Simply Get Everything Done with Nozbe

Originally published at siftery.com.

Nozbe helps busy professionals and teams organize their time and projects. It is a multiplatform tool that syncs with the Cloud. Use Nozbe on your laptop, smartphone and tablet. All apps work offline so you can work productively anywhere, anytime. You can also sync Nozbe with your favorite apps, to create your Perfect Productivity System.

Kevin William David interviewed Michael Sliwinski, CEO at Nozbe to know more.

Hey Michael, Tell us about what you are working on?

For the last 10 years I’ve been working on Nozbe. It’s a universal productivity system used by over 400,000 professionals and their teams. We offer apps for all popular platforms: Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone, Apple Watch. Nozbe is a task and project management tool as well as a perfect app for boosting both personal and team productivity.

So why are you building this?

A decade ago I was still running a small Internet Marketing consultancy. When my client list started growing and the number of my commitments increasing, I had a hard time keeping up and had to figure out a system to manage it all. And so, in 2005, I started coding Nozbe for myself. After 2 years I realized this tool really worked for me so I decided to share it with the world…

Today Nozbe helps you get it all done: you can use it to manage tasks and projects; set deadlines, categories, responsibility; communicate through tasks using comments, attachments and integrations as well as create templates for you, your team and work any time you want thanks to a cross-platform synchronization.

What’s unique about what you are building & why do you think companies should use Nozbe?

Our top competitor is the lack of awareness and a pen and paper productivity set :-) There are 7.5 billion people in the world. Most of them want to be efficient — no matter what they do, they need a trusted system to organize their work and personal stuff. And our mission is to teach them productivity rules and provide a tool that will help them get things done.

Nozbe is a flexible and universal system available on all the popular devices. It has a intuitive interface, a set of super-handy features for personal task and time management and powerful options for team work.

In my company, we all work remotely and we are advocates of asynchronous communication and organized, undisturbed work. Nozbe is the key to our efficiency. We use it daily and we know it works!

Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Nozbe?

Well, Nozbe is used by lawyers, doctors, teachers, students, marketers, pastors, free-lancers, developers, housewives, real-estate agents, charity organizations and local authorities teams, etc. I don’t see any reason why Nozbe couldn’t be used in any specific segments. As I said — it’s utterly universal and really flexible. Moreover, the security and safety of customer data as well as the stability of our infrastructure is our main focus.

Also, Nozbe is available in 10 languages: English, Polish, Japanese, German, Spanish, Dutch, French, Chinese, Korean and Russian, so we serve people from all over the world.

How are your customers using Nozbe? Could you share a few different use cases?

Initially, people used it mostly as a to-do and GTD app. We regularly added cool features and published educational resources and, with time, our customers started to consider Nozbe their main task & project management tool and teams — a collaboration platform. Today, more and more teams from various industries use Nozbe Business accounts for running their complex projects.

Law firms use Nozbe to manage all their clients, cases and communications. Teachers and professors apply Nozbe for their educational projects and classroom work. Michael Hyatt uses Nozbe for achieving his goals :-)

Here are a couple of links to the interviews with our customers explaining how they use Nozbe:

https://nozbe.com/blog/user-mike-st-pierre/

https://nozbe.com/blog/interview-glenn-williams/

https://nozbe.com/blog/interview-marek-zmyslowski/

https://nozbe.com/blog/jeff-sanders/

https://nozbe.com/blog/user-marc-woodland/

Interesting use cases!

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Yes, definitely. Especially that at the beginning, Nozbe was a one-man shop with me working as the CEO, the developer, the marketer and the customer-support officer :-) At first, Nozbe users were actually my co-workers and helped me develop the app.

The example I often mention is the way I developed Nozbe for iPhone not even seeing an iPhone or touching it :-) 2007 was the year iPhone was announced. It was available only in in the US and I lived in Europe. Right before it went on sale I built a Nozbe web app (iNozbe.com) for the iPhone without even seeing the device. I used “iPhone simulators” I found on the web and a few Javascript libraries. My users tested the app, sent me feedback and helped me design it!

Another example was some managers who loved GTD and Nozbe and asked me if they could set up a “team” Nozbe account for them and their peers. They’d come to me and say: “Michael, I know GTD, people on my team don’t. And they even don’t want to read a book. I think if we signed them all up in Nozbe they’d learn “by doing”. Delegating tasks and managing projects would help them learn about the GTD concepts like “Next Actions” or “Contexts”… This is how the multi-user plans came to life.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

In 2007 we were one of the first apps to have an iPhone web app, but when iPhone started accepting native apps in 2008, we were not ready. I outsourced my app making to a company in the Far East and because I didn’t have enough expertise there, the app wasn’t really that great… After a year of a so-so success with the app, I convinced another company in Poland to help me improve the app and they did an amazing job of making an iPhone and iPad apps for Nozbe.

It was a good solution at the time and worked great for a few years… but the times were changing even more… Native apps started making more sense than web apps. Android was gaining momentum. We had to build native apps for different platforms and make them all sync together in the cloud. So we did. We started with an Android client and later with apps for Mac and Windows.

Boy, it wasn’t easy. Suddenly I had to hire more developers and we needed to make some tough technological decisions… and we made a few bad ones… and lost many months on building stuff that didn’t work well.

Finally, we did make a good turn, hired some talented guys and now we have native apps for the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Android, Android tablets, Windows, Linux and Mac. Nozbe is a productivity and collaboration platform now. And we’re just getting started :-)

Good luck!

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added?

Nozbe syncs with Dropbox, Box, Evernote, Google Drive, One Drive and Google Calendar. Each of these integrations was really important for our users. People use various cloud-based storage, they love Evernote and Google… well, it’s everywhere :-) My personal big 3 for productivity is the Nozbe-Dropbox-Evernote combo. I use Nozbe for tasks, Dropbox for files and Evernote for notes, digital documents and everything else.

Before we wrap up, What are the top 5–10 products that you depend to run the company & how do you use them?

Apart from the 3 apps I’ve just mentioned there are many other tools that help me run my company, communicate with my team and get my stuff done. As we all work remotely, the key products are the ones that help us communicate efficiently within the team and optimize the work we do individually.

If it’s about communication, we don’t follow the rules that are popular in traditional offices. At Nozbe we realized there are actually 5 levels of communication which vary between “highest bandwidth” and “lowest bandwidth.” We call this idea the pyramid of communication (you can read about here: https://sliwinski.com/pyramid/) and for each level of the pyramid we apply different tools. Nozbe — for asynchronous communication, Slack — for quick feedback, Zoom, FaceTime, Skype — for calls and meetings.

Actually, I wrote a book “No Office Apps” to show how the Nozbe team uses modern technologies to communicate better and get more done. It’s free: https://sliwinski.com/apps/

Do you use Nozbe and recommend them? You can do it here https://siftery.com/nozbe?recommend.