I’ve always seen the inbox area of Woosabi as being key to the product and key to where the product will be driven. This is probably because I’m an engineer and communicate with my clients almost 100% through email - we do face to face meets too which are vital but once we’re working email is the main link really.

Which means my user experience of Woosabi is focused almost totally around the inbox (using jobs and invoices to make sure i get paid ) . Where Woosabi already has a leg up  on solving the ‘overloaded inbox’ problem, is that email (in the Woosabi world) is either connected to a contact or it isn’t (in which case it’s a new contact and Woosabi will ask to create an association or do something with it spamwise).

 What this boils down to is with Woosabi that your inbox is usually only a 10 or 20 messages deep, and messages are either marked with reminders to reply (important) or not (not important) - sounds simplistic? It is and it works really well!

 At the moment I believe Woosabi email is at least as good as the current webmail offerings (gmail, hotmail, etc) but our architecture means we can do so much more and in particular aggresively attack the problem of spam, volume and response times to email.

The problems and perceptions of which are neatly summed up in this techCruch post

2,433 Unread Emails Is An Opportunity For An Entrepreneur 

Shooting Stars

Be it the Fab Four or the Dirty Dozen, the group has combined talents so the business is starting to take off and could be aiming for the stars. Time is precious, the right moves are crucial and wise decisions will rely on accurate visibility of the entire business.

With personal user accounts each member can tailor woosabi to fit their own working style and unique business responsibilities. Personal productivity is one thing, but woosabi captures, organises and keeps everything coming in and moving out of your business in sync - making sure that everyone has access to the same, up-to-date information at all times. Woosabi presents everything you need, and nothing you don’t.

One Man Band

No, not a street musician with a ukulele, large bass drum and cymbals strapped to the knees. That sounds like fun, but we’re actually referring to those talented people out there who simultaneously juggle every role their businesses needs to make it a success.

Sales, marketing, accounts… the list can be endless and the work involved in managing all these roles can itself hinder the work you really prefer and enjoy doing each day. We have a better idea that will change all that and free up more time for what’s really important both in your work and your life. Woosabi is simple and easy to use, building all the essential business tools in to a prescriptive system that is organised, accessible and allways working for you.

As we’re now in beta, we’re also doing a little ’spring’ cleaning - and this is what Woosabi looks like when it’s style sheets are removed

How do you get a baby to sleep? Talk to her about software development

As of this week I’ve been using Woosabi to run my main job’s affairs (www.inpractice.org) and the three things Woosabi does that will benefit it are:

• Sorting an horrendous amount of email
• Automatically invoicing clients every month (fixed fee work)
• Keeping track of the jobs I need to do (and reminding me to do them!)
• Being able to do this on the move (I hate being at a client site and not being able to access email and invoice info - especially if it’s a long day there)

So I took the leap and became the second full beta client for Woosabi, which means if it loses anything I’m in big trouble.

I’ve got a job to do

How’s it doing then?

Awesome! I just logged onto my Woosabi account in a coffee shop to find 4 clients have new invoices waiting to go out (monthly fixed fee items) as it’s March 1st, their billing date. It might be nice to have a simple way to email them these now so I can cut down the amount trees cut down in the name of invoicing

From city to city

I also get a lot of email. My inbox from the past night, which consists of backup files, automated batch job reports, personal email and spam has been nicely filtered for me. What Woosabi has done is group all these by the sender, which allows me to go into my contact view, and see only their email.

Wouldn’t it be great to read an email that’s a request for work and turn it from an email into an actual job of work that would be recorded later for invoicing? Welcome to Woosabi.

All in all, it’s looking and feeling very solid and I’m starting to feel incredibly proud of our efforts.

In between developing the Woosabi product and building practice placement systems for Universities (www.inpractice.org) I’m trying to finish this book Dreaming in Code (this is why I’m doing my blogs at 6am in an attempt to claw some of my day back). The book documents the development of an Open Source Calendering/Personal Information Manager (PIM)/Email project that’s been in development for the past 5 years. It’s interesing in that it has quite a few functional similarities to Woosabi - I should stress that the similarities are quite generic and are shared by a whole slew of Web2.0 projects

One Vision

The main part we share is this vision (Vision):

Chandler - “Our goal is to serve the way people actually work, independently and together, particularly in small groups, a market segment we believe is underserved. Our belief is that personal and collaborative information work is by nature iterative and that the existing binary Done/Not-Done, Read/Unread, Flagged/Unflagged paradigm in productivity software poorly accommodates the reality of how people work.”

That could quite easily describe Woosabi, if we had sat down and articulated it that consicely!  But we never did and I’m hoping that where we succeed will be down to all the things we “didn’t do”. I’m not sure if that sounds dumb, belligerent or both as it’s 6am and my vocabulary is still sleeping downstairs (I’m in the attic) but bare with me and I’ll explain that bit of triteness (that’s the word I was searching for!)

God is in the (right) detail

The part of our little project that sets us free from the pitfalls of other large-ish development projects is we’ve thus far kept ourselves largely free from bureaucracy and the meeting moth syndrome - aka the overwhelming desire to plan and attend meetings, usually to discuss what you could be doing if you weren’t currently at a meeting and then to plan the next one, to usually co-incide with some large project milestone.

What we do have is a great development team that understand the product we are building. We didn’t spend months writing white papers and technical specification documents because we never had the luxury of time to waste on something that is superceded by working code and a usable product. Is that a chicken and egg situation? In my opinion, and I could be proved wrong if our product sucks, it’s not. If you have a development team that fully understand the goal (and it could be as simple as ‘to build a login screen” or as complicated as “build an email client”), you use your code as your project plan with the build’s usable functionaility as a meaure of progress.

Teamwork or no work

The one major document we do have is the product’s “Style Guide” which is totally indespensible and almost entirely visual (i.e.without text). This is pretty much the only document that the developers refer to (on a daily basis). Woosabi is lucky in that we’ve a very talented Product Designer who’s able to visualise with the developers the entire product before it’s built.

Which means the other thing your team needs is ‘trust’ which comes not from a creaking shelf of documents that people are pushed toward (”hmmm, it’s all in version 1.2 of the MRS+TFS, now go away I’m trying to look busy”) but from outward, visible signs of work.

Successful IT projects come from having the right people and a good product that is visibly improving. Getting there isn’t easy but in my opinion you need to trust in your idea and build your product.  Not just a dream of one.

Spotted this post on lifehack.org which has some really interesting ideas. The ‘tricks’ are great but their application relies on  ‘you’ writing lists, arranging schedules, setting reminders etc in a particular way to attain your ‘life/work’ goal.

If these tips are ‘road signs’ then Woosabi would be your ’sat nav’. Rather than simply providing pointers, Woosabi lets you ’set your goals’ and then does all the lists, scheduling, reminders and so much more, all for you.

One tip which stood out for me as “this is Woosabi” was:

One Bucket: Minimize the places you collect new inputs in your life, your “buckets”.  Ideally have one “bucket” where everything goes.  Lots of people experience an incredible sense of relief when everything they need to think about is collected in one place in front of them, no matter how big the pile.

Have a read of the 50 tricks and mentally tick-off just how many of them are done ‘for you’ with Woosabi. I think you can be pleasantly ’smug’ when you tell your frinds and colleagues… “Yeh I’ve been using Woosabi for ages. It could help you so much too.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone reminded you that it’s been a while since you got in touch with the ones you care about.

And then helped you send them a text message or email or letter.

And then sent it for you.

Welcome to Woosabi.

No prize for spotting the deliberate speeling mistake!

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