Boxy: from Dribbble mockup to Product Hunt hit and Mac App Store top paid app

Here’s the story of how two Italian guys, without meeting in person, made their first Mac app, a client for Inbox by Gmail, which then got 1k upvotes on Product Hunt and was downloaded more than 10k times on the Mac App Store

Written by Fabrizio Rinaldi, Designer of Boxy

It all begun in September 2015. I was in love with Inbox by Gmail, but I hated using it in a browser, so I opened up Sketch and started making a quick (and pretty bad) mockup of an Inbox Mac app.

I’m a filmmaker, but I’ve always been into Computer Graphics and Design. I published the mockup on Dribble and that was it. Or maybe not.

A few hours later, Francesco Di Lorenzo — a developer I only knew online — sent me a screenshot of a little wrapper he’d just made, inspired by my mockup.

We laughed about it, but then we realized we might have been onto something, so we started working on it.

I gave him a bunch of CSS rules to make it pretty, and he started fixing and tweaking it to make it work like an actual email client.

I couldn’t imagine I would end up writing more than 450 custom CSS rules, and using this app as my main and only email client on the Mac.

Indeed, I started spending many hours customizing the Inbox UI to make it compact, responsive and native looking, while Francesco started working on many features, some of them I though impossibile to make for a wrapper.

Boxy was born, but there was a lot of work to do.

The most difficult challenge

Soon came a very delicate moment. We needed an icon and a name. The problem is that I’m NOT a designer. I like design, I like designers, but it’s not something I make for a living. So I decided to make it myself.

After many iterations, and sharing thoughts and ideas with Francesco, we ended up with an essential icon that reflected the app in a direct way, and a I chose a color that reminded me of the Inbox blue, but with its distinctive look (I tweaked it a bit later on).

Choosing the name, though, was a real pain. I really can’t do that. I can do many things, but I’m just terrible at choosing names, even when I’m writing screenplays or other things.

At first we settled on “Mailbro”, and we even bought a domain and started telling people about it, but it soon became clear that we didn’t think it through. We’re Italians, and we didn’t realize it could have, let’s say, some implications.

After many conversations and iterations — we made lists with tens of different names and variations and asked friends for help — we finally chose a new name, mostly out of desperation: Boxy, as the app is now known.

A simple, easy to remember, kind of familiar name. We wanted something that reminded people of Inbox by Gmail, but with its own identity.

Bug fixing and word of mouth

So, we spent more than 2 months fixing bugs, experimenting with the UI, discussing and making features and testing them thoroughly with the help of some amazing people (my friend Federico Maggiore was the most helpful and meticulous tester).

I also built the official app site from scratch, and I’m pretty happy about how it turned out to be since I’m not even a real webdesigner. We also started getting the word out there and organising the launch.

Along the way we got in touch with some amazing people like Owen Williams and Chris Messina. The latter tested the app thoroughly, gave us great feedback and then decided to hunt us on Product Hunt on launch day. Chris is like a patron for us and Boxy, and to this day he still follows the developement of our creation and give us continuos feedback and support.

One thing that really caught us by surprise, was the official demise of Mailbox. We didn’t start making Boxy to fill a void, but we ended up doing just that. We were also pleasantly surprised by the amount of interest the app was receiving. Our teaser mini-site, with just a subscribe button and a small part of a screenshot of the app, ended up receiving more than 700 newsletter signups. Many of those signups converted in a newsletter that now counts more that 1k subscribers who follow our updates.

The submission

We decided that even with all its weak spots the Mac App Store was the right place for Boxy, so when the app was finally ready we submitted it to Apple. But then we pulled it, because there were still some things to check and fix. They we sent it again. And we waited.

When you’re excited to put something out there, more than a week of waiting can be psychologically devastating, but we used that time to keep working and discussing features and working again.

Then Apple approved it. It was time to ship it, and that can be scary.

The launch

So, it was the 9th of December. The site was ready. The app was approved and ready for release. We were ready.

I was scared because I had never made nor shipped an app, but the excitement trumped the fear and we were set to proceed. We pushed the button and waited for the Mac App Store to propagate the app.

As soon as it started propagating in the stores around the world, people started noticing, even if we didn’t update the website or told anyone; and when the first customers told us they were downloading Boxy, it felt amazingly great. It was real.

So we put the official site online, Chris hunted Boxy on Product Hunt, we notified the subscribers via email and finally clicked the “tweet” button.

Then things started happening.

Way more people than expected started upvoting Boxy and commenting on it, sharing thoughts feedback and excitement. We started getting a lot of traction on Twitter too, and we tried to answer to every single mention and email we got. And they were A LOT. We really weren’t expecting our “little” app to make so much noise.

Then Owen Williams wrote about us and praised our work on The Next Web. Then Lifehacker published a piece on Boxy too. I couldn’t believe that something I made ended up on those sites.

And we jumped for joy when we got this mention on Twitter:

Numbers kept growing, and I started updating the site with reviews and comments from the first customers. Lots of people were finding out about Boxy, and our site registered 20k sessions in the first week. We also discovered that during that time Boxy was top paid app and top productivity app in many countries, multiple times.

Truth be told, when we launched I was REALLY hoping to get more than 100 upvotes on Product Hunt. PH is one of my favorite sites and communities, so getting our work recognised there was kind of a big deal for me.

This is what happened in a couple of days:

More than a thousand upvotes. That number meant a lot to us, just like all the comments we received, the questions, the congratulations, and all the bug reports and feature requests that soon proved to be fundamental for the development of Boxy.

Being so popular on PH helped us reach a remarkable group of early adopters, and we were sincerely surprised to climb up so many charts.

A new start

In the following months users kept growing, also because Boxy was featured in other major tech publications like The Verge. So, while we kept working, we reached our first milestone: on February 12, 2016 we hit our first milestone, 10.000 downloads.

That was a big success for us and it gave us more motivation to improve Boxy. Also, it should be noted that when we launched there weren’t other remarkable Inbox clients out there. At the time of writing this piece, I count at least 10 of them.

Since the launch we improved our communication and collaboration workflow (Slack and GitHub had a key role in this process) and after releasing updates 1.0.1 and 1.0.2, we started building version 1.1.

1.1 was a really big update that we’ve been thrilled to build and deliver. It brought Boxy to a level of quality and functionality that were seeking from the start. It gave the app its first UI overhaul and many, many fixes and additions, among which we managed to put new major features, like Markdown and Multiple Windows support.

After I finished remaking all the marketing materials and Francesco finished preparing the update, we submitted it to Apple and it went live on March 15.

We really did our best to make a great email client, based on a fantastic service that we can’t thank enough Google for making. We also definitely draw inspiration from Mailbox and Sparrow, two sadly departed apps that every modern email client owes a lot to.

In March 2016, after months of remote work and thousands of Slack messages, we finally met in Milan, where Francesco lives and studies.

Creating a successful product with a person and meeting him afterwards is weird and funny, and as soon as we met we started talking excitingly about what’s next for Boxy and what other project to pursue together.

Boxy has now grown a lot and we have a big roadmap. It started with zero planning and taught us a lot about shipping a product. It can now be tried for free, so if you haven’t already gave it a chance, you can do it now.

Thanks a lot for reading our story! If jumped here without reading anything, thank you anyway, I’m in a good mood today. And since you’re likely a tech nerd if you ended up here, to conclude here’s a roundup of the resources we used to make Boxy a reality:

• XCode. Boxy was born here.
• GitHub. To collaborate on code, version it and track issues.
• LiveCSS for Safari. I basically built Boxy styling layer with this extension.
• Safari’s Inspector. Without I really don’t know what I would have done.
• Chrome Developer Tools. Throttling the connection to test things with slow internet proved really helpful, both for the app building and for the official site.
• Dropbox. Where the first files and assets got shared. We still use it today but we transitioned almost everything on GitHub.
• Slack. For all our communicational needs. We can’t live without it now.
• Slack integrations. From StatsBot to Zapier, we receive every sort of thing directly in our Slack, from website views to Beta feedback, from iTunes sales to App Store reviews.
• Zapier Parser. If you want to get some data that your receive by email on Slack, or anywhere else, use this parser, create a Zapier automation and you’re done. Not super-easy to set up but it’s worth it.
• Quip. We host and edit most of our documents here. Other solutions just don’t come close to Quip’s real time collaboration capabilities.
• HockeyApp. For our Beta Program.
• Espresso. For the site building and some UI CSS editing.
• Sketch. For the assets and the marketing material. Nothing beats Sketch if you want to be fast and efficient.
• Google Analytics. To monitor our site stats in real time.
• Boxy. Our email client of choice 😜

If you have any questions, reach out on Twitter or via email, and if you liked our story, please hit the Recommend button below. Thanks ❤