What is Reddit's opinion of germ.io?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

I'm the co-founder of germ.io - a personal productivity tool that looks at project management as something more than just a collection of tasks.

Here's how it works:

• Create a new project (we call them Flows) and put in your thoughts - these could be ideas, feature stories, campaigns or top-level objectives...
• Break this down into focussed sub-pieces. You can progressively break each thought down into smaller and smaller more detailed pieces as you go.
• Collaborate with your team - brainstorm and discuss.
• Turn each thought into an action item, assign, and get things done.

We've built germ.io as a project management tool for abstract creative projects (like marketing campaigns, or starting a startup) where you don't have a bunch of defined requirements and task items ready before you start. And here's the kicker:

• It allows you to break down goals - in fact, you can break down goals almost infinitely.
• It's simple - you can visually see the structure of your thoughts every step of the way (kind of like a mindmap), but you still have the flexibility to pour down each thought free-form.
• It's free - we're still pre-beta, so using germ.io is free now... plus we will grandfather our users forever, which means for all our users who get in before we start charging, germ will continue to be free forever.

I think consumers are on the opposite end of the spectrum - nobody reads TOSs and nobody cares (IMO).

In fact, in our app, we specifically put up a separate non-legalese page called the germ.io Omega Honor Code outlining both our and our user's commitment.

That said, there is a reason why legalese is worse than Klingon - because it needs to cover every conceivable loophole in the book...

Everyone with a Million Dollar Idea should read this.

/u/tator22 summarizes the execution piece perfectly though. I'd just go a bit further to say:

• Start defining your idea. Write down the problem, the target market, your solution, and competitors. Often, you'll notice big gaps and gaping holes in your ideas only when you put it down on paper.

• If you've got the basics in place, start sketching the final big picture. If you're planning to build software or manufacture a physical product, start by building out a dummy prototype - once you can SEE what your ideas look like in real life, you've crossed half the hurdle.

• Show demand. Get a domain, push out a minimal website and see if people actually care for your idea. You could validate your ideas with family and friends, but you have a real business only if you can prove a few thousand people WANT what you're trying to build and are willing to give you their money for it.

• Start building. If you've come this far, it's time to start building a first cut of your product, or run a stripped-down version of your business. Get partners to help you in your weak areas, push and sell.

Congratulations. Your million dollar idea is now probably a few 100k business. Sure - it's not yet a million dollars... but it's worth way more than the "idea" of it!!

Shameless plug: I'm the founder of germ.io - a project management tool for startups that puts the focus on creative ideas, breaking them down and building solid execution plans out of them. And we've got pre-built templates to help you through each step of your startup... If you have an idea and want it to see light, you should check us out!

Our PH day was this close to becoming a disaster at germ.io. It was a regular Friday lunch for our team so we left our pre-beta app to fend for itself and went across the street to grab some food.

Within 15 minutes, I got an alert from our monitoring tool that we were getting a 500X spike on our server calls. I was pretty sure this was somekind of DDoS attack and was just laughing at the irony of it before we even really launched our app, before I realized one of our users had added us to Product Hunt.

Scrambled back, increased our AWS instances and cruised through the day. Would we have held back our grand PH day? Probably. But was it awesome for us while it was? Hell yeah!

I'm waiting for our official Beta launch with some significant updates to the app before we hit ProductHunt again. To every startup out there, if you can shoot for the moon - shoot as and when you can. There will always be more opportunities tomorrow, but the ones you miss today will never ever come back.

Excellent workflow. We had the same problem about a year back - switching between to-do's, evernote, mindmaps and a dozen other tools ended up making us less productive and our output more mediocre.

So we started building germ.io - as a tool that puts the focus on Ideas and turning them into Actionable projects.

It does exactly what you've described through your post, except all in one place:

• a. Start out by capturing your ideas in free-form text. That's a nice, clean editor like you'd have on evernote.

• b. Break this down into more focussed branches - the different things you need to do to work this idea.

• c. Every idea starts in an "Ideation" state. That means you still need to work and plan it out before it's actionable. You can then make it "Actionable", set deadlines, and assign it to someone, till you can move it to "Completed".

• d. You can leave a germ as Actionable without a deadline, and it's automatically "Deferred".

• e. We also have a 4th state called "Not Taken" for the ideas that you've thought through but don't want to take up now.

I know you've probably invested a lot into building the right toolset for your problems, but if you get the chance I'd recommend you try out germ.io

The problem with almost every GTD app is it assumes "things" are "tasks" that can be summarized in one line, when most often the Things you want done are abstract ideas that you need to work on, polish and build till you can get it done. germ.io is a pre-project GTD app that lets you put the focus on ideas and turning them into structured micro tasks.

Give it a try - it's not exactly a to-do list, but chances are what you need is a place to organize your thoughts - not just your hours.

(disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of germ.io)

Well, we did quite the opposite with our app at germ.io. We had a regular old-school privacy & legal docs, but hey - all of us know nobody gives a thought about legalese.

So we created a new document called the "Honor Code" which is specifically non-legalese, simple to read and understand, and shows the risks and commitments that both our users and we must honor.

Here's my approach to fostering creativity:

• Set the scope of the problem: Start by defining exactly what problem you want to solve through this "creativity experiment".
• Kickstart the flow: Others often don't exactly know what kind of ideas you're expecting until you show them a few examples.
• Showcase the big picture: Understanding the larger context of where this idea fits in the scheme of things helps. A lot!
• Focus on one thing: Counterintuitive to the last point, but ensure the brainstorm/ creative effort is directed towards solving the specific micro-problem at hand.

Incidentally, am the founder of germ.io, an app that lets you capture ideas, brainstorm and build an actionable project out of it. So this problem hits a chord quite deep to me!

We've been building germ.io as a collaborative project management tool that puts the focus on ideas. So in essence, you put in your ideas, share them with the world if you like, and invite other interested people to collaborate on it.

You might want to check us out - and perhaps, if our heart is in the same place, work together?

First, what *every*one else thinks doesn't matter. When you ask a question like "what kind of man are you", you are going to be pissing off a lot of people - women/ feminists to start, and all the way to men who just don't fit in the mold. The important point is - that's OK.

We launched http://germ.io about a month back to help people (like OP) to get their ideas validated, built on and finally executed. Our market testing was boring to say the least - sure everyone said they wanted this, but of course that's what they'd say. People were like "yeah sure, we'd give it a spin", which technically means "I don't care, but I'll act like I do so I don't offend you".

So we stopped asking questions, and decided to go ahead and just launch. Of course, we weren't ready yet - so 2 weeks back we launched germ.io as a very early, very pre-beta app called the Omega (story here: blog.germ.io/wtfs-an-omega/), which helped you do one thing (putting in your idea and validating it), and did that right. So instead of people signing up and thinking all we had was just a text editor, we sold the big picture of what we're trying to do and where we are along the way. We got 600 signups within the first 4 days of our launch, with zero marketing dollars - purely through virality within the app. So that's your market research, Mr. Gartner!

Make 3 bottles (types) of your cologne, go all out with the packaging, put in a nice hand written note, and hire someone you don't know (high school kid, maybe) to make a sale outside your local mall or something. If you get your cost dollars plus ANYTHING at all, that's your market research.

TL;DR: Nobody wakes up in the morning wishing to smell like a scholar (or carpenter, or bike mechanic). But evoke that memory, make a sale, and you win. Put an Omega out there right now.

I don't know if that's the silver bullet to success, but definitely one of the keys to productivity is (i) capturing your ideas the moment you have them, (ii) breaking them down into actionable next steps, and (iii) scheduling an execution plan to get things done.

Shameless plug: I'm the co-founder of germ.io, a project management startup that does exactly this. Instead of purely focussing on "tasks", germ puts your ideas front and center, and lets you derive an action plan from it organically.

If you are looking for a tool for an absolute project-management noob, you should try out germ.io. germ.io lets you start from your top-level goals and break them down progressively into smaller, focussed action items. You can collaborate, discuss each piece, and assign.

And it's free.

The only thing you'd miss is a gigantic report with gantt charts and managerial stuff. If that's what you're looking for, Pivotal Tracker still gets the job done best.

If you can reduce stuff to an easy to-do list, Wunderlist is an absolute pleasure to use. Though I don't know if it adds much value when using it as a team.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of germ.io

Let me throw in our startup - germ.io. germ.io is the result of our personal problem in managing projects with most of the other tools you mentioned. Since all these other tools are "task focussed", you don't have a way to capture an abstract idea, turn it into an epic, break down stories, and discuss feature-level tasks in them.

In short, they lack any structured heirarchy and that's something you definitely need when you're planning through an agile project.

germ.io is centered on ideas and building an action plan from them. You capture an idea, break it down into finer details, brainstorm with your team, and choose which items are actionable (and by whom, and when).

You even have ready-made templates to pick up and get dashing through your project ideas.

We've had quite a few early users jump ship from Trello and Pivotal, and they love germ.io. I wouldn't say we are as sophisticated as Jira though - so if you're looking for a boatload of features you won't have it. But otherwise, please do give it a shot and let me know what you think..

Oh, and it's free btw.

Get social. Not just online, but also offline. You might want to attend a lot of events that relate to your industry and network with people. You could also try building an awesome community of your existing users and make them feel like a winner, something that we at germ.io focus very hard at. Like Jeff Besos said, Customers rule! :-)

This problem comes up because at least a handful of "things" we put into our GTD buckets aren't really tasks yet. They still need to be debated, broken down and understood before you can get working on them. So when you make it an "action item" prematurely, it just sits there, gathering dust.

You might want to check out germ.io - a GTD tool that puts the focus on Ideas, and lets you make them "Actionable" when you're ready... Or mark them as "Not Taken" if you want to hang that thought around, but don't want to delete it yet. (disclaimer: I'm one of the founders of germ.io)

If you are looking for serious trouble, it's best to have your business incorporated and get some real legal help. That is, if you are looking at people's personal safety, working with children, payments or limping on legal/ethical/moral gray areas.

In most cases though, it's probably not a big deal. Our product revolves around people throwing in their ideas and evolving actionable project plans out of it - so it's a bit personal.

• We had our company incorporated and had the regular legalese drawn
• We kept our first few users to mostly people we knew (friends or friends of friends who wouldn't bite us in the rear). We opened up to the world only once we knew we had a (sufficiently) secure and stable app.
• We have an additional non-legal Honor Code in English that our users could read and understand.
• We trust our users to give us constructive and critical feedback, and they trust us to build an even better app for them. We've both kept up our ends of the deal, so now when users bring their colleagues into germ.io, they personally vouch for us.

Content Marketer here and I can honestly feel you. There's so much you can learn, and more importantly reuse, if you could just throw your thoughts in a common pool.

Our startup (http://germ.io) is aimed at helping you throw in, collaborate and build on your ideas with other like-minded people. Compared to a hangout session, or even a closed community forum, here the focus is on your ideas, the discussions around it, and how you plan to take your ideas forward as you go.

We're now in closed pre-beta, but if you'd like early access, signup and drop me a line so I can shoot you an invite.

Before we actually launched a prototype of germ.io, we tried going minimal with a one line teaser and a signup box. We got less than a hundred signups over the next week, so nothing big or significant.

We knew our product would take at least 6 months to build, and instead decided to roll it out in stages as an MDP that solved each step of the ideation process. At this point, we crafted our story, complete with all the features and the usecase on our website, and wrote a snazzy blog post explaining our MDP approach. The result has been way better, getting us hundreds of new users signing up month on month. Even better, the people that sign up now are exactly the kind of target customers we would want when we roll out the complete product and a paid plan in a few months.

We're building a better gtd tool in germ.io (IMHO) that lets you progress your ideas from "Incubation" to "Actionable". An idea under incubation is technically when you still need to work on "how" you should get it done. Once it's actionable, you schedule it for now or later. But the idea is you don't spend your time on researching "how to get this done" once something is actionable...

It's finally a lot about "style" - If kanban doesn't quite cut it for you, Trello would just suck, no matter how awesome it was.

The thing is, there is no real king in the task management space - just leaders in various micro styles. Trello, for the visual. Asana for the collaborative team. Wunderlist for the inde creator. There is still room for more because no single tool here seems to plug all the holes in getting things done.

We're trying to solve this problem at germ.io by taking a few steps before the "task" - by focussing on the idea and letting you evolve it with more detailed ideas as you go. That's another way. But like one of our early users said - this is a problem that mankind, as a species, hasn't quite solved yet.

[Update] We just launched the first cut of germ.io this week that lets you manage and validate your ideas. Coming up next, you'll be able to drive projects and create your entire thought tree organically. If you've had trouble managing ideas, I'd request you to give us a try at http://germ.io

absolutely. That was why we decided to roll out in Omega stages instead of a broad but boring MVP. You should signup (at http://germ.io), and just shoot a reply to the welcome email - I should be able to get you in.

In fact, I'd go as far as promising you a money back guarantee but we aren't even close to charing anything yet... :)