Throwing less at the problem

Over the years, we had several users asking for a Team version of Newton. Instead of jumping into conclusions and building product features, we probed more to understand more about these teams and what they were missing. We found out that a lot of them were very small teams, mostly partners in businesses, and they just wanted a mechanism to pay for their subscription using the company credit card. Yes, many of them didn't mind some “team features” thrown in.

We knew that it was tough for someone to convince an entire team to switch their email app, and that too to a highly opinionated one like Newton. But creating a team payment interface for people who are already using Newton was something that we could pull off without making any change to the main product. So, we sent a mail to a section of our users to see if more people wanted it.

Email — Take 1

Glad you chose Newton as your email app. We’re thinking of building ‘Newton for Teams’ and would like to involve you in the process. To start with, we’re working on a simple interface, which will help your team use Newton and manage users & payment. What we’d like to know is:

Is Newton, with its current growing feature set and an interface to manage users, enough to get your team on board?

OR

Would you wait till you see more team features? Feel free to share your feature wish list.

The responses we got for this mail were all over the place. We got a list of all kinds of team features that we could build in Newton but nothing concrete about the answer we were looking for.

We made some changes to the email and tried again.

Email — Take 2

Glad you chose Newton as your email app.

We’re working on a self-service interface, through which you can pay for your team’s Newton subscription using the company credit card. Will you be interested?

This worked. We got clear answers. We also got to know that even though some of them were interested, their teams comprised of both Mac and Windows machines. (We didn't have a Windows app then.)

The Team Subscription interface is now live.