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Show HN: Nudges.fyi – simple, unmissable reminders via phone/text/email

103 pointsby ttaover 2 years ago
I built this app primarily for my wife, who has tried many mainstream todo-list apps (OmniFocus, Things, and Todoist come to mind) over the years with little success. She isn&#x27;t particularly interested in setting up a productivity system and the administrivia that goes with it. Even having to remember to look at an app once a day was far from ideal for her. This app is an attempt at a solution for anyone that fits this description, with a focus on alerting over organization.<p>Here&#x27;s how it works: you create a nudge that&#x27;s set to trigger at a given date and time, and the app phones you, texts you, or emails you (or all three) at the right moment. Nudges can trigger on a schedule, so something like &quot;call me about monthly bills for the next month on the last day of every month&quot; is quite easy to set up. It also works well (sample size 1, admittedly) as a supplement to a more robust GTD system. I use Things for almost everything, but my most important reminders are set up as nudges.<p>I&#x27;ve worked on this on and off for the last month or so and I think it&#x27;s ready for a Show HN. There&#x27;s likely some rough edges in there so I wouldn&#x27;t use it for anything _critical_ just yet (let me know if you see anything that looks buggy!). I cut a lot of scope in order to release an initial version quickly; here&#x27;s a list of things I&#x27;m considering adding to the app in the near future:<p><pre><code> - Implement something analogous to Pagerduty: create nudges that repeatedly nag you (with something like an escalation policy) until you acknowledge them - More notification channels: get nudges on Telegram, WhatsApp, Slack, etc. - Families (or teams, possibly) share a namespace and can send nudges to each other - Nudges that collect a response: possibly for polls, a daily diary entry, or habit tracker - Incoming and outgoing webhooks - Snooze a nudge so it re-triggers in X minutes </code></pre> I work on distributed systems at my day job and haven&#x27;t done frontend and CRUD things in a long while now, so building this out was a nice change of pace. If anyone&#x27;s curious, the app is built with: Next.js (in static HTML mode) and Tailwind for the frontend, Go for the API server and background nudge loop, and SQLite (+Litestream) for persistence.<p>In any case, I&#x27;m looking for feedback from the HN community here: is this something you would use?<p>TL;DR: schedule reminders for yourself via phone call, text message, and&#x2F;or email<p>(PS: the free plan doesn&#x27;t allow call&#x2F;SMS nudges because I&#x27;m a bit wary of spam, but if you&#x27;d like to give this a shot and can&#x27;t [or don&#x27;t want to] subscribe to a paid plan at this point, send me an email at tim@nudges.fyi for a 1-month code)

20 comments

ttaover 2 years ago
Thanks to everyone who has checked this out! This is the first real app I&#x27;ve launched on HN, and it&#x27;s a great feeling to know people are using something I&#x27;ve made. :)<p>To anyone who wants to give the phone call&#x2F;text messaging features a shot asap, you can use the code NUDGESHN for 3 months free on a Pro plan.<p>For the record, the free plan doesn&#x27;t include any call&#x2F;text credits at the moment because I&#x27;m worried about my phone provider disabling my account over spam if I allow this for free accounts.
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pfoofover 2 years ago
So it&#x27;s basically WUPHF. I think I will love it.
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satvikpendemover 2 years ago
I do this through calendar notifications but I agree that there isn&#x27;t as much granularity, such as &quot;ping me X times a week but once I finish a task, stop pinging me.&quot; Calendars don&#x27;t keep track of that kind of state and thus aren&#x27;t well suited to this kind of productivity tracking.<p>I&#x27;m building something in the same space [0], the landing page is outdated but the version in my head is similar to your idea, as a mobile app in Flutter with a Rust backend API, and Twilio for the SMS, calling, and emailing.<p>And good for you for cutting scope and just launching! That&#x27;s what I did a few weeks ago, I built a site in 24 hours, launched it on HN and Reddit, and got 20k visitors in a 48 hour span after launching [1] because I was tired of procrastinating launching products. I also got a lot of really good feedback from the launches, so now I&#x27;m learning that launching early and often is key to iterative development.<p>Don&#x27;t worry about the pricing by the way. I&#x27;m going to make my app cost $20 a month simply to weed out people who won&#x27;t take habit formation seriously. Those that want to buy it will buy it and those that won&#x27;t, well, they&#x27;re not really worth caring about since they&#x27;re not your customers anyway.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getartemis.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getartemis.app</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33303269" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33303269</a>
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xigoiover 2 years ago
How is this better than creating a reminder in a calendar app or something?
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garyrobover 2 years ago
This is very much like a project I made for myself and have been thinking about commercializing! &quot;create nudges that repeatedly nag you (with something like an escalation policy) until you acknowledge them&quot; but that has absolutely been my plan! It does text me and my idea has been that it would escalate to phoning!<p>I&#x27;ve been using my own version, completely terminal-based, for more than a year now and it has changed my life. I&#x27;m a lot like your wife; other systems haven&#x27;t worked for me. This does, because I do look at all my SMS messages every day and dismiss them. Todoist&#x27;s alerts just didn&#x27;t do the job, and other systems didn&#x27;t either.<p>I almost certainly would have had a product out in this area months ago but my attention has been going to crypto-related projects! I have the start of a Django-based UI nudge-like product now. I&#x27;ve been working on it in the background, partly in case none of my crypto stuff works out, and partly just to learn web UI development.<p>I&#x27;m not sure where my project will go now that yours is out, but congratulations on getting it out there, and good luck! (Now I&#x27;m thinking I might just open source my terminal version, and drop the django one. Techies could use the terminal version by getting their own twilio accounts...)
culturestateover 2 years ago
<i>&gt; the app phones you, texts you, or emails you (or all three) at the right moment</i><p>My instinct would be to get rid of this granularity and automatically notify every contact method that a user has set up. I might even <i>require</i> more than one at signup.<p>The problem that most people who’d use this kind of thing have isn’t <i>missing</i> reminders as much as <i>ignoring</i> them.<p>Think about a broader target audience of e.g. people who set 10 morning alarms scheduled one minute apart. You could nudge them <i>at</i> the set time and then again every X minutes afterward until they mark the task as completed, only allowing one snooze per task.
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spaceman_2020over 2 years ago
This is perfect. I’ve used Google Calendar in the past for reminders but this is better since it doesn’t clog up my calendar space with birthday or bill payment reminders. Also love the simplicity of the UI.
endorphineover 2 years ago
This title gave me MSN vibes. Anyone remember the unlimited nudges hack?
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netsharcover 2 years ago
A few weeks ago I thought about setting a Telegram bot to send me a reminder to do stuff, you get the dopamine hit of &quot;Oh someone&#x27;s sent me a message&quot; so hopefully it&#x27;s harder to ignore.<p>I&#x27;ve also thought of a To Do app that has statistics of how long you&#x27;ve ignored&#x2F;snoozed items, to shock people like me who&#x27;s procrastinated things like learning French for probably 5+ years now...
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boxedover 2 years ago
I believe the concept of notifications is deeply flawed. I&#x27;ve written about this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kodare.net&#x2F;2021&#x2F;09&#x2F;10&#x2F;status-not-notifications.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kodare.net&#x2F;2021&#x2F;09&#x2F;10&#x2F;status-not-notifications.html</a>
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bigthymerover 2 years ago
Hey, I wanted to wait a day or so before commenting but I wanted to let you know that you can send an email to a specific email address so the receiver receives an SMS text. People may try to cheap out of paying by doing so. Good luck on the venture!
tothrowawayover 2 years ago
Something to consider: Make it possible to create a nudge without signing up. I would even go as far as making the homepage the interface to setup a notification (with ample explanatory text). I think it&#x27;s much more likely to catch on that way.<p>You can include a magic link in the notification so the user can manage it without an account.
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TIPSIOover 2 years ago
There&#x27;s a gigantic market for pharmaceutical compliance and old people.<p>Insurances want &#x2F; will pay big money for systems that get people to take their medicine (less sick people).<p>Look into it and good luck!
maheshnmurthiover 2 years ago
an alternative that I have been making use of lately (for myself however, may not work to nudge others) is Snooze in Gmail.
tobaseover 2 years ago
Terms and privacy documents are not public.
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padmickover 2 years ago
You are suffering the HN hug of death, AxiosError: Network Error on your dashboard after auth0 login.
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RamblingCTOover 2 years ago
Why not use Apple Reminders?
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INGSOCIALITEover 2 years ago
WUPHF!
nprateemover 2 years ago
Way overpriced
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pcdoodleover 2 years ago
way cool.