We're building an app that helps people manage their schedule, tasks and notes all in one place.
The goal is to create a workspace, where people can manage their various priorities, both personal and professional, see a single schedule combined of all their calendars and manage their days without switching between multiple apps.
At the moment we've implemented Google calendar synchronisation, basic tasks and notes. Also Emery has some things we really wanted to see in other apps – private notes for meetings, categories that can be used to group tasks/notes/meetings together, weekly productivity reports.
Happy to hear any feedback and answer any questions!
Since it's not mentioned anywhere, I assume I don't own it. It's all in your database in AWS or wherever, maybe there's some export that's about 60% complete in a sort of workable format. But it's not going to be usable 'plaintext' on disk, parseable with other tools, and usable even if the Emery app stops being updated/disappears.
Because of this, I've come to distrust any offering that's not self-hosted on my homeserver. Sounds drastic, but I've been burned too often. The quality I get from this is significantly lower, the amount of work I need to put in is much more, and though often fun it's not always at convenient times and sometimes I hate it. But I'm fairly confident that all my data, be it email, cal, notes, pictures, whatnot, will still be accessible 3 years or 10 years from now. Some things from 10 years ago I dearly miss, and I don't want that to happen again.
Export functions wouldn't convince me though. Those can disappear och be broken or miss things, which I wouldn't only notice when it's too late.
Even though I self-host Vaultwarden, I pay the yearly subscription to BW.
Suggestion: answer the question “how is this different from just using your normal calendar” to plan your day. Because lots of calendars have ToDo / Tasks functionality, and you can simply block out time on your main calendar - instead of using this app.
EDIT: also, I see lots of reference how not using this app is harder because “No overview. It's all scattered across multiple apps”. Is that really a problem? I use 2 emails (1 work, 1 personal); however, I only maintain 1 calendar / todo (my work calendar). It seems like introducing a new app is introducing something that will cause more scatter (as opposed to my current setup today).
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> however, I only maintain 1 calendar / todo (my work calendar).
What I've found, personally, is that having multiple e-mails is fine. I don't need to check them every five minutes anyway. But I don't want to have my work anything on my personal phone (because I don't want it remotely managed), nor my personal stuff on my work email (say I need to schedule an interview for a new job).
I'm sure quite a lot of people are in the same situation.
My personal best experience was when I was using a personal mac for work, and I could have all my calendars combined in basic macOS calendar app, and emails in the mail app. Everything worked so well, and it's something I miss terribly since I've moved to Linux.
One thing that makes Emery different from normal calendars is that you can group things together with collections. For example, you can add project-related tasks, meetings and notes in one collection. Or group together tasks, meetings and notes that relate to your boss, a peer, a direct report.
The pricing is high-end, but there's one time option (which I opted couple years ago and paid itself, pretty much!) and optionally usable offline for most features.
[1]: https://amazingmarvin.com/
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In some way, that illustrates the app very well, as I've had to adjust many thing along the way figuring out what works and not, rather than getting it perfect right away...
-What platforms are supported (it looks like MacOS from the demo video, but I couldn't find whether there is an iPad or iOS app, or whether it supports Windows and Android; access and syncing to a mobile device is very important from my perspective as a user)
-Whether it's possible to "Get started" without using the Google sign-on; I typically avoid using Google to sign in, and prefer traditional registration with an email and password
-A clear and straightforward Privacy Policy, which would be a plus. You have one linked at https://emery.to/privacy/ , where you did write that users have the right to: "Restrict the processing of their Data. Users have the right, under certain circumstances, to restrict the processing of their Data. In this case, the Owner will not process their Data for any purpose other than storing it. [...] Have their Personal Data deleted or otherwise removed. Users have the right, under certain circumstances, to obtain the erasure of their Data from the Owner." The "under certain circumstances" seems vague, and I'm unsure what that means in practice.
However, you have to scroll down quite a bit, and I'm not comfortable with the use of Google Analytics. I'm not necessarily against using the app just due to privacy reasons (though other users might be), but I wish I could find out in advance of signing up, how much data collection I could opt out of before signing up.
- We're planning to introduce other login methods such as classic emails later this week.
- You're right, we have to be more clear and give more flexibility on the data collection front.
Regarding syncing – it'll still be required for syncing between devices and Google calendar integration. Google calendar sync is being done on backend as it's the most stable way from our experience.
Warms my heart to see startups still catering to us web/app-averse "luddites".
I'm in no position to question your business model - I don't know your situation as a company, but $7/mo seems a little steep for me. But it's understandable that costs are higher early on. Do you think prices might drop later on, assuming your product is successful? Or when you have more of a feature suite to segment into different plans?
I quite like Bitwarden's model of having a limited free version, an "enthusiast" model with a few extra features nerd especially might like, such as yubikey support. That's $1/mo. Then they have various business facing plans with higher cost and enterprise features.
However you are too fast to make me enter my credit card info. It's 2022, can't I at least play with the app to see if it's what I want? Demo for a day? Create just one page of notes?
As it stands the landing page was not enough to get me over the hump to put in my credit card info. I somehow can't get back to the landing page now that I started the signup flow.
1. Give people a free demo so they can get their data into the system.
2. After the trial period, let them export the data out if they want (don't make the credit card request seem like a ransom request).
Archival storage is so cheap these days that it doesn’t make sense to delete customer data unless they ask, or you are in B2B.
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Why would anyone buy into a new product if they don’t know at least a little bit about who is behind it?
It should be the most important page on the site behind maybe the pricing and contact/support page.
1) none seem to handle multiple calendars well. I have a personal calendar, a work calendar, and a side project calendar, I want them all to be independent, have tasks blocked out on them, etc, but still be aware of each other. So for example, I want to schedule a doctor’s appointment on my personal and have my other calendars mirror that time block, but scrub the details/make it generic. Super specific idea obviously, but if I don’t have it I have so much manual overhead aligning everything that I just give up and do it by hand.
2) they are all dogshit slow (not sure about this one, haven’t tried it). The combo of electron apps and what I guess is just calendar synchronization latency makes them have surprise ux patterns and overall just shitty experience in general.
A third thing is that I really enjoy planning my life with a kanban, and executing my day from a todo list (scheduled). That’s hard to nail.
Last: my notes live separately (as most people’s do I’ve seen anecdotally).
I hope someone can really succeed in this space because time blocking is so powerful, but nothing has fit my lifestyle quite right yet unfortunately.
Actually not that specific at all! I know a lot of people have at least the work/personal schedule split, and personally I have the additional side project one the same as you, which I bet is pretty common among people putting on this very website.
I also know a lot of people have other arrangements they'd like. Partially out trans people jump to mind. And I'd like my personal contacts to know what my side project life is up to but not vice versa, which is probably not standard but I doubt I'm alone.
So I think customizable ways to separate your life and who is able to see it is not really a niche feature at all, and just a commonly missing one.
YES, THIS! Managing personal, family, and work calendars is a nightmare. So much double handling.
Is a scheduled todo list basically just a todo list with times attached? A little like time blocking?
How does your Kanban fit into that?
The second point – just give us a go :)
see: https://cron.com/changelog/2022-05-09-automatic-event-blocki...
https://www.getclockwise.com/
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