Our partners: Powerbot history

By Dmitry Gorshkov, Product Director, Yam Labs , Powerbot Product Developer and Evernote Partner

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

Of the parallel tracks that followed at the conference, the section on the platform was the most interesting - at one of the old projects we did integrate with the Evernote API and it was interesting that it would change.
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The state and development plans of the platform were pleasantly surprised: both from the point of view of optimizing security and other infrastructural moments, and the emergence of new features - searching the user's account for relevant content, setting reminders and general direction for more “smart” work with user content. And all this is supported by really sensible documentation.

But besides the technical side of the issue, Evernote’s attitude to 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, an Evernote user and quickly develop: the Evernote partner solutions gallery, banners in client applications, the official blog . And there were also Evernote Devcup and Accelerator .

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

Ideas

Reflecting on the use of 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 the tools that I use every day and many times, that is, in the mail and calendar. From this we pushed away.


The first step in the evolution of an idea into a successful product. UI Powerbot for Gmail

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

Following them, others appeared: integration with Outlook, Google Reader, Google Drive. Here I would like to say thanks to the platform team in Evernote, for the correct guidance in terms 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 hard, since we didn’t develop browser plugins before) we released the first beta of Powerbot for Gmail and after a few days we ended up on Lifehacker.com. And in the next couple of weeks they received several dozen more blog posts, from young to old. In those weeks, we fully felt the love of bloggers for everything related to Evernote. Server endured. :-)


The second step of evolution. It looked like a live UI in the Powerbot for Gmail beta. Already without tears you will not look.

Full products

A few more months we spent on bugs, tweaks, a complete reworking of the interface, optimizing the use of API, support for several languages ​​and many other interesting things.

We almost completely rewritten the product for integrating Google Calendar - initially it was a web application that worked absolutely without user intervention - it tracked the appearance of meetings 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.


The third step of evolution. Current UI

In addition, we worked out in advance with the beta users the payment model and the cost - sent out the tariff scale to all, listened to the reviews and did 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, the time savings still outweigh a few dollars a month.

At the moment, our products have already downloaded a quarter of a million users.

Development

The demand for current products is very inspiring for new feats. Here we aim in two ways.

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 appearance of Dropbox support in Powerbot for Gmail.

New products
In the very near future, our Outlook plugin will appear (Evernote client fully integrated with the application interface). And a little later this year we will release another, yet 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 the users, but also to the Evernote team. The guys really helped. In the comments I will be happy 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 find out more about our product in the blog and ask your questions on the forum for bugs / ideas . Looking forward to seeing you among our readers on Twitter and Facebook .