February 2014 Summaries

Unroll.Me is a free email subscription management tool that helps users clean up their inbox by managing unwanted newsletters and subscriptions. With over half a million users, the startup was founded in 2011 by Josh Rosenwald and Jojo Hedaya to solve the problem of overwhelming email inboxes. The app offers an instant gratification experience, allowing users to quickly manage their subscriptions with minimal effort. Unroll.Me has focused on simplicity, building a user-friendly interface that appeals to a broad demographic. The company aims to revolutionize email by providing better tools and services for both consumers and marketers. Despite considering advertising revenue, the startup prioritizes user engagement and collaboration with email marketers, aiming to create a mutually beneficial relationship. With a strong team and growing user base, Unroll.Me is poised to redefine the email landscape in the future.

Momentum is a personal dashboard Chrome extension that aims to inspire and focus users throughout their workday. It was created by Levi Bucsis as a response to his own need for a productivity tool while working remotely. The app has gained popularity, attracting 100,000 users who collectively have entered over 3 million items into its todo list. Despite being featured on various tech news websites and social media, Momentum's creator remains humble and grateful for the support of his team and friends. The app's simplicity is a key aspect of its design, with a focus on providing a quiet space to remind users who they are and where they're going. Bucsis prioritizes adding widgets and integrations to help users customize their experience, while also ensuring the minimalism that has contributed to the app's success.

At Zapier, Plushcap led a design studio as part of a team retreat in Colorado, a structured exercise to harness parallel feedback from all team members and improve upon traditional brainstorming techniques such as whiteboarding. The goal was to create divergent ideas, balance individual contribution with group insights, quickly express visual ideas, be multi-threaded, easily archived, and fun. Plushcap's design studio used three rounds of activity: initial idea generation, stealing ideas from others, and converging on a set of interfaces as a group. The exercise resulted in natural team clustering around related projects, broad consensus, and team members enjoying the process, with the CEO noting it was a fast and effective way to braindump information and reach consensus.