<aside> ⚠️ CONFIDENTIAL
</aside>
Happy new year 🎉.
As customary, let’s reflect on the past year.
Unfortunately, from a numbers perspective, it wasn’t a great year. We started strong with good numbers in acquisition (50k+ traffic), retention (30+% after 12 weeks) and a very active community.
But several things happened:
ChatGPT came out which forced Google to change their approach to SEO which in turn impacted us and many businesses in all industries.
In our market, suffice to say that all companies have suffered, including Notion and Zapier, with only ClickUp doubling down and maintaining their traffic.
On our side, our traffic went down from 50k to 10k visits per month.
We operated our switch to a local-first, data-centric, graph-based and customizable engine.
This meant a lot of R&D necessary to get to a point where we could grow again.
We made mistakes, in particular regarding the community which we should have better managed, perhaps mitigating between features and long-term R&D.
But 2024 was also and most importantly a “human” year for Routine!
Not only did we welcome great new investors with MOC, PWV and Failup Ventures with the key participation of Target Global, but we strengthen the team with 3 backend and 1 frontend software engineers along with Android freelancers (and soon iOS).
We couldn’t be more proud of the Routine team as it is today. 🙏
As you can expect, 2025 is going to be a pivotal year for Routine:
For all those reasons, 2025 should be the year where Routine shines by its ability to deliver value quickly!
On the market side, not a lot of changes.
Yes Notion is moving to email but not the right way. Instead of leveraging its vast amount of data and treating the calendar and email apps as complementary experiences, those simply are Notion-looking apps.
Superhuman is going more and more into calendaring with Calendly-like availability sharing, Mem.ai hasn’t produced anything new in the past 2+ years, Coda merged with Grammarly (very strange) and ClickUp continues its aggressive approach to enterprises.
Only Tana.inc could have gone in the same direction as us, but decided to focus on PKM with no integrations in sight.
In other words, Routine seems to be the only company taking the data-centric approach!
🔴 Didn’t start testing the CRDT-based app internally, putting the finishing touches on integrations, more specifically recurring events
🔴 The new note editor still has a few bugs that need to be fixed before we can consider releasing it
🟢 We released the first version of the Android app (even though it hasn’t been announced yet)
So far it is very well received by the beta testing users.
🟢 The existing integrations (Google Calendar/Contacts, Notion etc.) were transitioned to work with the CRDT
🟢 Launched the “Behind the scenes” initiative to be more transparent toward our community, showcasing every week what the team is working on
🟢 We have also launched a few partner programs:
🟢 Connected with the Local First community in Berlin
🟢 Set up a new system for notifying users upvoting for features and better close the loop
🟡 @Shiva Prabhakaran is leaving us for new adventures