Ask HN: How can I grow this or gain more traction?

27 points

16 years ago

I built http://todoneapp.com/ about 2 months ago. I actually built it for my wife who doesn't work well with normal todo lists. She would have cracks of time in her day between chasing our kid around and I devised this tool to help her maximize use of that time. At its core To->Done is basically an ultra-minimalistic todo system based around just getting you to do SOMETHING rather than encouraging a meta game of managing todos. It's not really supposed to compete with anything else out there, it's not a "stripped down" RTM or Tada list. It's really just a whole other (new?) kind of system for taking action.

Anyway, I got To->Done featured on the front page of Lifehacker and got about 30,000 visits the first couple days after launch. Two months later, traffic has trickled to a crawl. There are definitely active users that visit it every day, but not a lot of them.

I'm wondering what I can do to take this to the next level. It's by design uncomplicated, not a ton of features for you to get lost in, etc. So I'm not even sure what the "next level" means. I'd love to have more traffic and users, but I'm not sure how to bring them in. I don't see a way to make the site viral, since todo lists are inherently private. I'm definitely not going to pay for traditional paid search marketing, since I'm not trying to make any money on the site right now.

I really just don't know what to do with it, and wonder if what I built is just inherently ungrowable since it's an application for private actions that has a philosophy of ultra-minimalism. Should I go gung-ho into this somehow or just put out a feature every couple weeks and switch full focus onto the 100 other ideas I have laying around?

Thanks!

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