Startups: Trying to bring the most value to the most users
Which features to develop?
We built a product to answer a current need, and to try to improve everyone’s life. Yes, although everyone says that, we truly believe it.
So we developed Azendoo to help people manage their active work lives. Month after month, our users base grew, and people were sending us good and bad feedback. The first thing we noticed was that people already wanted more from our product. They asked for more features, they wanted to do more with our solution, but we wanted to keep our product as simple as possible. At this point you need to know what Azendoo is about. It is a management and team organization application based on tasks and projects.
One of this feature our users were asking, was the possibility to take note in Azendoo so that users could share them quickly. So we brainstormed different ways to develop this new feature. You might already be familiar with this stage in product improvement, that precise moment when you wonder if you should (or should not) develop a new feature that will keep at least 2 developers busy for at least 3 months…
Keep your product simple
But remember that we still wanted to keep our product simple, and developing a note-taking feature would really weight down our User Experience.
That’s when we decided to integrate Evernote into Azendoo. Evernote is an excellent note-taking application, so why develop something that someone else has already done better than we could ever do? Little did we know that integrating Evernote was one of the best ideas we ever had!
And this is at this point that we’ve changed our product ambitions. Azendoo was evolving from a simple task and project management application into a centralized interface where all team members were able to connect their own external applications and get in sync really easily.
From there, we kept on integrating other applications with Azendoo. We like to call it BYOA to Azendoo. After the Evernote integration, there were more that followed: Google Drive, Dropbox, Box and Skype. And even more are coming soon (by the way, if you have suggestions on which apps we should integrate feel free to let us know!)
Go beyond your initial ambitions
For each new application we integrated, we had really awesome feedback. Our users were thanking us and it felt good! So we wanted to go further and to fully integrate our partner applications, starting with Evernote.
We thought about how we could bring even more value to Evernote and Azendoo users alike, and we came up with our Evernote to-do list synchronization with Azendoo Tasks. In other words, you can now import your Evernote to-do lists into Azendoo, and turn them into actionable tasks by simply tagging your Evernote note with the word « azendoo ». Then, you can enrich those tasks with descriptions, deadlines, documents, ect., and even delegate them to your co-workers.
If you want to learn more about this integration, check out our announcement on the Azendoo blog.
The moral of this story: Make fewer features and work with the tools that your users are already using.
