, and in particular the MoneySF team, for being a wonderful place to work. We grew up a bit and learned a ton while we were there ❤️
Phil will be in SF until Jan 23, but afterwards, we’ll both be in Texas as we prepare for our travels to Asia ✈️ 🧳
Random side projects: Phil made an update to https://motivationalwd40.com/ - adding a privacy page, and a new prompt - “What’s Happening”, which was inspired by a tweet
If you haven’t tried SpaceTime yet, here’s a quick link to check us out on the app store!