Being in the business of developing apps is not a walk in the park. Thanks to excellent open source frameworks and mushrooming tech incubators, though, it doesn’t take much for a developer to turn an entrepreneur. And if you look at the task management domain, there probably is a new app releasing every other week.
I’ve always wanted to pick the brains of a team developing a task management app and thankfully, I got the opportunity to interact with Ilan Abehassera of Producteev. I reviewed Producteev way back in 2010 and since then, they have come a long way, establishing themselves as a company that keeps innovating.
After the break, you’ll get a sneak peek at the working of one of the pioneers of the task management domain and what keeps them going. Have fun!
Tell us a bit about the Producteev team: when did you get started, where are you located, and what motivates your team?
Ilan Abehassera – Founder and CEO
We started the journey in 2008. I (Ilan Abehassera, founder and CEO) asked my brother-in-law, Aric (co-founder and CTO) to come join me in NYC for the summer of 2008 to work on an idea I had – Producteev. Aric was in his 1st year of engineering school in France. He decided to come for the summer — I raised an Angel Round — and he never went back to Paris. Three and a half years later, the Producteev team is now comprised of 9 people: 6 engineers, 1 UI designer, 1 support and social community person and myself. A lot of our engineers are actually French, but we’re all based in New York. It’s like a family here; everyone has been with us for at least a year and a half. Together, we have fantastic mindset and passionate love about the product we’re building, the problem we’re solving and experience we’re delivering to our users and customers. We’re here for the long haul.
How did you zero in on the task management domain?
We zeroed in a huge opportunity and our focus has never changed since the beginning. The thinking behind it is pretty straightforward: we all manage tasks every day, whether they are personal or professional things to-do. We saw a need in the market for task managers like Producteev – a solution that could help people work with their tasks in a way they were already used to working – on email, IM, with websites and services like Google Apps and Google Calendar.
Meet the Team!
There are so many task management and task management apps online. What do you do to stand out of the crowd?
A good and important question, and here’s simply why Producteev stands out from the lot. We’re not building yet another task management app; we’re building a universal platform for your tasks – no matter what device or service you use. Producteev is a suite of apps connected to each other (iOS, Android, Web, Mac, Windows, and soon much more!), as well as integrated with other productivity apps that individuals and businesses are already using to tackle their work and to-do lists. The platform element is key to our building a universal task manager — accessible from anywhere, anytime, any device, and any service. Very few players have that vision, or have executed on it at least. Other existing solutions are focused on building a couple of apps connected to each other, but in a closed environment; Producteev is an open task manager. We have many more enhancements that augment this notion and you’ll hear more about what we have store soon!
Producteev’s new branding looks totally different from its earlier design. Tell us about your rebranding efforts – the why and how.
New Logo after Rebranding
We’ve changed our logo, that’s right. Our beaver logo (named Tasky) was a fun mascot for the company in our early days, but as cute as he was, he didn’t fully express what we were ultimately doing. This was building a platform for universal task management that was easy to use to with team members to collaborate around any projects. We started working on a rebranding with a renowned logo designer, and we loved the new concept of a logo that represents a collaboration tree. The new logo is modern, social, open and joyful, we immediately adopted it.
New task management apps tend to one up each other with gorgeous user interfaces. Personally, I get tempted to switch to a new app every time a new task management app is released, mainly because they are so good to look at. With a well established product, how do you tackle this eyecandy onslaught?
You raise a good point and I think there is truth behind that. Overall, ALL app developers have stepped up the game design–wise, not just in our category. We recognize that so we are continuously doing our part to make Producteev’s interface gorgeous. Making it easy on the eyes also means making it really easy to use and navigate for our users. I am a big fan of well rounded apps, and am really attentive to details. I used to work for L’Oreal, and that’s the kind of company where you learn how to pay attention to finessing the smallest details. It is still definitely something that helps me on a daily basis. As far as design, we have our in-house designer who is trying to design consistent and refined interfaces across platforms, and I believe he’s really good at it, and getting better and better. Not only are we pretty happy with the current state of our apps’ UIs, but we get steady feedback from our users that they like it too. Just as we keep updating our task manager apps to keep pace with our users’ needs, though, we will also keep evolving the UI so it’s exactly in tune with that. Next up, redesign of the Mac app, so stay tuned!
Except for a Gantt chart, Producteev has almost every single feature of a web based project management app, but you don’t market the app that way. With this move, are you trying to avoid the “just another project management app” tag and ease people into a less threatening term “task management” instead?
When Producteev started in 2008, task management was the small fry of the huge project management market. Not anymore. I believe that the task management category has been cracked wide open and actually will become WAY bigger than project management over the next few years. Why? Because task management is becoming much more mainstream: Apple has launched their Reminders app to their millions of users, Google has launched Google Tasks, and so on. These big companies have helped evangelize the task management category. Bottom line, in today’s work environment that is mobile and always-connected, everything becomes taskable – tasks come from emails, people IMing co-workers about this or that, ideas from reading newsletter and so on, so people today are looking a lot more for how to manage simple tasks, than large departmental type projects on a daily basis. We saw this early on and always marketed Producteev as a task manager, and always will.
What’s your take on the freemium business model in general? Are conversions satisfactory enough?
Definitely, we’re very happy with the way our revenues grow organically. I think the freemium business model works for services that have a lot of users, and I really mean a lot. But you can reach break even pretty rapidly with a very good product. The most important factor though is product quality. Having a product your customers can’t live without is key to retaining them and ideally converting them into paying customers.
We are very curious – which language/framework(s) did you go with for creating the web app?
Producteev is built on the LAMP Stack and JavaScript; mostly open source technologies: PHP, MySQL and MongoDB.
What are some web apps that your team loves and uses on a regular basis?
Uservoice for our Support forum (we love it), Stripe for payments (the new kid on the block for online payments), Hootsuite for Social Media, MindMeister for mind mapping, Yammer for internal communication (although not a fan of the product itself, it does the job!), and Chartbeat for real time traffic data.
Do you have any upcoming features you could share with our readers?
New apps will come out soon: iPad, WP7 are in the very short term roadmap. We’ve just launched our mobile web app, accessible from all mobile phones and tablets: m.producteev.com.
As far as features, we’re working on highly customizable reports for individuals and teams with analytics etc. Lots of other features are in the works though and we listen very diligently to what are users are requesting.
Wunderkit now allows users unlimited collaboration for free. What’s your take – are they trying to disrupt or destroy a business model?
Well, some well-funded companies are certainly trying to disrupt the market with free products. We don’t think it’s a threat for us, especially with products like Wunderkit that are far less efficient from a productivity standpoint. They’re trying to do a couple of different things that veer away from task management, and that’s not what our users want. Producteev’s users want tasks only, with a specific set of features that we’ve nailed I believe. That’s why we’re zeroing in on Tasks, and it’s just the beginning. This is still a market where companies are used to paying for software, so I am not worried about the future.
Thanks Ilan!
We’d like to extend our thanks to Laura for helping organize this interview, and Ilan for his candid answers! If you haven’t already, do checkout Producteev. As someone who’s been following their apps very closely since launch, they iterate a lot and always get things right. Do you have any questions for the Producteev team? Leave them in the comments below and we’re sure they’d be glad to answer them.