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Examples from our company: - My cofounder uses random historical figures: David Hume, Leif Erikson, Miyamoto Musashi. They're always busy creating tasks like "Sword Sharpening" and "Pillaging". - A colleague used all cereal characters: Toucan Sam, Tony the Tiger, Lucky Leprechaun - A colleague used famous Portland Trailblazers
My test personas are in two categories. I have fake alliterative versions of famous mathematicians like "Frank Fourier" and "Lesley Laplace" and then mythological characters from the Mahabharata.
This goes all the way back to when I was a kid and I found out my dad had named all the servers in his lab after famous elephants: Dumbo, Ganesh, Babar...
I'm Ashutosh, one of the founders of Sunsama (https://sunsama.com). Sunsama is a daily planner for busy folks. Each day, Sunsama walks you through a guided daily planning process that helps you create a calm, focused, and intentional plan for the day. Sunsama pulls together your calendar, emails, and tasks from other SaaS tools into a single place.
Travis and I started building products in the calendar and productivity space a couple years after graduating and working our first jobs. The idea that we were going to spend the next 40 years behind computers, working, and that Outlook or Google calendar would be the best way for us to be thoughtful and intentional with what we did at work felt unacceptable.
Before Sunsama, we built, launched, and shut down six different products in this space over the course of four years. I’ll spare you the postmortem on each failure but my favorite boondoggle was the first product we built. We tried to build a “social network for time” (think Calendly meets LinkedIn). In retrospect, it was doomed because it wasn’t something we needed ourselves nor did we have a real user in mind, we just thought that “networking calendars” would be an interesting problem to solve. After shipping this and learning that no one wanted it, we just kept frankensteining our software from one pivot to another, mostly unsuccessfully. In one of our last pivots before Sunsama as it is today we hit a breaking point when our biggest customer churned and we realized we only had a few months of runway. It was a gut punch because we felt we’d finally run out of “if we just change <blank>, this will definitely work” ideas.
This time, instead of frankensteining our idea, we took a step back and started fresh. Luckily, all the products we built were calendar/productivity related and over the years we’d talked to thousands of users and customers about their calendars, their work tools, and how they went about their work day. This intuition and expertise for how people work coupled with a fresh perspective got us to the realization that everyone started the day by asking themselves "what am I going to do today?" but answering that question was difficult and there wasn’t a great place to answer it. The calendar works well for planning meetings but is too clunky for heads down work. Project management tools work well for documenting all the work a team might do over long periods of time but it's stressful to look at hundreds of Jira tickets when you just want to work on a couple of them today. Text lists or written notes are flexible but don't connect back to the actual source of work. And simply keeping a mental list seems to break down once your job becomes sufficiently busy or ambitious.
So we decided to build a calendar + daily todo list for people who function on a hybrid of a maker and manager's schedule (to use Paul Graham’s terminology).
We’re excited to officially launch on HackerNews now that product is self service! It took us a while to get to this point as we originally started out as a product with a concierge onboarding (a la Superhuman).
Right now, we integrate with Google Calendar, Gmail, Asana, Github, Jira, Todoist and Trello. In the future, we hope to add more integrations and open up signups to folks who use those tools as well! We'd love your feedback on how it feels to plan out a workday with Sunsama!