Posts about running my Nozbe online startup business and developing/designing Nozbe apps. Successes, failures, mistakes and lessons learned… it’s all in there.
Hello, I’m Michael Sliwinski, founder of Nozbe - to-do app for business owners and their teams. I write essays, books, work on projects and I podcast for you using #iPadOnly in #NoOffice as I believe that work is not a place you go to, it’s a thing you do. More…
I’m a huge fan of videos where there are two talking heads and both are the same person. Especially I’m a fan of Pitch Meetings by Ryan George. That’s why as I started my new @MichaelTeam YouTube Channel I wanted to try it out myself and finally yesterday as I had my favorite “Design Fight” meeting with my Nozbe team I decided to take this opportunity and try it out:
Last week, on February 1, Nozbe turned 17 years old and as I reflect over these last years I’d like to dig deeper into who is Nozbe really for? While working with Seth Godin’s marketing book I was thinking how to really convey to our current and future customers what we as Nozbe believe in. What’s our why? Because people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Not only our core values but also how we work, how we’re remote first, we don’t use email to collaborate, or have very few meetings. How to create this tension and play with status. How to say that people like us do things like this. Being a productivity nerd and loving the SMART acronym for goal setting, I decided to piggy-back on it and create my own way.
One of the most important reasons to have a cloud-based productivity system like Nozbe is to be able to add tasks or ideas 💡 to it at any time from anywhere. One thing is to install the app on all of your devices, but another is to use other ways to add tasks to the system - using email, Siri Shortcuts or even dictating from an Apple Watch. Here’s how I do it:
Over the last almost 17 years of running Nozbe we’ve developed our main values that dictate how we run our business, how we build our product and how we treat our customers and each other. But we never really codified them. Before our last Nozbe Reunion in Katowice I decided to finally review all we’ve written about our values, commandments and in the end I made my team go through the entire process to finally agree on 4 core values that will guide our decisions going forward. These are: Passion, Simplicity, Freedom and Fairness. In this post I’ll explain what these values mean to us, why we chose them and how we got here:
The biggest problem we face at Nozbe ✅ is that we are in business of changing habits of entire teams that need to work differently to get better results. So we decided to offer a free 30-min video call with us:
Last week I did a guest webinar (in Polish) on how we ship Nozbe app and I gave all the details… In a nutshell, we break lots of “industry standards”, and we eat dog 🐶 food…
Last month new Nozbe finally got Evernote integration (v.2013.19), similar to the one we’ve had for years for Nozbe Personal. While we were working on this, Evernote was aqcuired which to me was kind of an end of an era. You see, I used to be a great Evernote fan and supporter, I have a long history with them - from integrating in 2009, through a failed acquisition in 2011 and later usage until I dropped it altogether. Today I decided to write this blog post where I’m sharing my history with them and where I see them headed:
On Nozbe blog I posted the summary of all pricing changes for all our customers to see. Even though on this blog I’ve shared a lot more under the “Nozbe” tag but I didn’t want our average customer to be exposed to so much detail and I wanted to share the gist of all the changes.
Choosing your trusted productivity system is hard. And once you’ve chosen yours, you want it to work reliably every day to help you get things done and last forever. Nozbe is such a system for you and we guarantee it. Here’s how:
When designing new pricing for Nozbe customers I outlined 5 rules and values that guided me throughout the process. The last, 5th one, was the concept of pay-less account change. Actually, this idea is not new to this particular pricing change. We’ve had it since the beginning of new Nozbe and now after a few years of having it, we’re doubling down on it as we believe it’s the most effortless way for SaaS (Software as a Service) customers to change their subscription. Here’s why and how it works in practice (with examples!):