It’s great to see you again Product Hunt fam!
I’m Samiur, one of the co-founders of Heyday.
Nearly two years ago, we launched our Chrome extension on PH and won Product of the Month.
After the launch, we grew to hundreds of paying customers at 57% DAU/MAU, and ~3% monthly churn. We even raised a Seed round and hired 4 teammates.
We thought we were on our way to a Series A.
Then the world changed.
OpenAI made it easy for developers to build world-class AI into their apps. And just like that, a horizontal productivity tool differentiated through its AI, like Heyday, wouldn’t be able to compete.
We realized that the most successful products in this new world would be those that specialize for the needs of a specific persona, the way Github Copilot does for engineers.
To survive, we selected executive coaches as our target users (my co-founder @samdebrule shares the story behind this decision in his maker comment) and refashioned our product to solve their specific needs.
To help coaches, we needed to understand their data/context and fit in seamlessly with their workflow. We’ve made coaches ecstatic with what we built (~50% conversion from trial to paid), and in the process, we stumbled upon a feature set that has organically been helpful to non-coaches who do a ton of research.
Our goal is the same as it was when we first launched Heyday on PH two years ago - build an AI copilot that serves all knowledge workers. Today, we think we’ll get there by building product experiences that serve specific personas one by one.
And that’s why we’re excited to share Heyday with you today. We hope to learn from you as you use it - and your persona might be the one that makes the most sense for us to serve next.
🙀 The problem
Our brains weren't built to handle the volume of information on the internet. Modern AI tools like OpenAI try to help, but they aren’t trained to solve the specific needs of your job, don’t have access to your context/data, and require a lot of manual work (and know-how) to bend it to your will.
😻 The solution
Productivity tools should easily pull in our context/data, seamlessly integrate into our workflow, and be tuned to the specific needs of our jobs.
What you’ll love about Heyday:
- Summarize key points and find answers that draw from all of YOUR emails, documents, notes, and articles
- Get specific advice from within your collections of research (e.g. Ask your “Startup Growth Loops” topic to suggest changes that will help you grow it and increase engagement)
- Eliminate writer’s block with original first drafts of content drawn automatically from your conversations and research, emailed to you weekly
- Capture meaningful moments from your calls with summarized key points, next steps, and follow-up questions pulled out of your Zoom calls.
My co-founder Sam and I will be answering your questions for the next 24 hours.
Ask us about Heyday, our process for gathering feedback, our plans for the future — anything!
It’s great to be back, PH fam! I’m Sam, co-founder of Heyday.
My co-founder Samiur and I will be answering your questions for the next 24 hours. Hit us with anything!
As @Samiur1204 mentioned, our decision to focus on executive coaches unlocked a level of traction we hadn’t hit when we first launched Heyday. And we think it will be the reason why we ultimately achieve our goal of building the AI copilot for all knowledge workers.
But like being told to “talk to your users,” being told to “focus on a specific niche” is not specific enough advice to be helpful.
Below, I’ve shared the process we ran to choose a niche. I hope it helps you whether you’re building a startup or hustling on a side project!
👉 Create a criteria of persona we want to serve
Does this person have a hair-on-fire problem? Is it ongoing? Would they pay to solve their problem? Do they have an urgent need to switch to us? Are there a lot of these people or are they very well connected with other groups?
We knew we’d want to be able to answer “yes”, to any persona we selected.
👉 Investigate existing user base for “weird” behaviors
We looked into our database to see who was using Heyday in extreme ways. This pointed us to folks who were motivated to solve a problem, many of whom had a profession that we didn’t think of as one who might need our help.
👉 Interview folks to learn about their problems
With quantitative usage data and no additional context, we wouldn't have understood the problems folks were trying to solve. Our conversations shed light on this.
👉 Select a few personas to run an initial experiment
After learning about the problems of ~50 people and whether they met our criteria, we had a shortlist of personas to work with - Coaches, Equities Investors, Consultancy CEOs, and Writers.
👉 Manually super-serve people in the target persona
We chose 3-5 people from each person and started working for them as consultants. Before we wrote a single line of code, we wanted to be sure we understood their problem deeply and identified a solution that would make them ecstatically happy when delivered.
👉 Identify 1 user persona that we are making ecstatic
What does ecstatic look like? We looked for two signs: 1. They spontaneously told friends how we were helping them 2. They said they would happily pay $100/month for the service we provided. Coaches were ecstatic about how we were helping them.
👉 Build tools for ourselves to serve 10 times the number of users
By this point, we were confident that we understood the problem and desired solutions for this small group of coaches. But with such a small group, we had to be sure that a larger group would feel similarly excited.
Instead of trying to nail the product experience at this point (costs time + $$), we built internal tools for ourselves and consulted 10x as many coaches.
👉 Incorporate the features into the product
When 60% of coaches in this larger group agreed to pay us $100/mo, we knew we were ready to flesh out our product and bring more coaches on board.
That’s our process for choosing a specific persona.
Let me know if you have any questions about this process or Heyday in the comments below!
At a glance, for me Heyday is sort of like AI that could be trained to read materials like email conversations, etc. My only worry is privacy. As with email, maybe Gmail + its own AI could do something in the future.
I am interested however, if the AI could be proactive in finding answers, based on supplied video tutorials from YouTUbe or long forum conversations, or Discord. Is it possible for Heyday for this?
I also have a long running Twitter X and I posted a lot perhaps Heyday can also do this?
I like the design of holding the comment boxes with your hands under the title "Give your brain a boost". Very creative. I've never seen anything like this before!
Likewise, using hands in the 321 animation is a very sweet detail.
I saw similar projects about the product, even a friend of mine had a project where you could talk with PDF. But this more personalized and easier-to-use working principle is a perfect idea. I haven't experienced the extra product, but even this much has left a positive impression on me!
Good luck!
Heyday looks like an incredibly useful tool for knowledge workers and creators!
I love how it automatically organizes and surfaces insights from your documents, notes, web history, and conversations. This could be a total game-changer for staying on top of research, improving productivity, and unlocking your personal knowledge base.
Kudos to the team for building something that taps into your own wisdom rather than relying solely on external data.
The future is bright!
Congratulations team! This sounds like a fascinating tool! Can it provide suggestions or help organize information? Looking forward to learning more about this innovative product!
But like being told to “talk to your users,” being told to “focus on a specific niche” is not specific enough advice to be helpful
@samiur1204 @samdebrule Looks interesting! looking forward to using it. Congratulations on the launch.
