Introduction
Calendly is an innovative scheduling software that has changed how people schedule meetings, appointments, and events. It has long been frustrating for people to find mutually agreeable times to meet in person or virtually. And until Calendly came along, it was a scheduling nightmare.
The company was founded in 2013 by CEO Tope Awotona and initially offered its products to small teams and businesses. Today, Calendly is a $3B+ startup and one of the most successful startups in the Atlanta tech community.
Let’s take a deeper look into how Calendly changed the game for scheduling.
Overview of Calendly
Calendly is a cloud-based software company founded by Tope Awotona in 2013. The company offers an online scheduling service to make it easy to schedule meetings and appointments without needing back-and-forth emails. The service allows users to customize their availability and preferences, integrate with other apps, select a buffer time before or after an event, and send automatic notifications when someone book an appointment. It is one of the fastest growing startups in Atlanta, having secured over $300 million in funding as of June 2020.
The introduction of Calendly’s services changed the way people managed their time. For example, before its launch, booking meetings was time-consuming and tedious since it required exchange of back-and-forth emails between different parties before a meeting could be scheduled. To address this problem, Calendly developed an automated system that allowed users to pick times on their calendar best suited to their needs, eliminating manual correspondence between invitees. This streamlined method has helped business owners save precious minutes on mundane tasks while building relationships with potential customers quickly and efficiently.
Problem Calendly Solved
Before Calendly came around, scheduling appointments and meetings was a tedious and time-consuming process with duplicated efforts and manually tracking back-and-forth emails. It’s no wonder that one study found that the average person wasted nearly 5 hours per week on scheduling meetings alone.
To make the meeting coordination workflow easier and more efficient, John Suh, the founder of Calendly, developed an online platform that allowed teams to automatically share their availability using direct links. For example, suppose a meeting must be set up with one or multiple people. In that case, users could input their availability preferences into Calendly and then simply send out the link for others to choose from—no more back-and-forth over emails or phones calls trying to pin down a mutually convenient time.
Calendly also revolutionized the whole experience of setting up meetings, making it much simpler and faster. With just a few clicks, any Calendly user could create events in seconds with all the details like scheduled time blocks and special instructions prearranged. This significantly accelerated meeting requests as well as improved overall productivity by enabling busy professionals to focus their efforts elsewhere.
Calendly’s Early Days
When the founders of Calendly set out to create a solution to simplify scheduling, they had no idea the massive success their endeavor would achieve. Founded in Atlanta in 2013, the startup was born out of necessity – the founders struggled to schedule meetings in their busy lives, especially across different time zones. Little did they know that their solution would become a household name and a $3 billion valuation.
Let’s look back at Calendly’s early days.
Founders’ Backgrounds
Before creating Calendly, Tope Awotona had bootstrapped and scaled a web design agency with several hundred clients. He had also acquired another software firm before that. Then, in 2013, he noticed that while most of his clients were using conventional calendar forms for their scheduling needs, a few had discovered new tools with automated information exchange capabilities and flexibility. Intrigued by the potential of such software, he decided to develop his solution.
Meanwhile, Martin Nethercutt was the co-founder of Vineti and had significant venture capital experience working in software analytics at Salesforce—as well as extensive knowledge in SaaS operations through roles at AppDirect, The Trade Desk and Demandbase. Recognizing the potential in Calendly’s simple yet powerful product offering, he joined forces with Tope in 2015 to establish Calendly’s core team. Martin and Tope bring an invaluable combination of insights from their respective professional backgrounds to help guide product direction and business strategy for the rapidly growing company.
Initial Struggles
When Calendly launched in 2013, many found the idea of a scheduling app intriguing but doubted its profitability. The company faced initial struggles due to overwhelming competition from incumbents with resources and larger staff. Additionally, users considered the software different and difficult to comprehend.
Despite these obstacles, Calendly’s founder Tope Awotona managed to garner interest in his product due to a strong emphasis on usability and customer feedback. By studying user analytics data and feedback extensively, he developed various iterations of the app that positioned Calendly as one of the most widely used scheduling apps globally. This enabled the company to steadily increase its consumer base—gaining millions of users within their first few months—and remain competitive in the market well into their seventh year.
How Atlanta’s Calendly turned a scheduling nightmare into a $3B startup
Calendly has become one of the fastest-growing startups in the world, raising more than $3B in funding and boasting over 3 million users. From its humble beginnings as a scheduling solution for Atlanta-based, Calendly has become a key player in the global SaaS space.
This post will explore Calendly’s growth and what can be learned from its success.
Early Adoption
In its early months of existence, Calendly was able to secure numerous high-profile consumers, including Microsoft and LinkedIn. This early adoption served as a valuable seal of approval that rapidly increased general interest in the product. It also allowed for insights into how different companies and clients could use the scheduling solution, which gave the founding team invaluable input to help refine the technology and ensure its features were user-friendly.
Calendly built relationships with influential clients and investors during this time, which enabled a more successful launch when the product finally went public. In addition, constant communication with customers over those early months enabled quick user feedback loops that allowed the company to develop versions of Calendly faster than ever before. The platform also grew awareness among potential users through expansive online advertisement campaigns, leveraging search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to increase their visibility through Google search results.
Growth Strategies
Calendly’s growth strategies have been centered on owning the customer experience and prioritizing user feedback. Founder Tope Awotona has always sought to maintain a personal touch with customers and ensured that usability was always the top priority when developing their product. Although initially focusing on organic user acquisition strategies, such as word-of-mouth referrals and content marketing, they soon pivoted to reach a wider audience by investing in targeted campaigns and expanding their market presence through channels such as social media.
In addition to its marketing efforts, Calendly also incorporated features designed to simplify scheduling meetings into its platform. The company offers shared inboxes to streamline workflow, personal profiles for streamlining personal settings, text notifications for meeting reminders, the ability to accept payments from customers during online bookings, customized URL links for meeting setup pages; as well as options for seamless integration with a range of third-party applications such as Outlook Calendar and Google Calendar. These combined functions have enabled Calendly’s continued success and propelled it into becoming one of Atlanta’s most successful startups.
Calendly’s Impact
Calendly is a scheduling software that is revolutionising the way people interact with one another. Since its launch, Calendly has been growing rapidly, reaching a valuation of $3 billion in 2021.
The software has the potential to positively impact businesses, customers, and the way we schedule our lives in the digital world.
Let’s take a closer look at how Calendly has managed to have such an impact on its users.
Automating Scheduling
Automating scheduling has become an increasingly important tool for business in today’s fast-paced world. Quickly and easily schedule appointments and meetings is essential in a successful workplace. While manual and traditional scheduling methods can be time-consuming and tedious, automation technologies, platforms, and software such as Calendly are revolutionizing the process within businesses large and small.
Calendly is an Atlanta-based startup that has successfully automated the scheduling process by integrating with popular applications like Gmail, Outlook, Salesforce, Zoom, Google Calendar, Slack, Zapier, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and more. Calendly eliminates human error from associated manual processes such as calendar synchronization by streamlining the schedulers’ workflow between multiple applications. This saves time and reduces effort for all meeting parties by simplifying the appointment booking procedure.
With features like automated email reminders before a meeting and conflict resolution options so both parties never double book themselves again – Calendly organizes your entire day by eliminating unnecessary back-and-forth emails between all participants. This greatly reduces confusion caused by deciphering multiple calendar inputs while significantly decreasing the possibility of errors or miscommunications associated with nonuniform scheduling structures across several platforms. Additionally, features like custom invitations and real-time availability notifications make it easier to collaborate across multiple teams or individuals located far away from one another while offering huge savings against both time and expenses for businesses who routinely communicate via phone or video conferencing. Now valued at over 3 billion dollars after a recent raise – it’s safe to say that this company already dominates its particular niche amongst dozens of other competitors vying for similar marketspace worldwide – making it undoubtedly one of Atlanta’s greatest success stories in recent history!
Impact on the Workplace
When Calendly launched in 2013, it immediately changed how people worldwide thought about scheduling meetings. No longer did individuals have to wait for days before someone could find a suitable time and date. With Calendly, meeting invitations can be sent and accepted with a few clicks. As businesses grew more dependent on digital tools to keep communication organized and seamless, Calendly’s impact has been felt at all levels of the workplace.
At a personal level, flexibility and freedom of choice reign – users can set their availability hours and pre-fill details they want to share whenever they receive an invitation through Calendly. Individuals can customize their page, add additional information or instructions, and create separate links to share with different recipients or departments. Organizing events no longer requires hours of back-and-forth emails to match calendars;Calendly streamlines everything into one interface that changes how we think about scheduling meetings in our daily lives.
At an enterprise level, hundreds of companies rely on Calendly for efficient communication between employee teams and clients. Large companies use it for internal team collaboration and external customer engagement initiatives like on boarding calls or demos, allowing them to easily book demos with prospective customers at their convenience without intervention from sales reps or admins throughout their entire customer journey flow. Additionally, the introduction of automated workflows for email invitations has eliminated tedious tasks such as manual backend data entry necessary when scheduling webinars or events before calendar-based technology platforms such as Calendly’s existence. Not only does this result in significant cost savings but also enables faster response times when booking resources/scheduling appointments or services giving busy employees more control over their time while sustaining growth & productivity effortlessly.
Calendly’s Future
Calendly is an automated scheduler and booking platform that has revolutionized how people do business. It was founded in Atlanta, Georgia and has grown exponentially to become a $3B business since then.
This section will focus on how Calendly plans to stay on top of the market and remain a top player in the scheduling game.
Expansion Plans
With a market already worth $3 billion, Calendly continues to make investments and plans for the future. For example, the company recently announced that it acquired Atlanta-based HyperMeeting and its subsidiary, OpenCal, allowing them to offer even more features and deeper integrations within their existing platform. The acquisition also provides an enhanced onboarding experience for new users while opening up Calendly’s suite of services to a larger customer base.
In addition to the purchase of HyperMeeting, Calendly is focusing on growing its international presence. In late 2020, the company launched localized versions in Spanish and Portuguese and has plans to expand into more countries in 2021. This global expansion will give users easier access to their scheduling needs by providing them more support in their native language.
Calendly is also investing heavily in research and development and artificial intelligence capabilities, aiming to further automate its services. By leveraging algorithms and machine learning technology, Calendly can adjust schedule availability around time zone preferences for each user. Additionally, AI will detect when someone needs help with their schedule or other relevant problems that may arise during usage. Through these developments, Calendly aims to ensure that its product remains at the cutting edge of meeting software technology as it continues to serve millions of people around the world daily.
Potential Challenges
Even with all of its success, Calendly can face several challenges in the future. The first problem is maintaining Calendly’s foothold in the marketplace. As competitors enter the field, it can be difficult for Calendly to protect its spot as the top scheduling app. In addition, customer needs are ever-changing and evolving, so keeping up with those changing needs can be a challenge for a relatively small company such as Calendly. The final potential challenge that Calendly might face is staying current with the latest technological trends. As technology continues to develop and expand, it will be necessary for Calendly to devote resources toward ensuring that their product meets new customer expectations and needs.
These challenges may seem daunting but with proper planning and dedication, they remain achievable goals for Calendly as they continue to grow as an Atlanta-based tech startup.