Our partners: Powerbot history

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    Posted by Dmitry Gorshkov, Product Director, Yam Labs , Powerbot product developer and partner at Evernote

    In the fall of 2012, I almost accidentally got to the annual Evernote conference - there are a lot of similar events in San Francisco and the county, but in this case it wasn’t not only an interesting event with a bunch of slot machines, but also a starting point for a new round of development of our company and a huge number of new products.

    Of the parallel tracks that went to the conference, the section on the platform was most interested - on one of the old projects, we made integration with the Evernote API and it was interesting what would change in it.

    The state and plans for the development of the platform pleasantly surprised: both from the point of view of optimization for security and other infrastructure issues, as well as the emergence of new features - search in the user’s account for relevant content, setting reminders and the general direction for more “smart” work with user content. And all this is supported by really sensible documentation.

    But in addition to the technical side of the issue, Evernote’s attitude towards the partner ecosystem was very pleased - already a year ago there were quite a few opportunities for external developers to present their product using the API as an Evernote user and develop quickly: Evernote partnership solutions gallery, banners in client applications, the official blog . And there were also Evernote Devcup andAccelerator .

    In other words, Evernote has a rather interesting ecosystem for developers, which is also backed by tens of millions of users. Armed with this interesting knowledge, I flew to Moscow and presented a couple of ideas to my colleagues.

    Ideas


    Thinking about using the Evernote API, I started with myself - with the question “What prevents me from squeezing the maximum out of Evernote?”. The answer came quickly enough - it is not built into those tools that I use daily and a lot, that is, in mail and calendar. From this we pushed off.

    c5646119-11ff-458c-870d-d80b1b16e3f4
    The first step in the evolution of an idea into a successful product. Applying UI Powerbot for Gmail

    And the concept of the first two services crystallized quickly - Evernote deep integration with Gmail and Google Calendar, using browser plug-ins that allow you to seriously modify the web services interface.

    Following them, others appeared: integration with Outlook, Google Reader, Google Drive. Here I would like to say thanks to the platform team at Evernote, for the right tips from the point of view of user needs. As a result, the company has a new product line - Powerbot.

    First results


    After three months of work (it was a bit difficult, since we had not developed browser plugins before), we released the first beta of Powerbot for Gmail and a few days later ended up on Lifehacker.com. And in the next couple of weeks we received several dozen blog posts from small to large. In those weeks, we fully felt the love of bloggers for everything related to Evernote. The servers have withstood. :-) The

    Add note
    second step of evolution. This is what the live UI looked like in the Powerbot for Gmail beta. Now without tears you will not look.

    Complete Products


    A few months later it took us bugs, tweaks, a complete redesign of the interface, optimization of the use of the API, support for several languages, and many other interesting things.

    We almost completely rewrote the product for integrating Google Calendar - it was originally a web application that worked absolutely without user intervention - it tracked the appearance of appointments in the calendar and created the basis for structured entries from this meeting in Evernote. In the second version, we turned it into a browser plugin that adds new UI elements to Gcal.

    trunk-screen2
    The third step of evolution. Current UI

    In addition, we worked out the payment model and cost with beta users in advance - we sent out the tariff schedule to everyone, listened to feedback and made everything 3 times cheaper. :-)

    As a result, the first applications now cost $ 1-1.5 per month, or $ 20 per year for a package of two integrations. Someone says "expensive", but for thousands of our subscribers, saving time still outweighs a few dollars a month.

    Currently, a quarter of a million users have downloaded our products.

    Development


    Demand for current products is very inspiring for new feats. Here we aim in two directions.

    New Features
    We are trying hard to develop the content of existing services. Good examples are the addition of Evernote Business support in all products, or the recent introduction of Dropbox support in Powerbot for Gmail.

    New Products
    In the near future, our plugin for Outlook will appear (Evernote client fully integrated with the application interface). And a little later this year we will release another, so far secret, thing. So far I can tell you that it will allow you to read and process 100 incoming emails in about 300 seconds.

    - All this happened in less than a year - and for this take-off we are very grateful not only to users, but also to the Evernote team. The guys helped a lot. In the comments I will be glad to tell you more about the features of the Evernote API, the promotion of integration products like ours, the development of browser plug-ins and any other questions about our services.

    You can also learn more about our product in the blog and ask your questions on the forum for bugs / ideas . We look forward to seeing you among our readers on Twitter and Facebook .

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