It’s been almost 7 years since I shut down Excel and opened text editor to build this MVP.
In my PM times, I was dealing with migration from the company’s current project management solution to something else. We had quite a requirements and I spent a long time to investigate solutions on the market. While doing this, I shaped up my vision of Minima.
There were a few main concerns I wanted to address:
- Every project management tool I tried was lacking personal space. It was all around the team, but I always felt the need in my very own personal space where I can conveniently manage my own tasks. So I had to cherry-pick things from N task trackers into my to-do list to build up my working pool. The core idea of Minima is that all users get personal space first, which will remain theirs forever, and then they can join teams, one or many, and benefit from being a part of the single system.
- One of the consequences of this is a simplification of communication between companies and contractors: the latter don’t have to have dozens of accounts for each client and the former can easily invite folks to the team just by searching for their account on Minima.
- Solutions for teams never really implemented GTD flow and I was eager to try to apply this pattern in this field.
- Web UIs was far behind desktop software in terms of UX: keyboard navigation, shortcuts, feedback, buttons for everything: it’s all felt clunky. Since I wasn’t a developer, I couldn’t imagine how hard would it be to address this point (it’s HARD) but I’m still trying to bring Minima as close as possible to the desktop experience.
There were two options to kick it off:
- Search for investors and do only product/management part.
- Learn to code and implement it myself.
You can’t efficiently manage the area that you didn’t master yourself
So naturally, I chose the latter and despite the fact that it took so much time, I never ever regretted this decision. Moreover, at this point, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to build something like this even if I had money and resources.
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The current state of things
- The app is in public beta, it’s going to remain free for some time.
- I’m starting with the Personal Workspace. Teams are in the prototype stage.
- I consider the current mobile version as a hacky workaround to make the app reachable from mobile devices. The mobile app will make it usable.