Italian wine, team retreat, and a new Gmail Add-on
This is the short story of how a team retreat in the fantastic Gavi wine region of northern Italy can lead to creative new product ideas. Just saying…
April 2019 update: we passed 100,000 users. So cool to see that many people using these beautiful email templates in Gmail: thanks for choosing BEE!
Nov 2018 quick update: we just reached 50,000 users of the Gmail add-on:
It all started one very productive afternoon at Villa Sparina (yes, we get to do team retreats in places like this because we have an internationally distributed team, but an Italy-based parent company. We’re hiring, btw!). So… we were saying… one afternoon…
… the BEE team was reflecting on why lots of users of the email editor — the one at beefree.io —would send their messages via Outlook or Gmail. Why? Aren’t those applications used to send text emails? Why visually rich messages?
We’re big believers in the Jobs To Be Done approach to product decisions, so we started asking ourselves: why are people hiring our visual editor to create an email that will be sent with Gmail or Outlook? What job are they trying to get done? Can we help them get the job done faster? How?
It turns out that there are a lot of jobs that Gmail or Outlook emails get done “better” when they’re more than just text. Both personal and business emails. To name a few use cases that we came across:
- A nice “Thank you!” note to a colleague, new contact, etc.
- A motivational message to staff (“Let’s do this!!”)
- A happy “Happy Birthday” message for a loved one
- A fun, casual invitation (“Let’s get together!”) sent to a few friends
- A product launch email sent to a short list of select partners
- … and so on
Yes, other applications could be used to get those same jobs done with a visually rich message. As it turns out, however, many people don’t want to leave their inbox. They don’t want to spend the extra time (and possibly extra money). They want to be able to do this right in their inbox.
How about we put a bunch of our email templates, optimized for Gmail, right in their Gmail inbox?
The idea came pretty quickly. Maybe the wine helped (at lunch, of course: hey, it’s Italy!!). Or maybe it was also that Google had just launched the new Gmail, with new support for add-ons.
We spec’d out a product as simple as possible to reduce development time to a minimum and release as quickly as we could. It had to be free, allow Gmail users to select a template in just a few clicks, and let them edit the message — at least most of it — right there in the Gmail composer.
The result is here and you can get a good sense for it by watching this very short video.
It’s a true MVP, with lots of room for improvement, but we believe it gets the core job done: visually rich messages, right in Gmail. Let us know what you think!
Long live new product brainstorming after having a couple of glasses of nice Italian wine :-)
BTW: if you install the add-on and you can’t find it, please make sure that you select a message (any message) in the inbox. Otherwise the add-on does not display in the right-side toolbar. If it still doesn’t show, please try clearing the browser’s cache.
Also, a quick note to other developers: as it turned out, the approval process with Google to get the add-on listed in the Gmail Marketplace took longer than expected (several weeks: it makes sense that they take their time checking an add-on’s quality) and much longer than the actual development time.
