The Exchanges

Q And, and sorry, who is your co-founder? How'd you guys meet?

A Um, well, interestingly, so it, it was my co-founder peer that had the initial idea of this. Um, he basically sort of specced out what he thought, you know, could be a more extensible and open source scheduling solution. Um, and then he, he published a website out there, just basic with like a wait list, just kind of explaining the idea. And then it was right around that time where his company, uh, actually got bought out By, uh, on deck, and, uh, he moved into a role of head of product, uh, on deck, and hence he didn't really have the time to, to, like, work on it, so he was looking for somebody to actually take over, um, and so what happened is, is, like, I was one of the first people on the wait list for this, like, super excited about it, because this was just a genuine problem which I'd faced, and then basically, you know, he reached out, I, I replied back, um, and then we, like, we started off literally just with pure engineering work, like, I built the very first sort of Pre-MVP, you know, just connecting to Google Calendar, working out some availability, that kind of thing. Um, and then we decided to actually, you know, we work well together. Um, you know, let's put an official arrangement in place.

AI assessment note: “it was my co-founder peer that had the initial idea of this”

Q Um, you must have a general idea. What's like a general idea? 40, 50, 60,000 a month, something like that.

A Um, so we're actually, I think we're more towards the 15 to 20 in mind, um, because essentially the main, the main idea of where we're going to be capturing our revenue, and this was the idea from the very start, is that we may, we plan to succeed in the enterprise side of, you know, business, um, which that is what we're launching somewhat now, you know, next few weeks, next few months. Um, so this is where we're really You know, starting to close the pipeline on enterprise. Um, so the real sort of cold, hard cash growth of cow.com is looking to be within the next few months rather than, you know, this period has just like, the idea for us is we, we build up a good name for ourselves in consumer SaaS. Then we leverage that to then break into the, the enterprise market and hopefully succeed that. Because the point is, is there's, there's no real point in just being another open source alternative to XYZ. It's like, no, you're right. If you have an open source Facebook alternative, it's not going to do well. Um, like our idea is like the consumer side is almost like a promotion for us to get our name out there. And then it's like, say somebody at Google signs up and uses it. Then they say to their manager, oh wait, yeah, I'm not using this personally, but I noticed they have a Like an infrastructure offering where we can, you know, implement it at Google on a massive scale. And …

AI assessment note: “we're actually, I think we're more towards the 15 to 20 in mind”

Q Wait, was that a mistake? You got all this traffic from Product Hunt and no way to capture their email address because you only had a paid option.

A Yes. Um, we, we basically, like, it was so early stage that we just didn't, you know, we didn't even have a solid commercial foot for this, you know. Um, we only started to think about that at a later stage. It was more of a Um, kind of buy it if you're interested and to support the open source. Like, obviously, you can run this thing and self-host it for free. You still can to this day. The point is, is you just pay for like the SaaS version if you're, you know, if you just want an easy solution and want to support open source. There are lots of companies that do that. I mean, like, uh, Metabase or GitLab now has a free plan, but there are a lot of open source companies out there where it's like, if you want it for free, run it yourself. But if you want this, like, SaaS version, which, you know, ultimately supports the development, then you pay. Um, so yeah, we literally, I think we got about, it would have been like maybe up to 50 paying customers in the first day. I don't know exactly.

AI assessment note: “Yes. Um, we, we basically, like, it was so early stage”

Q Damn it. I wish I knew about this ahead of time. Okay. So I have a bunch of questions out. Does this create conflict on the team? Someone goes, Joe is making more money than me. I do more work than he does. Pay me more.

A Right. Yeah. Here goes into another one of our policies, which has worked pretty well. Um, so we have three payback or in, in engineering, which is like nine percent of our team, we have three pay bands and that's it. We got, I see one, two, and three, like junior, mid and senior. It doesn't matter where the hell you are in the world. It doesn't matter what, like you don't, Negotiate a deal, whatever. It's fixed pay bands, which means that if you're doing the same responsibilities as like anybody, you're not getting paid any different. So we have like complete equality on, you know, every, um, every like demographic across the world. So like we have engineers in like India who are making like 1132% of the average salary. And we're paying that same money, you know, anywhere in the world.

AI assessment note: “It's fixed pay bands, which means that if you're doing the same responsibilities”

Q Okay. So let's, let's break down the sort of story here before we get too deep into the finances. Um, what is Cal? If people want to use it, what do they get?

A What is Cal? Um, Cal is essentially the, the solution to all of our problems with Calendly and, you know, any of the existing solutions out there. The point is, is, you know, I, I used to use Calendly. Um, I did try Savvy Cal. They're, they're great products. They are genuinely good products, but the point is, is, you know, scheduling is, scheduling is like email. It's one of those core foundational things that runs businesses, runs the web, Um, and the point is, is that means that people from time to time have like complex use cases and things like that, like telehealth or hiring marketplaces, or, you know, anything that you can think of where scheduling takes part in. Um, Calendly and Savvy Health just don't really sort of fit all of their requirements. I mean, they're good products. Like if I just want to book one-to-one sales calls with me, you know, just a basic Zoom Uh, set up. That's great. But the point is, is, you know, if you're running a massive hiring marketplace and want to be, you know, integrating this fully into your platform, you know, have it completely white label, push across 300 users. It doesn't really scale well. So this was literally a Which me and my co-founder had had. Um, it was literally just started as a, as a side project, but then we found that people actually really, really liked this.

AI assessment note: “Cal is essentially the, the solution to all of our problems with Calendly”

Q That's amazing. Okay. Let's fast forward a bit. What month did you guys get your first paying customer?

A Um, so, so that moves on to the, the interesting part of the story. So literally I built the, like the most basic MVP, you know, really strain on the word MVP there. Uh, like I built it for like three weeks and this thing, I mean, it, it was hard coded to Google calendar. You couldn't use anything else. And it just about made a booking. I don't actually think it even had proper time zone support. I think for me, like it was hard coded to like the London time zone. I don't know if it even translated time zones properly, but we launched it on Product Hunt because like already there were people piling up with, you know, like the wait list for this grew to like, I think it grew to like thousands before we'd even shared that we're actually building it. Um, and so we launched it on Product Hunt and literally that day we had a whole bunch of signups.

AI assessment note: “we launched it on Product Hunt and literally that day we had a whole bunch”