Project management, task management, calendaring, CRM, billing, expenses, the list goes on. I wanted one app to rule them all, simply put.
However, today things are very different. My latest ‘project’ (which has now turned into a successful SaaS app), is super super simple. What makes it really great? In the words of my customers, it’s the integrations.
It’s taken me years to learn this. I remember a few years ago talking to the founder of a successful productivity app which I’d never heard of, and was asking him how he managed to make it so successful. The answer was he was basically one of the first time tracking apps to integrate with Basecamp, and because of their awesome, and seamless, integration, he acquired lots of customers and still does today.
I still wanted to be all things to all people though, and continued building out features that my users wanted, in the hope that they would just use one app like me. However, technology changes. It’s not long before your ‘chat feature’ has become very slow and out of date, compared to the real-time chat apps on offer today like Slack. It’s the same for everything, expenses, invoices, whatever.
We ended up focusing on what we do best, for this first app, and that was project management. And that is what keeps the app alive today. The other features I built in those early days haven’t really changed much, because quite simply, we can’t compete with the likes of Freshbooks or Google Calendar for what they do best.
Zapier was a game changer for us. When we integrated with them over a year ago, we were then able to integrate nicely with all the big players, e.g. Google Calendar, Slack, Asana, Highrise, or whatever. The issue with that though was that it wasn’t seamless – you needed an account (possibly even a paid account) with Zapier, and you had to set up all the ‘zaps’ manually which could be time consuming. It’s still added huge value for us though and continues to do so.
HourStack is exciting to me, because we are focusing on what we do best, and that is week planning, time tracking and resource allocation for teams. The app is really simple, and people love that. But if that’s all it did, then we’d still be stuck at 3 users (just us). The way this app will grow is through integrations, and that has proven itself already.
We’ve had hundreds of signups from when we first got featured by Slack after integrating with them, then we got hundreds of users when we integrated with Asana. We then integrated with Google Calendar adding more users, and plan to keep adding seamless integrations.
When users ask for a new feature, we just add a new integration. Simple.
For example, we don’t do task management, we let Asana handle that, cos their better at it. We ain’t touching invoicing or accounting, we’ll let Xero handle that. Etc.
Also when I talk about integrations, I really do mean seamless integrations. I’m not talking about some Slack app that gets featured in the top spot of their apps page when all it does is post a notification in a channel when someone creates an invoice. For me, it’s all about amazing user experience (we won’t even integrate unless the app offers OAuth), and that is critical.
We’re applying the same model to another startup I’m involved with, which is about handling meetings. The app itself is cool, and could be useful just by itself, but what really makes it powerful is its integration with Asana and Google Calendar.
I’m sure many people reading this will say, “well duh!”, and I maybe late to the party, but for me this is a great revelation that’s very exciting for the future of all my apps.
