My First Product Positioning Failed. One Feature Showed Me Why
I initially built Reminders as a broad document-expiry and persistent-reminder app.
The obvious feedback was: “Why not just use Google Calendar?”
I was leading with features instead of the problem, supporting too many unrelated use cases, and spending too much time strengthening the backend before proving that people understood why the product should exist.
The part people actually found different was what happens when a reminder is ignored:
Set a care reminder. Get email or SMS follow-ups. If nobody responds, a trusted backup contact can be notified.
I am now focusing the product on important family-care dates: parent checkups, post-surgery follow-ups, children’s vaccinations and health forms, pet-care dates, and similar situations where one person should not carry all the responsibility.
The product now supports external recipients, email acceptance, SMS consent, acknowledgement, backup-contact opt-out, delivery-status visibility, and repair when a recipient becomes unreachable.
I am looking for around 10 people with a real upcoming family or pet-care date. I will help set up the first reminder personally and want honest feedback on the experience.
I will provide free Plus access: https://reminders.verysimple.systems
The pivot from broad document expiry to family care coordination is a meaningful narrowing, but family care is also a space where trust and data sensitivity matter more than almost any other consumer category. Where does reminder content, recipient contact info, and escalation history actually live, and is there a clear answer for someone who'd be storing health-related dates and contacts about their parents or kids?
Everything lives on a secure Supabase managed instance. I think this should be enough for MVP purposes.
There is no place to upload any health-sensitive documents. We only capture dates, title, emails. You can fudge the dates/titles if you'd like
Makes sense for MVP scope, keeping it to dates, titles, and emails rather than health documents is the right way to stay out of HIPAA territory while still being useful for the actual use case.
"Leading with features instead of the problem" — this one line describes 90% of failed SaaS landing pages I've ever seen.
The shift you describe (from generic reminders to "shared accountability for care dates") is classic Jobs-to-be-Done in action. The feature didn't change. The story around it did. And that story change unlocked the exact segment of users who felt the pain deeply enough to pay.
I went through the same thing with my tool. I started by positioning it as "AI that generates content" — which sounds like every other AI tool. Nobody cared. What finally clicked was repositioning around the specific moment of pain: a Vietnamese shop owner staring at their phone at 10pm, knowing they need to post tomorrow, with no idea what to write. Same product. Completely different resonance.
The question that helped me find my actual positioning: "Who would be genuinely upset if this product disappeared tomorrow, and why specifically?" The answer to that is usually buried inside a feature nobody else noticed — just like your escalation flow.
Congrats on finding yours.
I really appreciate your perspective. Would you be open to a demo of this application?
It is recommended to get a dental cleaning every 6 months. I will make sure you NEVER forget yours again. Even if I have to email/sms/call you multiple times till you get it scheduled.
The escalation-to-a-backup-contact bit is basically the whole product, everything else is table stakes. I went through the exact same thing recently, spent weeks polishing features nobody reacted to, then noticed people only lit up at one line in my pitch. The thing I'd almost cut turned out to be the only reason anyone cared. Curious how you landed on family-care specifically, versus the other places that same "nobody responded, notify a backup" feature could go, like on-call or small-team ops?
Posted on Reddit and Indiehackers. Some kind people tested it out and gave me this feedback. Earlier I was making it into a general document/insurance expiry type reminder app, but it seemed like those weren't convincing enough to get someone to pay for it.
Also would you be open to a demo? It is recommended to get a health checkup once every year. I will make sure you NEVER forget yours again. Even if I have to email/sms/call you multiple times till you get it scheduled.
"Why not just use Google Calendar" is one of the more honest signals a founder can get, it means the value wasn't differentiated enough to justify a separate tool. The backup-contact notification for care dates is a genuinely specific feature that Calendar can't replicate, that's a much stronger wedge than a general reminder app. How did you find the people willing to test with a real upcoming care date, that seems like a narrow group to source for.
I asked for feedback on Reddit and Indiehackers. Some kind people tested it out and gave me this feedback. I also asked a wide variety of family and friends(with varying ages and levels of responsibility)
Also would you be open to a free demo? It is recommended to get a dental cleaning every 6 months. I will make sure you NEVER forget yours again. Even if I have to email/sms/call you multiple times till you get it scheduled.
That's a good range of testers to pull from, family and friends across ages probably surfaced different blind spots than a narrower group would have. I'll pass on the demo for now, but the multi-channel nudge idea makes sense given how often people ignore a single reminder until it's someone actually following up.
Which feature was it — the one users actually came for, or the one that revealed you'd been describing yourself in a category people don't shop in?
Asking because I keep catching myself explaining my product in terms of the mechanism instead of the outcome. Technically accurate, completely unmemorable. The moment I described it as a contrast against the thing people already hate, it clicked for people. Same product, different sentence.
I don't have enough users to make a proper conclusion on this. But as a technical founder, I often fall into the trap of being excited about the mechanism and communicating that, instead of WHY the audience would use it and WHAT it would solve for them.
Also would you be open to a free demo? It is recommended to get a health checkup once every year. I will make sure you NEVER forget yours again. Even if I have to email/sms/call you multiple times till you get it scheduled.
The backup-contact escalation is the real wedge, but it also creates the trust risk. For the first 10 testers, I’d pick one category, probably post-surgery follow-ups, and measure two things: whether the primary person acknowledges before escalation, and whether the backup finds the timing helpful rather than intrusive. Which category currently has the clearest “someone else must know” moment?
I'm realizing that post-op follow up are usually at the front and center of someone's mind(that just got surgery) and is likely already scheduled.
I think more mundane things like dental cleanings and annual health checkups are things that people would tend to forget. When was the last time you got a dental cleaning?
I don't have a personal dental schedule to cite, so I would not fake that signal. Your positioning point still holds: routine care is forgotten precisely because it feels low-urgency until the interval has already slipped. The sharper product question is whether the reminder has a clear owner and a consequence when ignored, rather than whether the event is medically dramatic.
"One feature showed me why" — that's usually the whole game. What surfaced it for you: talking to users, or watching where they described the pain in their own words? I ask because the sharpest positioning signal I've found is Reddit/forum threads where the ICP complains in their language, not yours. Been building a discovery tool around that. What's your channel for finding those conversations right now?
So far, talking to people on Reddit/Indiehackers + family and friends. They told me in their language what was important enough for them to pay for, which broke my assumptions since I am biased towards my app.
I am interested in your tool, and willing to pay you if I can get some new users through it. Let's connect
That’s a strong signal — and yes, let’s connect.
One honest distinction: ThreadScout finds and scores relevant conversations; it can’t guarantee users, because conversion still depends on the channel, your reply, and the offer.
Send me:
I’ll map a sample first. If the threads match people you’d genuinely engage with, we can discuss paid access.
What stood out to me is that the differentiation wasn't another reminder—it was what happens when the reminder fails. I'd keep validating whether customers are buying reminders or shared accountability. Those are very different products, even if they look similar on the surface.
Yes, but it is surprisingly difficult to get people to imagine the reminder failure scenario. I've had friends and family vehemently defend their Apple Reminders/Google Calendar app.
This becomes frustrating after the first couple of times.
That's the part that caught my attention as well.
Reading your reply gave me one thought about why people defend reminder apps right up until the moment they stop being enough. I'd rather explain it in the context of your product than try to condense it into a few comments.
If you're interested, what's the best email to reach you on?
What part of your approval process takes the most time? Trying to understand if this is a universal pain.
Hi, I am not sure I understand. What do you mean by approval process?
What part of your approval process takes the most time? Trying to understand if this is a universal pain.