Hi, I'm Kirill Maximov // Checkvist co-founder

[rfctr]

You can create a list, name it “Template: Weblogic+OSB11g”. Fill it with tasks. When you need to perform this procedure for an existing customer, you copy/clone this list “toolbar=>more actions=>Copy(Move) to another list”, make appropriate modifications and pass it to operations team.

Cool, I shall try it next time. However, as I said, there are policies about storing data outside of company that will probably slap me on the wrist if I do it.

Checkvist is a generic outliner, packed with features. And can be used for very different purposes and in different areas. People make checklists, write books and blog posts, have birthday calendars, collect notes. And this makes marketing hard.

And it shows. Your copy and overall marketing material is all over the place, trying to fit everyone. That makes it unfocused and I’m sure reduces the conversions.

(Strictly speaking, your copy, even not taking into account the business part, is far from ideal. This: “Create and share checklists, plans, and outlines” is not a good headline. It focuses on what it can do, and not what benefit the user will get. The benefit would be something like “Take control over your life with checklists” or “Execute complex plans with no mistakes and omissions” and so on. Users do not want to create checklists, they want to solve their problems.)

But let’s get back to the business part of the tiers.

What I would do is:

Step 1.

Create a separate landing page, business.checkvist.com.

There I would focus on the benefits for businesses only. Do not even mention the free accounts.

I would put the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) in place.

The (A) attention-grabber I’d borrow right from the article above:

If a simple checklist can transform intensive care, what can it do for your business?

Then I’d follow this guide step by step (I used it here):

• Describe the horrors of what happens when employees do not follow the instructions
• Tell them that a checklist is a solution
• Tell them you know a thing or two about checklists and are running this business for years
• Show benefits (reduced rate of errors, timely execution, no omissions, being in control)
• Social proof (preferrably feedback from other business owners about Checkvist, but could also be general statement about usefulness of checklists for a business)
• Offer (“Only $9.95 per user per month!”)
• Provide a guarantee (promise them they will improve in 3 months, or get full refund)
• Scarcity… hmm… well, make $9.95 a limited time offer; regular price is $19.95 per user per month.
• … and so on, following the template.

Step 2.

I would make a blog on the same site (/blog or blog.business.checkvist.com). There, each week, I’d post summaries of articles I’ve found on internet (there are plenty of them) about How X Made a Great Success with Business Y Using Checklists. Each article would follow the same plan:

• Tell about a success (or a failure!) X had
• Show how it can be achieved (or avoded) using Checkvist Business, with screenshots or animated gifs
• Call to action

Ideally, focus on one Checkvist feature per article. This week is attachments, next is task assignments, yet next is reports.

Make sure the keywords (“checklist, business, …”) are somewhere in there.

In some time, Google will pick it up and start sending you the organic traffic.

The stories should also give you some ideas about what features are important for businesses.

(Another good book about checklists in business – well, more like rules, but still – is Work the System)

(I use https://wordy.com/ to proof-read my posts. Highly recommend.)

Step 3. Business pricing

I believe, the pricing page for Business tier should be totally separate from the regular Checkvist. The reason is that the prices page is not the end of the road. It should continue to sell, i.e. on the prices page you still need to reiterate the benefits you provide, specifically for business. If you have all tiers on the same page, it makes it hard to co-exist with benefits for Pro, and for Free plan.

So I’d say – make a separate pricing page under business.checkvist.com, and make 3 tiers:

1. Enterpreneur (essentially Pro, 2 users max).
2. Small Business (up to say 20 users, and may be some extra features, say, ACLs?)
3. Enterprise (unlimited users, contact us for the price – because the fortification or a dedicated cluster may be needed)

The smallest price tier can be $9.95 or even $4.95 per user per month (but do not make it $1, you’re not a Dollarama!), the Small Business should start at $9.95 or $14.95 or … you can adjust the prices as you go.

You will probably have to implement ACLs on tasks, a Manager and Employee roles. Nothing more complex than that, at least until you prove it all works and you get demanding customers.

You would have to redesign the UI of the Checkvist Business a bit, getting rid of all links to the regular site, make it feel more businessy. White-labeling is required (allow the business to set their business’ color and logo, and links to their resources, e.g. Help desk, for their employees).

…

That all shouldn’t be much work, but you effectively separate business marketing from free marketing, and it should help both.

[rfctr]

Now, sidetracking.

I also have an idea of a white-labeled application on the Checkvist engine.

I would have already jumped on it if I had time. So for time being I’ll just leave it here for you or anyone else to grab.

Codename: Implementation Plan

As you know, implementation (AKA deployment) plans in large companies are complex, sometimes very complex. The plans often touch dozens of applications, which should be re-pointed, stopped, updated or restarted in a very precise order and manner, or the consumers will see some functionality unavailable.

I was making such plans for my operations team in a large bank for a year, and IT IS A EFFING PAIN! Each plan took 3 to 4 weeks to prepare, 2 to 3 meetings every week, daily meeting in the last week, participation of all the teams of all the affected applications, numerous changes (where I had to reevaluate the dependencies and recalculate the start-end time, and check them against different conditions e.g. “do we still fit into the deployment window?”).

But an implementation plan (AKA MOP, Method of Procedure) is just a checklist, where:

• Tasks shall be executed in a given order, at a given time
• Some tasks depend on others and cannot be started before them
• Each task is assigned to its own dedicated person or team. Only that person or team can report the task closed.
• May be ACLs, i.e. attachments in a task could be made accessible by the assignee only (may contain PROD credentials), but that is not critical - credentials can an should be delivered by a more secure channel
• As the execution progresses, the list of watchers gets notifications how it goes (instant or hourly)
• The status is also available on an URL

As I can see, Checkvist could have been a engine for this product. It lack only:

• Start time for a task (it has due date, but it is not the same)
• Duration for a task (missing)
• Dependency for a task (missing)
• ACLs

Again, I do not plan to start working on it this year

But what would be your estimate, how hard to add those properties to the tasks without affecting the rest of the code?

May be there a way to use some sort of custom properties for a white-labeled application?

[kir]

@rfctr Thanks a lot for all your suggestions

I also assume that, since you’ve come here and introduced your project, you’re not fully satisfied with how it is going, and is looking for ways to improve. Hence the barrage of the suggestions.

So, my first question would be: are you looking to improve Checkvist as a business, or as a free service?

I’d like to improve the business side of the tool. The most important task as I see right now is bringing more customers and to show Checkvist power to new users. Not converting existing free users to paying customers, but extending the number of users via some marketing and promotion.

I think you have enough features to justify the third tier. You just need to re-arrange them.

This is a good point. Checkvist has many features, that’s true, and they may be not organized well from business perspective - so thanks for your advice on this.

Practically, I think it is pretty easy to do – you need to review all the accounts that have access by 3+ people (that would be considered a team), and see how there usage pattern differs from accounts with 2 people (those I would call Pro – a rainmaker and a helper). Then put the differences into Team tier.

I can only find out lists with 3+ people. It is not difficult. But I’m not sure I understand what you mean by analyze usage patterns in this context. We have several thousands of such lists from different customers, so doing this manually is a hardly feasible task.

You can add Slack integration when requested.

It was requested already, a couple of times. Right now it is rather trendy, but who knows how it turns out later.

So… make a Team tier, please. I have to note again though that adding the Team tier requires re-balancing of the free and Pro tiers.

Will do. But a bit later, first, we have to offer a decent offline mobile solution - according to the feedback, it is one of the major pains why they leave Checkvist. And, we’ll have a chance to make the offline option a part of the PRO plan.

The fonts and everything are too small. I had to squint my eyes. It is clear that the mobile version must have a different CSS.

Have you tried http://m.checkvist.com? The incorrect font size could be if you visit https://checkvist.com from the mobile, and we haven’t implemented redirect to the true mobile version.

Now, I do not believe you should do any of that now, but you should start collecting the requests. I.e. (may be) put something like “Hosted version (WIP)” under the Team tier and ask the subscribers what are their requirements for that. You can also fire a quite survey of your current users that are having corporate email.

We have this request in our uservoice forum already, and it has collected a noticable number of votes already. But so far I’d like to focus on SaaS offer.

Adding the aforementioned issue with Checkvist on mobile, I think you should consider a CSS that re-arranges the layout. For instance, Hints sidebar should disappear if the window is too narrow, and such.

We’ve done this work for the site, but haven’t made tweaks for the list view in the application. We plan to do this eventually, especially given that we allow to create public lists, which could be accessed on any device.

If you’re serious about Pro and Team, you should build the sequences for Free (pushing them to Pro and Team) and for Pro (pushing them to Team).

Smart Passive Income podcast recently had an issue on exactly that:
http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/autoresponder-email-best-practices/

We don’t send extra e-mails after the registration. You said it - it usually goes to spam, even if it reaches inbox. And this is my personal experience as well - I hate getting bunch of e-mails after trying some service, especially when I don’t use it. If a customers used the service, and stopped - we ask, why this happens. If a registered user didn’t visit us after the first day - we ask, if we can help. Only once, of course.

But thanks a lot for the link - may be we should reconsider this approach and be more pro-active with e-mails.

Later I may want to share some of those lists with my coworkers – and that should NOT be possible if I’m not Pro.

We consider such a sharing as a mean to extend the user-base. And it works, we have a noticeable amount of new registrations coming from list sharing.

Have I said thank you for your suggestions?

BTW, the changelog feature I mentioned – it is certainly Pro.

Yep. We have it in plans, but a bit distant ones. Currently you can make a global search like in:closed changed: 1w to review recently closed tasks.

Of course, the spent time is nice to add to that… may be some modificator to space key, e.g. Ctrl-Space to ask for time… or easier yet, first Ctrl-Space to set time to 1 hr, second Ctrl-Space to 2 hrs and so on (configurable).

People ask for time-tracking, but so far I think this is not our target market. Or, this is not our vision of the tool - time-tracking is much more specific task with specific use cases, reporting, etc.

P.P.P.S. Another potential Pro add-on is the password-encryption of the list after the session end. I.e. the list is stored encrypted on the server; only when I login and enter my list password, it gets decrypted – into memory. If someone steals the database, the list is not readable. (Again, poll is required).

Besides you, only one or two people asked for this during the last 6 years. So the poll is not probably required. Rather, in-house downloadable solution is.

P.P.P.P.S. Long file names in attachments cannot be read. When there mouse is not over, they are truncated. When it is over, they overlap to the next name. Given that many files in my projects have the same long prefix (project name, project code, and only then the differential part), I cannot really tell which file is which.

Thanks for pointing out! I’ve made a quick fix for such situation, hope the file names are visible now.

(I assume the link is not public by default, is it?)
The file is visible on the list, but I cannot download it anymore.

Unfortunately, it is public, but has quite a cryptic path. I haven’t fixed it yet.
I think the file became unavailable due to its transfer to the rackspace cloud (where we store attachments), and Checkvist removed the old local copy too early. I’ll fix it, along with access issue.

Thanks again for your feedback and for giving Checkvist another try, it was really refreshing

[kir]

As I can see, Checkvist could have been a engine for this product. It lack only:

Start time for a task (it has due date, but it is not the same)
Duration for a task (missing)
Dependency for a task (missing)
ACLs

Again, I do not plan to start working on it this year

But what would be your estimate, how hard to add those properties to the tasks without affecting the rest of the code?

I think that to implement this properly, with main expected features, at least 3 months of work are required.
Personally, I would not be interested in such a project.
By the way, I’ve made a quick search - here is a tool which could be probably used for this MOP task: http://www.digispoke.com/. They have the features you asked for, as far as I can tell, including project templates.

[rfctr]

Checkvist has many features, that’s true, and they may be not organized well from business perspective - so thanks for your advice on this.

I’ve read a good method of doing it: you imagine a Persona, an imaginary user that is a typical user of every tier. For example, Free tier user would be an advanced computer user, working as a insurance broker, making lists to manage the work with client’s applications. Pro user would be an blogger who also has an offshore helper. Team is … and so on.

Then you can list all the features Checkvist has, and see if they are necessary or desired for each Persona.

But I’m not sure I understand what you mean by analyze usage patterns in this context.

Essentially, to build a matrix where rows will be the features used by an account and the columns is the size of the account. If you notice a feature that is ubiquitously used by “heavy” accounts, it is the first candidate to Pro.

On the other hand, the dichotomy could be just “does this feature help to make money for user or not?”

It was requested already, a couple of times.

By paying customers? Are they ready to pay for it? Ask them for a prepayment!

What I’m trying to say is that the requests coming from free users are to be… not ignored, but taken with a grain of salt.

Requests of paying customers are more likely to match the needs of other paying customers, hence improving the positioning of Checkvist as a business tool. Request of free users are more likely to match the needs of free users.

But a bit later, first, we have to offer a decent offline mobile solution - according to the feedback, it is one of the major pains why they leave Checkvist.

Yes, the m.checkvist.com is enough for Free. (Funny how it almost impossible to find about m.*. Found it in settings eventually. Yeah, you need to do a redirect.)

Offline is Pro. (Are you going to use the browser local storage?)

But so far I’d like to focus on SaaS offer.

I agree.

You said it - it usually goes to spam, even if it reaches inbox. And this is my personal experience as well - I hate getting bunch of e-mails after trying some service

Here’s where you’re awfully wrong!

First, the emails do not normally go to spam. As soon as user replies or interacts with a email (clicks a link to confirm the email, for instance), the email is marked as safe.

But most importantly, you should stop thinking about yourself, what you hate. Quoting:

You’re not your users!

You hate to get educational emails precisely because you’re a super-user, and know things. But when you’re building a business, your users are regular computer users. They focus on their business problems, and do not step far from a safe path. If you show them how to do their work faster or easier with, say, multi-select – they will only be grateful to you.

Closer to your goals, the email sequences are demonstrated to increase revenues, sometimes 3-4x times. Not because it is pushy (how pushy can you become in a email? The Del button is always a click away), but because those emails show users useful features of the application that they did not have an effing idea about before.

Of course, the emails should have a value for the end user, a simple user. No point to send emails to your free nerds. Except to nudge them to upgrade to Pro – again, but showing them useful features, such as assignments.

Seriously, dude, you think like a programmer. Stop it. World is full of non-programmers.

We consider such a sharing as a mean to extend the user-base. And it works, we have a noticeable amount of new registrations coming from list sharing.

Understood, but here is the thing – what is the conversion rate for the referred users? I.e. how many of referred users become paid ones?

The growing of the userbase is not the goal. The goal is grow the revenue.

When you enable sharing for Pro only, I believe, it will serve two purposes:

• Push free users into Pro tier (because it is a very useful feature)
• Bring in new users that are more likely to become Pro (because Pro folks work with Pro folks)

Making share available for Free users only grows the Free tier… any list sharing is collaboration between two+ people, meaning some economic activity, meaning some profits. Get a cut of that profit!

Well, of course, sharing a list with a husband to buy a milk is sharing too.

OK, may be you should limit the number of shares. “One shared list for a free account.” Enough to share the groceries list, not enough for a business. Though I would still go with “sharing for Pro only”, because many Pros will only have one helper, i.e. one shared list may be enough. Zero lists is not, and so they migrate to Pro (hopefully).

Or, this is not our vision of the tool - time-tracking

Agreed. Focus helps.

I’ll fix it, along with access issue.

OK. The file is accessible now.

I think that to implement this properly, with main expected features, at least 3 months of work are required.

I’m thinking it could be enough to have custom properties set by API for a task. I’ll talk to you about the details if I ever get to this Currently my hands are too busy.

http://www.digispoke.com/

Thanks… looks too heavy on the first look… but I’ll check out the details later. If it does what I want, I’ll forward it to my friends at my old company, and make them happy

[kir]

you imagine a Persona

Have you really tried that in your projects? About face is a great book, but I think the Personas approach is oversold.

Essentially, to build a matrix where rows will be the features used by an account and the columns is the size of the account. If you notice a feature that is ubiquitously used by “heavy” accounts, it is the first candidate to Pro.

After our long discussion, I started thinking about converting our existing PRO plan to Team account (with some modifications) and introducing a PRO plan with some features which were available for free. I think this may be technically easier. I will ponder the specific details of that.

By paying customers? Are they ready to pay for it? Ask them for a prepayment!

Prepayment for Slack integration won’t work, I think. But offline mobile app could go to Kickstarter

Yes, the m.checkvist.com is enough for Free. (Funny how it almost impossible to find about m.*. Found it in settings eventually. Yeah, you need to do a redirect.)

Offline is Pro. (Are you going to use the browser local storage?)

Actually, http://m.checkvist.com will be both free and PRO. Because it works offline, can be opened offline, and stores data in IndexedDB/WebSQL. localStorage is 1. Small 2. Slow. But this offline part will be restricted to PRO, when it will be more stable and feature complete.

Of course, the emails should have a value for the end user, a simple user. No point to send emails to your free nerds. wink Except to nudge them to upgrade to Pro – again, but showing them useful features, such as assignments.

Seriously, dude, you think like a programmer. Stop it. World is full of non-programmers.

I cannot resist I rather re-focus the tool for geeks, add markdown, code highlighting and stuff like that.
Seriously speaking, it is really hard to change the hat. But thanks again for the push.
I’ll also think about making list sharing Pro as well - you have the point there.

Thanks,

[rfctr]

Have you really tried that in your projects? About face is a great book, but I think the Personas approach is oversold.

I do use Personas in my commercial project, but with a major twist – them are real people, whom I see every day, and so it is very easy for me to “imagine” them.

Having said that, when I evaluate how a feature should look or behave, I do think how these two different people use it.

Prepayment for Slack integration won’t work, I think.

Then why do you believe it should be implemented for a Team tier? If it was a pain that users ready to pay to get rid of, prepayments would work, and the conversions to Team tier would increase, too.

I rather re-focus the tool for geeks, add markdown, code highlighting and stuff like that.

Yeah, everyone does that. I recently found myself tinkering with a cool JS graph library that I managed to persuade myself JUST GOT TO BE used in my application. 3 days lost, and when I kinda awoke from that self-hypnosis, I realized I do not need it, at all - meaning there is no value in it for the user.

Currently you can make a global search like in:closed changed: 1w to review recently closed tasks.

Case in question: I did not have any idea I could do that. And I’m not exactly a simpleton, I was using Checkvist before, and I’m using it again – and yet I’m uneducated in anything that is not in my main usage pattern.

If you sent me a email “Hey Vlad, do you need Checkvist to help you with your invoices? Do you know you can get the list of all the tasks you completed last week by doing this: …” – do you think I’d be upset?

First, you start your email with a very real benefit for me. Second, you’re not doing hard sell – you educate me. And if that feature turns out to be available in Pro only, well, it is something that I’ll have to think about.

[rfctr]

Re: pushing to Pro.

For me the Pro trigger would be the attachments. Not large ones, just attachments. I’d like to keep all the project documentation (5-10 files typically) next to the task list.

Checkvist is doing fine job there.

I’m just wondering if there is a faster way than right-click on Outlook attachment, save it to disk, then find that file in Checkvist and attach it?

Could it be streamlined somehow through the clipboard? Copy in Outlook, paste in Checkvist? With a help of some applet, flash or some other native code, may be?

I’m somewhat behind in what is possible in Web these days, so I do not know.

P.S. Of course, if I could attach the whole emails, it would be just terrific.

[kir]

Then why do you believe it should be implemented for a Team tier? If it was a pain that users ready to pay to get rid of, prepayments would work, and the conversions to Team tier would increase, too.

Simply because Slack integration is a Team feature, who would need it in an individual plan

If you sent me a email “Hey Vlad, do you need Checkvist to help you with your invoices? Do you know you can get the list of all the tasks you completed last week by doing this: …” – do you think I’d be upset?

Of course you won’t if you need it this feature and if you don’t know about its existence yet. But if you know about it already - it is annoying. OK, I can send you such a tip only if you haven’t used this feature yet. Still, you might won’t have a chance to try it at the moment, or the context is wrong.

The better way is to show hints right in the interface, with a right context, and without annoyance. May be, on a separate panel. Something like Meduim shows at the screen bottom when you write a story. Hope I find a time to implement this.

I’m just wondering if there is a faster way than right-click on Outlook attachment, save it to disk, then find that file in Checkvist and attach it?

Have you tried forwarding the e-mail to the list? The attachments from the e-mail should become attachments for the list item, created for such forwarded e-mail.

Also, you can drag-n-drop attachments onto the list item you want to attach it to. Should work as well.

[rfctr]

Simply because Slack integration is a Team feature, who would need it in an individual plan

What I mean, is why do you believe Slack integration will move the conversions needle? I’m not so sure.

But if you know about it already - it is annoying.
…
The better way is to show hints right in the interface, with a right context, and without annoyance.

Hmm… I understand.

I was thinking about it, and I believe these two channels both have their pro and contra.

You already listed the pro of UI notification and contra of email. Let me list the opposite:

1. I read emails at my break hour, when I want to distract from the main activities. Reading short educational emails is perfect – it takes a very little time, but it is potentially useful. Since I’m not interrupted, it is not as annoying as you may guess.

2. When an UI tip pops up, it happens exactly when I’m working on something, and as such it is an interruption, and can be annoying. It also takes the precious real-estate.

3. UI tips, due to screen size limitations, cannot be longer than 1-2 paragraphs. It may be harder to fit a useful instruction into this limited space, reducing the conversion rate (which in this case I define as a number of people who started using the feature). Email has less limitations.

4. UI tips are more tactical, while email can be more strategic. I.e. a tip can tell me “to get the list of closed tasks within last week use …”, while email would tell something like “To build your invoice, use our smart filtering. Here’s how:…”.

I wouldn’t ignore one for another. I think they supplement each other.

Have you tried forwarding the e-mail to the list?

!!! /me excited !!!

(Definitely Pro feature).

I wonder if I can train it to add the task under the top-level sublist with the closest abbreviations? I guess, this requirement is too vague.

P.S. Recurring tasks are cool. But – I’m confused how it works. So I “spaced” a recurring task. Will it “unspace” itself at next due date?

[kir]

What I mean, is why do you believe Slack integration will move the conversions needle?

I’m not sure, it is just an assumption. Checkvist is currently targeted for geeks, and Slack is a kind of geeky tools. It is not a serious assumption. What’s probably more important, Slack integration can be generalized to WebHooks integration, which opens more integration possibilities.

Reading short educational emails is perfect

and

UI tips, due to screen size limitations, cannot be longer than 1-2 paragraphs. It may be harder to fit a useful instruction into this limited space, reducing the conversion rate (which in this case I define as a number of people who started using the feature). Email has less limitations.

are a bit contradictory, I think. If we want to educate people in more detail about some subject, we can always give a short introduction, and a link to help/knowledge base article (and this is more important from SEO perspective as well).

When an UI tip pops up, it happens exactly when I’m working on something, and as such it is an interruption, and can be annoying. It also takes the precious real-estate.

Yes, a good implementation of this approach could be tough. Definitely, nobody wants to be interrupted during the work.

I wouldn’t ignore one for another. I think they supplement each other.

Yes, it could be so, but with limited resources, I’d choose in-app hints.

P.S. Recurring tasks are cool. But – I’m confused how it works. So I “spaced” a recurring task. Will it “unspace” itself at next due date?

By default, it will be reopened in couple of hours, but with the updated due date. Also, we have a separate option which defines when the task will be re-opened (Generate…). You can read more details about recurring tasks in the docs

Thanks a lot for the feedback

[rfctr]

What’s probably more important, Slack integration can be generalized to WebHooks integration, which opens more integration possibilities.

In other words, it is a fun programming project

Unless you’re ready to point to 1+ applications which, when integrated, are likely to improve the conversions.

are a bit contradictory, I think

Nope. 2 paragraph on-page tip is already seen as a wordy one. 2 paragraph email is nothing but a short note.

You can read more details about recurring tasks in the docs

Well, busy users do not read documentation. Not in this age, where everything is expected to be clear from the UI. You could at least make a note about re-opening in the status message.

P.S. I’m going via the trial (how come I could get the trial again? granted, it was actually usuful, because I totally forgot how it all works from the first time), and then I expect to convert. I’m not going to pay the ridiculously low monthly fee – I honestly suggest you to hide it – I’ll pay the annual one. And, for the record, my conversion features are 1) attachments 2) sharing. So I repeat again – NO ATTACHMENTS AND SHARING FOR FREELOADERS!

[kir]

I’m going via the trial (how come I could get the trial again?

We reset the trial counter a couple of time, and notified customers about this. We did this when we introduced new interesting PRO features, and we wanted people to try these.

I expect to convert

Great news, thanks! Thanks for all your advice, I’ve enabled the PRO plan for you

NO ATTACHMENTS AND SHARING FOR FREELOADERS

Attachments are PRO already, and sharing may become one day. So far, only two hands for most of the features.

[rfctr]

I’ve enabled the PRO plan for you

Mmm… why did you do that? The payment is well earned. Are you a business or a charity?

[kir]

This is the least I can do for your advice here