Activitywatch: Reach more users

[ErikBjare]

ActivityWatch is getting pretty good (at least that's what our current users think) and it's getting to the point where the impact/utility it has is limited by the number of people using it.

It would be nice to get it into the hands of more people, not the least because more users mean more people potentially donating. We have metrics on users/downloads/pageviews (see #83) as well as survey data from current users (see #291), so we're well prepared to evaluate which efforts give results.

Questions:

• How do we reach more people going forward?
• Why do some people who find ActivityWatch don't start using it?
  
  
  
  • Likely related to most requested features yet to be implemented?
  
  
  • Is installing ActivityWatch too complicated? (currently the case on macOS, see #334)
  
  
  • Are we not designing for their use case?
  
  
• How do people find us now?
  
  
  
  • I have data on this from website analytics (a lot of people come from AlternativeTo or through Google searches)
  
  
• How have efforts to reach users in the past performed?
  
  
  
  • Toggl has a blogpost on how putting effort into social media presence has limited impact (can't find it now though)
  
  

We've done some work on this in the past (https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch/issues/38), this issue is intended to track the general continuation of that work.

Accepting suggestions for how to reach out to a wider audience :slightly_smiling_face:

[xylix]

Probably somehow ensuring our solutions are actually found when people search for a time tracker would also be a step towards making possible users find us.

For example, currently (11.03.2020) if I search for "time tracker" on google play there's hundreds of apps but can't really find activitywatch anywhere.

Actually even searching on desktop for "time tracker" activitywatch can't be found very easily in the results. We could maybe try some low effort SEO at least, to make sure common search phrases for people who might be looking for activitywatch actually find it.

[snovak]

LOVE the project by the way. Just pitching in some ideas here.

Influencers! Reach out to a few "self help" and/or "high-performance" and/or "startup" gurus, like Tim Ferriss. If you can get just one to plug you, you've just reached a TON of people in a meaningful way.

Videos! "How do you use Activity Watch in your routines?" For example, I work remotely for a big company, ~90K people, and many others are remote too (especially now with coronavirus). We have to log our hours every day (at end of the week), and split up our time into categories Until I found AW, IT WAS SO TEDIOUS!!!

Integrations. Oh, I don't know. Let's just say there was an integration to something like GitHub, Slack, or Basecamp, or some other productivity tool. Like, for Github, maybe it would be useful to highlight tasks that actively contributed to a bug fix or new feature and it would spit out a string, or something, that you could drop in the commit. Uhhh, I think that's a feature request.. I think I'm getting off track. But, what I think I'm saying is, if AW works with some of these niche tools, you'll very quickly gain many of their users too. Or, like I mentioned above, crappy time logging systems NEED this. But, can't be mandatory. And they can't control the data because then it's creepy, which is why open source is great solution!

Hope something here helps!

[xylix]

Hm yeah great point about the influencers. Personally I follow a few time management / productivity persons on YouTube (for example Matt D'avella and Nathaniel Drew) and asking for a change to pitch activitywatch on some such people's podcast could be a great way to get through to more people interested in tracking time etc.

Thanks for the input :). It looks pretty useful.

[alexriabtsev]

Hey, team!
Kudos for great app! I used to use 0.8.4 and updated today to the latest. The difference is huge!

Regarding promo - there are three main ways: people (influencers + referral), ads/money (Google + FB networks), content (blog/email/telegram etc.).

BTW, you can have Slack for community (it used to be great Trello community in Slack).

Feel free to ping if you need further thoughts!

[samuelsimoes]

Hi, I love your effort to do an app like this open-source, thank you for all the work.

I think if you work more in your "call to action" in your home page with a highlighted one-line command to install it through package managers like apt and macOS brew would help you a lot to get some more users because today you need to download a zip (from a small button, btw), extract it and read the "get started" to understand how to start the app, which hurt your "call to action" IMHO by my experience.

Nonetheless, installing through repositories will probably help you to not lose users that may face issues with missing dependencies.

[johan-bjareholt]

I think if you work more in your "call to action" in your home page with a highlighted one-line command to install it through package managers like apt and macOS brew

@samuelsimoes We don't want to recommend installing from the command-line by default, all users are not comfortable with that. We do however already have support for brew and we are working on building a .deb
https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch/issues/10

I do however agree that the installation process is not obvious. Personally I especially want it to be easier to make aw-qt autostart on macOS and Linux (currently only easy on Windows).

[fmiqbal]

I have listed AW on ArchWiki List of Applications, if its fine by you, https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/list_of_applications#Time_trackers

[Oymate]

I found this app through itsfoss.com, so maybe some articles from sites?

[ErikBjare]

@Oymate We've tried getting people like itsfoss.com to write about us, as you can read about in #38 :slightly_smiling_face: