James, I was describing GTDNext to a colleague. While impressed, he asked me if there is a long-term commitment to this product and what the long-term plans are for growing GTDNext. In essence, he asked how financially stable GTDNext is and how the future looks. What should I tell him about all of this? I of course said absolutely yes to everything he asked, but I thought I had better get this directly from you!
Best wishes!
I agree that this is a cool app and I would be super disappointed if they close it down. Hopefully they can open source the project if that happens so that others can host it.
I’d tell your friend that the worst case scenario would be that they stop performing updates on the site. Not sure how much just their web hosting costs but I would think that would be covered by the Premium memberships. It the new application development that is expensive.
Great question by your friend. Here are my thoughts.
I’ve seen several different articles over the years suggest that when picking a task manager you pay attention to the funding and length of time the company has been in business.
While I think that in general, this is good advice, I also think it’s a bit more complex than looking at just those two factors.
For example here is a list of some of the largest funded startups that failed. So clearly having a lot of money (financial stability) doesn’t guarantee that your company will be around forever. So if money isn’t the key, what is the key?
In our case, I’d suggest that passion is key to sustaining this business. As a small bootstrap startup, passion project, we are in a better position to keep this app going for the long term because of the following factors:
That’s not to say that we don’t want to make a profit and take this product bigger. Of course, we do, we would be silly not to want that. However, it does mean that we have the ability to be more patient than most VC-backed companies. It means we can be in it for the long haul without feeling pressure from those who gave us money.
The flip side of that is we have so many plans for the future that it is difficult sometimes to be patient, we want to go faster than we have funding or time to do so. However, due to our recent growth, we are currently looking to hire a contractor to work with us on a native mobile app.
Thanks for sharing the app with your friend. The more you all share our app with your friends (and online in social media!) the faster we will be able to grow and put into place the features we all want!
In fact, I’d love it if all of you would take the time to list the reasons you love GTDNext as new posts in the Kudo’s section of this forum. I will then post those comments on social media and attract even more users. How about it all?
Thanks, James. This is excellent and I am sure everyone is happy to hear this! I will definitely post as Kudos why I love GTDNext!
Not to poke with a stick TOO much, but could we have an update on the native apps development?
We are working on getting the mobile view working well so that when we create the mobile apps (they will be based on current mobile web views) that they work well. At the same time, we are looking for a good Ionic developer to bring on board to help us with that work. Thanks!
Sounds great. Thanks, James.