TaskSpot Passed 1,000 Users. The Number I Care About Is 6,224.
Six months ago, about 100 people used TaskSpot. As of this week, it's 1,023.
That's roughly 10x since January 1. No launch day, no ad budget, no growth hacks, partly because I don't have those to spend, but mostly because I didn't want to buy growth I couldn't keep. What I had instead was a clear idea of what TaskSpot should be and the stubbornness to protect it. People found it, told a friend, and kept using it.
I build TaskSpot on nights and weekends, one small change at a time. Growth like this doesn't feel like a rocket. It feels like the payoff for a few hundred small decisions that each looked too minor to matter, finally adding up.
The number I actually care about
1,023 users is nice. But signups are just people who opened the door. The number I keep coming back to is this one: 6,224 tasks completed.
Out of 10,244 tasks created this year, more than 6,000 got finished. That's not a vanity metric sitting in a dashboard. That's real work that real people actually did. Someone planned their Tuesday, did the thing, and checked it off. Six thousand times over.
I'd take that over a bigger signup number any day. A to-do app that collects tasks you never finish isn't a productivity tool. It's a guilt machine. The point was always to help people close the loop, not open more of them.
Boring won
Here's the part I find funny. TaskSpot has fewer features than almost every app it competes with. No projects. No labels beyond optional #tags in a task title. No 47-view dashboard. No setup weekend. The whole product is Today, Tomorrow, Backlog, Done, and Deleted.
I kept waiting for people to ask for more. Mostly they didn't. Mostly they asked for the same boring, simple thing I wanted when I started building this: see what to do today, get a head start on tomorrow, and get out of the way. That's it. If you've never used it, the today-tomorrow method is the entire idea in one page, and the case for a minimalist to-do app is the longer version of why I bet on less.
Turns out a lot of people were tired of configuring their productivity system instead of being productive. Who knew.
What actually moved the needle
There was no single trick. Three things did the real work:
- People told other people. Most of the growth came from word of mouth. That only works if the product is actually good, so it's the feedback I trust most.
- You told me what was broken. A real chunk of this year went into fixing small annoyances that users emailed me about. Paste-to-import, keyboard shortcuts, the streak toggle. None of it was on a roadmap. All of it came from replies to my inbox.
- I said no a lot. For every feature that shipped, several didn't, because they'd have made TaskSpot heavier. Keeping the product small was the actual work.
Thank you
If you're one of the 1,023, thank you. For trusting a side project with your daily planning, for the emails, for the bug reports, for telling a friend. I read every message, and a surprising amount of TaskSpot exists because someone took two minutes to tell me what wasn't working.
This is still early. Still a side project. Still just me, on nights and weekends. But 1,000 people is 1,000 people, and 6,224 finished tasks is a lot of things that got done.
If you've been meaning to try it, it's free to start: plan your day with TaskSpot. If you already use it and something bugs you, reply and tell me. That's how we got here.
Prabhdeep