How to succeed the App Store? Mailbox creation story from his CEO Gentry Underwood

Mailbox - one of the best apps in the App Store to work with Gmail. This minimalist application that uses gestures to control, which motivates you to order in your email box. If you do not use it, you probably have heard of it: this is the application that was free, but for them it was necessary to stand in a long queue. Recently, Mailbox Dropbox was purchased and moved under his wing. On this occasion, Lifehacker.com We interviewed Gentry Underwood, co-founder and CEO Mailbox, and find out how he and his team managed to make such a high-quality application that has a large number of fans.

How did you come up with the idea of ​​creating an application? You have tried to solve the problem faced by you or spodviglo something else?

We really like the tools that simplify routine tasks and are always enthusiastic approach to the creation of such applications. In general, we were working on our first app Orchestra To-Do, even in 2011, but later it turned into Mailbox. It was influenced by the fact that many people use their email as a to-do list: create and route tasks to themselves and to work together. The app has been well received at the start, but then we had a user churn. Analyzing why it happened, we found out that in order to solve their problems of our users still use e-mail. In the end, we realized that the best solution is to create a partition outside (Inbox), where you will put all the tasks.

What happened next, after you come to this idea?

In fact, the creation of email-solution sounds easier than its implementation. Strangely enough, simple ideas become much more complicated in the process of working on them. Our objective was to simplify the confusion and provide a truly simple interaction mechanism. And the only way to achieve this - numerous (and multiple) iteration.

How do you prioritize when choosing a platform?

When we were looking for a niche in the market, we decided to focus on one platform and one service - it is iOS and Gmail. We believe that with the Mailbox we found it and are working hard to provide access to the Mailbox all interested and plan to launch several more email-services and increase the number of supported platforms.

What was the launch of the application for you?

The launch was a blur. After the release of a promotional video, we were overwhelmed by the number of views. Only for the first day, there were over half a million. It was clear that this is a real issue for many users. Due to the fact that email is an important means of communication, we are seriously concerned to system stability and reliability, while scaling service. For this reason, we have developed a queuing system and decided to grant access to the application gradually. Shortly after the launch, we had more than 1.5 million. bookings and we did not have time to process them all. In short, we had a lot of enough sleep.

What was the main obstacle for you and how do you overcome it?

Of course, the biggest problem that we face - was scaling. The growth of the beta version, to hundreds of thousands of users in a few weeks - it's a lot. As I have said, the stability - the most important quality for an email client, so we had to maintain a delicate balance between reliability and application growth. And it's not just servers, we also had the possibility to improve customer service and the staff of our team.

How do you react to criticism and requests from users?

We are fortunate that formed around Mailbox wonderful community. They quickly react by sending us feedback and suggestions, and we in turn take them into account during the adoption of certain decisions. Integrated button feedbacks and our Twitter, helped us set priorities, taking into account the wishes of users. The most common request is to support other platforms and other popular email services. And we're heavily working on it to give you a new Mailbox cmdlet, as soon as possible.

How do you allocate time between the development of new features and improving existing ones?

Now, Mailbox cmdlet is part of Dropbox and we now have the resources to maintain service stability and continue scaling, while the development of new features that make email even faster processing and it's better.

What would you recommend to other developers who undertake similar projects?

Be persistent. Development of applications quite time-consuming process and requires a lot of patience. Make a sketch of something, try to act, redo and try again. Modify or alter again. Nothing is perfect, you have to spend many hours bringing your product to perfection and noted previous versions. We have gone through thousands of iterations before settling on the most simple (and obvious) decisions, and this applies to literally everything: the interface, the logo, the program code.

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And you use the Mailbox? Ever tried to create your own application? Or maybe you're just planning to release its EPG? Be sure to share your answers in the comments.