Showing posts with label marketplace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marketplace. Show all posts
Friday, March 13, 2015
Manymoon sees 30 higher conversions on Google Apps Marketplace
Editors Note: This post was written by Amit Kulkarni, CEO at Manymoon, a company that provides team and project management software. We invited Manymoon to share their experiences building an application on top of Google Apps utilizing some of our APIs.
An Idea
We started Manymoon with the idea of bringing social communications to the workplace. Not because it was cool, but because we think the best way to get work done is with the help of the people around you while still minimizing interruptions.
Like most start-ups, we wanted to build something we’d use ourselves. As heavy Google Apps users, we immediately saw the benefit of integrating Manymoon with Google Apps for tracking tasks or projects.
We also knew that professionals have unique requirements:
This led us to create Manymoon: a social productivity tool. It allows you to leverage your professional network to get work done. That means doing things like tracking conversations, managing projects, completing tasks and sharing documents. That was the easy part, now we just had to build it and find customers.
Finding Customers
The market opportunity speaks for itself: Google Apps has over 30 million users spanning over 3 million businesses. It’s also a growing business since they’re signing up over 3,000 new businesses per day. We would be in good shape if we got a small fraction of this flow.
Most importantly, the Google Apps Marketplace brings qualified customers who are comfortable using the cloud to run their business. Google Apps customers understand the value of:
How We Did It
As a start-up, one of our advantages is time to market. There are numerous features that would have normally taken us months to develop but we accelerated the process by leveraging a variety of Google APIs and products.
Google Docs
Attach a Google Doc to a task or project and Manymoon will automatically handle the sharing permissions. This is the feature that consistently receives the most “wow” comments from customers.
Google Calendar
Keep your calendar automatically updated with relevant tasks and project information. We saved months that would have been required to build features such as reminders, views and meeting requests.
OpenID & Google Universal Navigation
Business customers already trust Google with their data, and this significantly reduces the friction in activating users. And with Google Universal Navigation, new users can experience Manymoon immediately without even having to register. Using Single Sign-On means users can move seamlessly from Google Apps to Manymoon without needing to re-enter their credentials.
Google Contacts
Contact integration via Google Contact API makes it incredibly easy to assign a task to someone or invite them to a project. Just enter their name! No more remembering email addresses or having to import contacts.
Gadgets!
Our customers are Google Apps customers first and foremost and this makes it simple to use Manymoon in the environment they’re already used to. We support a Gmail Contextual Gadget so users can create tasks and projects without ever leaving their inbox. And a Google Sites/iGoogle gadget allows project data to be part of more complex wiki and portal pages that customers build. Ultimately, Google Gadgets significantly reduce the friction for users to create and track projects.
The Results
The results have been fantastic. Since the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace in March, we’ve been signing up as many as 1,000 new businesses per week ... and that’s with no sales or marketing people in our company. These customers are finding us on their own in the Google Apps Marketplace, adding the app and getting engaged with it.
Google Apps Marketplace customers upgrade to a premium edition of Manymoon at a 30% higher rate than non-Google Apps Marketplace customers. The best part, however, is that our monthly registrations increased by 150% since the launch of Google Apps Marketplace. And that’s where the Marketplace really excels, it provides large enough volumes to make the Freemium business model work.
We also closely monitor business sign-ups since their users activate over a period of time. If a business with 1,000 employees signs up to Manymoon, some fraction of those users will use Manymoon in the 1st day. But a larger fraction will use it in the first week and and an even larger in the first month.
What We’ve Learned
We think there are three ingredients that are important to sustaining a large number of business sign-ups from the Google Apps Marketplace:
1) Appeal to a broad audience - Google Apps customers comprise all types of industries and job functions. Manymoon is broad enough to apply to most of them, so we cast the widest net and try to appeal to as many as possible.
2) Integrate deeply - of course most all Google Apps customers use Gmail. But each customer has its own mix of Google Apps they use (e.g., Google Docs + Gmail, Google Sites + Gmail, etc). We built Manymoon to be flexible enough to accommodate any of these mixes.
3) Demonstrate immediate value - logging in using a Google Apps account is the price of admission (literally). To really engage customers, you have to very quickly demonstrate additional ways your app works with Google Apps. We do this during the registration process.
How To Get Started
Google provides open APIs with very good documentation that can be accessed here. They also have a simple and transparent process for listing your app. We were able to find everything we needed to build and integrate Manymoon with Google Apps.
Read more »
An Idea
We started Manymoon with the idea of bringing social communications to the workplace. Not because it was cool, but because we think the best way to get work done is with the help of the people around you while still minimizing interruptions.
Like most start-ups, we wanted to build something we’d use ourselves. As heavy Google Apps users, we immediately saw the benefit of integrating Manymoon with Google Apps for tracking tasks or projects.
We also knew that professionals have unique requirements:
- Utility - professionals are busy throughout the work day and get judged on productivity. Any app they use needs to provide tangible value with immediate gratification. And what’s more satisfying than completing a task or project?
- Security - they need the ability to control what’s shared and with whom.
This led us to create Manymoon: a social productivity tool. It allows you to leverage your professional network to get work done. That means doing things like tracking conversations, managing projects, completing tasks and sharing documents. That was the easy part, now we just had to build it and find customers.
Finding Customers
The market opportunity speaks for itself: Google Apps has over 30 million users spanning over 3 million businesses. It’s also a growing business since they’re signing up over 3,000 new businesses per day. We would be in good shape if we got a small fraction of this flow.
Most importantly, the Google Apps Marketplace brings qualified customers who are comfortable using the cloud to run their business. Google Apps customers understand the value of:
- Not having to install or maintain software
- Software that requires minimal training
- Self-service software (they don’t require significant amount of in-person sales or support).
How We Did It
As a start-up, one of our advantages is time to market. There are numerous features that would have normally taken us months to develop but we accelerated the process by leveraging a variety of Google APIs and products.
Google Docs
Attach a Google Doc to a task or project and Manymoon will automatically handle the sharing permissions. This is the feature that consistently receives the most “wow” comments from customers.
Google Calendar
Keep your calendar automatically updated with relevant tasks and project information. We saved months that would have been required to build features such as reminders, views and meeting requests.
OpenID & Google Universal Navigation
Business customers already trust Google with their data, and this significantly reduces the friction in activating users. And with Google Universal Navigation, new users can experience Manymoon immediately without even having to register. Using Single Sign-On means users can move seamlessly from Google Apps to Manymoon without needing to re-enter their credentials.
Google Contacts
Contact integration via Google Contact API makes it incredibly easy to assign a task to someone or invite them to a project. Just enter their name! No more remembering email addresses or having to import contacts.
Gadgets!
Our customers are Google Apps customers first and foremost and this makes it simple to use Manymoon in the environment they’re already used to. We support a Gmail Contextual Gadget so users can create tasks and projects without ever leaving their inbox. And a Google Sites/iGoogle gadget allows project data to be part of more complex wiki and portal pages that customers build. Ultimately, Google Gadgets significantly reduce the friction for users to create and track projects.
The Results
The results have been fantastic. Since the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace in March, we’ve been signing up as many as 1,000 new businesses per week ... and that’s with no sales or marketing people in our company. These customers are finding us on their own in the Google Apps Marketplace, adding the app and getting engaged with it.
Google Apps Marketplace customers upgrade to a premium edition of Manymoon at a 30% higher rate than non-Google Apps Marketplace customers. The best part, however, is that our monthly registrations increased by 150% since the launch of Google Apps Marketplace. And that’s where the Marketplace really excels, it provides large enough volumes to make the Freemium business model work.
We also closely monitor business sign-ups since their users activate over a period of time. If a business with 1,000 employees signs up to Manymoon, some fraction of those users will use Manymoon in the 1st day. But a larger fraction will use it in the first week and and an even larger in the first month.
What We’ve Learned
We think there are three ingredients that are important to sustaining a large number of business sign-ups from the Google Apps Marketplace:
1) Appeal to a broad audience - Google Apps customers comprise all types of industries and job functions. Manymoon is broad enough to apply to most of them, so we cast the widest net and try to appeal to as many as possible.
2) Integrate deeply - of course most all Google Apps customers use Gmail. But each customer has its own mix of Google Apps they use (e.g., Google Docs + Gmail, Google Sites + Gmail, etc). We built Manymoon to be flexible enough to accommodate any of these mixes.
3) Demonstrate immediate value - logging in using a Google Apps account is the price of admission (literally). To really engage customers, you have to very quickly demonstrate additional ways your app works with Google Apps. We do this during the registration process.
How To Get Started
Google provides open APIs with very good documentation that can be accessed here. They also have a simple and transparent process for listing your app. We were able to find everything we needed to build and integrate Manymoon with Google Apps.
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Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Improving the Apps Marketplace Sign in experience
Easy access and single sign-on to applications has been a cornerstone of the Apps Marketplace since it launched. When a user clicks on an app in the Google Apps universal navigation (the “more” menu), they’re immediately signed into the app resulting in the same experience as when switching between Gmail, Calendar, and other Google apps. However, sometimes users navigate directly to the homepage of the app and want to sign in there. Handling this case while still maintaining a great user experience can be challenging.
To help, we suggest that Marketplace vendors evaluate the Google Identity Toolkit (GITKit). The toolkit drastically improves the sign-in experience for Google Apps users, as well as for users of popular free webmail services such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and AOL Mail.
The biggest improvement in the sign-in flow is that after a user has logged into your website once, their return experience will be as simple as seeing the account (or accounts) they have used with your site and clicking the one they want to use.
For example, the user Bonnie might use the sassyapp.com app for both her main job, as well as for a small business she runs with her husband Clyde. Whenever Bonnie or Clyde need to sign in to sassyapp.com, they simply click the account they want to use.
If the user does not see their account listed, then they go through a one-time flow to add the account which sends them to the screen below. A Google Apps user can either click the Gmail button or type their email address. For users who cannot login with an identity provider, they will be asked to either enter their password or create a new account after entering their email address.
This user experience is based on an industry technique called an account chooser. In fact, Google is in the process of replacing its own login box with an account chooser and you can opt-in to start using it on Google yourself.
The Google Identity Toolkit (GITkit) can be used by any website, but is particularly useful for Apps Marketplace vendors. The toolkit is an external REST-based API built on the exact same infrastructure that Google uses to be a relying party, and includes a JavaScript widget for the same account chooser experience that you can opt-in to use on Google.
For more information, refer to the GITkit and Apps Marketplace documentation.
Read more »
To help, we suggest that Marketplace vendors evaluate the Google Identity Toolkit (GITKit). The toolkit drastically improves the sign-in experience for Google Apps users, as well as for users of popular free webmail services such as Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and AOL Mail.
The biggest improvement in the sign-in flow is that after a user has logged into your website once, their return experience will be as simple as seeing the account (or accounts) they have used with your site and clicking the one they want to use.
For example, the user Bonnie might use the sassyapp.com app for both her main job, as well as for a small business she runs with her husband Clyde. Whenever Bonnie or Clyde need to sign in to sassyapp.com, they simply click the account they want to use.
If the user does not see their account listed, then they go through a one-time flow to add the account which sends them to the screen below. A Google Apps user can either click the Gmail button or type their email address. For users who cannot login with an identity provider, they will be asked to either enter their password or create a new account after entering their email address.
This user experience is based on an industry technique called an account chooser. In fact, Google is in the process of replacing its own login box with an account chooser and you can opt-in to start using it on Google yourself.
The Google Identity Toolkit (GITkit) can be used by any website, but is particularly useful for Apps Marketplace vendors. The toolkit is an external REST-based API built on the exact same infrastructure that Google uses to be a relying party, and includes a JavaScript widget for the same account chooser experience that you can opt-in to use on Google.
For more information, refer to the GITkit and Apps Marketplace documentation.
 | Eric Sachs Eric is a Product Manager for Google Security and board member of The OpenID Foundation. He has more than 15 years of experience in the areas of user identity and security for hosted Web applications. During his five-plus years at Google, he has worked as a Product Manager for many services, including the Google Account login system, Google Apps for Your Domain, orkut.com social network, Google Health, Google Security, and Internal Systems. |
Monday, March 9, 2015
SlideRocket completes Google Apps Marketplace integration in just a few days
Editors Note: Mitch Grasso is CTO at SlideRocket. We invited SlideRocket to share their experience integrating the Google Apps APIs for the Marketplace.
We at SlideRocket were very excited to take part in the launch of the new Google Apps Marketplace. Weve always seen the value for our customers in providing integration with the Google platform—for example, in SlideRocket you could already load your Google contacts when inviting others to view your presentation, as well as link a table to a Google Docs spreadsheet. The new Google Apps Marketplace made it simple to leverage Googles existing set of extensive data APIs to take SlideRockets integration with Google to a new level for the millions of people already using Google Apps. The best part was that we were able to complete our initial integration for the Marketplace in only a few days thanks to the straightforward platform Google has built using various open standards.
The first and most pivotal step was setting up SlideRocket to work with Googles Federated Login using OpenID. Without the single sign-on capability of Federated Login, the rest of the integration wouldnt work. A key part of the login integration is making sure that Google Apps administrators have control over which of their Apps users have SlideRocket accounts. We accomplished this using the Google Provisioning API, which allowed us to make a small application for administrators to see a list of users in their domain, and check which ones should have SlideRocket accounts.
Fortunately, not only does Google Federated Login provide simple one-click login from Google Apps so that customers dont need a separate SlideRocket user name and password, but it also allows SlideRocket to utilize 2-Legged OAuth to integrate Google Apps users data into the SlideRocket workflow. This provides the best user experience, because once the Google Apps administration as added SlideRocket as an application, we no longer need to prompt the users for additional permission or confirmation—the integration is seamless from the users perspective.
Now that the users could easily sign in, it was time to integrate their contacts and Google Docs into SlideRocket. Our existing Google contact integration allowed users to login to their Google account using AuthSub and allow SlideRocket to access their contacts. We left this functionality in place for our existing customers, but for Google Apps users, we now utilize OAuth to automatically load their Google contacts—with no additional work for the user.
Similarly, we expanded our existing Google spreadsheet import functionality for Google Apps users, without having to change it for our existing customers. Existing SlideRocket customers can still paste a link to a published Google spreadsheet and have it imported into a table, but now Google Apps users in SlideRocket will see a list of all of the spreadsheets in their Google Docs account and can easily choose the source for their table. This was easily accomplished on our end using the Google Documents List API. We even expanded this functionality to allow all users—existing customers and Google Apps users—to import a Google spreadsheet directly as a chart or graph in SlideRocket.
We also leveraged the Google Documents List API to allow users to import their Google presentations into SlideRocket, so that they can spice them up a little with some animations, 3D transitions, video, and Flash content. Since the Documents List API provides all of this functionality, we were able to extensively reuse code for tables, charts, and presentations, thereby minimizing the resources required for our integration into the Google Apps Marketplace.
Finally, we are now beginning to use the Google Apps Licensing API so that we are able to view and monitor which Google Apps companies have added SlideRocket to their suite of apps. Although the licensing API is still in Labs, its provided us a great start towards keeping our Google Apps users properly integrated with our billing system.
It was amazing how quickly we were able to build such a compelling integration for Google Apps and weve just scratched the surface of all the possibilities the dozens of Google Data APIs can provide. The best part is that Google has wisely chosen to build upon existing standards like OpenID, OAuth, and AtomPub. This means that none of the resources we invested in learning these technologies and writing integration code is restricted to any one partner—we can reuse what weve gained with other standards-compliant partners in the future.
Author: Mitch Grasso is CTO at SlideRocket
Read more »
We at SlideRocket were very excited to take part in the launch of the new Google Apps Marketplace. Weve always seen the value for our customers in providing integration with the Google platform—for example, in SlideRocket you could already load your Google contacts when inviting others to view your presentation, as well as link a table to a Google Docs spreadsheet. The new Google Apps Marketplace made it simple to leverage Googles existing set of extensive data APIs to take SlideRockets integration with Google to a new level for the millions of people already using Google Apps. The best part was that we were able to complete our initial integration for the Marketplace in only a few days thanks to the straightforward platform Google has built using various open standards.
The first and most pivotal step was setting up SlideRocket to work with Googles Federated Login using OpenID. Without the single sign-on capability of Federated Login, the rest of the integration wouldnt work. A key part of the login integration is making sure that Google Apps administrators have control over which of their Apps users have SlideRocket accounts. We accomplished this using the Google Provisioning API, which allowed us to make a small application for administrators to see a list of users in their domain, and check which ones should have SlideRocket accounts.
Fortunately, not only does Google Federated Login provide simple one-click login from Google Apps so that customers dont need a separate SlideRocket user name and password, but it also allows SlideRocket to utilize 2-Legged OAuth to integrate Google Apps users data into the SlideRocket workflow. This provides the best user experience, because once the Google Apps administration as added SlideRocket as an application, we no longer need to prompt the users for additional permission or confirmation—the integration is seamless from the users perspective.
Now that the users could easily sign in, it was time to integrate their contacts and Google Docs into SlideRocket. Our existing Google contact integration allowed users to login to their Google account using AuthSub and allow SlideRocket to access their contacts. We left this functionality in place for our existing customers, but for Google Apps users, we now utilize OAuth to automatically load their Google contacts—with no additional work for the user.
Similarly, we expanded our existing Google spreadsheet import functionality for Google Apps users, without having to change it for our existing customers. Existing SlideRocket customers can still paste a link to a published Google spreadsheet and have it imported into a table, but now Google Apps users in SlideRocket will see a list of all of the spreadsheets in their Google Docs account and can easily choose the source for their table. This was easily accomplished on our end using the Google Documents List API. We even expanded this functionality to allow all users—existing customers and Google Apps users—to import a Google spreadsheet directly as a chart or graph in SlideRocket.
We also leveraged the Google Documents List API to allow users to import their Google presentations into SlideRocket, so that they can spice them up a little with some animations, 3D transitions, video, and Flash content. Since the Documents List API provides all of this functionality, we were able to extensively reuse code for tables, charts, and presentations, thereby minimizing the resources required for our integration into the Google Apps Marketplace.
Finally, we are now beginning to use the Google Apps Licensing API so that we are able to view and monitor which Google Apps companies have added SlideRocket to their suite of apps. Although the licensing API is still in Labs, its provided us a great start towards keeping our Google Apps users properly integrated with our billing system.
It was amazing how quickly we were able to build such a compelling integration for Google Apps and weve just scratched the surface of all the possibilities the dozens of Google Data APIs can provide. The best part is that Google has wisely chosen to build upon existing standards like OpenID, OAuth, and AtomPub. This means that none of the resources we invested in learning these technologies and writing integration code is restricted to any one partner—we can reuse what weve gained with other standards-compliant partners in the future.
Author: Mitch Grasso is CTO at SlideRocket
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