On Productivity Tools And Time Management With Julien Quintard, Founder Of Routine

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

My name is Julien Quintard, Founder & CEO of Routine. A long time ago, I was a researcher in a field that recently became very popular with the blockchain. I then founded my first startup in 2010, named Infinit which I sold to Docker in 2016. I then took over the management of Techstars’ accelerator program in Paris from 2018 to 2020.

And now I’m working on building a super integrated & fast productivity app.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

We are called Routine and we are building the next-generation personal productivity app by combining tasks, notes, and the calendar with automation and a super fast interface.

What is the origin story?

I started Routine because none of the hundreds of entrepreneurs, investors, and managers I talked to are happy with their productivity tools.

I’ve been a productivity geek for years now, first as a computer scientist to automate as many things as possible and then as an entrepreneur, trying out all the productivity tools on the market and hacking them to do even more.

Unfortunately, none of those were good enough.

Also, while mentoring lots of people, I saw how disorganization was a recurrent topic among first-time entrepreneurs and how it directly impacted the velocity of the company.

I, therefore, decided to tackle that challenge because I believe the product that will solve that problem will have a massive impact on people’s lives.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We officially started working full-time in October 2020, right during the COVID crisis. The first thing I did was to contact people from my previous company to see if they would be willing to join this new adventure. This is how I partnered with Quentin Hocquet who was my previous company’s (Infinit) CTO.

We quickly assembled a small team and started building a prototype. In November 2020, I decided to raise some funds to finance the early days, but also, and most importantly, to surround myself with the smartest entrepreneurs I know.

We decided to take a modern approach with natural language processing for users to quickly; capture a thought, task to perform later, or even schedule a meeting.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Difficult to say. Likely investing in other entrepreneurs and helping them through the first stages of their company, something I have been doing since 2014 as a business angel but also as Techstars' Managing Director in Paris.

But most likely, I would be working on another problem to solve :)

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

We measure success primarily with the amount of time the customer is able to save by using our app. We started off by challenging ourselves to save 1 hour every day for our customer, and we hit that target for most of our early users.

Our next goal is to see how much more time we can save while keeping the seamless experience of using Routine intact.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

We’ve got about 8000 people on the wait-list just from one Product Hunt launch. We also ranked #1 Product of the day.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

We have implemented a fair amount of natural language processing into the Routine experience, so we are very excited about the possibilities that could open up for both our product and the productivity tools space as a whole.

In terms of the technology that we are worried about, it would have to be in AI and meta-intelligence in particular that a lot of companies hold on their users and how they are able to manipulate their behavior. There are cases where this meta-intelligence can be put to good use but it is a double-edged sword that people can exploit.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

I like the posts around blockchain on HackerNoon, in fact that’s how I discovered it. Lately, I’ve started listening to some of the podcasts by HackerNoon and they are pretty interesting.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

It is okay to take a break when you are tired. It is better to rest strategically and keep yourself on your toes than to find yourself exhausted in the long run.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

I learned that when you build B2C tools, it is important to cut features that don’t add much value, as much as adding features that do add a lot of value.