Reimagining Productivity with Marie Ng of Llama Life
Enabling a legion of 1000 true fans by building in public
“Building in Public” has become somewhat of a buzzphrase in recent times. However, Marie Ng, founder of Llama Life and host of The Weekly Build has shown how a community-led approach can truly enable a legion of 1000 true fans and become a powerful driver of growth.
In the midst of the 2020 pandemic, Marie Ng learnt to code through online courses and tutorials. In what began as a personal coding project, Llama Life quickly became a to-do list tool with Marie publicly sharing her building journey on Twitter. Today, Llama Life is a productivity and mindfulness app designed on the concept of “time-boxing” to help you get through your daily tasks.
A plethora of productivity apps have captured the market from Flora, Flow Club to Todoist, Marie Ng shares a fresh perspective on the features that truly matter when it comes to productivity apps. She also shares her thoughts on the whole gamut of the founder journey: from community building, and bootstrapping to raising VC funding from Black Sheep Capital and Jason Calacanis of the All-In Podcast, This Week in Startups and Founder University.
What were you working on prior to building Llama life?
Llama Life is not my first startup. I’ve done a few startups before, but Llama life is the furthest that I’ve gotten in this journey. There’s a lot of luck when it comes to building a startup and there’s just a lot of factors that go into something being successful or not. We’re still figuring out product market fit with Llama life, but we’ve certainly gotten signs of that, which has kept us going and, and the product going. Prior to startups, I worked in corporate for about 12 years in the advertising marketing space. I worked in London and also New York City and also a while in Melbourne.
Often with startups, people focus a lot on building the product and the tech stack, but there’s a whole marketing, branding and a sales side, which is also important because if you build something that nobody knows about, it doesn’t really exist. I started off building core skills across marketing, and branding and then I learnt how to code. I’m currently rounding out my skills, and focusing more on the tech side and, and building products.
You mentioned that you are a multi-time founder, what makes this time different?
This time was different for two reasons. Firstly, it started as a learning exercise so there was a lot less pressure. I was teaching myself how to code by mostly watching YouTube videos and putting those skills into practice. When you’re watching a video there’s an influx of theory, but actually to make that come to life and cement that knowledge, you want to build projects. I started building a very basic to-do list, launched on Twitter, and posted daily and gained traction and a community of users.
That encouraged me to build it out and it was all from a learning perspective, hence there wasn’t much pressure. Questions arose: how can I build a basic to-do list? How can I add user authentication to it? How can I add a database to it, how can I add payments to it? Each aspect of that journey was trying to figure out how to add an additional feature and fulfil a request. The second reason was that I was diagnosed with ADHD about 10 years ago, and since then I’ve been trying to find products that stick. I was using five different apps trying to accomplish one thing. I was solving the problem for myself and subsequently we have also found a target market of people with ADHD.
What does building in public entail?
Building and learning in public go hand-in-hand. You’re building projects, features and you’re sharing it in public as you go. You are being very transparent about the journey, the ups and downs, the decision-making, the product, the progress that you’re making, alongside screenshots and design wireframes. Whilst building Llama life, it became super helpful as I built a community and a following around the product. Every time there’s a new feature or a launch, we already have a community behind it and their networks. As avid users, they feel drawn to the community and a part of the journey.
When was the inflection point for you to turn Llama Life into a startup?
My initial intention wasn’t to build a startup. Nor was it to build this product and get an MVP out as quickly as possible. It started off as a sort of side project I was doing just to practice my coding skills. It took around four months to build the product, a couple weeks testing no-code tools and talking to customers. Seven months in, we launched on Product Hunt. It grew quite serendipitously with Twitter and users providing feedback and expressing their need for the product. I decided to turn it into an actual product in an actual business.
What does Llama Life offer?
Llama Life helps you get through your to-do list rather than making endless lists.
By making it rewarding to use, a fixed amount of time for each task is set with a countdown timer. A countdown timer rather than a stopwatch is designed to make you think very purposefully about what you’re doing. There is a bunch of features built into Llama life to help you do that. Once a task is completed, you have particular animations and sound effects- confetti. Preset Lists are also a feature to create, save and re-use templates.
What is the north star Llama Life is working towards?
There’s a lot of productivity tools on the market, hence we are really trying to focus on the angle of mental clarity and wellbeing aspect. When we design the product, we always have well-being in mind, and I talk about it being a fun product. So, questions arise: what does it mean for it be fun? How do you design fun? How are you thinking about somebody’s day, the stress that they’re having, the feelings that they’re going through, and how do you design for that? In addition to being a productivity tool, Llama Life is also a tool that accounts for wellbeing during the day as someone works.
How has building in public impacted your fundraising process?
It was actually quite serendipitous. I was building in public on Twitter, someone on Jason Calacanis’ team saw the tweet and reached out to me on Twitter DMs. It was along the lines of… Hey, I can see that you’re bootstrapping this business. Have you ever thought about raising capital? We hopped on zoom and that made me think about what Llama life could be. It made me think bigger about the product, what the vision could be and how could we scale this?
They invited me to join the LAUNCH accelerator- a 15-week program in the US completed remotely. Following the accelerator program, I decided to fundraise, which was the pre-seed where Jason and Black Sheep Capital invested.
Final words of wisdom on building community and product?
What is really tricky is doing the marketing and community-side of a startup. I would argue as a founder or as an early employee in a business, you want to do it yourself as you are so close to the product. People can sense the authenticity. Part of the community and branding is the founder as they are the closest to the product. Build community for the purpose of community.
Want to know how you can take the first step to starting your project? Be sure to follow Textbook Ventures’ socials here and subscribe to our newsletter to learn more about the founder's journey and exciting opportunities with amazing startups making a difference.
