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jsmail63-reg

Posted Jun 27, 2020 in: We’re Back
Score: 5
Anant - I'm a VERY long-term user (probably since the earliest days of TD) who at one time (per Jake) had the largest number of tasks in Toodledo. In fact, he had to change the backup code around for me to handle such a large data set.

Nothing would make me happier than to see ACTUAL progress with the app. But my confidence in that, candidly, is very low if not totally nil.

I spent 35+ years in IT with a focus on enterprise software, so have a decent amount of experience in what makes a successful software company..here are a few suggestions on where I would focus if I were running Toodledo..

- You need to communicate with your users CONSTANTLY. Not just once a week, two times a month, once a month, and not even daily. You need to communicate to them and respond to their questions, issues, etc THROUGHOUT THE DAY, EVERY SINGLE DAY. It's obvious you yourself can't do that, nor should you as CEO. Hire someone who can. Or, give up and sell the company to someone who's able to make that level of investment. It's a total "must have". Until you do this, NOTHING else matters.

- Know and understand your current customers and who your target customers are. Your customers are by and large individuals interested in having a productivity tool that they can manage their busy lives with. They are not, REPEAT, NOT EVER going to be large companies interested in buying an enterprise or even departmental license of Toodledo. (I'm mentioning this because at one point I saw some posts indicating that selling to large companies was part of the vision for Toodledo). Candidly, you can't even support the individualist customers you have. Any dreams of supporting a large or even mid-size company (which I did for 35+ years, so know a thing or two on what's needed to successfully do that) is a complete and total fantasy. Keeping it real - abandon any desire to do this, unless you already have. You would not be successful unless you hire a large (and I mean LARGE) number of very expensive people who can be responsive to those companies in "minutes, not hours" and certainly not days or weeks, and nothing could tank Toodledo faster than pursuing sales to companies vs. individuals.

- Publish your roadmap. Make sure it includes good detail on planned feature updates, bug fixes, etc and hard dates. Publish constant updates on how you're delivering (or not) against said roadmap. Don't let this lag.

- Don't break what isn't broken. Don't change features people have relied on for years. Your biggest gap is Mobile Apps. Create something modern and fully featured that works on iOS (all devices - including iPhone, iPad and iWatch versions) and Android. And make them the best they can be.

Jake built one of the best "to do" apps out there. I wish you guys well, but the lack of confidence you're hearing from the long time users is going to be hard to overcome unless you can deliver. The proof is in the pudding, as they say.

Good luck - and we are all rooting for you despite the candid feedback and 'tough love'..

ETA - I'd also suggest giving your long term customers incentive to stick with you. No secret they've all been through a lot. Offer them some compelling pricing to stick around. It's a lot easier to keep an existing customer (as long as you do the things I mentioned above) than it is to get a new customer.


This message was edited Jun 27, 2020.
jsmail63-reg

Posted Aug 22, 2019 in: Feature Roadmap and New Pricing Plans
Score: 0
Wow, this is turning into a massive train-wreck. New team buys the IC. Promises great things. Increases prices. Abandons current customer base in lieu of chasing a new customer base. Has no ability to actually support new customer base - as they weren't even able to properly support the OLD, existing customer base.

Then, the new owners TOTALLY VANISH.

I've sold to F500 companies for many years - 4 decades, in fact. A small, 2 (or 3) person company despite all their good intentions cannot support a SINGLE F500 account. Yet, for some bizarre reason, this seemed to be the expectation (go after "big" companies) of the new ownership at one point.

Now, the CEO has bailed. And ToodleDo (which we all love and rely on) is totally rudderless. Anant may be a great guy but doesn't seem to be posting that much..

Guys - PLEASE SELL THE COMPANY - back to Jake, or whoever can keep it alive.

We're begging you. There is no viable alternative, and we will all gladly pay "reasonable" rates to keep TD alive.

Please. Double, triple Please. No harm. No foul. Sometimes the best laid plans go awry. No-one will hold it against you. Please just do what is needed to keep this alive.


This message was edited Aug 22, 2019.
jsmail63-reg

Posted Jul 17, 2019 in: Pros/Cons of Alternatives to Toodledo.
Score: 2
Joyce - I've tried to move over to ToDoIst also, but it just seems to lack the robustness of Toodledo.

One thing I really don't like about ToDoIst is it's history. In Toodledo, I can check off a task, and that task remains in the search history for as long as my subscription level supports it.

In ToDoIst, you check off the task, and far as I know, it's no longer searchable. Sure, it shows up for a WHILE (I think 2 weeks?) in the 'completed tasks' section say, of a particular folder, but after that - it's not directly searchable.

I looked at RTM and some other tools, and far as I can tell, no-one supports searching for any significant period of time on completed tasks.

I was an IT guy for 30+ years before retiring, and this makes little sense to me from a software design perspective. All I can figure out is once you complete a task, these services (ToDoIst, RTM etc) are moving them to a different database table. That'd help search speed on 'current' tasks as the table is not flooded with completed tasks also, but any decent database should be able to do both easily. So, it's very odd..

I also liked how Toodledo could be navigated by due date. ToDoIst does have a due date, but once that date passes, the task moves to "OverDue" and I've yet to find a way to go back to navigate to see all tasks (completed as well as open or some other status) that were originally due on that date. Really powerful compared to the other apps like ToDoIst, RTM, etc.

It's frustrating me beyond words that the new developers seem to be letting the old user base die off. Best I can tell, they appear to be focusing on selling Toodledo services to companies vs individuals. If that's their business plan, I sure wish them luck. I spent more than 3 decades selling to large, Fortune 500 companies, and a very small shop like Toodledo now appears to be is going to have a very tough time supporting the demands of corporate users, no matter how hard they work or how good of intentions they have. I just don't see how they could ever make that work. If it were me, and I spent the $$ to buy Toodeldo, I'd do everything humanly possible to service and hang on to my EXISTING user base - because that's the bulk of your revenue stream. Chasing a different revenue stream with even more demanding customers, when it hasn't been demonstrated that the current and much less demanding customers can be supported seems to be something that is not going to end well, even with the best of intentions.

Oh well..if anyone can find a decent alternative to Toodledo, I'd love to hear about it. My preference would be that the new owners would resurrect Toodledo from what appears to be an early grave, but based on the lack of communication (eg: no June update and we're already in mid July), my confidence in that happening is unfortunately not high..
jsmail63-reg

Posted Jun 27, 2019 in: Very quiet here and No News
Score: 4
I've started using ToDoIst ($36/yr) after spending a bunch of time reviewing all the major alternatives to Toodledo including RTM and others. I still prefer Toodledo overall, but have completely lost confidence that there is going to be any real development done - especially anything for personal (vs. business users). It's just staggering how the new owners promised frequent communication and to listen to the user community but have all but vanished aside from the recent update talking mostly about what they are going to be doing for business users..

It appears that the new owners believe their best opportunity to grow the company is to target business users. Hard to fathom how business users are going to entrust their productivity and critical data to what appears to be a very small company (< 5 employees if I'm not mistaken) that so far have not consistently shown that they can even support the existing (personal) user base. I wish them the best of luck, but it doesn't take a huge leap to see where that business strategy/plan is heading. Not intended to be anything personal and I don't know much about the new owners as individuals, but if you can't adequately support a loyal, die-hard community of long-time users, how are you going to get NEW users - especially those who are likely to have much more demanding expectations as their business success depends on a rock solid tool with great support? Maybe reconsidering what the real business opportunity is (retain the customers you already have, and grow the personal user base) would be worth some strong consideration..

BTW, one REALLY nice feature of ToDoIst is to have a usable and reasonably "modern" mobile app. That alone makes it worth the trade-off on other things I used to love about Toodledo that ToDoIst either doesn't do as well, or at all..
jsmail63-reg

Posted May 29, 2019 in: Feature Roadmap and New Pricing Plans
Score: 4
Is Toodledo pretty much dead at this point? It's hard to fathom there have been no responses from the new owners to nearly 20 pages of comments and complaints about the new pricing.

I've relied on Toodledo for 8+ years and at one time Jake told me that I had the largest number of tasks in the database, so used Toodledo extensively. Sad to see what seems to be happening to it, and am getting the impression the new owners bought it to get the install base, are effectively abandoning it, and just going to take what's left of the subscription base. Would love to be shown or proven that I'm wrong, but that's the clear impression with the total lack of communication.

I spent a full day recently (am now retired so had the time) checking out alternatives and have pretty much settled on ToDoIst. Toodledo still has some unique features I prefer, but ToDoIst is usable - and at least has a modern, fully functioning mobile app which for me is far more important than any 'nice to haves' that Toodledo uniquely has.

Would be nice to see some updates from the new owners..I really didn't WANT to leave Toodledo after relying on it for so many years - but Toodledo seems to effectively be leaving many of us.
jsmail63-reg

Score: 0
Hi, Jake. Sure. Just submitted ticket #65861. Thanks for your help.

This message was edited Mar 28, 2017.
jsmail63-reg

Score: 0
Hi Toodledo..

Long time user..so I have a lot of tasks and history that I rely on.

I was always under the impression that Gold & Platinum subscribers could retain & view completed tasks "forever" (as the subscription page states saying "Subscribers can retain & view completed tasks for forever [Gold & Platinum]"). But today ran into an error message stating that I hit a max of 20K tasks and can not add any additional.

I'm confused. How can the subscription description say you can keep tasks "forever" yet there be a max of 20K - which requires you to delete old tasks to add new ones?

I really don't want to have to delete history as I rely on Search of old tasks. But I also don't have time to go through and clean up hundreds or thousands of old tasks, either and am not sure what tasks the "delete old tasks" (or whatever that link is called) would wipe out. I realize I can export and save off an XML file, but that's not the best way to search old tasks.

Could you plz let me know? I rely heavily on Toodledo to manage 30+ things on average every day and not being able to add tasks at the moment is really frustrating - not to mention something I don't have bandwidth to figure out today.

Thx -

J
jsmail63-reg

Posted Oct 02, 2012 in: Backup/Restore > 4 MB?
Score: 0
Ahhh..OK. Sounds like a good option, and glad to hear that the backup does indeed capture everything in my account. Thanks!
jsmail63-reg

Posted Oct 01, 2012 in: Backup/Restore > 4 MB?
Score: 0
Thanks, Jake. I'm a Pro user with several years of historical data that I want to keep (account history and other things - I'm in Tech Sales). So, there's probably well over 5,000 tasks dating back quite a while - most of them completed and there for historical reporting and search purposes.

I 'only' have 200 or so active tasks - but I want to make sure to backup my entire account as I have literally YEARS of data in Toodledo. So, if there's a better way that I should be doing backup, could you plz let me know?

It somewhat freaks me out that my entire work 'life' is in Toodledo and there doesn't appear to be an easy way to archive and restore if needed.

Thx..
jsmail63-reg

Posted Sep 29, 2012 in: Backup/Restore > 4 MB?
Score: 0
Hi..I'd like to make complete backups of my Toodledo data, but see there's a 4 MB limit on the "Restore" file upload.

My backup files are a bit over 4 MB..so, is there a way to backup and restore an entire account with more than 4 MB of data?

Thanks.
jsmail63-reg

Score: 0
Hi, Toodledo..

Longtime Pro User here, wondering if it'd be possible to have a "type" field for each task to indicate whether the task is a todo, call, email, "goto" (travel to), etc.

This would be extremely helpful in managing task history and reporting..as it stands now, I have to start each task with "Call so-and-so".."Email so-and-so"..and it gets cluttered.

ACT and other PIMs do implement this, and it's a pretty nice feature for reports and also the task list itself.

Thanks!
jsmail63-reg

Posted Mar 23, 2011 in: Completed Tasks show as 'Overdue'?
Score: 0
Why do completed tasks show as 'Overdue' when displaying by Tag and sorted by Due Date?

This would seem to be a bug..shouldn't the completed tasks show up in a section called "Completed" vs "Overdue"?

I use Tags to organize my tasks by customers (one tag per customer), and like to have a running history of what I did for that customer. So, viewing by Tag and then Due Date descending is a perfect way to do this - except all the completed tasks show up in a section labeled "Overdue".

Would it be possible to have completed tasks show up in a "Completed" section instead when not hiding completed tasks?

I'm not entirely certain, but I believe the iPhone app also does this..
jsmail63-reg

Posted Jan 10, 2010 in: 2015 task not showing in Folder
Score: 0
Hmmm..showing up now. Weird. So, I think it must be user error on my part?
jsmail63-reg

Posted Jan 10, 2010 in: 2015 task not showing in Folder
Score: 0
Thanks..checked the filter, and "hide future tasks" is off.

Any other suggestions? The task does not show up in any list unless I search explicitly for it..
jsmail63-reg

Posted Jan 02, 2010 in: 2015 task not showing in Folder
Score: 0
Just created a task with a due date of 3/1/2015. For some reason, I don't see it in Folder view for the Folder I put it into..it DOES come up if I do a search, but I want to see all tasks in that Folder, regardless of how far out (even years) the due date is.

Any ideas?

Thx..
jsmail63-reg

Posted Nov 20, 2008 in: Does iPhone app show Status field?
Score: 0
Thanks..see above, though - I was wondering if the status field shows when you're looking at the ToDo list by Due Date (like..tasks due "Today").

On the website, I can select the Status column to show, so I see "Active", "Waiting", "None", etc for Status when sorting by Due Date.

Does the iPhone version do the same thing? I'd like to see all tasks due "Today", with a Status field that I can not only see, but also SELECT (on the iPhone) to choose "Waiting", "Active", etc.

Also - is there an Eval version (or detailed docs) available for the iPhone app? I realize it's only $3.99, but would like to see if it meets my needs before having to buy it outright..

Thanks -

- J
jsmail63-reg

Posted Nov 19, 2008 in: Does iPhone app show Status field?
Score: 0
Hi, Toodlepeople.

Does the iPhone app show a "Status" field in the "Due Date" List?

I'd like to be able to see / select more than just "done" or "not done" (ie: choose/show 'active', 'waiting', etc), like we can with the Web app or the FF add-in.

Thanks -

- J
jsmail63-reg

Posted Nov 15, 2008 in: Viiew by Tag doesn't show all tags?
Score: 0
Thanks, Toodledo.

Might be a bug - the tag that I don't see a tab for is the "only" one on the task. And it doesn't show up on the Tags list under Task View By (Tag).

I also only have 5 or so total tags that show as tabs..and lots of room for other tags across the top.

Any ideas?

Thanx..
jsmail63-reg

Posted Nov 14, 2008 in: Viiew by Tag doesn't show all tags?
Score: 0
In View by Tag, I noticed that I automatically get little "tabs" with "most" of the tags I've entered displayed across the toolbar. (Cool!). Clicking on any of the tabs "filters" the To-Do list by tag. (So far, so good!)..BUT..

I noticed that not "every" tag has a tab. There also doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to which tag gets a tab automatically and which ones don't.

I know I can create a custom search for a particular tag, but don't love how the display separates things by date (ie: 'completed on' headers). Clicking "toggle headers" in this view also didn't do what I expected - it actually collapsed the detail lines UNDER the headers (so only headers were shown!) vs getting rid of the headers. Not sure if that's what was intended, or if this might be a bug..

Thanks..
jsmail63-reg

Score: 0
Yep! An "all-purpose"/custom field for sorting would be awesome, and at least give us a stop-gap until something more elegant/fully featured (eg: drag-and-drop sequencing) could be implemented.

I use tags for other things (eg: account name), so using tags for sequencing really isn't 'ideal'.
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