If I had to summarise 2020, I would say this dystopian year is the one that put our very core mission and value to the test.
Gmelius Mission
Make you happier at work by simplifying the way you collaborate with your teammates, and automating your grunt work.
Gmelius #1 Value
Give a damn: Care for our users, care for your teammates and care for the work you do.
Everything we do at Gmelius is guided by these short and simple lines. The challenge of 2020 was to ensure we can deliver on a very short notice key initiatives to stay true to what we are. To do so, we reorganised our focus and adapted our growth strategy. Here is a brief summary of what we did.
Support you whatever the cost
One of the first initiatives we put in place in March 2020 has been the revamp of our pricing structure with a specific focus on our Free tier. We made our core features such as shared inboxes, shared Gmail labels, and Kanban boards available for free in order to ensure that businesses impacted by Covid could still use our platform.
We sacrificed our short-term (revenue) growth objectives but learned a lot in terms of product usage by doing so. Email collaboration increased by 200% from April to December while kanban boards usage increased by 700% over the same period! Looking at our data, it's now clear that real-time transparency in a team's process and straightforward workload distribution are key for our userbase.
Besides, our Marketing and Success teams have been busy putting in place short and free actionable courses to ensure you and your teammates can start using our platform as quickly as possible: Gmelius University was born!
Finally, when the world went fully remote and our days were filled with Zoom or Google Meet calls, we released in April our meeting scheduler, making it so possible for you to schedule in 1 click video calls with anyone.
Develop the best collaboration platform on the market
At Gmelius, we develop a collaboration platform like no other on the market used by companies of all sizes, from VSB of 2-3 users to large organisations with more than 10,000 users. We call it an "integrated collaboration platform" because Gmelius seamlessly integrates with your daily applications (e.g., Gmail, Slack, Trello) instead of migrating your teams to a totally different ecosystem.
The rationale behind our vision is simple. In 2020, any company - regardless of its size - has adopted a kind of definitive stack: 1 email client (in your case Gmail), 1 Project Management tool, 1 CRM, 1 instant messaging service, and so on and so forth. The interesting observation is that those tools tend to be all the same ones. For instance, I bet your PM tools is one of those four: Trello, Asana, Monday, ClickUp. Your CRM will be either HubSpot, Pipedrive or Salesforce. For instant messaging, there is a very high chance you use Slack...
Yet, the #1 issue for teams nowadays is the lack of visibility caused by data dispersion, i.e., the fact that there exist too many data silos which cause in turn a lack of transparency in your company's workflow. To fix this, we develop a platform which bundles your stack and its key tools. In 2020, we've integrated your stack further...
Gmelius for Slack
In January, we released our first 2-way or bidirectional integration with Slack, making it possible to synchronise a Gmail label or a shared inbox with a specific Slack channel, and manage your conversations either from Slack or Gmail. This new integration proved to be very handy to manage your customer service and daily operations.
To learn more: https://gmelius.com/integrations/slack
Gmelius for Trello
In July, we released a bidirectional integration with Trello, making it possible to synchronize a Gmail label / Gmelius Kanban board with a Trello Board and vice-versa. This is the integration I'm the most excited about as it's a real game-changer in our space. I'm convinced that to adapt to this new work environment, companies will have to implement simple and effective models of workflow management... and the Agile/Scrum methodology is a strong winner here.
To learn more: https://gmelius.com/integrations/trello
Gmelius API
Last but not least, we released a few weeks ago our public API, making it possible for you to build custom integrations and opening our platform to any third-party service that wishes to build upon our bidirectional architecture.
To learn more: https://gmelius.com/api
By the way, our API was the last milestone before the release of our Zapier integration in the first weeks of 2021.
These releases and development efforts have been complemented with hundreds of other transparent updates to our core infrastructure. For example, we completely revamped our kanban boards and developed a suite of smart workflow rules to let you automate grunt work and distribute workload across your teams in a more efficient way.
We also significantly improved the performance and user experience of our mobile applications.
Make the Future of Work your Present
Looking back over the past few months, I'm extremely proud of the team as we managed to adapt to this pandemic and stay true to ourselves!
Speaking with a few of you or reading your reviews and comments on the Web, it sounds like we're on the right path as Gmelius is now a key component of your daily company's workflow.
As we move forward, we'll keep the same mission and mindset. We'll develop even further our offering, we'll keep bundling and centralising your communication channels by releasing other key integrations, we'll make internal communication even more transparent with improvements of our existing features, and we'll build upon our existing automation suite to help you design even more powerful workflows. I'll detail our 2021 roadmap in a next blog post but you can already expect a constant flow of changes designed to make you and your teammates happier at work regardless of your work environment, which is our definition of the "Future of Work".
It's now time for me and the Gmelius Squad to wish you a very Happy New Year!
If you wish to thank the team and share with us how Gmelius is used within your company, please send an email to success@gmelius.com or leave your thoughts on G2 Crowd.
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