#todone

[nothingtodonothingtogain]

surving q2, 5/41

it's gonna be an interesting weekend.

[nothingtodonothingtogain]

surviving q2, 1/41

timeframe for today:

yoga, breakfast, shower

1030-1200 work

1230-1300 things

1300-1430 work

1430-1500 lunch

1500-1630 work

1630-1700 things

1700-1900 work

1900-1945 dinner

1945-2100 walk & bike

2100 yoga, bathroom

2130 bed

[leedawidge]

06/02/2016

Wrote agenda

Had meeting

Finished learning presentation

Gave presentation

Had lab

Typed up minutes

Finished binaural sky work

Did radio show

Played Escape Goat and Lego Star Wars

[kr-bucket-list]

June 16, 2015 So, I was at this show. And this made me so unbelievably happy.

Lifetime Bucket List item #27 COMPLETE!!

-Also Last Summer As A Michigander item #5

[todone-at-ct-blog]

The Metric Showdown

“If you torture the data long enough it will confess.”  Ronald Coase

This week in product management we discussed metrics and planning for them. If you think about the right metrics to track the right things early enough then you hopefully get to avoid the gruesome quote I began with.  Instead you have a nice dashboard confessing everything in a slick manner.

Team ToDone talked about a few things: the conclusions we can draw from the data we have, the data we’ll need operationally, the data we’ll need revenue wise and data investors like to see.

Let’s start with what looking at our data taught us.  First due to lack of use (one total phone call) we’ve opted to kill AlexDoes Assist.  This was a product where one of our team members would help you create your todo list. We also looked at the outcome of our last Start Up Sprint, AlexDoes Social a site where you can post your todo items and help other Cornell Tech students check off their items. This had use during launch, but has since gone stagnant indicating it shouldn’t where we focus development for the rest of the semester.  That will be on directory integration with current todo list platforms.

Next we talked about what kind of metrics we would need for different aspects of the business. One of the class instructors was making strong points for paying more attention to active usage, not simply things like downloads. Here are a few of the important operational metrics we need to track:

1) Todo list upload attempts (and success rate)

2) Integration pulls with todo list vendors

3) Ratio of tasks that can be completed to total (both by list and aggregate)

4) User behavior metrics - how often do they revisit after upload, time on site, acceptance rate, etc

For sales and business model purposes we identified different metrics.  Ones that not only we need to track for revenue purposes, but ones that could disprove our current ideas of what the revenue model should look like.

1) Cost per task and the revenue breakdown from different types of tasks

2) Average tasks per order

3) Spend by user each month (perhaps people set aside a certain budgeted amount and a subscription model would fit their needs? We don’t know yet)

We’ve got a great start for what we need to track and will find more metrics as we move along.

Cheers,

Kate

[todone-at-ct-blog]

Customers Are the Key

Products are designed for customers. Customers are alwaysthe key to the success of a product. ToDone team has spent the past week and will spend the future week to determine the edge, and reach out to our potential customers.

 Currently, we are targeting those city professionals with mid-high income. They are usually busy, have tons of tasks on their to-do list, and willing to pay reasonable amount of money to get things done. With the temporary success of MAGIC (getmagicnow.com), it is confirmed that customers exist, needs exist, and market exists.

 ToDone team went through an extensive hack-day/sprint last Thursday and Friday, and all the team members are proud of the great progress we achieved during the 24 hours. We had our first-ever testing product (AlexDoes.com) launched, and received our first-ever customer communication within 6 hours from launching. He was looking for help to outsource his outsourcing tasks (what a special task! -_<). He was directed by a post we made on QUORA to our website, and left the contact info for us to reach out. Our team intentionally maintained the direct real-time contact (phone call) to directly learn about the real needs from the potential customers.

 For the future week, ToDone team has made the plan to spread out company name cards to some high-end luxury apartments. We are looking for some real input from someone we don’t know. This will help us to better define our product/service, and hopefully find a real attractive business edge.

Jiheng

[todone-at-ct-blog]

ToDone -

Hello World,

We're ToDone, a startup team working out of Cornell Tech during the spring semester. We're a mix of MBA and M.Eng in Computer Science graduate students looking to create a platform that allows you have a smarter to-do list, one that intelligently tells you what it can outsource for you at what cost. Rather than manage several different outsourcing options, it does that for you from one central account....or that's the direction we're moving in! 

So far, our team has had several ideation sessions and performed a first bout of customer research on privacy and to-do list platforms. We've been whiteboarding out our idea and examining it in product management philosophy. From class demonstration with another team, then putting it into action within our own, we learned to map the product into the following: narrative (the why), how (the what), goals, assumptions, unknowns. These factors start leading more into the tactical execution points and raising questions around investigation points. For example, one team member raised the question of privacy and how personal to-do lists are and to get a gut feel, we decided to ask our Cornell Tech family if they were willing to give us their to-do list in any fashion to help our start up project. 

We got quite a response of to-do lists in a variety of forms, offers to show us and push back on how that was a very private thing. Part of what we're working on this week is digging through the data we got, as well as profiling the market landscape from a business and technical viewpoints!

Stay tuned for more updates and fun from the ToDone team,

Kate (who uses a strange combination of Trello, a sticky noted planner and calendar invites to get things from to-do to done)