Portland productivity and leadership consulting firm Productive Flourishing is taking its much-beloved planner fully digital with an app.
To do so, the company has raised its first outside chunk of capital, with $300,000 coming from a single angel investor plus $42,224 raised through a successful Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. The new app is called Momentum and its development is well underway.
A public release is expected in June and pre-orders are available online.
Productive Flourishing works with nonprofits, startups,high-growth businesses and leaders on executive coaching, team development and workplace consulting. Part of this work includes a specially designed planner to help creative types make better decisions on what they do, prioritizing and finishing a project, said founder Charlie Gilkey.
The firm sells physical planners and has had downloadable PDF versions available for years. The PDF has been downloaded more than a million times. Since about 2014, clients and community members have been asking for the planner to be an app. And for all those years, Gilkey resisted. Until now.
“There are a lot of productivity and self-improvement apps in the market. I didn’t want to be another one. At the time I was concerned about the technology and apps that were being built would make people more distracted and anxious and I didn’t want to be a part of that,” he said. “But, I have a solution that works and it can work in different formats. Just because (those other apps) are done one way doesn’t mean we have to.”
Productive Flourishing's 10-person team is augmented by an outside development shop based in North Carolina. The app will be subscription-based. Gilkey says one chief difference between Momentum and other productivity apps is that this version is based solely on the individual user and how that user works. It’s not orchestrating a team.
“So many of our community members and planner customers use one tool for their holistic work and other tools to manage their team,” Gilkey said. “We are honoring that separation at this time.”
Productive Flourishing has been around since 2007. Gilkey founded it while he completed a Ph.D. in philosophy and worked as an Army logistics coordinator, a period when he found himself with too many ideas and responsibilities and not enough time to get everything done.
He started figuring out how to complete projects for himself, then began blogging about it. Others started asking him for more insights.
Philosophy and logistics might not sound related, but those disciplines helped Gilkey determine the how and why for getting items moved and projects completed.
The vast majority of clients work on retainer, as the firm usually works in six-month engagements. The company, which is profitable, also has a robust community of about 32,000 users who are engaged with Productive Flourishing tools and content. Two years ago it launched The Academy, said co-founder and CFO Angela Wheeler.
The Academy is a paid product that counts about 100 members. It consists of clients who benefit from the resources the company creates, which partly led to its successful fundraising.
“The Kickstarter is not just funding, but (helping) pull people into this earlier,” Gilkey said. “We are making this for our community. Our design philosophy is more like building a community garden. As we learn what works we go from there.”
Momentum uses positive psychology to guide to the outcomes desired, said Wheeler, who has a background in sociology. It also is designed with neurodivergent principles in mind that allow those on every point of the spectrum to thrive.
The app is being developed in an inclusive way to ensure it helps people no matter how they show up.
“Caring for kids, having a chronic illness, and working are all projects,” said Wheeler. “We believe that there is a broad range of life experiences that are not accounted for in the narrow designs of current planner apps, including people who have lives that don’t conform to traditional stereotypes, work days, or lived experiences.”
