We designed ganttchart.ai for the ten minutes before a meeting. You’re about to walk into a room (or a call) and someone is going to ask, “so what’s the plan?” You have the plan — it’s in your head, in plain English, maybe in a few bullet points. What you don’t have is the picture. And the meeting starts at half past.
That situation gave us a time limit for the whole process, from entering the plan to sharing a usable chart.
It set the input
With ten minutes on the clock, nobody is going to fill in a form with start dates, durations, and dependency dropdowns. We let people enter the plan as they’d describe it aloud: “Launch the bakery website in six weeks: design, build, taste-testing photos, then go live.” That’s enough to generate a first draft.
It killed the account wall
Email verification and workspace setup would use time someone needs for the chart itself. So you can make a timeline without an account and decide whether it’s useful before spending any more time on the product.
It decided what “done” means
For that meeting, you need a readable chart you can put on a shared screen. You also need to correct the AI’s estimates and share the result without sending files around. That’s why the generated chart is editable and can be shared by URL.
It made drafts disposable
We also found that quick generation made people more willing to try another version. If the first chart looks wrong, they can change the description and generate it again without losing an afternoon of setup work.
The general lesson
Asking when someone would use the product helped us make specific decisions. Account setup could wait. A readable first draft and quick corrections couldn’t. We could assess each feature by whether it helped someone get ready before the meeting started.