I’ve been building software for a long time. Since 1994. That’s 32 years. When I started writing code, C++ was the primary language being taught in CS classes in college and Netscape was the main browser used to search for information on this new thing called the internet. If you wanted to access the internet from home, you had to use a modem and wait for it to dial a phone number and make some fax machine noises and finally connect you. And the amount of time you were online mattered because your plan probably only allowed so many minutes a month.
In 2000 when I got my first software developer job for a startup, there were so many search engines to choose from. Lycos, Excite, Yahoo and the others I’ve forgotten. If you’d have told me there was this new company that was a search engine I would have thought… Why? But not much later, Google was this word and a box on an otherwise blank screen where you could type your search terms just like any other search engine already on the web. Everyone started using it because it worked well and didn’t show all kinds of news articles and ads in your face (then). And that was it… everything else died and there became basically one search engine and Google became the verb meaning search the internet.
There are a lot task manager apps out there and every day it seems there is another article or expert talking about how AI agents are replacing apps. There is often a task manager as one of the apps being replaced.
I’ve used Asana and Trello over years of running entrepreneurial ventures and in my day job managing projects with enterprise customers. I use AI on a daily basis for both personal and work use. I’m familiar with using Claude with skills and MCP servers and I have a solid understanding on how LLMs work and how applications are built around them. So I’m no stranger to what AI can do for me and how to use it productively.
Yet, here I am, building and using Drindal for a task manager at work and in my personal life.
Because...
Software companies are usually funded by investors. Investors invest for one reason… to see a return on their investment. Why would I buy shares in a public company? In hopes the value will rise and I can sell them for more later. That means at the end of the day, the company exists for one purpose… to increase its value. Who wants to buy shares in a company that cost $50/share today and is estimated to be worth $50/share in a year? Nobody. And what happens when nobody wants to buy your stock? It drops in value, even the company makes billions of dollars a year in profit.
And how does a company become more valuable? Well, by getting more customers, for one thing. But also, by continually convincing those customers the price they are being charged is worth the product. One way to do that is to keep on adding features because more features makes a bigger, “better” product and bigger, “better products are worth more money. But are they?
I know what I need to do and I have ideas. I just need something to help me keep track and prioritize so I don’t forget things or waste time on the things that aren’t the most important. I don’t need AI to tell me what’s important or put tasks on my calendar and tell me what to do throughout each day. I’m independent after all. I don’t need an app to automatically send emails to anyone or capture every word I type or be a wiki or CRM or website builder. There are plenty of solutions for those things and they’re also starting to increase their feature list beyond what’s valuable to me.
Claude is great. My life would not be the same without “him”. MCP and skills allow him to integrate with my other apps, including Drindal. That’s amazing because then I can have Claude start doing work across multiple tools way faster than I can myself.
Prompt: Find the companies in Hubspot without sentiment updated in the last 3 months and create a task in Drindal for each of them to check in and gather sentiment. Review the activity log to see who the best contact would be (or two) and draft an email for each one with copy like “Hey [name], yada yada”. Let me review a few before you send and after you send, tag the tasks as ReachOut=Emailed, add a link to the email message in a comment and set the StartDate = 4 days from now so I know when to follow up.
That’s a lot of work made easy with AI, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need those tools anymore. Claude isn’t a database to hold my tasks or all my contacts and sales pipeline data. He’s more like an assistant, as if I had a human assistant to do things for me. He wasn’t built to be a database. Sometimes he has a hard time doing simple things I intuitively wouldn’t expect (though analytically I may understand), like coming up with a millisecond timestamp when I just give him the string version of a date. It’s a lot of work for him. Or explaining a 2000 line pasted SQL query, which he easily summarizes but then has a hard time referencing the exact line numbers for his comments.
LLMs are tools and they serve a purpose, which isn’t to be every other tool, unless you don’t really know how to use the other tools anyway so your life only consists of 25 tasks, which you could just manage on a piece of paper, or with Claude’s context.
I don’t want to ask Claude to show me a list of tasks I need to do today. I’d rather just click the app and see it. A picture is worth a thousand words you know. When my task is done, I just click the done button. I don’t want to summon Claude for that. But, you say, Claude could make an app with those buttons and I could use that app. Ok, sure. Notion sort of tries to do that. I could probably even have Claude leverage Notion to build an app for me. So… we’re using tools to build more tools that build tools? Alright, but as a normal person, not a nerd who wants to build his own toaster instead of have toast, the last thing I want to do is build an app every time I need it, or maintain them all over time. I just want to click to see the list and click to mark it done. I’ve got a life to get on with.
Drindal holds my tasks, keeps them in sync across all my devices and across all the devices of my team members, has great features I, as a user, don’t need to maintain or build. It does a lot as the tool it is.
Let MacMail or GMail send email or hold calendar events and Hubspot manage customer records. I can drop files into Google Drive. Claude can leverage all of them so I don’t need everything in a single app with all my data in one place. I just need apps that do what they do well and I need them to interface with me as a human and my AI assistant.
Claude is great at using my apps but taking those apps away actually leaves a pretty big gap to be filled by Claude alone.
In the old days, software was distributed on discs and that sucked, so we built web apps. But that was a long time ago. Today, every major user platform has an app store that keeps software updated automatically. In addition, desktop apps can easily be built to update themselves even when they aren’t installed from those app stores. So WHY, WHY, WHY are new applications still being built as web apps? Stop it already. Give me an installed app that is managed by my real OS. My browser was never meant to be an OS that’s running a circus of apps at once.
It’s a task manager after all. Many programming 101 courses walk the student through building a task manager. It’s not that complicated. To be fair… the devil IS in the details and to be truly productive, Drindal has to be far more than what you’d build in your 101 class. That said, it doesn’t need to be what all the big task mangers are becoming, especially because it’s bootstrapped and not feeding investors. It’s enough for it to be enough.
Because software isn’t free and if you’re not paying with money, you’re paying with something else, or someone else is paying with money for you. Drindal doesn’t collect information on you or sell your data. We don’t even use cookies on our website. Most products push the expense onto the big customers. Hence more high prices because they need to cover all the users who aren’t willing to pay. It’s no wonder though. Who can blame them? To get the features they really want probably cost over $10/mo/user, maybe $20. But it is a really long list of other features… if you’re into big lists of features you don’t use. I don’t want to be a free loader. I just want a fair price for features I actually use.
So here's Drindal, built for us. If you're not using it yet, give it a try. It may be exactly what you're looking for.