How my immature decisions led me to celebrating 18 years of my productivity business?

Nozbe - the productivity app that I founded back in February of 2007 is celebrating 18 years in business. To commemorate the occasion, we bid and won the cover of iMagazine (see below) as all the proceeds from this auction went to charity. So… my Nozbe app is now mature. However, as I’ve been preparing today for this Wednesday’s celebratory recording of the NoOffice FM Podcast, I’ve realized that I’ve been making some very immature decisions on my way to getting here:

• I launched the app with a hard-coded limit of 5 projects and no way to charge customers for more!
• Instead of setting up an office, I hired first co-workers who were living very far from me!
• I gave away rights to Nozbe mobile apps to a different company for a few years and let them keep all the profits!
• I refused to let Venture Capital companies invest in Nozbe even though they were very interested!
• When my dream Silicon Valley company approached me to buy Nozbe with millions of dollars, I refused!
• I let my programmers re-write Nozbe from scratch even though everyone knows you must never do that!
• I tell people to work only 4 days a week by introducing Mighty/Happy Fridays!
• In the era of Social Media, I’m focusing on word of mouth, partnerships and true connections instead of “likes”!
• Instead of a corporate “Mission Statement”, we have our 4 values of Passion, Simplicity, Freedom and Fairness.

I launched the app with a hard-coded limit of 5 projects and no way to charge customers for more!

I explained my whole founding story in this interview and if you’re curious about how Nozbe looked like back in 2007, some screenshots are on the Nozbe blog. To summarize, when I launched Nozbe 18 years ago I was nobody on the Internet so I had no way of knowing if my app was any good. I knew it worked for me, but I didn’t know if my simplified approach to Getting Things Done would find an audience. So I just released it with a 5-project limit and no way for my new users of getting more projects.

(Un)fortunately my app hit the blogosphere like crazy and people signed up in droves. I had 1000 users in the first month alone and all of them complaining that they wanted MORE projects. So I created “fake” way to upgrade to premium to unlock more projects. They could basically get a premium account without paying. Very mature of me, yet again.

Only after 3 months and more than 5000 users signed up I launched a way to pay for Nozbe $5-$10 per month and out of all these users, only 100 paid in the first month. Luckily for me, it only grew from there.

Instead of setting up an office, I hired first co-workers who were living very far from me!

After a year Nozbe was already making enough money that I decided to shut down my marketing consultancy career and focus on it full time and hire first co-workers to help me out. I was receiving too many emails from users and I realized that my programming skills were impeding further development of the app, so I hired first customer support rep and first programmer.

However, instead of setting up a proper office, as any mature business would do, I hired two most talented people I could find, who were living very far away from me and I kept working from my home office.

Despite my company growing to 10, 20 or more people over the years, I never built that office. Immature all the way! True #NoOffice lifestyle!

BTW, my first hire, Tom, still works with me and is our member of the board!

I gave away rights to Nozbe mobile apps to a different company for a few years and let them keep all the profits!

Back in 2010 as iPhone was slowly taking off and the iPad was announced I didn’t have the expertise to be developing a mobile Nozbe app. And I needed an iPhone and probably an iPad app quickly. So I struck an immature deal with a new mobile dev company called Macoscope to let them develop an iPhone and iPad app.

The business terms were clear: they develop an official iPhone and iPad client for Nozbe and they will sell it as a paid-for app on the App Store. They keep ALL the profits from the mobile app sales, but they will receive NO profits for our recurring Nozbe subscriptions. It was a simple deal. They developed an official mobile app for free, but they had to make it so good that our customers would pay for it. They got all the marketing from us and a big customer base but they didn’t receive any cut from our subscriptions. Most business people I talked to thought this deal was crazy.

It worked out. It was a win-win-win. Win for our customers who got a mobile app, win for us as we were very early on the App Store with a leading productivity app, and win for the Macoscope guys as they had a great showcase for their prospective customers and easy profits from people we’d send their way. This also lead us to be one of the first productivity iPad apps and being big in Japan.

I refused to let Venture Capital companies invest in Nozbe even though they were very interested!

In the first 3 years of Nozbe our growth was very strong and we were one of very few Polish-based companies that were known outside of our country. At the time we even didn’t have a Polish version of our app. English only. Global all the way.

Many investors were talking to me. They still keep sending me emails but at the time I was flooded with offers from the top investment companies. But I wasn’t mature enough to let them invest. I didn’t want to have outside bosses. I didn’t want to go all in on growth at all costs. I still don’t.

When my dream Silicon Valley company approached me to buy Nozbe with millions of dollars, I refused!

Evernote wanted to buy my company and hire me as their productivity guy. They really didn’t care about my app, but more about me and the team that built it as they wanted to have a to-do component inside of Evernote. So basically they wanted to acqui-hire me.

I was very honored. I went through the process but in the end I turned them down as again, I didn’t want to have a boss. The money they offer were OK, but not FU money and they wanted me to relocate to California quickly. I know, first world problems, but I like living in Europe.

I let my programmers re-write Nozbe from scratch even though everyone knows you must never do that!

We’ve been improving Nozbe for many years and as we were approaching 10-year anniversary we realized that our current technology wasn’t going to cut it in the new dynamic mobile-first world. So we decided to do something completely immature and re-write the app.

Yes, we made lots of mistakes. We launched too early. We alienated many of our customers. Knowing what I know now, I’d do this whole transition differently. However, now it’s done. The new Nozbe is the one Nozbe we’re selling and the old one is still out there as Nozbe Classic for all the thousands of customers who still want to use it.

So we went through a rough patch, but now the new Nozbe’s growth is on its way up and to the right so I think we’re set for next decade or more. Thanks to the new Nozbe app we’re iterating faster, launching a new version almost weekly and the app is truly mobile first.

I tell people to work only 4 days a week by introducing Mighty/Happy Fridays!

Back in 2016 I figured out we could work less but better and launched a TGIF idea, or “Thank Goodness it’s Friday”. We work from Monday to Thursday on day-to-day tasks and Friday is for Weekly Review and personal development.

We are still working like this, I wrote about it recently and had an entire No Office FM episode 57 about it. What an immature company!

Instead of working more, we’re working less!

In the era of Social Media, I’m focusing on word of mouth, partnerships and true connections instead of “likes”!

Last but not least, Nozbe has survived 18 years, despite recently having so many new competitors on the market. All the Asanas, Mondays, Todoists and Notions of the world are competing in the same productivity space and they are making much more mature decisions by taking VC money and burning it all on growth.

We tried this route. It was ineffective, frustrating and didn’t bring us results. This year and beyond we’re going back to our roots and focusing on true word of mouth. On long-term partnerships and network effects that are beneficial for everyone’s productivity. We’re doing it our way.

And things are coming along. Our last months have been very good and there’s still a lot to be done. We are doing things that initially don’t scale or don’t bring results in the first months, but years.

Instead of a corporate “Mission Statement”, we have our 4 values of Passion, Simplicity, Freedom and Fairness.

When you go through my whole list of these “immature business decisions”, you’ll see that they were guided by these 4 CORE Nozbe values of Passion, Simplicity, Freedom or Fairness. This is how we make decisions.

When I look back at Nozbe’s history, whenever I’d steer away from these values, I’d make truly wrong decisions. I’ve made plenty of those. I think I’ve made every mistake possible.

However, I really believe that the above-mentioned immature decisions were actually the right ones for me.

These immature decisions let me get to a mature business of 18 years and keep me passionate about it and excited for many years to come!