I have some exciting news to share: Boomerang has acquired GQueues, and the GQueues team will be joining Boomerang to help us work on both products.
In almost 15 years, we’ve built a lot of software and built a profitable company, but we’ve never made an acquisition before. This is a big milestone for us, and it’s going to let us bring even more powerful productivity tools to you. We’re incredibly excited about what we’re going to be able to do together, and we’d like to share a little bit of that vision in hopes that you’ll be excited, too.
Why GQueues?
Well, 2024 was the year of experiments for us at Boomerang. Instead of mostly building new features like in prior years (there were some new features), we spent most of last year making our existing features work better. We ran a total of 52 experiments across all Boomerang products to optimize onboarding, simplify workflows, and smooth out rough edges. If you started using Boomerang in 2023 or earlier, you may have noticed a lot of small optimizations. (1) They worked!
Managing all of those experiments was complicated. There were so many cross-functional responsibilities, so many changes affecting different parts of the products at one time, and so much instrumentation and analysis needed to make sure we were measuring the impacts correctly. Although we’re still only a 20-person team, the amount of chaos and communication needed, especially since we’re fully remote, made it feel a lot bigger. This was the first time in our company history where we felt like we outgrew our systems and processes.
We tried using the same project and task management software we’d always used, and we tried new ones. We tried changing our workflows. We changed how we organized meetings. And no matter what we did, we still screwed up the analytics, or forgot about mobile, or used the wrong control group, or ported the wrong logic into the wrong version, or botched the rollout. We were continuously learning about what we could have done better in the next experiment, and we kept getting better, but we never got our processes where we wanted them.
Every single experiment was “the same” in the sense that we had an existing workflow, built a test version of that workflow, and wanted to measure the difference. But every experiment was different too: maybe we couldn’t use the same cohort splitting system, or maybe mobile had to be special-cased, or maybe two experiments would confound each other.
None of the project management software we looked at were built to work well with “the same, but not the same” even though most of the work we do day to day, even beyond the experiments, actually fits into that category. We thought hard about making our own project management software, but unlike Tiny Speck(2), we didn’t have $15 million laying around.
So when Cameron, the GQueues founder, reached out a few months ago, we thought “Huzzah! Let’s buy this thing, rebrand, cut costs, and do some synergy!” Oh wait, sorry, we’re not an evil private equity firm. That’s their playbook, not ours.(3) What we actually thought was “What perfect timing! We’ve just been thinking about how to solve the problems GQueues has been solving this whole time.”
In many ways, GQueues felt like a natural extension of Boomerang. GQueues, like us, has been around for 15 years, is bootstrapped, takes care of customer data the way we want our own data taken care of, and cares more about value creation by making our customers’ lives better rather than maximizing revenue growth at all costs. We’ve known Cameron for over a decade, and we know that their team will integrate with ours synergistically (Is this really an acquisition announcement if the word “synergistically” isn’t used?)
From the beginning, Boomerang has been a productivity software company. We started with email software because email was the tool our customers used to get their work done. We started as a Gmail extension because we wanted to seamlessly integrate into our customers’ existing workflows. And just like us, GQueues has best-in-class integrations with the software you already use to get work done, like Google Drive, Google Calendar and Gmail.
I’m already excited, how do I start?
GQueues is the leading task management and workflow organization for Gmail users. Its seamless integrations with Google apps like Calendar, Drive, and Gmail are trusted by GQueues users around the world to organize their work and life.
If you love Boomerang, we think you’ll love GQueues, too. Give it a try today!
What is GQueues?
GQueues is a task management and productivity tool that helps individuals and teams organize their tasks and workflows. It’s the best task management app for Gmail users because it integrates seamlessly with Google’s apps like Google Calendar, Google Drive, and Google Docs.
GQueues helps you focus your energy on what’s most important. You’ll spend less time managing your work, and more time achieving your goals. And its intuitive design promotes transparency in teams, making it easy for everyone to collaborate and stay aligned.
What does this news mean for Boomerang users?
Starting today, Boomerang for Gmail’s Premium plan will now have a GQueues for BUSINESS subscription included at no additional cost!
For now, there are no changes to Boomerang products or features. We will continue to develop and support our category-defining productivity tools for email management and meeting scheduling. In the future, we plan to explore how GQueues can integrate with Boomerang.
At the risk of landing on Our Incredible Journey, we are really, really, earnestly, truly excited at what we’re going to be able to do together. GQueues is already a great project and task management system, but the team has always been small. So if we can combine the existing system with what the Boomerang team learned from punching way above our weight in project management complexity over the last year, we think we can build something truly special. We are full of ideas that we can’t wait to build, get in front of customers, use ourselves, and keep making better!
- If you haven’t used Boomerang since before 2024, please give it another try! We promise it’s better. We fixed so many things!
- You probably know them as Slack
- We might actually rebrand, coming up with names and logos is kinda fun
P.S. For more, check out Cameron’s post over at GQueues about joining Boomerang.
