Goalscape’s Visual Goal Management is an ingenious leap forward from To-Do lists, Spreadsheets and Kanban Boards.
In this episode, we speak with Marcus Baur, the inventor and CEO of Goalscape, a unique goal tracking app that utilizes a visual framework to help individuals and teams effectively manage their goals. Marcus shares his journey from being an Olympian to creating Goalscape, emphasizing the importance of prioritizing goals and the limitations of traditional productivity methods. The conversation explores how Goalscape enhances team collaboration, supports larger organizations, and integrates AI to improve goal setting. Marcus also discusses common mistakes in goal setting, the significance of communication, and the role of customer feedback in shaping the product’s development.
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Show Notes
Takeaways
- Goalscape is a visual framework for goal tracking.
- The app was inspired by the need for a holistic approach to goal setting.
- Traditional methods like to-do lists and Gantt charts have limitations.
- Goals should be prioritized and placed at the center of focus.
- Successful teams discuss their goals frequently.
- Goalscape facilitates better communication around goals.
- The app supports collaboration among remote teams.
- Breaking down goals into smaller sub-goals helps maintain motivation.
- AI integration aids in creating work breakdown structures.
- Customer feedback is crucial for the app’s development.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction to Goalscape and Its Creator
01:10 – The Journey of Creating Goalscape
03:53 – Visual Framework of Goalscape
07:43 – Goalscape for Team Collaboration
10:24 – Supporting Larger Organizations
13:05 – Common Mistakes in Goal Setting
17:58 – The Importance of Communication in Goal Achievement
20:25 – Maintaining Focus on Long-Term Goals
23:12 – AI Integration in Goalscape
26:57 – Customer Feedback and Product Development
29:12 – Success Stories and Real-World Applications
32:23 – Final Thoughts on Goalscape’s Mission
Transcript
Beau Hamilton (00:01.329)
Hello everyone. And welcome to the SourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton, Senior Editor and Multimedia Producer here at SourceForge, the world’s most visited software comparison site where B2B software buyers compare and find business software solutions. Now, if you’ve ever struggled to organize your ambitions, balance competing priorities, or just stay on track with long-term objectives, chances are you’ve downloaded a goal tracking app or a task manager. There’s no shortage of options, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and also unique philosophy on the best approach to take.
One app that might’ve just cracked the code for the most effective way of keeping track of your goals is Goalscape. And I would say it’s just another productivity app. It’s more of a visual framework that helps individuals and teams see their goals like never before. It sounds cliche, but I really do think they’re onto something here. So joining us to talk more about Goalscape is Marcus Baur, Inventor, CEO, architectural engineer, and double Olympian. I think that’s pretty incredible. Marcus, welcome to the podcast. Glad you could join us.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (01:08.856)
Pleasure, glad to be here.
Beau Hamilton (01:10.927)
So you are the first Olympian on the podcast. That’s an honor. It’s an honor to have you here. I feel like it played a, yeah. Well, I feel like it played a pivotal role, you know, in developing Goalscape. Can you walk us through sort of the, the, the story of how it was all created and conceived?
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (01:15.854)
It was a long time ago.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (01:27.522)
Yeah, well, back when I wanted to go to the Olympics, there’s two things that come together when you have a goal like that. One is you’re really passionate, obviously, else you wouldn’t go through the hard work that’s required to make it to the Olympics. And the other is you have a deadline that you can’t move. The Olympics is not an event that’s going to be moved if you’re not quite ready, right? You’ve got to be ready on the spot at a given time. So the challenge you’re facing is, how do I become the best version of myself in that limited framework? And you quickly realize when you draw up a mind map of all the things that you need to do that you’re never going to be finished. You can’t get to 100 % everywhere. So you have to make hard choices where you want to evolve, where you think your time is best invested. And for that, you need a holistic picture.
And I needed to come up with a solution for that because I wanted to achieve my goals so badly. And back in the days I was studying architecture and I followed an architectural thinking framework that led me to create, to creating Goalscape, which I believe, which we believe is a, is a better way to approach challenging goals holistically.
Beau Hamilton (02:43.963)
So would you say you were looking at solutions on the market and you just didn’t find one that really resonated with you and that’s kind of what ultimately inspired Goalscape? No.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (02:53.662)
Absolutely, absolutely. Back then, actually, there were only three solutions on the market that you could use. mean, let’s call it not solutions, but methods on the market. People were working with to-do lists. And I love the Getting Things Done framework by David Allen, which deals with to-do lists super elegantly. So you had to-do lists. Some people were drawing mind maps, and project managers were drawing Gantt charts, the waterfall, right? And then later in the around 2005, 2010, the Kanban board became more popular. So that’s four methods that are out there, which are still the dominant methods that people use day in and day out to manage their stuff. And they’re great. You can do good things with them, but they have their limits when it comes to the goals, because they don’t really put your goals in the center. The goals are sort of floating in and out of these methods.
Beau Hamilton (03:25.233)
Mm.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (03:53.304)
but they’re never quite clear in center stage. And I wanted a way of putting the important goals center stage and then evolve the tasks and the to-do lists from the goals, not the other way around.
Beau Hamilton (04:06.737)
I think that’s great. Yeah. Cause I still use to-do lists. I’m a big spreadsheet guy, but after learning more about your product and, and, using the free trial, I really started to realize, I think I could actually integrate this into my, daily workflow. because I think it, lot of the visual, I’m a big visual guy and I think a lot of the visual features make a lot of sense and speak to me and just help me kind of move forward to the next thing I have to do. so I love, could you talk more about that? Like, what are some of the visual elements that differentiate it from the other more traditional tools out there.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (04:40.12)
Well, the key is that you work with a circle instead of an endless list, you know, that kind of pretends there is no limits to what you can do. But there is, you know, everybody only has 24 hours in the day and you have that deadline for whatever you want to do. And you got to put all the things inside that limited space. So a circle is actually the better metaphor for that. And that’s why we plot the central goal in the center of the circle. And then we plot the sub goals, for that goal around it. It’s a normal work breakdown structure. There’s nothing revolutionary about that. You can plot it as a list, but if you plot it in a circle, something really interesting happens. If you start prioritizing, you make one goal bigger, and the first donut, if you like, all the other goals become smaller. So you realize you’ve got to strike a balance. You can’t make everything priority one, then nothing is priority one.
Sometimes everything has the same priority. That’s a rare case. We had to decide where are the golden nuggets? Where are the important goals that we want to invest more effort in to get more bang for the buck, if you like. How can we evolve quicker in the areas that really matter? So these were the big goals. And so in Goalscape, you can adjust the size of the goals on every level relative to each other.
That’s one big difference. You can’t do that in a Kanban board. You can’t do that in a mind map. You can’t do that in a to-do list. So that is a very powerful image and becomes a way of thinking. You accept the limited resources that you have to achieve your goal and then you start working with it in a creative way. And then once you have your goal structure plotted like that, you can mark your progress. So how far have you come? A third of the way, half the, half of the way, 90 % wherever, you just move a slider and try to gauge where you have arrived in a sporting context. You would do that with your coach in a business context. You may do that with your financial department, but you gauge where you’re at. And if you do that in Goalscape, the goals get filled in from the outside in towards the central goal in the middle. And that highlights
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (06:59.138)
the goals that are evolved further and the goals which are lacking development. And this way you see the white spots, the areas that are not filled in and you can use that to readjust your strategy going forward.
Beau Hamilton (07:14.769)
Yeah, I like the shading element there and just seeing how the shading progresses as you work towards the goal. And then fundamentally, you have the breakdown of various smaller actionable steps, which I guess is fundamental for any goal tracking app. But the fact that you have the circular element and then the colors and the shading to illustrate your progress, I think that’s really crucial here.
Now, I also know that in the business world, as you alluded to, the goals aren’t always personal. They’re shared across the company or maybe various teams. So how would you say Goalscape helps teams in particular prioritize their goals and like allocate the time and resources to where they matter most?
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (08:02.968)
Well, the crucial thing is, and this was a finding by the Sloan School of Economics at MIT, successful teams speak about their goals more frequently. And if you’re using tools that only focus on your tasks, you’re less likely to talk about your goals. In Goalscape, the goals sit in the center. And you can discuss them. And you can ask the all-important question, do these goals make a difference to us? Because if that’s not the case, nothing’s gonna happen. People are just gonna pretend to work. They’re not really going to get stuff done. Only when people really wanna achieve a goal will they actually move and act efficiently and with passion and with creativity. So the simple question for the central goal or the central goals is, is there pain relief in achieving those goals or is there a gain and a promise in something that people really desire? Because if it’s not, it’s going to be really lame and people don’t really want to do it. And it’s not going to be a fun project. It’s not going to be a profitable project. It’s not going to be a project that people will enjoy. So you got to go through that process that the Sloan School of Economics described, where you discuss your goals more frequently. And Goalscape animates that more than other solutions do. They kind of tend to hide the goals. In Goalscape, you can always get the big picture.
Now, you don’t always have to look at the big picture because simply by double clicking on a sub goal, you can make that the central goal. But it’s easy to go back to the big picture. It’s always there in the background and easy to access. And management really, it’s management’s responsibility to give life to those goals which are in the center. Goalscape doesn’t do that for you. The management has to do that and the people involved in the project.
Beau Hamilton (09:57.465)
Yeah, the management has to do that. And then it has to be, yeah, has to be really stressed and kind of prioritized, especially with the increasing shift to remote work. We’re all scattered and there’s not like the office dynamic where we’re able to kind of bounce ideas off as easily, I would say, and kind of focus on what needs to be done. along those same lines, like working remotely, I work remotely, we’re
I’m talking to you, you’re in, I believe Germany, is that right? What kind of collaboration features do you offer to help team members around the world collaborate on these, these Goalscape charts?
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (10:28.098)
Yep, Northern Germany.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (10:37.208)
Well, that’s pretty standard stuff. You can share a Goalscape, you can share that project with anyone. It doesn’t cost anything for other people to read the project if they want to edit and work beyond their two week free trial. They have to get a subscription and then they can edit together. They actually work on this goal structure together. They can all add notes, images, videos, whatever. And then you can add comments. And that’s an elegant feature where you can actually comment on each goal.
And we integrated email because email is not going away. A lot of communication platforms have arisen and the multiplicity of those is nagging at us. People have WhatsApp, Slack, Signal, whatever. There’s so many now, but email doesn’t go away. So we figured since email is here to stay, and especially in the business world, people still have to check their inboxes.
Why not include good old emails? So if you add a comment, you can decide, and we want people to decide, is that something my colleague needs to know? And then you can send that off as an email as well. And if they reply to that email, it shows up in your Goalscape in that specific goal. And the beauty of that is we call it goal-focused communication. You already have the subject line to the email because that’s the name of the goal, right? You don’t have to think about, you know,
Beau Hamilton (11:56.399)
Right.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (11:58.988)
What is this email about? It’s right there. It’s that goal that you’re trying to achieve together. And then you can assign people as responsible for a goal. And once you work on that structure, once you’ve worked out that structure, you can also derive tasks and next actions from that simply by filtering down to who is doing what. Like you select the person and you see all the goals that person is responsible for. And what we do is we tag the goals that a given person is working on now with a now tag and a goal that a person is likely to work on next with the next tag. And that creates two super simple lists. One is now and that person. Okay. We want that list to be very short. One goal, two goal, maximum three. So people focus on one goal at a time. And the next list can be longer, maybe 10, maybe 15, even 25 items could sit on the next list. And then when you’re done with your now goal,
You go back to the next list and pull the next goal out that you deem valuable.
Beau Hamilton (13:04.336)
So, okay, so I imagine a lot of what you just talked about is going to apply to my next question here. And that’s just about how organizations grow and scale up as they get bigger and add more team members. So how would you say Goalscape supports the just increasingly complex goal hierarchies and larger teams of an organization?
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (13:27.096)
Well, initially it was created for small teams of 10, but we now find that organizations with 100, our biggest customers are government institutions. They have more than 500 people working with Goalscape. It’s up to management how they want to break down their goals. And the beauty of Goalscape is we don’t make a prescription of what the central goal is. The central goal could be a project, it could be a portfolio, it could be a company vision.
And then around that, you can place the smaller sub-projects and entities. And it depends on the organization, how they structure it. For large organizations, we believe it’s super important that they’ve got a proper goal breakdown that the people understand. Shocking studies from Harvard show that 70 % of employees sometimes do not understand the company’s strategy. That’s because the goals are hidden. So creating a clear goal structure on the top level and then deriving the projects and initiatives which can then be smaller Goalscapes. That’s the job of management. We’re actually now developing a feature where you can take separate projects and compile them into one. That’s currently not possible. Currently they’re separate and you can link them with a link to the other project, but we actually want to enable users to bind them together. So you can have a project of projects. That’s in the making. And that will open the door for the largest organizations really to work with Goalscape.
Beau Hamilton (15:02.009)
Okay. want to come back to that because I think that’s interesting. And I definitely want to, just pick your brain about what’s, what’s coming down the pipeline and, particular AI of these other automation features. But before I do, I I’m curious, like when it comes to actually setting and tracking goals, what are some of the most common mistakes you see people make and what are you working to kind of address those, those mistakes?
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (15:25.272)
Yeah, the biggest mistake is that people don’t worry about them enough. And with worry, I don’t mean it in a negative way. I mean it in the MIT Sloan School of Economics way. They don’t talk about them enough. And that leads to lame goals. It’s so paradox for me as a former athlete. I was in an environment where people endured quite a lot of hardship physically to go to the Olympics.
It didn’t financially pay off for most of these athletes, but they loved to do it. Now, then you shift to the business environment where any business that wants to live for the long run needs to provide something meaningful to their customers, right? So you’ve got a lot of meaning and motivation built into that. Whereas an athlete goes around in circles. There’s no meaning in it.
But what’s different for the athlete is they have an easy to understand goal. Yeah. And there’s a lot of internal motivation because going to the Olympics means you’re seen, you’re appreciated. There’s a lot of positive emotions around that. You overcome yourself and that creates the motivation. But it’s the very simple goal that’s in the center. Now in businesses, we tend to abstract goals. And I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes.
That’s something that needs to be avoided. You’ve got to nurture or suck energy out of the fact that any business that wants to survive for the long run is providing a service to the society, to their customers. And that creates meaning. Now take that and use that as a central goal. You want your product to be better than the product of the competition. Make a battle out of that.
So put something in the center that feels motivating, engaging, and powerful. I guess that’s where the highest potential is. And don’t put them in the background. If you sense that people don’t feel that, then rework it. Go back to it and find a better way of describing the goal. And I think that’s the best way to unleash the energy. If you don’t do that,
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (17:48.44)
You’ll just get low energy at the competition who manages to get their people fired up about about a better goal. They will win for sure.
Beau Hamilton (17:58.349)
Yeah. No, I think that’s a, that’s a great answer. And it just, I love the dynamic of your, your experience being an athlete and, and translate that into the business world because, I don’t know when you’re, when you’re explaining that, just think of the, one of the biggest hurdles for goals and for an organization to, share their goals amongst their, employees is just the communication barrier. And like a lot of times communication, I mean, with every lot of different facets of life, it’s, it’s a difficult thing to do. And so by kind of offering this visual software, I think that kind of helps. But obviously you need to, you still need to visualize your goal, communicate your goal before you can visualize it. But I think partnering the two will really help take it to the next level and resonate with employees. Yeah.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (18:48.782)
I believe it’s important that you get people to think holistically, understanding that whatever they invest their energy in, they cannot invest their energy into something else. So making it almost a passion of everybody in the team to find the golden nuggets, to find the valuable activities that will pay off. And it’s so easy to pick those activities simply by asking yourself, I like doing it?
And that’s the wrong question. You want to ask yourself, do I like the goal that we’re trying to achieve? And if that’s a yes, then you’re prepared to do things that may not be fun, but you realize those are the valuable things we need to do to get there. So Goalscape draws you back into the big picture where you see, yeah, I remember, we wanted to do that. And I’m not just falling in love with that task that seems to be something I’m passionate about that I find easy, but maybe you’re more likely to move to the goals that are maybe a little bit harder, but not so pleasant, but they help you to achieve your bigger goals.
Beau Hamilton (19:56.379)
Yeah, I think that one of the things that the hindrances of accomplishing your goal is the lack of maybe focus and just motivation over time, which I think is a byproduct of our kind of doom scrolling internet era where we’re constantly kind of chasing the dopamine of all these short form, you know, TikToks and reels. I think that’s really eroded our long-term ability to focus on the bigger picture and kind of that holistic approach.
So I’m just curious, like what have you done to ensure that, for example, I stay focused on my goals, especially longer term goals that could take months or years to complete.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (20:34.478)
Well, the most important thing is to break down your goals. In motivational science, it’s called the middle slump. People are usually motivated at the beginning of a project and when they’re closing into the finish line. Actually, there’s good research that people run faster when they look at the finish line. But if the finish line is not in sight, at some point, motivation sort of fades away and people… That is called the middle slump, know, that area where motivation drops. And you can break that really easily by just breaking down your goals into smaller sub goals that are more achievable, where the finish line is more in sight. And this way you just stay engaged and motivated. And with Goalscape, you can do that in a really nice visual way. And if you sense, there’s nothing happening on that goal, well then break it down further. And we’re now using AI to do that.
At the moment, you can go into Goalscape and put in any goal and it creates a work breakdown structure for you. Very soon, we’re going to add a feature where you can pick any goal inside a Goalscape, we call it. That’s the actual project. Your goal project is called a Goalscape. And inside that, you can pick any goal and say, break that down further. Now, you don’t want to overdo it, but this AI is surprisingly good at giving you ideas on how to break it down. And then you can readjust it for your context, for your liking by deleting some of those sub-goals, again, adding some that the AI didn’t think of because they were so specific to your context. And that’s the best way to stay motivated.
Beau Hamilton (22:13.689)
Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. I like how you’re using AI here. I think that’s a very novel way and you’re not overdoing it. You’re not like making AI create the entire chart for you. It’s just sort of using it for inspiration for these smaller sub goals, right?
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (22:28.482)
Yeah, and it’s surprisingly good at it. What it’s not good at is specific personal context. These fine grain things that make up our life. It can’t do that. AI can’t do that, but it can take the broad strokes from that huge body of human knowledge that it’s built upon. Large language models are kind of made for work breakdown structures, for goal breakdown structures. And we were surprised over and over again.
Beau Hamilton (22:39.11)
Yeah.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (22:58.786)
How good it was as a starting point. But it’s not a final plan that you can just then execute. You need to go in, the brainstorming phase was dramatically shortened by that.
Beau Hamilton (23:12.837)
Now is that, is that currently built into your app now or is it coming down the pipeline?
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (23:17.836)
No, it’s currently built in. We call it Goldberg Einstein. And you just push a button at the top of the home screen and you can enter a goal. You can even add some context. And very soon you can do it inside any project. This will then create an initial project proposal. And very soon you’ll be able to add notes and action plans to individual goals, break them down further. So you kind of have a goal coach on the side.
Beau Hamilton (23:24.079)
Love it.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (23:45.752)
Beauty of that is you don’t have your AI in a separate window, but you actually, as you’re working with your plan, you can integrate that AI information right there.
Beau Hamilton (23:57.135)
Now, how often are you shipping updates? it kind of as they arise or as you kind of get feedback and incorporate customer feedback or think of these ideas or is it, do you have a strict schedule for when you’re?
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (24:09.902)
Well, we’re working very agile on the extensions and we ship updates almost weekly. Sometimes they’re fixes and small extensions, but I’d say monthly there’s feature updates of things coming in. We’re now partnering with a large organization on building some dedicated features that they wanted and
Beau Hamilton (24:20.816)
Okay.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (24:39.116)
We believe they’ll also be useful for other people. The project of projects feature that I mentioned is one of those. And what we haven’t done so much yet is plug in further into the human motivation system. Apps do some weird stuff sometimes. They throw confetti or you’ve got a unicorn flying over the screen.
We’d like to go a level deeper in creating really engaging moments when you achieve a goal, for example. We believe that social interaction plays a bigger role in that. It’s funny to see a unicorn flying over the screen, but it’s not like someone making you a compliment for achieving a real goal, a real person, right? That’s on a different level in terms of making you feel good. And we’re trying to integrate these mechanisms.
Got a lot planned. Things are going well. The concept is catching on. When I said that there’s four methods, to-do lists, mind maps, Gantt charts, and Kanban boards, we think of Goalscape as the fifth method that is only just now seeing the light of day. It’s only beginning that this is spreading. But it’s a way of thinking really, that comes with it. And it’s not complicated. It’s easy to understand once you’ve tried it and you’ve got a hang of it. It’s really easy to use. And we’ll make it more usable on mobile. Once you’ve built your goal structure, then you want to filter and say, OK, but what am I doing now? And this is great on mobile. You just get your little to-do list on your mobile. That’s when lists are useful. Once the whole goal setting thing has happened. Well, that’s also an agile thing. We believe that goals should be adapted agile. But once you have your goal structure, you need to start working. And then you want your lists. And we want to make those more available on mobile. At the moment, it’s predominantly a desktop and a cloud-based, browser-based app. But it will be more available on mobile. You can already use it on mobile. But there’s room for improvement.
Beau Hamilton (26:57.777)
Hmm.
Look at better. Okay. Okay. That’s, that’s good to know. And yeah, just, it’s exciting to see what’s, what’s coming. And, I think, you know, it’s, it sounds kind of silly just talking about like having a unicorn fly across the screen for that sort of, reward element, but, it makes a lot of sense because you look at. Like, you know, the app that comes to mind is like tick tock or one of these, these are Chinese shopping apps and they’re just like, they go above and beyond when it comes to like all the different animations that pop up and the kind of reward you with like whether it’s a follower account or like a spin wheel to get a special promotion or all these little things really make you like, wow, this is this I got to keep I got to keep navigating keep exploring this app and like, makes you come back for more. And it works in gaming. Yeah. Yep.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (27:41.6)
It works in gaming, mean, games are addictive. we wanted to work for the long run. We want the actual goals, the real achievements in the real world to be the motivating factor and the social interaction we want to be the motivating factor where people give each other compliments and respect for what’s being achieved and they celebrate together. But you can animate that through the software, right? And that’s what we’re working on as well.
Beau Hamilton (28:08.433)
So broadly speaking, what role does customer feedback play in shaping the product roadmap?
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (28:16.586)
it’s our biggest source of feedback. Our support team sits in the UK and nothing our customers tell us is lost. doesn’t always mean we jump and build it straight away because we don’t want Goldscape to be a Swiss army knife, right? I mean, some people like the concept of that circle and that nested structure and you can sort your collections of whatever with it, but that’s not what it’s made for. It’s a goal setting app.
And we want it to be super simple because we want people to get better at goal setting and creating work breakdown structures and not something else. So it’s not going to be a Swiss army knife. And that’s why we’re careful with integrating the feedback. We always listen to the feedback and we look for ways of integrating things in an unobtrusive, super simple way. If we find that way, we integrate it.
Beau Hamilton (29:12.165)
And I imagine you’ve received a slew of various success stories over the years. Is there one particular story that comes to mind?
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (29:20.514)
Well, there is a beautiful testimonial video on our website from a Microsoft engineer who said he gave Goldscape to his nephew. he said, my God, this thing works the way my mind works. And we’ve heard that a couple of times from people. And then he adds, and he used it for his business and his business took off.
Beau Hamilton (29:38.136)
Okay.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (29:47.028)
I had, you know, the range of people using it is really wide. It’s roughly 50-50 private to business users. And there it’s really from small organizations to really big ones like Volkswagen, for example. And yeah, we were continually surprised of how people applied. Athletes have won gold medals with it. The most successful sailing coach in the world uses it since years.
I’m not saying he’s so successful because of Goalscape, but it didn’t hurt. And yeah, no, and we love the small stories. mean, honestly, I’m not getting people sometimes write to us and say that thing saved my life. And that’s weird for a software, right? I mean, because they got their act together. And I find that myself, you know, when I have phases in my life where I think, it’s all too much. I sit down.
Beau Hamilton (30:19.195)
Right.
Beau Hamilton (30:30.897)
Yeah.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (30:43.138)
put the puzzle pieces together. I said, I do, really want to do that or do I want to do that? And then it becomes clear, you know, once you, can drag and drop your goals around, make them bigger and smaller and sort of organically you realize, yeah, I just want it too much. And that’s why I’m doing nothing. Right. So now I’m going to focus on that. I put that in someday maybe, but that’s out of the picture now. And now I focus on just solving that. And then you get back into the mode of achieving things and then your motivation increases because of that. And yeah, we hear that it’s working all the time.
Beau Hamilton (31:22.139)
That’s what you want to hear, you know, and it, love how one thing I love about your software is that it doesn’t, it’s, it’s available for really anyone and everyone, you know, it’s like, if you have a goal, it’s going to, you might want to look into this software versus like, you know, we’ve, we’ve interviewed various, various, clients and it’s like their software is, is a very niche and specific to a particular business and, facet of the business. your software is, is really wide, very wide, wide ranging. And I think, um, you said there’s like 50, 50 breakdown of kind of the personal private, uh, use cases in the business side of things. I think it’ll be really, yeah, really neat to see like increasingly adopted amongst various organizations. You mentioned like the 500 person, uh, kind of government entity organization that’s using it Volkswagen. Um, I just imagine as the word gets out, more more we’ll start adopting this, because I think it just speaks for itself, you know?
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (32:23.736)
Well, it’s interesting. It’s nothing magical. The Kanban board is nothing magical. It’s just a simple idea of let’s put what we want to do on this card, and then we move this card through a process of stages. That’s the Kanban board. It’s been lingering for 50 years, and it only became popular roughly 15, 20 years ago. And now it’s all over. It’s in all those tools, and it’s a good method.
You know, we like Kanbanning, but when it comes to goals, it’s not good because it’s very task oriented. likewise, if someone adopts the Goalscape method, he’s just got one more tool in his toolbox. And we believe that the method should be more known. That’s why we love talking to people about it. And we think it has the same potential as Kanban.
Beau Hamilton (33:18.065)
So we’re coming down to our last couple of questions. And so I just want to give you one more opportunity to really hammer home a key takeaway, maybe summarizing some of the points you discussed earlier. So if listeners could take one key insight away about Goalscape and its mission, what would that one key thing be?
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (33:35.182)
The key thing is start with why. Start with your goals and derive your tasks from that. But the goals come first.
Beau Hamilton (33:43.419)
Goals come first, I love it. All right, well, for listeners who wanna learn more and maybe get a free trial of Goalscape, where should they go? Where can you send them?
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (33:51.95)
You just go to goalscape.com, goal as in goal, scape as in landscape, so that’s goalscape.com, and just click on try now at the top and download the trial version. Try the AI, just click on the home screen and then enter a goal and you see how it grows. There’s some tips in the bottom right popping up from time to time, but it’s really easy to handle easy to get used to. You add your goals, you can drag them around, you can expand the levels, double click on a goal that centers it. And on the website, we’ve got a bunch of videos that explain some more tips and tricks, but it’s really easy to learn and really easy to navigate. That’s what we hear all the time as well. Wow, this is finding a software that is easy to use.
Beau Hamilton (34:39.377)
Awesome. Well, I’m excited to build out my goals with Goalscape. yeah, just, appreciate you telling us all about this. I think a lot of people will get a lot of use cases out of, or lot of insights out of this. So Marcus, thank you for taking the time out of your day to talk with us here. I really appreciate it.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (34:52.174)
Thanks, Beau.
Marcus Baur | Goalscape (34:56.194)
Thank you, my pleasure.
Beau Hamilton (34:57.937)
Thank you all for listening to the SourceForge Podcast. I’m your host, Beau Hamilton. Make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with all of our upcoming B2B software related podcasts. I will talk to you the next one.