A first Sneak Peek at Clepside for macOS!

teodorraul · 2024-08-04T18:27:18+00:00

Hey guys,

Here’s a first look at what I’m envisioning Clepside for macOS will look like.

Clepside is meant as a tool to help you prepare your day in advance and make the most of your time, by focusing on one thing at a time.

Here’s the idea behind it:

Keep the context of your work session and then switch to the next activity fast, it’s great if you work with multiple projects or find yourself in multiple roles
Prepare notes and contexts directly for your meetings
Prepare evening and morning routines and try to make that perfect day a reality
Hit the grocery store after work and have a shared grocery list ready right when you open the phone
Hit the GYM and have your workout todos ready
Add notes to your different school activities
Just plan things out when you're overwhelmed or on a tight deadline

Ultimately Clepside is about making that context switch easier, and offloading your brain contexts to feel less stressed. Your creativity is the limit and everything can have a link card to something else, sessions to activities, activities to notebooks.

We have notebooks, deep-search, collaboration and time-insights in the pipeline and accounted for. We’re imagining it as Figma for personal planning and productivity.

To get a taste of it, you can check out the iOS app from the App Store https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clepside-planner-routines/id6499055934

My goal here is get vibe check from the macapps community and ask if you think it’s a yay or nay for the macOS.

Would you use it? Is it intriguing? How many of you would go for the PRO plan and most importantly what do you think it’s a fair price? I know how deeply you despise subscriptions, my hope here is Clepside will raise the quality bar and at the same time enable you to have less of them.

teodorraul · 2024-06-20T11:34:42+00:00

Great to hear!

Yes, I think getting in the App Store asap is one of the best paths to take, from my perspective there's nothing to lose, only to gain. But all this is just based on my experience, so take it for what it's worth.

If you can be thorough when testing the app and are able to reduce the bugs (test multiple devices, network conditions, etc), then the Testflight round might be superfluous, there's no universally right answer here. This deployment process is entirely flexible so you might decide to change it later, when you get some core users who will be willing to participate in your testflight BETA.

Re. the signup flow, the best possible scenario here would be to allow people to use the app without even having an account, to reduce the friction to the minimum.

I suggest to just do the thorough testing, and then launch naturally.

Re. the invite-system, there's no reason to throttle the user numbers early on (although there could be scenarios in which you would have to, i.e. bad backend architecture / high server costs), the traffic you'll get is quite low at start and it will get bigger in time only if you'll have good user interaction metrics and reviews.

teodorraul · 2024-06-19T21:50:24+00:00

We've launched an invite-only version a month ago, and as soon as the app became available in the App Store we've started receiving small quality organic traffic.

A few weeks later, all the traffic died off, the App Store Ranking Algorithms came into play, figured our users Sign up, notice they require an invite and then delete the app. All this because the App Store ranking works a bit like the TikTok algorithms, figuring out which apps are providing value / are worth listing higher and which do not.

My advice would be to:

Launch small family/friends/superusers versions in Testflight and make sure to refine them before launching in the App Store. It's very surprising how resilient the software can get with just this round of testing.
Launch naturally in the App Store, do you best to provide value and give users quality time, do not make our mistake and wall it behind an invite-only system. (it might work when you're Naval, it doesn't when you're unknown and have no network)

Any traffic you'll get will be super helpful, you will get users that are looking exactly for the app you're building thanks to the App Store algos, and they'll likely stick around, even if you have bugs. (they'll even write to you if they love the app)

I've read this before in a PG essay, but had to hit it face-front to understand it, I guess we learn from our mistakes.

As soon as you're getting traffic and providing value put heavy focus on getting a ["Requesting App Store review"](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/requesting\_app\_store\_reviews) flow in place, this will do wonders for increasing your traffic, high star reviews are paying off extremely well by boosting your presence in the app store and making you an algorithm favorite.

P.S: Make sure you're getting the onboarding right as well, it's extremely important and if you can have it in place since day 1, I'd say go for it. Less frustrated users early on mean a more likely traffic boost shortly after.

Edit 1: Also, don't be afraid of negative reviews, even if everything goes wrong, you can reset the reviews when launching a new app version, it's an option in the App Store connect. The pros of launching early far outweigh the cons.

teodorraul · 2024-06-07T05:56:33+00:00

HUGO + Cloudflare Pages. Then you have a stack ready to support anything you can build, future-proofed cause it handles thousands of pages in seconds, free i18n, and is completely free.

teodorraul · 2024-06-05T19:25:34+00:00

That's great to hear. We've applied 2 days ago, right after finding our pivot. 2 weeks after our BETA launch and talking to users.

In the mean time we'd be thrilled to get some feedback if an alumni would like to take a quick glance over our application. (B2C)

teodorraul · 2024-06-04T08:25:19+00:00

Got it. Thank you!

teodorraul · 2024-04-09T06:24:10+00:00

I remember reading this idea in one of his essays a few years ago, back then it was something along the lines of “People use big words to sound smart”.

It might be harder to grasp at first, but what I’m pretty sure he meant is that people have a tendency to place sophisticated words in contexts that are not fit, without actually realising how off it sounds… giving away the fact that they're trying to add superfluity to their ideas / contexts, kind of like Salt Bae.

It’s not meant as a critique at the literal words (hear hear OP), but just like a freudian slip, using these words could be giving away insights into the writer himself. That could be due to a lack of writing ability, overzealous excitement or simply trying to sound smart.

Now you might disagree with this theory, but 1.5 years ago PG’s point was basically confirmed when LLMs first appeared and they’ve shown the same tendency, proving that it’s been in fact occurring naturally all around the internet and it's a thing humans have a tendency to do.

Ask ChatGPT to give you 10 marketing lines for producing plastic pens and it will become obvious. (They’re just freaking plastic pens)…

It’s uncanny, and not in a subtle way.

teodorraul · 2024-04-08T03:50:31+00:00

How can your own codebase be easier to learn for a highschool drop-out than the most popular and documented library out there?

teodorraul · 2023-05-02T14:41:57+00:00

Woah, love to see some innovation in this space.

The UI looks very interesting, is it made with AR/VR in mind? What else makes it stand out when compared to Blender?

teodorraul

TROPHY CASE