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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:

• 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).

These are critical traits since they allowed us to focus on building a great product instead of having to ramp up other parts of the organization (e.g., hiring sales people, support engineers, etc).

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.

Posted by Don Dodge, Google Apps Team

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