Workomo 2.0? – manage your network in one place

To everyone who has been following Workomo’s (and my) journey over the last 2 years, apologies for the hiatus — our entire team took a break from writing to channel our energies towards building Workomo 2.0.

Since the beginning, our vision behind Workomo has been to build an intelligent hub where a professional’s entire network lives, including valuable context around these people. So what is Workomo 2.0 and how did it come about, you might ask? Read on to find out…

1. Workomo 1.0 journey — tiny steps with mighty pivots

The driving force behind our vision, as I had articulated in my?original blogpost ?in June 2019, was my own frustration with the limitations of LinkedIn esp. its lack of relevance, noisy feeds, extremely weak search, and no workflow capabilities.

First landing page

Starting from launching the first landing page and opening the waitlist in mid-2019, over the next 1 year, we actively iterated on what’s the most burning problem we should be solving first, and what’s the easiest solution we can build for it. After about 15 MVP iterations, we got the most traction from users for the simple use case of displaying a distilled professional profile of a person before you meet them and doing so with minimal typing or manual work from users.

While the use-case sounds simple, achieving this simplicity required creating a highly automated people-intelligence API even for the first cut. We created the v1 of this platform & built a Chrome extension that delivered this people-info directly in workflows like calendar, Meet & Zoom in a “zero-typing” experience. We?launched Workomo 1.0 on Product Hunt ?in Aug’20, trended #1 for several hours, ended in the top 10 products of the day, and got featured in their newsletter.

Product Hunt launch

2. Learnings from active users?

Between Oct-Dec’20, the Workomo Chrome extension got tons of user love. People used it for everything from?Lunchclub meetings ?to?interviewing over video . We also started receiving active feedback on what users want Workomo to be, in order for them to use it more deeply & eventually pay for it. The most important of these being:

#1?A more holistic network management experience that has utility even outside of ‘meeting a new person’, and where users can do many contact-management actions (eg. add a contact, search etc.)

#2?Ability to bring your own insights into Workomo (a.k.a note-taking)

#3?Significantly better profile-matching accuracy

#4?Even deeper integrations into a user’s workflows, to make the UX more intuitive

#5?Multi-calendar, multi-address book & multi-platform support

Sounds familiar? Our users had themselves defined the product manifestation of Workomo’s original vision — creating a smart & simple professional relationships management hub.

3. Alpha launch of Workomo 2.0

Perhaps for the first time, we knew exactly what we needed to build to effectively solve a burning pain point for our users. And this time, our goal wasn’t just to get users; we wanted paying customers. It was time to turn on monetization.

During Jan-Mar’21, we built our entire web app from the ground up to include all the above capabilities. In parallel, we created a significantly upgraded v2 of our people-intelligence API with improved identity-mapping accuracy, shorter data-display times for real-time workflows, and higher profile processing capacity. Powered by a herculean effort from Team Workomo, we soft-launched Workomo 2.0 alpha in Apr’21 to existing users.

Workomo 2.0 is your “one-stop-shop” smart Rolodex that deeply integrates into calendars & address books, aggregating contacts as well as important info about them in one place.?

What’s even cooler? Your Workomo Rolodex actually interacts with your life, showing you profiles of people you are about to meet, enabling you to take people or meeting notes when and where you prefer, sending you smart pre and post-meeting reminders, and making everything about your network contextually searchable. Basically, everything you wished LinkedIn could do for you!?

?Workomo is now an end-to-end product suite :

• Supports multi-calendar and multi-address book integrations (both Gsuite and Office 365)
• Can be accessed by a progressive web app on both desktop and mobile browsers as well as a Chrome extension
• Displays people-info across calendars, browser Meet & Zoom?PLUS…
• A super-cool, on-demand “assistant” experience coming soon on your favorite messaging app

Here’s a 60 sec.?product intro ?of Workomo.

Workomo web app

4. Paying customers across multiple countries

Even before starting the company, I had always imagined the following 3 elements as being integral to my vision:

#1 Effective aggregation — auto-capture any important person I interact with on any platform

#2 Minimize manual work— drastically reduce the inertia of managing my network

#3 “Fabric” user experience— be present everywhere in my life but show up only when I need you the most

As a founder, it gives me immense satisfaction to see that Workomo 2.0, as it stands today, is perhaps the closest manifestation of my original vision and the way I had imagined the product to be.

Given the depth of the product now, we gradually turned on monetization over the last quarter with our “Premium” ($8.99 per month) and “Pro” ($14.99 per month) plans.?Super-stoked to share that we now have paying customers across multiple countries including the US, UK, and India. Overall, Workomo has touched?users in more than 20 countries since our first launch.

5. What’s next?

We are about to soft-launch a game-changing integration into a top mobile messaging platform— a one-of-its-kind experience wherein a customer can interact with its Workomo Rolodex entirely in an on-demand “assistant” experience to add contacts, fetch contact profiles (what we call ‘cue cards’), add people/ meeting notes & get smart reminders.

Stay tuned for more updates on it!

We keep marching on…

Workomo 2.0 is a result of the courage, conviction & hard work of Team Workomo — Swaraj ,?Nidhi ,?Pankaj ,?Harsh ,?Sujith ,?Rhythm , and?Stas . Super-proud of this team for overcoming all kinds of challenges thrown at it, from the pandemic and delivering in a fully-remote & distributed team, to solving extremely hard data problems & cracking an intuitive design language.

This journey from 0 ?1.0 ?2.0 has been intense, gut-wrenching yet full of learning & transformational at a personal level for each of us.

We would love to have you try out Workomo 2.0 (sign-up?here ) and get your feedback. Till next time ???

PS: check out a?60 sec. intro of the product .

Note: This article first appeared on the Workomo blog here .