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Crazy idea I'll probably not implement: See who viewed your todo

I notice a growing concern in the maker community (not WIP specifically, but in general) of people's work being blatantly ripped off. It makes people hesistant building in the open, sharing the revenue numbers, etc.

So I had a crazy idea inspired by Twitter's new view counts.

What if you could mark certain todos/activity as private, and people who'd want to see it have to tap a button "unlock" it which is publicly recorded and next to the Like button it shows which members unlocked and thus saw the todo.

Would something like that motivate you to share more behind-the-scenes stuff?

How would you feel about other seeing which content you unlocked? Or should it only be visible to the author?

I'll probably never implement this, because it's a lot of work with a potentially limited use case and there might be better alternatives (such as Twitter-like protected accounts/projects). But I thought it was a fun enough idea to surface and get people's thoughts on.


I can't say I'm a fan. I stopped using LinkedIn because off their creepy, "show me who was looking at my profile" feature.

I know I'm weird because I don't really use WIP for my todos vs. WIP'ing status updates as I go. So I'd be +1 for optional private todos but I'd never use it anyways.

Not sure if you have seen collective2, but they have an interesting model. Basically, think social media for trading stocks, bonds, gold, etc. Everyone's results are public so you can see how effective they are and then you can pay them a subscription to see the details behind their trades and portfolio. So you can pay to see how a real gold trader beats the market and other cool stuff like that. (note: subscribing to someone does not give you access to contact them.)

So it might be a stretch but it would be kind of cool if that existed for makers so someone could pay you to see what your Stripe stats look like through the app and some other level of status messages worth paying for.

Oh that's a really interesting idea!

I've been wanting to build a "share your Stripe numbers" product since before it was cool, but never found a good model.

Some mechanic where a user can unlock it seems really interesting.

Have you seen home.omg.lol yet? I signed up for a 10-year account recently because the app works well, and it was $50 ($5/year).

I point it out to you because it does an amazing amount of community building as add-on value which I think is brilliant. Not sure how many of these are relevant to WIP, but I bet reading their offerings might give you some ideas.

I presume at an individual task level this may be complicated and adds a lot of dependencies.

There's merit in the idea. I'd be interested if you explored adding some permission and privacy settings in 3 different ways.

Access/view settings:

  • Open/private to non-WIP members
  • Open/private to WIP members
  • Open/private to specific members

Access/view areas:

1) Profiles
2) Projects

All private permission settings can have a request view access, but they must be a member and the creator needs to approve it.

Yes, making this now!

Will start with semi-private projects that are only visible to other members.

A simpler version could be simply being able to toggle public vs private to-dos. Public view setting by default, but if someone wants to hide specific to-dos, they can. No 100% private to-dos since that defeats the purpose of being in WIP.

An expansion could be the same settings but for entire projects (great if a project is still in early days stealth)

Nice yes I'm adding private projects right now 👍 (activity will only be visible to signed in members)

Better public/private settings like you're adding now will make WIP a full productivity suite for companies and makers. New projects are nice to log but before launch better to keep private to avoid clones sometimes!

After launching, make every todo public, ask AI to write a 'how I built <product> blog' based on todo's, their sequence and completion date.

Did not think about this reply/idea.

Love this idea, it would feel like a present 🎁 to unlock those “private” todos.

Although I think this is a nice feature, it also sounds as just something to spark resentment. If your product was copied and then this matched someone who unlocked your product, then what?

Also, this might inspire people to create cryptic / misleading content to just get unlocks as we see all over the internet with people's ways to get views/likes/shares.

I never had someone that copied my idea, so can’t really reason about that aspect.