100k users and 1,000 reviews

Round of applause for everyone

Can you believe it? It’s been 4 months since we’ve written a post. Since then we’ve grown from 64,000 to 104,000 active users. That’s 61% growth! Hats off to you, keep spreading the word about Toby (we love you for it).

We’ve also hit another big milestone: 1,000 Chrome store reviews! That means for every 100 users 1 takes the time to write us a review! These reviews are really important for Toby, but they’re also great for the community because they help educate and provide insight to users who are thinking of using Toby. You are all #TobyFriends and you’re doing a great job! Let’s aim for a ratio of 100 users to 5 reviews by December, I believe in you.

Last update before we get into the exciting news. I think Caitlin and Benny, our support team, deserve a pat on the back. To date they’ve answered 9,000 emails and responded to 300 live chats on the website. And that’s not including all the direct messages on Facebook and Twitter! This is a huge effort for a team our size, but we want to be sure that users always come before anything else. As co-founders, we’ll continue to answer emails directly as long as we can (maybe until we reach 50,000 emails).

Okay, onto the good stuff!

Toby compatible with Opera using this extender
Toby on the latest version of Firefox
Toby iOS v1 app is in production (sorry, no Android yet)
Tobybot (Slackbot) is working and being used internally to gather links from channels and add them to collections
Google Calendar integration embeds collections inside of the event description
Toby Teams closed beta v2 was a big success (20 companies signed up)
Shared by (name) and hearts added on cards
Sharing collections via link and also collaboratively with a team

Expanding our services horizontally

You’ve sent us tons of emails about this, and the wait is over. Toby now works on Firefox, the third most-used browser in all of the interwebs. A user also pointed out that they’ve been using Toby in Opera with an extension extender. I guess that’s a win for all Chrome extensions? Just be careful with the extension extender, because we didn’t build it and it could potentially cause issues that we can’t debug or fix (third-party apps).

Taking advantage of mobile

We should’ve thought about mobile much sooner. Access to your read-it-later collections and other useful resources on the go is extremely valuable. That’s why we’ve decided to build a simple iOS app for Toby so that you can do just that. It’s a shame that mobile Chrome doesn’t support extensions, otherwise we’d be the first ones there. For the time-being we’re working on making the user experience spick and span before releasing it to the public. We might even launch it on Product Hunt!

Being part of the conversation

We get it! The modern day team works in the browser. This also means your attention is split between a few core products like Slack, ZenHub, Google Drive, and GitHub. Toby is an essential tool to help surface information from all of those tools. But there’s an issue: what if you forget to add your tabs to Toby? Then it defeats the purpose of using Toby as the central tool to help speed dial you into your work apps. To help with this we wanted to tackle links inside of Slack with Tobybot. As a helpful assistant, Tobybot will take links from channels and add them inside of a collection. That way you can reference documents and articles with ease without searching through the chat feeds.

Making lives easier

Meetings… does anyone like them? Not only that, think about the things you have to do before and after a meeting. From day one, we’ve set out to build a product that makes your lives easier by bringing information to you. A small step towards this vision is our integration with Google Calendar. With this you can now embed a collection inside of the event description, so that all of the invitees will have access to the resources before and after the meeting. It’s our way of eliminating the back and forth of email (and so far it’s working great).

Bookmarks (nope). Emails (nope). Chat (nope). Wikis (nope). What do these all have in common? They’re all siloed, and they don’t consider the working habits of a modern team. Are intranets still a thing? Maybe for large enterprise companies, but we think that Toby is going to disrupt the “enterprise social platform” and “identity and access management” market (sorry I didn’t make up those names, it was Forrester). Introducing Toby Team! An entirely new way for organizations to share and collaborate within the browser. We launched this to 20 companies 8 weeks ago, including Starbucks, Twitter, IBM, New Relic, and Bazaarvoice. We’ve been iterating on their feedback and have implemented a ton of changes to the team experience. We plan to release some of the features, like sharing collections with a link, to all users. In the meantime, we have a waitlist for a third cohort of beta companies. If you’re curious and have a team larger than 20 we want to talk to you!

Thanks for helping make Toby great.

(more updates on sharing after the release)