Today, it’s time to take you back to the beginning, and show you what got us to today. This is a long post, but it’s worth reading if you’re curious how we got to this point. Let’s turn back the time machine and head back to 2007!

It’s still astonishing to us that Michael’s little side project has evolved into a productivity platform with an enormous community and a great team. So many factors got Nozbe on its current path. Both coincidences and hard work.

Beginnings

You might not be surprised (if you have already read Michael’s “It’s all about Passion” book, among others) to learn that Nozbe wasn’t intended to be a global business. It was just a quick and dirty solution for organization issues.

It was 2005. Michael, known today as The Productivity Guy and the author of #iPadOnly, was a PC user. Hard to believe, huh? There’s more than that: before he read “Getting Things Done,” he kept organized with MS Outlook – just like many other folks in those days.

Michael was a marketing consultant. He worked from home, helping other businesses get better results online. Because he worked with their websites, he learned HTML, PHP and MySQL (technologies needed to build modern websites). And he had a lot of fun coding.

But managing projects for many clients at the same time became a struggle. Then he got David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done”. Convinced by the method, but not by its reliance on paper, he searched for a digital solution.

Inspired by David’s method I built a tool that’d help me achieve my goals and implement the GTD system in real life. I spent a whole day researching the web to find a tool I needed for this […] and finally when I found nothing, I dedicated one weekend to building a very simple, bare-bones web-based tool. (from “It’s all about Passion”)

In the next few months, he spent some time fixing bugs and making new features. And he still thought about Nozbe as a simple project only for himself. Initially, there was no plan to make money.

Michael had already tried running his own business. Michael and Victor created a simply email reminder service called… Nozbe. They offered a subscription but only a few users decided to pay. This project, like a later one, failed quickly, because they focused on making money. Michael gave up, but he learned a lesson. It was a chance to take entrepreneurial baby-steps. And now he already had a fancy name for the next project.

You may know Michael as a #NoOffice evangelist, for proving that a remote company is a reliable and effective model. In fact, the idea isn’t new. Nozbe reminder was developed using tools like ICQ and FTP. Now it would be Slack or iMessage and Dropbox. Is that really so different?

Tools have changed, but not the methods.

Now let’s focus on 2007 - the launch:

Today we’re happy to announce a new version of Nozbe. Nozbe 3.4 contains some really cool stuff that you’ve been asking for.

• Weekly and monthly reports about your team performance
• One Drive integration
• Windows: Quick Add with global keyboard shortcut and more powerful shortcuts in the app
• Android: Add task to Nozbe via Google Now
• iOS: Snooze reminders

Watch a short overview of new features in Nozbe 3.3 and 3.4:

One of the frequently asked questions we’ve heard a lot in the last few weeks is how best to make use of the Business version features of Nozbe. To answer this question, we created a short video tutorial about team & project roles and the Nozbe Ratio. In fact, Nozbe PRO users can learn something too! Check it out!

Nozbe and Google Calendar are like best friends: they share information, work together for the greater good and don’t bother each other. And, by the way, they both work for you! Learn how to make use of integration with Google Calendar. And a calendar in general.

This time it’s all about iOS. Almost 50% of our users are already using iOS 10 and Nozbe 3.3 is dedicated to them. So take a look at what the Nozbe team has prepared for you :) Android and Windows fans don’t worry! Features for your platforms are being developed and we will ship them in future Nozbe releases. Better “Add to Nozbe” on iOS Two years ago, when iOS 8 came out, we added a new way to add stuff to Nozbe: the Share Extension.

Some people rely on their calendars completely: they work on reducing blank holes in their schedule, minimizing time spent in meetings and tasks and optimizing processes. But what if this isn’t enough to fully improve our workdays?

Today we can finally introduce our fantastic users to another update from Nozbe. We worked really hard on version 3.2. This time the new features may not look as spectacular, but we believe they will be great improvements for the productivity of you and your team.

Here are the highlights of new features in Nozbe 3.2:

With technology, the only thing that can limit us is our creativity!

Nozbe’s success and user base of more than 300,000 people grew mainly thanks to word of mouth. Happy and productive people referring their friends and family to Nozbe. Introducing Nozbe in their companies, demoing our app to their colleagues and explaining how they could also achieve higher productivity and reduced stress levels. To help people refer others to Nozbe, we’ve always had an affiliate referral program and in June of 2016 we’re making it even better.

Ever since I founded Nozbe back in 2007, the security and safety of customer data as well as the stability of our infrastructure were my biggest points of focus. To the point that I’d wake up in the middle of the night to check if our servers were still up… Over the years we’ve had our failures, outages and issues… but if you’ve been with us for the last few years you’ll have noticed that our infrastructure has been rock-solid for a while now.

In this blog post I’d like to explain why that is, what we’ve done so far and what we’ll be doing in the near future to actually make it even better and more secure for you to get things done and communicate effectively through tasks thanks to Nozbe.

I’d like to mention a few things:

• how our server infrastructure is built
• how we store your data (tasks, files, attachments, 3rd party files)
• how we do backups
• how we can keep Nozbe going even through a major catastrophe…
• who has access to your data
• and what’s still to improve here :-)