Hello, I’m Michael Sliwinski, founder of Nozbe - to-do app for business owners and their teams. I write essays, books, work on projects and I podcast for you using #iPadOnly in #NoOffice as I believe that work is not a place you go to, it’s a thing you do.
Last week, I had an interesting conversation with a fellow entrepreneur whose app is focused on marketing services. We talked about pricing, value and ultimately why people buy (or not) subscriptions to our apps. He pointed out that benefits of using Nozbe are not monetary unlike what he’s offering (bringing businesses leads that convert to revenue). After our conversation I was feeling confused. What about the old saying that time is money? Exactly!
I’ve created a version 2.0 of Nozbe Shortcut to add tasks recently and it’s much more powerful. Here’s what it can do:
My app Nozbe is kind-of in productivity space, but now as we serve SMART business owners we are more in habit-changing space. Especially as entrepreneurs realize their companies are becoming successful and need to get organized, they need Nozbe but they tell me they have no time to set it up. That’s why I recorded this short video explaining that you CAN set up yourself and 2 of your closest co-workers in 5 minutes or less, from start to finish:
At Nozbe we are fans of #asynchronous communication, meaning, it’s not in real-time: you do something - you get feedback later. So why did we include chatting/messaging in our app now? Because #productivity… let me explain:
After years of back and forth with our customers and ourselves, we decided to change our opinion on it 180 degrees and add one-on-one chatting/messaging in Nozbe in such a way that it doesn’t impact productivity but makes Nozbe a perfect app for SMART business owners:
Today I’m offering a very controversial take on trials. Industry standard is to offer them… but at Nozbe we just stopped doing that 🛑. We’ve found out that trials are ineffective so so let’s do something different:
I’m a huge fan of videos where there are two talking heads and both are the same person. Especially I’m a fan of Pitch Meetings by Ryan George. That’s why as I started my new @MichaelTeam YouTube Channel I wanted to try it out myself and finally yesterday as I had my favorite “Design Fight” meeting with my Nozbe team I decided to take this opportunity and try it out:
Last week, on February 1, Nozbe turned 17 years old and as I reflect over these last years I’d like to dig deeper into who is Nozbe really for? While working with Seth Godin’s marketing book I was thinking how to really convey to our current and future customers what we as Nozbe believe in. What’s our why? Because people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it. Not only our core values but also how we work, how we’re remote first, we don’t use email to collaborate, or have very few meetings. How to create this tension and play with status. How to say that people like us do things like this. Being a productivity nerd and loving the SMART acronym for goal setting, I decided to piggy-back on it and create my own way.
One of the most important reasons to have a cloud-based productivity system like Nozbe is to be able to add tasks or ideas 💡 to it at any time from anywhere. One thing is to install the app on all of your devices, but another is to use other ways to add tasks to the system - using email, Siri Shortcuts or even dictating from an Apple Watch. Here’s how I do it:
Over the last almost 17 years of running Nozbe we’ve developed our main values that dictate how we run our business, how we build our product and how we treat our customers and each other. But we never really codified them. Before our last Nozbe Reunion in Katowice I decided to finally review all we’ve written about our values, commandments and in the end I made my team go through the entire process to finally agree on 4 core values that will guide our decisions going forward. These are: Passion, Simplicity, Freedom and Fairness. In this post I’ll explain what these values mean to us, why we chose them and how we got here:
