There are four lights, my friends

I suspect it was one of the content review bots. In my first Show HN post, I handwrote the comment, but using a bulleted list style suggested by an AI agent, and that got flagged. I reached out to the mods, and they told me to switch to prose, which passed muster.

That's neat, did you wire a voice model to your own backend, or do you use something off-the-shelf and seed the context and save the output?

Personally, I tend to dodge phone calls, but it's true that I use this mostly with voice. Rather than having something talk back to me, I'm using a gesture and talking to it.

How often are you taking that phone call?

Thank you. No, this is my first pricing strategy. I came to it two different ways:

1) Bottom-up: this is the price that is sustainable given that there is a model reading your task list every morning

2) Top-down: this is priced between simple todo lists that just manage your data, and more complex AI tools that do a lot more than tasks.

Does your freemium app feature AI? Does it convert well into paying customers?

I take your point. It's not the first llm-assisted app I started writing, but it is the first one I'm launching, so I guess that counts.

I'm hoping the answer to that is the same reason I built it, which is that proper task management is actually hard work. I think we like to fool ourselves into believing that if we removed this friction or that friction, we would just start the habit of managing our tasks, and only then would we get stuff done.

This app is about getting off that track, and just doing things instead. You might use it differently, but I've built it so that I only barely use the app. It's almost like a note taker, I just say the things I need to do into it, and check my email in the morning.

Thanks. That's both encouraging, and sobering, at the same time.

I'd love to know more about how that played out, two questions actually: 1) did people not sign up, or did they sign up and leave? 2) for the ones who left, did they dislike the triage, or did they think it was great and just not want to pay for it?

Getting the answers to those would help me choose where to focus first.

I've used it every morning since June, with incredible delight in what it does for my days, so I'm still going to try to find users who find the same value that I do.

Thank you for the offer.

Thought it was great, didn't want to pay. We made it free for the basic todo, paid for groups and templates.

We also didn't have the advantage of good whisper models so voice input wasn't a thing. I feel like that hurt adoption as well.

Thank you for the answer.

It's not exactly what I was hoping to hear, but it's also why I don't have a free tier, and I'm not relying on promo codes. If people won't pay for it at all, I want to learn that quickly, rather than building up a large number of users on a free tier that I can't sustain. Even a small paying audience can make this maintainable.

Voice input is prominent in the app, but the gesture setup is manual for a web app. I'll try to make it clearer on the site, help users get it set up.

It's a prompt to a model with a set of rules that were built up from my usage (and those of testers) from roughly the last four months. It takes into account a deadline, if you specified one, urgency if mentioned, the text of the task itself. It looks at the age of the task, and its activity, the project, and it gets the whole list every morning. The model chooses three, and the reasons behind those three. I know it works, because I've used it and tuned the rules. When it got it wrong, I fixed it, using evals to make sure the existing cases didn't break.

There are already a decently large number of todo apps that don't have AI. They compete on audience, and integrations, so it's hard to differentiate and hard to deliver value worth switching. This one doesn't just add an AI chat interface, it uses the strengths of a model, handling arbitrary input, and re-reads your list every single day without getting bored or overwhelmed.

Yes, you can build something with ChatGPT if you have a $20 subscription, and I'm sure that there are people who have already done that.

If you go that route, you do need a place to store your list that your assistant can see. For this app, it is the one and only place your task list lives, with voice input, and the UI has been tailored over many iterations, to make the common use cases as simple and as obvious as possible.

Getting an email to work the way this one does will take trial and error, because this one's not a summary, it's intentional choices, with the rationale, and it's complemented by the UI to customize your day.

Handling the prompts, as they change, will take work, and if you're using scheduled prompts, you'll need a way to know whether your new prompt works. I keep an eval set because the prompt change you make today can fail in subtle ways when looking at a different set of tasks. I've seen this nearly every time I've made a prompt change.

Thank you. It's a fair criticism, and I'll take note.

For the landing page, that's good to know. I didn't catch that, and I need to fix it, though I could definitely use your help with some specifics, if you're willing. I linked straight to the trial page. Is your criticism about that page, specifically, or about the home page?

What came out here that did not come across over there? Not speaking to design elements, but what could have told you it does more?