FAQ for bloggers and the very curious
An overview with some of the questions we are often asked. Just click the question to show the answer. You can find a high-resolution image of our logo enclosed at the bottom of the page (800x466px).
We are Simon, Ewout and Mattias, as described just above, three friends who graduated Computer Science at Ghent University, Belgium, in 2011.
We got in the finals for a business plan competition in our last year together (basically offering consulting services centered around Google Apps solutions). We were on the brink of starting a business using this idea, but figured it was smarter to first get some experience at a big corporate company, so all started working in IT consulting.
During this time, the little free time we had (horrible commute) went into this project because this meant working with technology we loved. It only evolved really, really slowly as you can’t really achieve much in just one hour (almost takes that long just to get back in the vibe).
Mattias started working at the idea back in the summer of 2011 on his own. He had created a raw first, but working version of the synchronization algorithm(just one gigantic ruby file) before he invited Simon and Ewout to join the project at the end of 2011.
We tried to work on it after-hours and during the weekends, but we only managed to advance marginally during this time. We each quit our day job (IT consulting) and started doing this full-time on March 1, 2012.
We launched a very basic website (still available here) where people could apply for a beta invite. The beta started late April and ran for 6 months with 40 selected companies. On 15 November we publicly launched our product and most beta testers converted to paying users and are still daily relying on PieSync.
Mattias created a very basic, local version working of the synchronization back before we actually focused on it full-time. It was a 500 line ruby file and a manual process which we only used once on our own domain, but it showed us that is was definitely possible.
We started a second time from scratch in March 2012. This version has been used by beta testers for 3 months from April 2012. During this time Mattias also rewrote the basics to create a scalable foundation which is a lot easier to log and analyse.
We knew the programs and had used them both before for different projects. We also had experienced the problem ourselves and saw that a lot of people were asking for a solution online (especially on the 37signals forums, which have since been removed) and 37signals made it clear that was not their primary focus. You could say we wanted to 'scratch our own itch'.
We currently focus on being able to work with your Highrise data in Google Apps. On one hand we offer synchronization of contact information from Highrise to Google Contacts, which also makes it easy to get customer details on your mobile. On the other hand we have made a custom piece of software which runs in Gmail making it easy to interact with your Highrise data (tasks, deals, cases, notes) related to people mentioned in your emails.
So you can spend more time communicating with clients instead of looking for clients' information. So people who communicate with customers always know about the latest updates related to those customers automatically. So you don't have to worry anymore about having the right customer information, be it in Gmail or on your phone. So you instantly know know who is calling your phone without ever having to add them (only works for customers of course).
At the moment it is one-way synchronization of Highrise contacts to Google Contacts for selected Google Apps accounts. Our program will check your Highrise account every 2 minutes for updates. If any are found, it will add or update the contact list of all linked Google Apps accounts. This makes it very easy to have your clients’ contact information on your smartphone (using native sync on Android or Google Sync on other devices).
Currently we only sync contacts which are tagged as being visible to everyone to make sure nobody gets to see information not meant for his/her eyes, but we are working on bringing support for contacts with limited visibility (and also on bringing a truly functional two-way synchronization).
It is a kind of widget which is added below any email. It contains information from Highrise about the people you are interacting with in the email. It shows notes, tasks, deals and cases in a manageable overview. It also allows to add new notes, tasks or the current email to the contact without having to open Highrise. If you email with someone who is currently not in Highrise, you can also easily add this person from within the add-on. It just brings the power of your CRM to Gmail and makes sure you don’t miss any updates.
Our entire back-end is written in ruby (we are huge fans) running on Heroku using MongoDB for our database needs and redis and resque to provide scalability.
The Gmail extension is a backbone js application connecting to our back-end api written with Grape (micro-framework for creating REST-like APIs in ruby).
The website is built with MiddlemanApp, a static site generator in (of course) ruby, and is hosted on Amazon S3. As it is just plain html, css and javascript it is almost infinitely scalable.
Making the add-on a true piece of art with all the features anyone could think of. This contains, but is not limited to, the possibility of adding deals and cases, adding emails, notes or tasks to deals and cases and editing and deleting any existing information.
We also want to make the synchronization work in any case you would expect. This means a perfect two-way integration which even works when you make updates on your phone, support for private contacts and syncing of tasks integrated with the task manager of your choice.
Bringing this powerful combination of synchronization and integration to an increasing amount of different B2B web applications with a focus on automation. So in short: synchronizing the internet, piece by piece (and keeping it manageable).
