Morninglist: The full lean start-up cycle in 48 hours.

    This post is done in association with Garage48 and is a part of the prize for the best Press Release amongst the teams that participated in Garage48 in Riga 2012.

    According to the lean startup methodology, start-ups go through a cycle of having an idea, building it, getting a product, measuring the data, learning and then starting the cycle all over again. This usually takes weeks, months, years. However MorningList that originated at Garage48 in Riga (Which is also coming to Helsinki soon) went through the whole cycle a number of times during the 48 hour period. They had an idea, revised it a few times. Then they chose a target group and named themselves “Make Ordered List”, then they focused on task lists and renamed themselves to something I can’t quite recall, finally they realized that targeting a niche is a great start and decided that Morning Task List organizers are their targets and renamed accordingly.

    I have to be honest, when it was first pitched, I thought nothing of it. Just another task management tool that is set for failure. It turns out, I was wrong. In 48 hours they built a fully functioning prototype that I find myself using every morning. The idea is simple, you can prioritise your task list by choosing which task is more important the one on the left or the one on the right in a series of comparisons. It will then give you ranked list of tasks for you to tackle. In just a couple of days using it, my task list decreased from about 40 active tasks to 23 thanks to the ordering.

    The algorithm behind this tries to get the top 5 tasks very accurately and the rest are not as important, in order to minimize the amount of times you have to make a choice. The project leader, Aldis Erglis tells us that in “48 hours [they] had more than 400 task lists on [MorningList.com] site.”

    Users also find creative uses for the system, such as ranking favorite school subjects or colours. The team is set to launch a new and a more complete version by the 1st of December, so stay on the lookout.