It would be fun and helpful if we could keep a record of all the things we’ve been doing over the years. Life is pretty transient and more often than not, we don’t notice it passing us by. Timelines offers you the opportunity to track your time-based data. It helps you create timelines of your professional and personal life to help you keep track of what you’ve been upto. The app comes with a variety of different features as well. In conversation with Björn from Mediawaves, we learn more about Timelines and how it can be used!
What is the startup/product about? Give us a brief description of it.
Timelines offers an easy yet comprehensive approach to track and visualize time-based data. You can create unlimited Timelines to track any events of your private and professional life. Timelines presents these events on an infinite timeline. You can easily zoom in to seconds to see detailed data or zoom out to decades to get an overview of your data.
Further, you can collaborate with other users on a timeline or even share your timeline publicly.
Timelines is offered as an app for iOS and Android and as webapp (currently for public timelines only).
How many co-founders are there? Please introduce them and their backgrounds.
Timelines is founded by Fabian Jager who is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of mediawaves services GmbH. Fabian develops and operates several technology startups and projects. Next to Timelines, he focuses on eHealth and real estate IT projects.
How big is the entire team currently?
So far, the team is made up of about five people, but we offer three further open positions – check out timelines.io/jobs for more information.
How did you come up with the idea? What motivated you to do this?
Mediawaves services GmbH has a focus on tech services. While developing these services in many different markets and for many different customers, we noticed that many services are built around time-based data. This data is tracked, displayed and analyzed. Thus, these services rely on a framework which offers tracking and presentation of time-based data.
From this point, we decided to build a generic version of such a service: a software framework for tracking and illustrating time-based data.
This framework offers the opportunity to quickly launch market specific products which are based on time-based data for eHealth, real estate and beyond. As a first step, we launched the Timelines app as a very high level and generic version of the framework.
What is your target market? Why do you think your product will appeal to?
As mentioned before, Timelines is a very high level and generic version of our core software framework. Timelines has no concrete market yet but is a generic productivity app for now. Nevertheless, we approach markets to test their relevance (e.g. cooking, sports, …).
On each of these markets, Timelines is the only app offering a perfect solution to track and visualize time-based data on an infinite timeline. During this early phase we found out that our users use Timelines because of its rich feature set and its simple UX.
What are the marketing plans apart from the product hunt/beta list launch? How are you planning to acquire new users?
At the moment, we are testing several markets at the same time for short periods to assess their relevance and find new user groups. In the next step, we will use features like sharing of public timelines to spread the product by users sharing their information. So, we try to feature good content on public timelines on any topic which as a result will grow our number of users.
Do you have a separate dedicated team to take care of marketing (digital marketing/traditional marketing)? Which digital platforms are you focusing more on?
No. We are a tech team. Thus, we believe that at the current phase the best marketing is automated marketing which is done by the tech team.
What according to you is the biggest challenge that you faced? Is it product development or marketing or scaling or … ?
Currently, the biggest challenge is growing the number of users to a level from which the network effect has a significant impact in growing this number by itself.
Who are your competitors/alternatives? What sets you apart from them?
Other apps which track time-based data do not offer an infinite timeline and a good UX.
What are the future plans with the product/startup? Any new features you are planning on?
The next major features are not fully defined yet. Integration with 3rd party apps (e.g. zapier, trello, …) is a hot topic.
Know a great start-up story or want to share your own? Write to us at interact@insidermediacorp.com and we will get back to you. For more updates follow Venture Mirror on Facebook