General Task

I joined General Task in order to help improve the productivity of all knowledge workers. During my time there, we were able to interview prospective customers, find real pain points, and build a product to solve them. In these efforts, we successfully built and launched our first product, the consumer version of the General Task app.

General Task was a task manager built for the modern software engineer, available for free on our website. It integrated with their existing tools like Jira, Slack, Gmail and Github, making it easy to stay on top of all aspects of their work. These integrations allowed a user to make a task automatically from any of these sources, and track and manage their progress on this task through the General Task app.

We had many users who loved our product, and got everyday use from it. It felt great hearing feedback from our users about how updates we made were making them more productive in their day to day work. It also felt great building a product where we were in the target market. We were able to make use of the product everyday, and could feel the impact of our work ourselves. It was incredible having such a tight feedback loop.

However, despite what went right, we were unfortunately unable to find a sustainable business model. We were never able to launch our paid professional version of the app, and so were unable to generate revenue. Ultimately, we had to shut down the company due to a prolonged path to profitability. However, I’m very proud of what we were able to achieve in my time at the company. I feel we truly built a great product that was loved by our users.

While our site is no longer hosted, you can still download/fork the codebase and run it yourself. Check out the GitHub repo for more information.