The last 30 days has been the my most productive of the past year. It’s easy to get discouraged building a product in a silo, in a foreign country, without a lot of interaction with your peers, and it’s not a big seller. Motivation materializes in a nice note from a user or a quick blog post that validates your product is solving a real problem.
I believe in checklists. I do. Really. And I would use them all the time…if I only had a great tool.
This was a huge kick in the ass, a well known entreprenuer, in touch with what people need is asking for a product that is inline with goals I’ve always had for Jottpad.
Building Jottpad I try to stay true to three key ideas:
- Quickly and easily save thoughts.
- Make available everywhere and to anyone (sync and share).
- Reusable, this has always been a bit vague.
Jottpad 2.0 rounded out 1 and 2, and started to tackle number 3 in a concrete manner.
Number 3 was not part of the original plan, but in 2011 when my wife and I were making a big move we had this moving “checklist” that was essentially a bunch of emails, if pooled together, formed all the steps needed to pack our house. It was hard to manage and without the help of a very involved consultant would have been a disaster.
About a month before, May of 2011, Jottpad 1.0 had just been released. I made a note at the time to investigate building a product for reusable checklists even though Jottpad is, at the core, checklists. I wanted to keep Jottpad super simple and the idea of adding templates or projects didn’t jive. This reusable checklist idea seemed like a seperate product directed at “enterprisey” applications.
Over the past year, in my own personal life, I’ve wanted reusable checklists many times. Packing for a marathon, a picnic on the beach, or a weekend camping trip. I created these lists in Jottpad and it worked but only because I shoehorned it in. With version 2.0 the reusable aspect is finally taking shape. Is it the exact product outlined by Evan? No, but it is becoming a viable solution for people looking for simple reusable checklists.
Thank you @ev for the kick in the ass, validation and a productive last 30 days.