The #1 Scheduling Service in the Galaxy - Calendly

At 31 employees and growing, the Calendly team is the 2nd largest startup in the Village. This B2C startup has simple, beautiful scheduling that prevents the back and forth emails. Solving this pain point has created viral growth resulting in over 750,000 monthly users, and gaining over 2,000 new users a day. That's right- PER DAY.  Calendly's goal is to be the number one scheduling service in the Galaxy, and they are well on the way.The Village uses Calendly daily and we are hooked. Their amazing culture, product, and leadership is resulting in growth that we consider ourselves lucky to watch. We sat down with Tiffany Cosgrove, the Director of Happiness to learn more.

What growth is Calendly currently experiencing?

Calendly growth has always been viral and now it seems to be happening at warp-speed! We are currently growing 10% month over month with no signs of stopping. We aim to be the ‘Mailchimp’ of scheduling.  

Why do you think users love Calendly so much?

Using Calendly helps you schedule meetings without the back-and-forth emails. We all know how time consuming it is to do the ‘Are you available Tuesday or Thursday? Morning or afternoon? 8 or 10am?’ dance, only to have that slot be unavailable by the time you get a response. Calendly takes all of that frustration out of scheduling. Plus, we have a clean UX and some pretty awesome customization features that can help you personalize your scheduling experience.

What is your biggest challenge as you scale?

From a Support perspective, staying ahead of the growth in order to ensure that we’re able to provide timely and valuable responses to all users that reach out to us. Rolling that up to a company-wide level, I think that balancing speedy but careful hiring is where we are finding a need to really focus right now. It is important that we hold being a great culture fit to equally as high of a standard as possessing the necessary skill-sets. The awesome intensity of our culture is what truly drives us to create, deliver, and support Calendly so well for our users.

What new features have you guys released recently?

Oh, so much good stuff! Within the last quarter we’ve rolled out an iCloud calendar integration, GoToMeeting web-conferencing integration, and based on popular user requests and feedback we’ve redesigned the way users set up their events in order to help them visualize their availability. All of our releases are aimed at making scheduling meetings even easier for our users and their invitees.

Where do you hope to be in 1 year?

We hope to still be in the Village! Can we please never move?! With our rate of growth, we know we’ll be booted off the 4th floor before another year goes by, especially since our goal is to be the number one scheduling service in the Galaxy. But here on Earth, we aim to be the ‘Mailchimp’ of scheduling, and we’ve still got plenty of work to do to get there. Anything can happen and we don’t take the incredible success we’ve had thus far for granted.

Any advice for other startups?

Decide what is most important to you and write it down, make that your mission. Create core values and write them down, hold them at the center of every decision you make. Create a culture that you’re proud of, and hold everyone at the company accountable to exemplify those traits. Never settle for less, or that will become your new standard.

How has the Village helped you grow?

The Village is an amazing resource for any startup. You don’t have to worry about some of the costly fundamentals of getting a business off the ground like meeting space, the internet, and bananas. Personally, having classes available in the Gym is a great way to take a much needed break and reset mentally & physically so I can hit the hustle hard all over again!If you don't use Calendly, you should start now. And, they're hiring. Now go make your life better.