How we build a Task Manager for Architects

How do we get the idea?

It all started when my brother, who works as the lead architect in an architectural bureau, came to visit my family. His job is to communicate with investors and coordinate the work of architects, engineers, legal teams, and contractors. He is doing a little bit of everything and lots of management.

We sat on the couch, talking about our families and work. At one moment he casually mentions his struggle to explain tasks and delegate jobs to people working with him.

So I started to ask questions about his problem. After half hour we identified two main sources for his problem:

• First, it is hard to explain what to fix and what to draw in CAD programs using only words;

• Second, every team member/contractor uses multiple communication tools: emails, chat apps, telephone, etc., so it is hard to remember and find what, when and where something was decided.

So we concluded that some kind of task manager where he can draw sketches on images/screenshots would solve his problem. He tried to use Asana, google sheets, but without success.

I was already thinking about building a small Sass app to validate is the Jembe web framework good or not. The problem of my brother looked like a good fit for me.

We set our goals

So we decided to go ahead and develop a “Task manager for Architects” to accomplish the following goals:

• Make the job easier for my brother and other architects;

• Learn how to build and market a Sass app;

• Validate readiness of the the Jambe web framework.

We are building TaskClip as a side project and development took us more time than we anticipated. We were hoping to spend up to three months working on it, but it took us close to six months just to have basic functionalities working.

The main reasons for spending so much time, as you may suspect was:

• Jembe framework had its bugs,

• We designed UI/UX casually and spend too much time fixing it;

• I miscalculated the time needed to develop app administration to be self-serving. This was my first sass project after all;

Did we accomplish our goals and build something useful?

My brother is satisfied, he is using TaskClip to communicate with his team and contractors, and their impressions are more than positive.

I’m not so convinced. My problem is that only he and his team are using the app. I need more architects to validate that TaskClip is a good solution for a real problem.

So, the next steps will be to call friends and college architects to try it out and give us honest opinions (preferably with their credit cards :) ). Something we should do much earlier.

Anyway, now we will learn, the hard way, about problem validation, positioning, and marketing.

Regarding my goal: to validate Jembe’s readiness for production use.

While working on TaskClip I fixed around 15 bugs in Jembe and didn’t make any changes in API or internal code structure.

• Does Jembe have more bugs? Yes, it has.

• Will Jembe gain performance and benefits with code restructure? Yes, it will.

Nevertheless, for me, it is ready to be used for web app development. For others to develop using Jembe, first I need to write some documentation :/ .

What have I learned?

I read a lot of books and articles about problem validation, acquiring and validating sales channels, and the need to do presales, but due to my inexperience I believed that knowing that a problem exists for a group of people who are willing to pay for a solution is enough to “validate the problem”.

In retrospect, my “believe” was convenient to me because:

• it’s easier to do what I already know how to do,

• it’s hard to do new and uncomfortable things with the unpredictable outcome.

It was so easy to say: Scratching my brother’s “itch” and knowing that more architects with the same problem exist is “problem validation”.

After six months we created MVP, and started to work on customer stories and profiles, to look into sales channels and create a product front page. It took us about 15 to 20 days to finish it. We learned that:

• It’s hard to create a sales channel because architects don’t have active online communities where you can freely talk to them. I don’t count sites where they post beautiful 3D renders or pictures of houses etc.

• TaskClip solves the problem for the lead architect but not for bureau owners, who are deciding on monthly spending.

All this concludes that making a profit from TaskClip will be very difficult.

From this perspective, if I created a customer profile, and try to do presale in the worst case I’ll lose one month and then find a new project idea “to learn how to sell online and validate Jembe Framework”.

It’s like my professor used to say: Knowledge is in the hands not in the brain. (Just knowing something by reading it is not applicable knowledge, you need a lot of practice and hands experience.)

The current state of the project

If you are interested in current TaskClip metrics are:

• 10 active users using it daily;

• around 60 site visits per day;

• around 2000 hits per day;

• more than 300 tasks;

• 0 € in revenue;

Not very impressive, actually quite the opposite.

After we contact more architects and get more feedback, we’ll decide about the TaskClip future.

It’ll eventually boil down to: Can we find a way, before end of this year, to sustain product development and maintenance, if not TaskClip will exist only for my brother to use it and for me to practice marketing skills and promote the Jembe framework, without any improvements.

Want to help us?

If you are an architect who wants to help us build the “Task manager for architects”, check it out at https://taskclip.me and give us your honest opinion or comment at predrag.peranovic@taskclip.me.

All the best, and thanks for reading.