Remote workers and small teams often struggle with keeping track of their Paid Time Off (PTO) days. This includes monitoring the number of PTO days left, scheduling time off, and ensuring a balanced distribution of PTO throughout the year to avoid burnout.
This problem leads to poor time management, potential burnout, and lack of coordination among team members or couples, ultimately affecting productivity and well-being.
Pain Points
- Losing track of remaining PTO days
- Poor scheduling and clustering of PTO days
- Difficulty in coordinating PTO with partners or team members
- Burnout due to inadequate time off
- Cluttered calendars making it hard to visualize PTO
Alright, I need you all to tell me if this is actually a problem worth solving or if I'm just building something that only my wife and I would use. **The idea:** A simple web app to help couples and small teams plan their PTO days throughout the year. **The backstory:** My wife and I both work remotely, and we were constantly losing track of our PTO days - how many we had left, when we'd already scheduled time off, whether we were spacing things out well or clustering everything in summer and then burning out in fall. Regular calendars were too cluttered with work meetings and life stuff, so I built a Google Sheets template (screenshot attached) that shows the whole year at a glance with color-coded day types (public holidays, PTO, company days, etc.). We've been using it for a year and it's been genuinely helpful for coordinating our time off and avoiding burnout. **What I'm thinking of building:** * Simple year-at-a-glance calendar view (like the spreadsheet) * Multi-person support (couples, families, small teams) * Public holiday integration (auto-updates based on country) * PTO allowance tracking (allowance → used → remaining) * Mobile-friendly * Shareable links for teams **Pricing idea:** Freemium - free for 1 people, €20/year for unlimited people and extra features. **My concerns:** 1. Is this just a feature, not a product? (Could Notion/Airtable do this?) 2. Are people actually willing to pay for PTO tracking when Google Sheets is free? 3. Is the market too small? (Couples + small teams vs. enterprise HR software) 4. Am I solving a problem that doesn't exist outside my own household? I just shut down my last SaaS (cover letter generator) because I wasn't solving my own problem and the market was saturated. This time I'm trying to do the opposite - build something I actually use daily. But I need honest feedback on whether this is viable or if I'm just wasting my time. So please, roast away. Tell me why this won't work. What am I missing? What's the fatal flaw? Give it to me straight - is this worth building or should I move on to the next idea?