by jasim on 7/19/23, 1:11 PM with 88 comments
by xnx on 7/19/23, 1:53 PM
Rough reminder for Calendly (and similar) that it's a feature, not a company.
by grhac on 7/19/23, 2:54 PM
I predict this product will become a sideshow, generate $50-100k/yr over a few years and be sold off, of course unless you start to focus on the product and get rid of the consulting gigs.
If you do turn into a product business you will quickly realize $4/mth is not even remotely sustainable when you add ANY kind of marketing spend (or sales/success people). Just too low. You cannot make it work. Your customer acquisition costs will cost 12-24+ months MRR, and SMB churn is brutal. typical 30%+/yr. Even at $10/mth/user its a slog. Which is why you see other calendly alternatives charging $10-30/mth/usr at min.
Good luck.
by gerad on 7/19/23, 1:24 PM
by ftio on 7/19/23, 2:10 PM
Straightforward and clear-eyed writing, and subtle, almost cynical positioning perfectly suited for the HN crowd. That is: "This is easy stuff to build. Price is the main differentiator in this category."
by KnobbleMcKnees on 7/19/23, 2:18 PM
Companies aren't looking for hypergrowth until they are. And that's when prices rise.
I think it's venerable to address the elephant in the room but then, in a room full of VC-funded startups, neeto _is_ the elephant in that it's intentionally straying from the public-company-or-bust path laid out in front of most tech startups.
by TravelTechGuy on 7/19/23, 2:55 PM
Add to that the non-existing costs of switching between these offerings. I was using the Calendly free tier, and when a feature I wanted was moved off the free tier, it took me all of 30 minutes to move to zcal (most time spent fixing web site, and email signatures).
Perhaps there's something I'm missing here. Maybe there's a social aspect that escapes me, but I would love to hear from someone building in this space about their motivation and long term goals.
by 58x14 on 7/19/23, 1:45 PM
I like their messaging and I'm more inclined to use a tool ran by a team/company like these guys.
Consider me a customer... whenever I clean up the backlog
by dsalzman on 7/19/23, 2:09 PM
Calendly is $8/user/month for essentials tier and $12/month for professional tier
For reference
by ttoinou on 7/19/23, 1:42 PM
by Brajeshwar on 7/19/23, 2:33 PM
by kwanbix on 7/19/23, 2:11 PM
4 dollars per month seems still pretty excessive for the very low resource intensive work of such an app.
In relation to the prices of Office365/Google Workspace, I don't think this should cost more than 1 euro/dollar per user per month.
Even if you compare it to much more resources intensive app like Disney Plus, which costs 8 euros per month, how can this cost 4?
by iambateman on 7/19/23, 1:36 PM
The biggest cost of a SaaS like this is the cost of sales…so if they can convince enough people with this tactic, it’ll work. But RabdomBugCo is paying Calendly $20k/mo to have an expensive account rep team answer their questions and $1k/mo for the technology.
by fakedang on 7/19/23, 2:22 PM
by alecstewart on 7/19/23, 6:22 PM
by 87volvo on 7/19/23, 2:11 PM
by refulgentis on 7/19/23, 2:11 PM
There's two pricing plans "free and all the features" and 4.99/"user"/month if you want to remove their logo.
That makes it read as self-congratulatory - there isn't a plan for it to be a sustainable investment, and it's not clear it's that cheap either.
Either pole of "take $10M in funding for a SaaS" and "eh we'll be free 99% and figure literally everything else, from marketing to support to sales, on on the fly" is an extreme.
To users, the funding one sounds better: at least that maximizes quality, support, and engagement with the company until right-sizing occurs. 0 reason for users to care that it'll feel like "losing" to the founders or that VCs will be disappointed.
by latchkey on 7/19/23, 3:08 PM
This is the feature... the ability to create a meeting 'poll' with all the members on your team, including external people, and it automatically takes into consideration everyone's availability.
https://help.calendly.com/hc/en-us/articles/223146447-Let-in...
The second feature is that I tried to reach out to the zcal support to ask if they had this feature and I could see they read my message, but I never got a response. So, having some sort of decent customer support is another crucial feature.
by dotcoma on 7/19/23, 1:25 PM
by nearting on 7/19/23, 2:21 PM
As an individual user, I find their feature set (https://www.neeto.com/neetocal/features) a bit underwhelming - they present a number of features as things that really any scheduler should have:
- different meeting durations
- time zones
- custom availability
- cancellation/rescheduling
- buffer time
- integrations with Zoom/Google/etc (but not CalDAV, somehow)
- email notifications, OTP and SSL (what is this, 2013?)
Personally, I use cal.com, which has all of that, plus is open source and self-hostable. And it interfaces with CalDAV so I'm not locked into Google Calendar.
by zharknado on 7/19/23, 2:08 PM
Seems really tricky to hit the ratios of free/paid users that would make this sustainable. Maybe if free is behind an invite-only volume gate or something. In any case, good luck! The consultancy/product blended model is a cool idea.
by zcesur on 7/19/23, 3:36 PM
I'm personally using Cal.com, it's free and I'm very happy. I'm also very biased because we interviewed the co-founder/co-ceo [1] and Cal.com uses our platform to reward its open source contributors [2]
what I love most about Cal is how young developers from around the world learn modern tech by contributing (and getting trained by the team) [3], support is crazy good [4] and the company builds in public, even their salaries and metrics are open [5]. I cannot not be a fan honestly
[1] https://youtu.be/gymNEH-skAY
[3] https://github.com/calcom/cal.com/pulls
by febusravenga on 7/19/23, 2:09 PM
by ckdarby on 7/19/23, 1:23 PM
$29 lifetime access as long as Sumo stays in business.
by smcleod on 7/19/23, 2:14 PM
by arbaaz on 7/20/23, 1:45 PM
I prefer to have short memorable meeting links.
by willhackett on 7/19/23, 1:55 PM
by yeahdef on 7/19/23, 1:28 PM
by mxuribe on 7/19/23, 1:48 PM
by aashishsaini on 7/19/23, 1:56 PM
by entrepy123 on 7/19/23, 4:03 PM
In general, is there an "open" calendar-sync protocol? Would that be CalDAV (often paired with IMAP mail accounts in my experience)? (But then, would that typically require giving email credentials to the to-be-synced endpoint?)
One thing that sort of surprises me is that the appointment-scheduling apps seem to have such a practical dependency on Google, if one wants to facilitate syncing with arbitrary external calendars. I get that Calendly has tons of integrations, and Neeto has a useful selection, too. But say I want to sync with Fastmail, which does not have a specific integration with Calendly or Neeeto (but which does support CalDAV/IMAP). The answer is to to mutually sync through a Google Calendar. (I guess a generic "data workflow integrator"--Zapier, IFTTT, or custom code for APIs--might solve this, too, but only at the cost of some additional party and some additional complexity for a glue layer to set up and upon which to rely.)
- I love having a slick scheduling web page interface as a service. Cool. But why no "generic" sync (CalDAV/IMAP or something better I may not know about)? (It seems weird to not have a more direct-line scheduling approach--is it just me?)
- For example, I'd like to have no Google dependency, but use Calendly (or, Neeto, or another scheduling service). But even when I don't plan/need/want/intend to use Google, much less for scheduling, Google still finds its way into being the most convenient dependency! Wow!
This wasn't meant to be a rant, so, apologies if it reads that way. I get that building a SaaS, the first integrations will be the ones that >90% of the target probably uses. It's just slightly boggling to me, though, that there seems to be literally no open-tech solution in place. Since even the 500 lb gorillas seem to not have it, it's not just a matter of scale/time. Maybe just literally not enough people would use it, period, I guess. Or does one of the many competitors do this?
So-- what's going on? Why's calendar syncing kinda convoluted? (Some reading online tells a similar story for a big company's mail product requiring specific sync tools as of late; so I think the issue is not limited to purely-scheduling apps or smaller companies.)
Does this plight register with others? To me, if the product/service truly is a commodity, then that might imply having a corresponding "common" open/standard tech-integration component--no? I suspect something about security, or maybe lock-in, or market size, or maybe ruthless focus on schedule-making (new bookings on top of existing ones) over schedule-syncing, but I don't know enough about it. I would think this might be an area where one of the competitors might be able to stand out, for a niche within the niche.
I'd be happy to be schooled on this, if anyone's willing.
by dave4420 on 7/19/23, 1:32 PM