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Launch HN: Akiflow (YC S20) – Bring your tasks and calendars together

105 pointsby nmnmover 2 years ago
Hi HN! We are Nunzio and Sebastiano, co-founders of Akiflow (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;akiflow.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;akiflow.com</a>). Akiflow is a personal planner that consolidates all your calendars and tasks in a unified view of your work.<p>For people who like to plan their time, it is tough to be realistic about what work you can get done without a calendar showing you how much time you can invest in your tasks. But it is hard to organize this because there is so much context-switching due to tasks coming from different apps—not to mention &quot;unstructured&quot; sources like email, notes taken during a meeting, a message on Slack, etc..<p>I’m that type of user—for me, my calendar has always been the ‘primary source of truth’. But the user experience was terrible. I had to keep to-do lists on the side of another app and manually turn my tasks into events to see them in the calendar. Tasks were scattered across messaging apps (emails, Slack), project management platforms, video calls, the web, etc., forcing me to jump between tabs, tasks and tools. I had to manually turn emails or Slack messages into tasks on Asana and always remember to push new tasks into my task lists.<p>We originally started Akiflow with a narrower idea: a command bar, similar to Alfred, to create tasks on Asana, Trello, etc.. or add events on the calendar. After a while, we learned that what our users really wanted was to have everything in one place. Once we understood that, it was obvious that we should pivot to building that one tool: a tasks+calendars app focused on making people faster.<p>How it works: most people start their day by checking outstanding conversations on their emails or Slack from mobile or desktop. There are two types of conversations—those that can be answered right away (in which case just do it!), and those that generate a task. The latter are what you save into Akiflow. Once you’re done processing your emails, Slack, etc., you open Akiflow where you find all your tasks coming from your various conversations and tools.<p>Once in Akiflow, you can organize each task quickly—you see all your to-dos and can drag and drop them into your calendar between events already scheduled. Alternatively, you can snooze a task for later if you need more time, or snooze it for someday if it isn&#x27;t actionable yet.<p>Now you have a complete list of your tasks for today and can hunker down to work. As your day goes on, Akiflow sends notifications on what you should be working on, based on your calendar events and tasks. We make this easy—for example, when it is time for a call, you can join right away with a click or a shortcut.<p>We have integrations (via APIs) with multiple sources of to-dos (Gmail, Slack, Todoist, Notion, Asana, Trello, ClickUp, and anything else via Zapier and IFTTT) to consolidate tasks in a single inbox. We added a lot of keyboard shortcuts and a command bar (we had this ready from Akiflow #1) and built a desktop application that manages all this information and helps schedule it.<p>The calendar works offline and supports both events and tasks; it&#x27;s built for time blocking and gives a comprehensive view of your day, week or month with features that make everyday actions much faster (join a call, share calendar availability, meet with, review your days). We integrate with your Google Calendar with a two-way sync, and we support working entirely offline. We also have a mobile app currently in beta to add and manage tasks on the go.<p>The desktop application is built using Electron and React. We use some native node modules to use a local SQLite database to store all the information and provide offline support. Our desktop app is in sync with our cloud, so multiple desktop clients will be kept in sync.<p>If you&#x27;re interested in trying the product, we have a free 7 days trial available; after that, we have a basic SAAS pricing model (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;akiflow.com&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;akiflow.com&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;</a>).<p>We would love to hear your feedback and ideas—thanks!

26 comments

smt88over 2 years ago
The permissions were a non-starter for me. If you&#x27;re going to download my contacts and have the ability to share, edit, or delete my calendars, you need to explain why.<p>Even then, requiring incredibly invasive permissions for a productivity app is unreasonable. Just limit the features that &quot;need&quot; those things instead.
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ftioover 2 years ago
What&#x27;s the go to market look like for a product like this?<p>Large enterprises have little incentive to invest in additional calendaring functionality, and the market for individuals who are this passionate about keeping a schedule cannot be very big. If it&#x27;s even &#x27;medium-sized&#x27; (for some arbitrary definition of that), the CAC must be crazy because people aren&#x27;t typically seeking out products like this, and competition in the app stores (and ad prices) are fierce.<p>Is the game plan here to rapidly get enough traction to exit to a major player in productivity&#x2F;calendaring? Feels like a tuck-in. I can&#x27;t imagine how this becomes a huge business, but I&#x27;m genuinely curious to hear what the strategy and target audience might look like.
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technicalreviewover 2 years ago
Akiflow convinced me to actually pay for a planner app. It has shown to be quite handy so far.
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a9h74jover 2 years ago
Not to be confused with <i>Ankiflow</i>, where you bring your repetitive tasks together with timed repetition.
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archydebover 2 years ago
I&#x27;ve been using this for a week since reading this post and I&#x27;m enjoying it.<p>The quick capture is the killer feature for me, although it&#x27;d be even better if there was a shortcut which automatically captures context too (e.g. URL, email)- maybe there is and I&#x27;m missing it.<p>Mobile capture is a bit of a nuisance but sure you&#x27;re aware of this. I think a WhatsApp bot would be the best way to give reliable offline or online capture without an app but I haven&#x27;t seen anybody executing on that so perhaps there are issues with the idea.<p>Agree with the other comments about the calendly-lite features being unecessary for me, and add complexity to a fairly busy UI.
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jtthe13over 2 years ago
We use office365 for calendaring. The onboarding flow stops at &quot;connect your Primary Google Calendar Account&quot;. I understand one has to start somewhere, but it still boggles my mind why so many B2B startups treat Office365 as second order of priority. Does it come from genuine market research on the addressable market, or tech myopia of Google apps usage in the startup ecosystem? Guess we&#x27;ll stick with Sunsama for the time being.
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waunbroderickover 2 years ago
It seems this application was designed to be at parity with other task calendar applications such as <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;TickTick.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;TickTick.com</a>?<p>Is there a roadmap alongside this product that shows at what stage this product plans to seperate itself from the; ticktick’s, sunsamas, and motions of the world?<p>I feel when selecting apps like these now a day the real question is almost where do you want to put your money? Future support and development seems to be my main concern since, almost all of their features are mutually inclusive of one another despite a small few, esp with zapper integrations. Does anyone see something I’m not?
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insomniacityover 2 years ago
I look at things like this and cry because I know I&#x27;ll never see it inside the large corporates I tend to work in.<p>I&#x27;d pay for it myself, but I wouldn&#x27;t be able to integrate with anything - eg our O365 tenant will be fully locked down.
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maslamover 2 years ago
No connection to the Akiflow team. I found the tool on my own and really like it. It’s snappy and does what it claims to do. I don’t really need their Calendly-lite implementation but everything else is very well put together.
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neil_sover 2 years ago
Since Timeful got shut down, I&#x27;ve been looking for a great solution for task time-blocking. This comment thread has so many great solutions for me to try, including Akiflow, thanks for working on this problem! I can&#x27;t use it right now because our corporate Google Workspace accounts are locked from sharing, but looking forward to using it eventually.
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ergocoderover 2 years ago
The founder must be spectacular in sales&#x2F;marketinf&#x2F;execution given this is a so-so idea with gazillion competitors.
amoghsover 2 years ago
<i>After a while, we learned that what our users really wanted was to have everything in one place.</i><p>This is so spot on! We&#x27;re having similar learnings with eesel [1] too. Work is far too scattered across apps. Thanks for sharing your journey so far and congrats on the launch!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eesel.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eesel.app</a>
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rayinerover 2 years ago
Why can’t this be done in a native plugin? For one thing, who uses gmail for real work? For another, the idea of paying for yet another web app that Hoovers my data into the cloud isn’t appealing. Sunsama (another YC alum) already does all that.
d4rkp4tternover 2 years ago
The first thing I look for in any productivity tool is keyboard shortcuts.<p>I see a lot of mouse clicking and dragging in the demo video. A truly productivity-focused tool should be heavily keyboard-shortcut based. Just my opinion :) Or are there Kb shortcuts that I am missing?
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warpechover 2 years ago
What a timing! I just found information about Akiflow on a blog[1] and decided to give it a try. I had no idea that you&#x27;ve officially launched today!<p>I used to use an app called Acapela[2] for a while, but they went out of business.<p>I am mostly interested in Slack integration and it seems that you nailed it. Pricing for your product ($15) is double than Slack itself ($7.25), but I will be happy to pay the price if it solves my problem of scheduling work that falls in through Slack.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brandonkboswell.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;Optimizing-the-iPhone-for-productivity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;brandonkboswell.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;Optimizing-the-iPhone-for-p...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;acapela.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;acapela.com&#x2F;</a>
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dhbanesover 2 years ago
App looks great. I connected three google calendars, however my personal calendar is inexplicably missing <i>some</i> events. One is recurring, the other was a one-off. Any idea how to fix?
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sharemywinover 2 years ago
Curious what direction you plan on going?<p>Business Teams planner: assign tasks to others, sync with other task tracking apps<p>or Family planner: shopping lists, financial planner etc.<p>or continue on a personal planner route
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jayonsoftwareover 2 years ago
Love your product
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ISLover 2 years ago
Is Jira integration planned? (I didn&#x27;t see it on the list &#x27;o sources above)
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danr4over 2 years ago
congrats on the launch. site works terribly in safari.
pj_mukhover 2 years ago
Okay, so apologies in advance because I hate it when people ask <i>me</i> this question.<p>But, how do you compare to Motion (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usemotion.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.usemotion.com&#x2F;</a>). I&#x27;ve been super curious about using a product like this. The other one I considered was Sunsama. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sunsama.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sunsama.com&#x2F;</a>). Would love your thoughts here.
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borchardtmpover 2 years ago
Amazing Nunzio! Congrats
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iLoveOncallover 2 years ago
&gt; Once we understood that, it was obvious that we should pivot to building that one tool: a tasks+calendars app focused on making people faster.<p>What is your opinion of this XKCD?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;927&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;927&#x2F;</a>
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hyperupcallover 2 years ago
This tool looks quite similar to Amie.so - which I use in conjunction with Todoist - do you have any major differentiating features? It seems like mainly there are more integrations<p>It seems unfortunate that the free plan is really just a 7 day trial, unless I misunderstood
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swyxover 2 years ago
congrats on launch! hope you fixed the memory issues
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satvikpendemover 2 years ago
Having made something similar [0], and having seen a lot of these types of tools, I&#x27;ll paste a comment I made before [1]:<p>&quot;&quot;&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve done a lot of research into this calendar&#x2F;tasks&#x2F;notes space, how does this compare to<p>- Sunsama [0]<p>- Daybridge<p>- Routine [1]<p>- Agenda<p>- NotePlan<p>- Cron<p>- TickTick<p>and the hundreds of others out there?<p>I&#x27;ve also seen a lot of apps like this shut down over the years, such as Sunrise [2], Woven [3] and more. Personally speaking, I even hesitate to continue on my own app as well because it seems the market is saturated with the same exact idea and style, but it seems that users aren&#x27;t really that attached to one company for it to generate enough revenue to keep building.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24990238" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24990238</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26565629" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26565629</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11676448" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=11676448</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26882680" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26882680</a><p>&quot;&quot;&quot;<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=32312413#32313370" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32312413#32313370</a>
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