Here are some of the updates we’ve made.

Simplified Navigation

Now you click on your avatar to see your images and the SAVEE logo to check your feed. Simple is better. We like that.

Dark Mode

You can change to dark mode in the menu under your avatar.

Multiple Item Selection

We’ve made improvements in how you can select multiple images. Press [shift] to activate the multiple selection mode, you will see a bar appearing on the bottom of your screen.

Our Extension is working on way more websites.

If you’ve used our browser extension you would know that sometimes it did not work. We re-built it and now it works on practically any website.

Follow more users

You will find a new drop down on the detail page of an image.

A better search

Search now much faster and you can also share any search url with the terms you are looking for. We will add tags to our search pretty soon.

Save straight into a collection

Now, when you save an image from your feed, press and hold the plus button, you will see an option to save straight into a collection.

iOs App =)

We are working hard on an iOs App for you guys. Soon we will have an MVP in place.

Cheers,

Andre and Ramon

Join Savee.it
Download Extension for Chrome
Download Extension for Safari

The Idea

It was Christmas of 2015; I had just moved from California to a new job in New York. My friend Ramon came to spend the holidays with us, and I shared with him my frustration about the business model that Pinterest had at the time where it would show me ads every single time I tried browsing my pins. Sometimes I would be checking my design inspirations and suddenly see some random things like underwear ads, for instance.

I remember walking the streets of NYC and telling Ramon, we need to do something about it, imagine something that you can save everything, with no ads, just simple image browsing with a very minimal UI, and I was like, save me Ramon please, OH WAIT, let's call it SAVE ME.

Of course the domain save.me was not available, so we had to call it something else. We also tried save.it but it was also not available. Then, after many naming attempts we ended up calling it Savee.

We started by asking a couple of friends (our version of user research) what their inspiration save flow looked like, and not surprisingly, the general answer was the same.

"I save it to a folder, on my desktop."

And then I was like; I think designers will use this. I am an 'inspiration freak' as I like to call it. For every new project that I start, I always need to look into some visual inspiration to clean my mind from what I was working on before. I design for a digital world and I love, as many as other designers, looking into real world design to escape from the traditional product design inspiration.

Execution

At the time, I was using Gimmebar but their website stopped working. We decided to download all the images I had saved until then (around 4,500 at the time) to build our first prototype. I was hoping that Ramon could pull something very basic together where I could at least browse all my images.

We iterate over it for months, refined it, shown it to friends and by July we had a more stable version which allowed users to import images from Pinterest and Tumblr. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it would not, but at that point, we had ~20 users as beta testers. I was constantly asking for feedback and also observing how they were using our product.

We both had(and still have) full-time jobs, so we kept scrambling between work, family time, sleep and other normal life activities, but we were too passionate about it to let it go.

So we worked together — oh boy we worked– probably spending around 3000+ hours in the past 18 months.

Since day one, I thought that the branding should be as simple as possible, then again, I sketched ideas that I thought could simple and strong as a brand.

So after months of work, we were getting close, but not too close. There was still a lot of things to figure out, marketing campaign, how are we going to price it(since we don’t want ads)? Also, we had to polish the product and put it in front of more users.

By the end of 2016, we had around 80 beta testers using the product on a regular basis.

All of this was happening between me changing jobs again (moving back to Cali to join Netflix) and my man Ramon having a baby!!! Yeah, I know what you are thinking…

these guys are nuts

…and honestly, we probably are.

We kept working in the beginning of 2017, trying to make sure the grid was fast enough, that it was running smoothly on any browser. Finally, on July 21st of 2017, we launched Savee.

The future

Today we have close to 11,000 active users, 1.2M images and a lot more to go.

Some users are asking for an iOS app ASAP which is kind of funny, but I am a user, and I would love ten more features by tomorrow.

Here is the video we produce for the launch.

We only scratched the surface so far and we want to do way more. But we will get there. The core functionalities are there. Now we need to build on top of it.

We've learned a lot working on Savee, and this is just the beginning, we are proud of what we've, launched and we know that there is a long way to go. We keep asking ourselves every day the three main questions for it to be successful:

1 — What's the problem we are trying to solve?
2 — Who is the user?
3 — What does success look like?

With that in mind, we keep going. The future is bright!

Right after launching we went through a massive code rewrite to make things scale better shortly, and I am glad that is done, and we are on track to start launching new features again.

If you are using Savee, please leave a comment and let us know what you think about it.

Cheers,

Andre and Ramon

Join Savee.it
Download Extension for Chrome
Download Extension for Safari

Ramon and I designed and coded Move to Apple — an easy way to import all your music from Spotify to Apple Music — in a weekend. Here’s how it went.

It was a Thursday night at 8pm. I remember getting a text from my friend Ramon saying “we got to do this”, and I replied “sure thing”.

The Beginning

Apple Music had just launched two weeks before, and Ramon got his first thought: “I want to import all my songs from Spotify into Apple Music to check it out.” Unfortunately, there was nothing available to help him do that.

So he decided to develop a simple script and put on his website for people to download. Surprisingly, they were downloading and using the script, even though it was tricky to get it working in this early iteration. That’s when he realized there was something there. It was an idea really worth exploring further. So he grabbed me to help design and flesh it out as a full app.

The Process

Apple didn’t release an API to grant us permission to “write” users’ songs on iTunes. Ramon (A.K.A Ninja) found an elegant way to intercept iTunes and add songs into the user’s profile.

We spent 3 nights in a row working really hard, from Friday to Sunday, and BOOM — on Monday morning Move to Apple was live and running.

Ramon and I have been working together since we were teenagers in our first digital agency job back in Brazil. We used to spend our afternoons drinking Coca Cola in our flip-flops while doing awesome websites.

The Marketing

OK. The app was done. But now we needed to promote it!

We immediately started posting on our social networks for friends and followers to download. A few days later I woke up with a simple visual idea for the website: 2 phones on a table; Spotify on one phone and Apple Music on the other. So I went to a coffee shop close to work, got a cup of Iced Latte (who doesn’t love to listen to music while drinking coffee?) and just took some photos. YES, I liked the result, one more thing done!

I also remember grabbing a colleague at work and asking him to do the voice over for the video we were producing. He accepted, and everything came together in the end.

Why It Worked

Timing was never a problem for us. Even though I don’t think we launched the best app in the world, at least we put a Minimum Viable Product out there really soon. We’ve learned so much because we both have full-time jobs and were doing everything in our free time.

And to be honest I think that’s the main reason why the app ended up working. We didn’t care so much if all the minute details were right, but we cared if the overall product was clear enough so people could start using right away; and robust enough that it would work reliably and live up to the expectations. We could add all the other fancy pieces later as the world started using it.

Happy End

We were happy working in digital agencies and now we both ended up moving to product companies. Ramon actually moved to Apple in Cupertino (what an irony huh?) and I moved to NYC to join Squarespace.

You can download the app at www.movetoapple.com