April 23, 2024 • 52 mins
Vimcal is the world's fastest calendar, beautifully designed for people with too many meetings.
It comes fully-featured with time zone conversion, booking links, keyboard shortcuts, and everything else a modern calendar app should have.
Our motto is to save you time on what you have to do, so you have more time for what you want to do.
We recently launched Vimcal Maestro — the first calendar designed specifically for Executive Assistants.
Vimcal Maestro currently saves admins at Kleiner Perkins, Zapier, and Dropbox over an hour a day to focus on higher priority tasks.
If you're an EA or have an EA, you can learn more here: https://www.vimcal.com/maestro
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Episode Transcript
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Intro / Outro (00:02):
Welcome to Building the Future, hosted by
Kevin Horek. With millions oflisteners a month, Building the
Future has quickly become one ofthe fastest rising programs with
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(00:22):
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visit building the future showdot com.
Kevin Horek (00:31):
Welcome back to the show. Today, we have John Lee.
He's the cofounder and CEO atVIM Cal. John, welcome to the
show.
John Li (00:37):
Thanks for having me, Kevin.
Kevin Horek (00:39):
Yeah. I'm excited to have you on the show. I've
been using VIM Cal for a numberof years now. I think what you
guys are building there isactually really innovative and
cool. But maybe before we diveinto all that, let's get to know
you a little bit better andstart off with where you grew
up.
John Li (00:54):
Yeah. I was born in Montreal, Canada.
Kevin Horek (00:57):
Oh, very cool.
John Li (00:58):
Yeah. I've been in Canada for ages. Yeah. Fellow
Canadian. And I moved to the Bayarea in California when I was 8.
Kevin Horek (01:07):
Okay.
John Li (01:09):
So from the ages of 8 to 30, I was basically in
California. I had my formativeyears there. And, yeah, now I'm
in New York.
Kevin Horek (01:18):
Okay. So you went to university. What did you take
and why?
John Li (01:22):
Yeah. I went to Berkeley. I studied a few things
because I was very indecisive.So I graduated in 5 years
instead of the typical 4. Istudied computer science,
business, and French.
Oh, interesting. Okay. Computerscience and business because
those are probably things Iwanted to do for work, but I had
no idea which one, so I keptswitching majors. And then
(01:45):
France was because I grew up inMontreal, so French was actually
my first language. It got alittle rusty, so I wanted to
just, you know, improve itagain.
But, yeah, I graduated in 2015,and since then, it's just been,
straight into tech.
Kevin Horek (02:01):
Very cool. So walk us through your career, getting
into Y Combinator, and thenlet's dive into how you came up
with the idea for VIM Cal andwhat exactly it is.
John Li (02:12):
Yeah. So in college, I had an internship at Apple,
which I would say solidified alot of the philosophies I have
now, running a company. Can
Kevin Horek (02:24):
you give us some examples? Sorry to cut you off.
John Li (02:26):
Yeah. Yeah. My first year there, I think, was the
last year that Steve Jobs wasthere. So, it was
Kevin Horek (02:31):
Did you get to meet him?
John Li (02:33):
We were supposed to have a I think an all hands for
the intern class that year, buthe was sick, unfortunately. Oh,
that sucks. It was like 3 monthsbefore he passed. But Right.
Yeah.
Just just basically, missed him.I would say some of the lessons
I took away was just productfirst. You gotta be hyper
focused on product. And theneveryone around me was very good
(02:58):
at pruning, just likesubtracting in terms of getting
having more focus on the 1 or 2things you should be doing. So I
saw that in my manager.
I saw that just in the cultureinternally. And so that's why
even building Vimcal, we're veryminimalistic when it comes to we
(03:19):
have a lot of features, but whenyou just look at it, there's not
much, you know, going on. Wehide it away pretty well. We
have everything harmonized. Allthe features harmonized with
each other very well, and that'sreally something I took away
from my experience at Apple.
And, you know, once I graduated,I worked at a start up for about
6 months as a software engineer,and then we got acquired by
(03:39):
Twitter. Just
Kevin Horek (03:40):
Oh, wow. That was
John Li (03:40):
great. Time. Yeah. And so I was at Twitter Twitter for
2 years, in the heyday of the2016 election. So it's
Kevin Horek (03:49):
pretty crazy time. Interesting. Yeah. You got some
stories, I'm sure.
John Li (03:54):
I got some stories. I was brought on call once for,
some election related stuff.Can't really talk about it, but,
Yeah. Fair. It's very, veryinteresting.
And then in 2018, my cofounderand I decided to apply to YC.
Kevin Horek (04:10):
Okay. So how did you meet your cofounder before
you dive into that?
John Li (04:13):
Yes. That that's a great question. I should go I
should go back to that. So wewere actually buddies from
college. Oh, cool.
Okay. We met, I think, like, 13years ago now. Right. I think
playing basketball, and then weended up taking the same, I
think, electrical engineeringclass and partnered up. And we
liked working with each other somuch that we actually would
(04:34):
schedule the same computerscience classes because he was
also a computer science major.
Right. And we would be projectpartners. So I think I did half
of my major with him as myproject partner. So we've been
coding for, like, 4 or 5 yearsbefore we even started a
company.
Kevin Horek (04:49):
No. That's awesome. Okay. So did you go to
Icombinator with the VIM Calidea, or walk us through
applying to that and getting in?
John Li (04:57):
Yes. Absolutely not. It was a very different idea.
Kevin Horek (05:00):
Interesting.
John Li (05:02):
So I was at Twitter. He was, I think, a PM at Microsoft
at the time, and, you know, weloved our jobs. It was fun. It
was challenging, but it was, youknow, they were big companies,
so we had a little extra time onour hands. We could, play around
with new technologies.
So at the time, VR was gettingreally hot. Yeah. So on nights
(05:23):
and weekends, we just startedbuilding fun VR apps. And Okay.
The first half we builttogether, I'm really embarrassed
to say it was v VR beer pong.
Kevin Horek (05:32):
There's nothing wrong with that.
John Li (05:33):
20 year old, you know, guys, single guys. So we we
build VR beer pong for ourfriends and us to play. And then
around that time, ARKit fromApple came out, and we're like,
oh, we believe in AR, augmentedreality more than virtual
reality.
Kevin Horek (05:48):
Yeah. K.
John Li (05:49):
So we pivoted and decided to do an AR company. So
we applied once to y c, gotrejected, and then applied the
following batch and actually gotin.
Kevin Horek (06:02):
Okay.
John Li (06:03):
And, basically, the next day, we put in our 2 weeks
notice. And yeah. Since sincethen, we we got in with our AR
idea. We went to y c, and wewere ecstatic. We're on top of
the world.
And on the first day, ourpartner pulls us aside and says,
hey. We like you guys, but wedon't like your idea. So you
(06:26):
guys need to pivot or you shouldconsider pivot. Yeah. So that
was a really crushing momentthat, you know, being young and
dumb and at that time, it's your1st startup.
Your 1st startup, you're verystubborn about. I think once
you've done it for a while, yourealize that pivoting is
actually, like, a good thing alot of times. Yeah. But we were
just like, no. We're gonna stickthis to the end.
(06:48):
And basically halfway throughoutthe batch, with, like, 5 weeks
left to demo day, we just stuckto the AR idea and finally
decided to pivot because it wasjust going nowhere. Like, the
the AR market was so nascent.Right?
Kevin Horek (07:02):
Right.
John Li (07:02):
So there was just, like, no activity. There's no
daily usage of AR apps. So wepivoted mid batch to a fitness
company.
Kevin Horek (07:11):
And so
John Li (07:12):
we graduated YC, did demo day, did all those investor
meetings with a fitness companythat was 5 weeks old, no app, no
traction. Basically, we raised,like, a tiny amount from people
that just believed in us. Okay.And that next year after YC was,
like, I won't say the darkest,but definitely the most
(07:35):
difficult emotionally becausewe're just trying to make this
fitness idea work, and we tried,like, 5 different things in the
fitness space. You know, just togo back, it was first Twitch for
fitness, so live streamingfitness classes.
And then Right. Eventually, wepivoted to an app for improving
posture. We just tried a bunchof different things. We tried to
sell to companies, toindividuals. And then with just
(07:59):
a few months of runway left,we're we just decided, okay.
This is our last hurrah, solet's actually pivot to
something that we would useourselves.
Kevin Horek (08:09):
Okay. And so this
John Li (08:10):
would be the 2nd pivot, and the 3rd idea. So we try to
find a problem in our life, andwe try to find problems in our
friends' lives. And it justturns out that, you know, we're
fortunate enough for most peoplewe know don't really have that
many problems in our lives. Sowe actually thought about
problems at work that we had.And I remember when I was
(08:34):
fundraising for the fitnessidea, I was talking because it
was after YC demo day, you know,even if you have a mediocre
idea, you're gonna get a lot ofinvestor meetings Right.
Just because of the whole rush.And I was scheduling, like, 30
investor calls a week.
Kevin Horek (08:50):
Yeah. Oh,
John Li (08:50):
man. Doing it manually and just messing it up so badly.
Yeah. Because when you when youschedule an external meetings,
you have two choices. You do itmanually.
You type out, hey. Are you freeMonday at this time, Tuesday at
this time, Wednesday at thistime? You have to do the time
zone conversion by yourself,
Kevin Horek (09:09):
and that's the worst
John Li (09:10):
errors if you haven't done that before.
Kevin Horek (09:12):
Oh, I still screw it up sometimes when they're,
like, they're helping you.
John Li (09:17):
Yeah. Tell me about it. I mean, that's why I started a
company around it. Yeah. Yeah.
And your other option is to usesomething like a Calendly, like,
you know, one of those bookinglink apps. Yeah. But the problem
is there's a slight powerdynamic that people feel and a
lot of people don't talk about.When you give someone your
(09:37):
county link depending on who itis like, if you're giving it to
someone important, it kindafeels too transactional. Some
people call it rude.
I think most people don't care,to be honest, but you don't
wanna risk it. Right? If I'masking you an investor for
money, I don't wanna risk makingyou kinda, like, you know
Kevin Horek (09:55):
It looks like you're giving them, like, a
white glove service if youbasically say, like, I'm free
these times instead of just,like, here's a link. Have fun.
John Li (10:01):
Yeah. Here's my robot EA. Right? Like, you don't you
don't wanna do that. So I alwayssay, there's a power dynamic.
I would never give an investor aaccounting link, but they can
totally give it to me. That'sfine for both sides.
Kevin Horek (10:13):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. Interesting.
John Li (10:15):
And so because I didn't wanna use that, I was manually
booking, you know, 30 meetingsat the same time. I booked one
meeting at 4 AM on accidentbecause the person was, you
know, across the world. I doublebooked 2 or 3 meetings. I'm
pretty sure I lost at least onepotential investment because of
just my scheduling mayhem. Andso when we were thinking about
(10:37):
the next idea we were doing, wewanted to originally build the
best calendar for foundersfundraising.
So very niche, very specific.And we're just like, if we can
only solve that one use case, ifour goal is, like, you know, YC
demoed it, all the founders andall the investors are using VIM
Cal to just schedule with eachother, then, you know, we can go
(10:58):
from there. But that's kind ofour niche. So we launched, after
6 months of development, and wethought it was only gonna take
30 days, but it ended up taking6 months. You know?
Kevin Horek (11:10):
Just Yeah.
John Li (11:11):
That's how things go. Yep. We launched, and when we
launched, we had 50 days ofrunway. So it was
Kevin Horek (11:18):
Really interesting.
John Li (11:18):
Backing its wall, hail Mary. I remember we were at a an
office hour with 1 of our YCpartners with 2 you know, like a
week a month or 2 months beforelaunch, and we were just, like,
just so beaten down. And sokinda, like, not depressed, but
just, like, so sad and, like,alright. If this doesn't work,
(11:40):
we're going back to the jobmarket where it it this is it.
So we launched and we luckily,in the founder community, people
really liked it.
Sweet. And so we actually had meonboard every user over a 30
minute call.
Kevin Horek (11:59):
So again, it's type onboarding type thing?
John Li (12:03):
Superhuman type white glove, and people think it's
because, you know, we we wereour timeline was superhuman for
counter at the time, which is
Kevin Horek (12:09):
I remember that.
John Li (12:09):
Yeah. But it wasn't because we want to copy
superhumans because we literallyran out of time to implement a
self serve onboarding andpayments. So I had to do the
onboarding for every singleperson, and I had to ask at the
end. Alright. Here's a Stripeinvoice for $15, and I had to
watch them put the credit cardin because because I don't wanna
wait for them to do it overemail and things get lost.
(12:31):
Right? So I did that with thefirst 1,000 users.
Kevin Horek (12:35):
Thousand users. Wow. 1,000 users. That would
have taken a ton
John Li (12:39):
of time. And it got to the point and mind you, we
launched this a month beforeCOVID. So I was doing all this
during the lockdown. So I thinkit was, like, late January we
launched, and then mid March wasobviously locked down.
Kevin Horek (12:55):
Right.
John Li (12:55):
Interesting. And then the my calendar was just 8 AM to
5 PM, just 30 minute callsnonstop for, like, 6, 7 months.
And it actually got to a pointthat, I I did it's weird, but I
did so many calls. I actuallyended up, in the ER. Why?
And at that point, I'm like,okay. It's time to hire our
(13:16):
first person. So I would do thecalls on my bed because I was
sharing an apartment with 4people during COVID, so no one
could leave the house, whichmeant, like, if you were
working, you had to work in yourroom because everyone's on
calls. Everyone's workingremotely. Right.
And my back and my hips just gotso stiff that one time I went
(13:38):
for a run. I got really stiff,and then I sat down on a chair
and just ended up on the floorfor an hour. Wow. Yeah. Just
because, like, I wasn't moving.
I was just, like, curled up onmy bed 9 hours straight a day.
Yeah. Wow. So, yeah, that thattaught me to move my body more,
and, also, it's time to hire afirst employee.
Kevin Horek (14:00):
Fair enough. Okay. So walk us through how kind of
evolved. I wanna dive into youre a version. Like, walk us
through what how what it was andto what it is today because you
guys have added a ton of stuffover the last few years.
John Li (14:17):
Yeah. Yeah. We add a lot of features. So at the
beginning, we were reallyfocused on catering to people
who had a lot of externalmeetings. K.
And especially people with a lotof different types of, external
meetings. So for regular, youknow, work use cases, if you
(14:38):
don't have a lot of meetings,then a regular counter, like a
Google Calendar, Outlook Counteris fine. Yeah. Of course. But if
you do end up having a lot ofmeetings, a lot of people find
that they start needingsomething like a Calendly or,
you know, one one of thosebooking link apps.
Yeah. And that works really wellif you have one specific type of
meeting. Right? Like, Kevin, ifyou're just booking podcast
(14:59):
interviews or, that that's greatbecause it's one very specific
type for Yeah. Recruiters, forsalespeople, for customer
support.
It's really good because youhave one defined role, office
hours. But if you are, like, afounder or investor, you have,
you know, customers here. Youhave investors there. You have
legal meetings. You have allthese types of meetings.
(15:21):
One link doesn't work foreveryone, which is why when we
built them, we built it withthat flexibility where you can
send different times todifferent people like you're
doing it manually, but but itcomes with a booking link. So
you don't have to do any timezone conversion, any of that. So
you are putting guardrails onyour calendar, and you're
basically designing your week asyou go because you're offering
(15:43):
specific times to specificpeople, but with a booking link.
Kevin Horek (15:47):
Yeah. That's
John Li (15:48):
sweet. Yeah. So that so that is still a huge focus for
us, but we have, over the years,shifted focus to building out,
features for the entire team. Sonow we have a lot of features to
help you not only schedule, youknow, with all types of people,
but if you and your cofounder oryou and two members of the team
(16:11):
need to meet with someoneoutside, you can offer times to
them, and it will protect allthree of your calendars from
conflicts. Right?
So there's all these differentdynamics now. We have a lot of,
features for internal meeting.If you have 5 people that you
need to get together and they'rein different time zone, we just
find times for you reallyquickly and really easily. So I
(16:33):
think taking a step back, VIMCal is really, really focused
now on the work use case,whereas before it was a little
more general. And we're reallyfocused on people who have a lot
of meetings.
And if you have a lot ofmeetings, usually your team has
a lot of meetings. And so thatis kind of where we've
transitioned, into. But the coreuse case is there. It's for
(16:55):
sending billable. It's justscheduling meetings.
Now when we were doing all themanual onboardings, and we're
still doing a lot of manualonboardings. About 25% of our
users are going through anonboarding call still.
Kevin Horek (17:09):
How do you find that? Sorry to interrupt you,
but, like, there was kind ofobviously, that was a new thing
a few years ago when you weredoing it. Yep. More and more
companies have been kinda doingit. Like, what's your experience
with it, you know, becauseyou've been doing it for so
long?
Is it valuable? Is it notvaluable? It really depends.
Walk us through that.
John Li (17:28):
Yeah. I think our philosophy with users is to find
champions. It doesn't matterwhat stage you are. Like, yeah,
I I you know, it doesn't matterif we're gonna be a huge company
one day or, you know, if we'reday 30 after launch. You want to
create as many power users aspossible, And nothing compares
to getting on a 30 minute callwith someone to walk through the
(17:50):
app to answer every little, youknow, question that they have.
And when they leave that 30minutes, they're a pro. And
Yeah. They usually really likethe app. Right? You know,
obviously, if you've done a goodjob billing billing application.
And we see that conversion is,like, 3 times higher. Retention
(18:14):
is also much higher. Obviously,you can't do it at the same
scale, so it really depends onhow you qualify the users that
get on the call.
Kevin Horek (18:22):
Sure. Yeah. That makes sense.
John Li (18:24):
Yeah. But we've done tens of thousands of these calls
by now. So I would say that'ssomething that's core to our d r
DNA as a company. And you justlearned like, that I think
that's one reason why people saywe ship fast and ship fix as
fast is because we literally onthe calls, we see it. Sometimes,
(18:44):
I don't even have to ask us, andwe just go back and fix it in
the next 15 minutes.
Even even today, like, 4 yearsinto the journey. And we also
learn a lot about our customersand not just about their use
cases, but all, like, the the,intricacies of scheduling, like,
how they send emails when theyschedule. Like, all these little
things because they're sharingtheir screen and they're telling
(19:06):
us, oh, I like to use this appfor this reason, and here's how
I write an email to someone. Wejust see thousands and thousands
of examples. Right?
And that's why it's so valuable.And one of the learnings we made
was that executive assistantsare scheduling a ton, obviously,
for very important people, Andthere's nothing built for them,
(19:26):
which is Yeah. Mind boggling tome. Right? They are the elite of
the elite counter users.
We call them the Navy Seals ofcounter users. And we've since,
you know, early on, we've we'veknown that if we can build a
counter for EAs, we can build acounter for anyone. Yeah.
Kevin Horek (19:42):
Fair. Yeah. That's interesting. Okay. Keep going,
sir.
John Li (19:47):
An EA schedules nowadays for, like, I think on
average, 3 executives. These arevery busy people. These are
people with every meeting ishigh stakes. One mistake you get
yelled at, 2, you can get fired.Like, it's just so stressful.
They're also, like, you know,often very underpaid. And it's
just like, you're on call 247for multiple, like, really
(20:12):
driven vocal people, right, witha lot of power. So it's a very
stressful job, and we alwaysknew that we would you know,
from the calls, we learned thatwe would always build something
for them and that they reallyliked FIM Cal when they saw it.
But because they're schedulingon behalf of other people, the
product needed a few tweaks tomake delegation really work. So
(20:32):
Right.
About a year ago, we decided toplay around with the idea of an
app for EAs. And, yeah, just themore we've been going down that
route, the more our focus andour actually, I would say most
of our go to market strategiestoday is around EAs.
Kevin Horek (20:49):
Got it. Okay. That's interesting. Okay. So
maybe walk us through some ofthe other use cases, that you
found and and maybe give us somemore of the the features that,
you've added over the tie orover time and, people are
actually really loving andusing?
John Li (21:08):
Yeah. Excuse me. So VIM Cal has always been like, our
strong suit has always been forto help you send out times to
other people. But one thing I'mreally excited about and that
our users really loved was whensomeone sends you time, you have
to go back to the counter andcheck, okay, which one lines up.
Or if someone sends you, like, abooking link.
(21:29):
The cool thing now is that ifsomeone sends you a bunch of
times, you can just either copyand paste that into VIM Cal.
Like, you literally copy it,open VIM Cal, and just type
command v or control v, andwe'll just display those on your
calendar. So that's our AIfeature. That's cool.
Kevin Horek (21:44):
That's super helpful,
John Li (21:45):
actually. Screenshot it. Sorry?
Kevin Horek (21:47):
That's super helpful, actually.
John Li (21:49):
Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Because scheduling is
2 sided. Right?
You're not always the onesoffering times. 100%. So for the
other half, we wanna cater tothat too. And instead of copy
and paste it, you can also justscreenshot it and drag it in.
We'll do the same thing.
Sweet. Or if someone sends you,like, a link or a Calendly link,
you can just copy the URL andpaste it into VIM Calendly.
(22:09):
We'll just show you all thetimes from that link with the
duration, the time zone,everything. And, like,
everything is figured out foryou. So that's one thing I'm
really excited about.
Not yeah. We we added odd AIfeatures. Another AI feature we
added is that we enrichinformation about the people you
meet. So every meeting you havewill give you details about
(22:29):
their company. So if I see let'ssay you work at, I don't know,
airbnb.com.
Right? And, yep, I I have ameeting with you on my VIN Cal,
under your name, I will seeinformation about airbnb.com.
What it is, what they do. And,you know, for big companies,
it's I don't need to look at it,but if you're at a small startup
that Yeah. No one's ever heardof or, you know, if you're
(22:51):
you're an investor, then I canjust quickly see information
about your startup or your fund,which, you know, we we do a lot
of things in the background toget information about you, your
your company online.
And then we also enrich your theattendees' contacts. So what
that means is if, again, if I'mmeeting with you on my VIM Cal,
(23:13):
I will see your Twitter, yourLinkedIn, you know, any web
personal websites you have, andthat's just there. Which is why
people with a lot of externalmeetings also really like VIM
Cal because we do the researchfor you. We basically hand you a
dossier for every meeting youhave.
Kevin Horek (23:27):
Yeah. Which is super helpful. Right? Because
everybody like, yeah, doingresearch for it's just time
consuming. Right?
Like, it's not hard. Yeah. It'sjust being able to have it right
there. Oh, okay. Yep.
Yep. Okay. This is cool. Yeah.That's sweet, man.
John Li (23:39):
Yeah, exactly. And a lot of our users, they, they're
just in back to back meetingsall day, so they don't really
have the time to quickly jumpand, you know, look at look up
who they're meeting with rightbefore the call.
Kevin Horek (23:51):
Sure. No. That makes a lot of sense. I'm
curious. Any other features thatyou wanna cover that are kinda
set you guys apart from yourcompetition?
John Li (24:01):
Yeah. One thing that a lot of very, I would say so when
when you build a calendar, youfind different pockets of users
that I would really like to getfeedback. One is the really busy
pro you know, the the busyperson, the founder, the
investor. The other one is, Iwould say, the aesthetic user.
(24:25):
So the I I would say this islike design Twitter.
This is people who care a lotabout just to look and feel
because a calendar, unlikeemail, unlike spreadsheets, it's
a very visual, very, you know,very again, like, a very visual
tool. Right? And it's it's likea it's like a grid. There's a
lot of things happening. There'sa lot of colors.
(24:45):
There's a lot of buttons. It'salmost like a canvas more so
than, like, tables and rows andtext. Yeah. So Interesting.
People have a lot of input abouthow they wanted to look and
feel.
And a lot of times, it'sconflicting between the groups.
Kevin Horek (25:02):
Sure. I think what I sent you some of those. Yeah.
I mean,
John Li (25:06):
it's good. We're implementing them. So thanks
Kevin Horek (25:08):
for the feedback.
John Li (25:11):
One that I really like and that I just it makes me look
at the counter. Just it justmake gives me a happy feeling is
when you, when you have 2 of theidentical events on your
calendar so let's say I'mlooking up my coworker's
calendar, and we're both on thesame meeting. Yeah. In Google
Calendar and Outlook, you wouldjust see, 2 2 identical meetings
(25:34):
of the same color. Right?
What we do is we combine it into1, and we give you, like, a
beautiful gradient of the 2. Soit's like, if your counter is
blue and theirs is red and it'sthe same meeting, you'll see one
calendar, and it's like a blueto red gradient. It's just like
looks like a rainbow. Yourcounter just looks like a
rainbow. It's very appealing.
So that's, like, on theaesthetic side. We also cater to
(25:55):
these, like, I also, like,advanced calendar users by
allowing automatic color coding.So we have a tagging system in
VIM Cal where you can say, okay.Tag all of my external meetings,
with an external tag and thenautomatically color them green.
Tag any meeting with the word 1on 1 in the title and
(26:19):
automatically color it red.
Right? I have I have it asorange. Right? So there's all
these these ways you can justcolor code your calendar, and it
takes, like, 15 seconds to setup one of these rules. And then
at the end of each week, we sendyou a metrics report of your
calendar.
We'll tell you you had 20 hoursof meetings last week, 15 were
(26:42):
external, 5 were internal, andthen you spent 3 hours on 1 on
ones and 5 hours on recruiting.You you know, all
Kevin Horek (26:49):
Which is cool. Breakdown. Yeah. That's nice.
John Li (26:52):
It's super handy. Yeah. Yeah. At the end of the year, we
do something like a Spotifywrapped for your calendar. So a
whole annual, like, statistic ina cool, like, IG story flow.
We call it them how we want. Sothat's every December, and
people love that.
Kevin Horek (27:06):
Yeah. That's cool. No. Yeah. It's it's super
helpful, right, to have thatkind of stuff.
John Li (27:10):
Yeah.
Kevin Horek (27:11):
So I'm curious. You you covered some stuff really
early on that I think kindademystified some of the stuff.
Obviously, I think, like well, yCombinator is this, you know, YC
is probably still the mostpopular tech incubator. At least
top 3, top 2, doesn't matter.Like, you know, that's kind of
(27:33):
the pinnacle.
Right? And it's interesting tome that you came in with a
different idea. You pivotedthrough it. Like, it's not all
just like you have this idea,you get in there, you raise
1,000,000 of dollars, and, youknow, you IPO, and you're the
like, you went through what atraditional people in startups
(27:54):
kinda go through is, like, youstruggled a bit. Right?
And Yeah. I'm glad that youtalked about that. But what
other lessons have you learnedalong the way that you'd like to
kinda pass along to other peoplethat you've learned and if maybe
through some of the failures,which I I think everybody fails
all the time. Like, I think themost perfect example of this is,
like, Apple just said they'rethey're stopped doing the car.
(28:17):
Like, if one of the biggestcompanies ever can still fail,
like, everybody fails.
Right? Yep. Including Apple.
John Li (28:25):
Yep. Yeah. I think one lesson I've had to learn over
and over again k. Is notdoubling down and tripling down
on something that already workseven if it's a little bit. It's
like almost like you findsomething that works, whether
(28:48):
it's a marketing channel,whether it's a feature that you
just launched, and it works and,like, hooray.
Let's move on to the next thing.Like, I would go back and just
milk milk it till I can'tanymore if it works even a
little bit. Because when you'rerunning a startup, it's it's so
(29:10):
hard. You're you're buildingsomething and trying to push it
into the world and have it beused every day by people. Like,
people are bombarded with stuff.
Right? So it's just hard to findone little, like, wedge into
people's lives. And once you doThat's interesting. Like, widen
that wedge. Like, don't don't gosomewhere else and try to find
(29:30):
the next shiny object.
And so I would say early on, wewere pretty good at focusing on
people with a lot of meetings.Yeah. And I think maybe a year
or 2 in a lot of competitorscame out, and they were more I
would say they were more likethe focus on making things
really aesthetic. And so Ithink, you know, obviously, you
(29:52):
know, design is one of the toppriorities for any counter
company. But I would say becauseof that, we started focusing on
different users almost.
We kinda strayed away from ourcore user base, which is people
with a lot of meetings. And sowe would launch features that
really didn't help you if youhad a lot of meetings. And then
(30:15):
when we did launch features thatwere related to scheduling or,
you know, actually puttingmeetings on the calendar, they
worked. The launch went great,and, you know, we did a quick v
2 to fix some bugs, and that wasit. But we should have gone back
and just, like, added morefeatures, added more support
around it.
And so I would say the biglesson this year is that we're
just focusing on, like, 2 or 3things, and that's all we're
(30:39):
doing because we know that theywork. So one of them is our VIM
Cal Maestro product Yeah. Whichis the, the product for EAs. One
is just booking links. We'rejust gonna make our booking
links the best the gold standardof booking links.
And then, team features. Becausewe know that teams love using to
(31:00):
schedule with each other evenmore than individuals.
Kevin Horek (31:03):
Yeah. No. That makes total sense. The the
interesting thing that you saidthere too is like, okay. You're
building you built this productfor a specific type of user, and
then now you're starting to,like, go adjacent to that.
And what I mean by that is,like, now you're building, like,
an EA project product, which is,like, a different user, but it's
actually for the same user.Because, like, if I have an EA
(31:26):
that's scheduling my calendar,obviously, I'm getting my
calendar, but they're alsoscheduling into my calendar. So
it's like you're just wideningthe net. Right? And the other
thing that you're doing which isreally smart with that is it's
really hard to move to thecompetition if now 2 people are
using it, and then it goes to myteam.
(31:48):
And, like, just switching my ownpersonal calendar to another
competitor is a huge pain. Butif I have to move me, my EA, my
whole team, you're just, like,forget it. Right?
John Li (32:04):
Kevin, that's such a good insight that you just had.
And, well, when we started, wewere basically focused on
startups and younger companies,like, smaller companies.
Kevin Horek (32:14):
Sure.
John Li (32:14):
And you see we saw some of our users, like, they just
experienced hypergrowth, andthey got to a place a few years
later where the company was bigenough. The CEO was big, busy
enough where they need to hirean EA. And all of a sudden, the
person who's doing all theirown, scheduling, who was a power
power user of VIN Cal,basically, overnight does zero
(32:37):
scheduling anymore. And Yeah.They have the same meetings on
the calendar.
Right? It's not like they'reless busy. It's not like they
changed jobs. So the EA product,apart from the primary goal of
actually catering to EAs andmake them more productive, it's
also to graduate with our userbase because Yeah. It's the same
busy calendars that will needthat product.
(32:59):
It's just someone else is in thedriver's seat. And, and that's
the interesting part now isbecause now we're going up
market. Now we're targeting,like, Fortune 500, whereas
before, we were just TechTwitter. And so we kinda have a
2 pronged approach where whereit was, like, you have a
marketing strategy for more ofthe PLG bottoms up part using
(33:19):
just the VIM Cal product. Andthen we have, VIM Cal Maestro,
which is our EA product, andthat's more sales driven.
That's more trying to landentire teams of, like, 500 EAs,
yeah, companies. Right? And thengoing from there because once
you the the the key thing isonce you have, the EA on VIM
(33:41):
Cal, you basically also have theexecs calendar. And so the true
value is that, you know, if allof Fortune 500 is using VIM Cal
Maestro, so are these x.
Kevin Horek (33:52):
Well, yeah, the other thing too is you you need
to basically get one exec and orEA at a big company well, any
company really, and then the itjust spreads like wildfire.
Because if I can quickly getback to you, I send you the
link, Other busy people or theirEAs are gonna be like, how are
you doing this? And then it'slike, oh, you just use this app.
(34:15):
And then it's like, it just itjust snowballs from there.
Right?
Because let's be honest, if youcan automate and you can save
people time in building aproduct in any vertical, it's
it's worth the money. Like, I,like, I also pay for superhuman.
A lot of people are like, how doyou pay 30 well, it's like $40
Canadian a month for, basically,an email client. It's because I
(34:38):
hate email. Normally, I wasgetting back to people
sometimes, like, 2 or 3 weekslater.
And it's like, if I can get backto somebody within, you know, 24
to 48 hours compared to 3 weeks,it's it's worth it to me.
Because then I don't then I Ilike, it's it's like it just
makes my me look like like abetter human being to other
people if I'm getting back tothem right away. Right? So for
(35:01):
the dollar a day that it cost meor, like, cup more than that
Canadian, but you get what I'mgoing at. Like, people don't
think of it like that so much.
It's like, well, that'sexpensive for that. But it's
like, is it? Right? If it'ssaving you x amount of time and
it making you look notincompetent in a lot of cases.
Because, like, if I book a bunchof meetings and I book them all
(35:24):
at the same time or I mess withthe time zone, like, some people
forgive that and some people,like, it can wreck to your
points.
Like, you potentially lostinvestment because of it. And
sounds stupid, but it's notstupid. Right? Like, for the
cost of it, it's like it's a nobrainer, especially if you're
busy.
John Li (35:43):
Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, I I think people think about
pricing very in a very funny waybecause, like, oh, $30 is too
much for this, but then they'llturn around, pay $30 for
something completely Yeah.
Kevin Horek (35:55):
Un I'll buy a $7 latte at lunch. Yeah. I live in
John Li (35:59):
New York. Like, you walk out, it's $25
automatically. You step onto thesidewalk. Yeah. But, yeah, you
you yeah.
You you have a good point there.I do think that another lesson
we learned very, you know, closeto what you said is that niching
down just makes everythingeasier. When our when we decide
(36:21):
to launch the EA app and we justfocus on EAs, it is so much
easier not only to reach out tothem, to you know, all our
marketing and sales got easier.The product was just more
focused. Yeah.
And I would say that's similarto when we were unfocused with
the regular with the flagshipproduct, and then we decided to
(36:45):
refocus on people with a lot ofmeetings. The same thing
happened where it's just, like,all the marketing copy, all of
the all of our numbers, theretention, the trial conversion,
all went up because we're like,this is only for this type of
people. Right?
Kevin Horek (36:58):
Yeah. And you're solving a real pain. Those type
John Li (37:00):
of people, it's gonna work for people that don't have
a lot of meetings. Right? Like,the it Yeah. It's we're building
for the advanced use cases, themost complex use cases, of the
calendar. If you don't needsomething complicated, you have
the free options.
That's totally fine. But that'swhy people come to VIM count and
stay with VIM count. So nichingdown as much as you can. And,
like, sometimes you get it rightfrom the beginning, and then you
(37:23):
just forget and lose focus, andthen you have to, you know, kind
of, like, recenter. So at thebeginning, when our tag our goal
was the best calendar forfounders fundraising, that was
so focused and niche.
And somewhere along the way, westarted looking at, oh, should
we do some things for collegestudents and this and that. It's
just like, no. Come back tocenter.
Kevin Horek (37:45):
Yeah. That's actually really good advice in
itself. Right? Because it'sreally easy to start building
all these, like, verticals, and
John Li (37:53):
Yeah.
Kevin Horek (37:53):
It it's also hard it's also building into
verticals that, let's be honest,like, are see the value in
spending a bit of money to helpthem save a bunch of time.
Right? Because Yeah. Yourcollege student idea, it's like
I sometimes selling to maybebroke college students isn't
your best idea. Maybe it is,maybe it isn't.
(38:14):
Right? Mhmm. Where you can spenda ton of time chasing a vertical
where there's not a lot of,like, paying users in. Right?
John Li (38:22):
Yeah.
Kevin Horek (38:23):
Yeah. That's interesting.
John Li (38:24):
Yeah. And and we found that in the calendar space,
everyone loves a good calendar.But whether someone's willing to
pay for it is you know, there'sa, I think, a sharp contrast
between those groups. And so wefind that anyone we show them
to, they would wanna use it.Yeah.
(38:46):
I think the amount of peoplethat would use it if someone
else paid for it is much higherthan the amount of people that
do pay for it, which is why yousee every calendar startup that
comes out, they basically getacquired within a few years.
Right? No one really makes it asa calendar. And that's the
reason because the majority ofthe market has so many good free
(39:07):
options. And that's also why webuilt for the most complex use
cases for the people that arewilling to pay, the founders,
the investors, the EAs, theexecutives, the business owners,
agencies, people like yourself.
You might have clients at 5different companies, and you
need all those calendars on oneview. Right? All these cases are
really freaking difficult tobuild. And that is a mote for us
(39:32):
because we spent the time wetalked to tens of thousands of
people manually to get to thispoint.
Kevin Horek (39:37):
Yeah. No. Makes makes a lot of sense. So I wanna
cover platforms you're currentlysupporting and then what
platforms you're gonna supportkind of in the near future.
John Li (39:47):
Yeah. We currently support both Microsoft and
Google accounts for both our VIMCal and our VIM Cal, for EA
product. Yeah. And we supportiOS for mobile. K.
And then for the desktop app,you can use it on PC or Mac or
(40:08):
anywhere in browser. Yeah.Android is on a road map, and,
we hope to have, iCloudintegration in the future as
well.
Kevin Horek (40:19):
Interesting. You also have an iPad app too.
John Li (40:22):
We also have an iPad app. Yeah.
Kevin Horek (40:23):
I'm curious. Like, I have an iPhone and an Android
phone. I'm I'm curiousobviously, like, a lot of
companies release for iOS,first, and I get why they do it.
Like, is there actually a marketfor, like, a VIM Cal for, like,
Android? Like, is that a realyou like, are you getting that
(40:45):
request?
Because why I ask is becauseit's it's a lot of work to build
for, like, one platform, nevermind multiple platforms. And
just from people listening, youknow, that are thinking, like,
what do I do here? Like, whathave you actually found? Like,
it sounds like you've got therequest if you're building it,
but what's been your experienceand feedback from your users in
(41:06):
that space?
John Li (41:08):
Yeah. I was talking to another just fellow founder CEO
a while ago, and, he mentionedsomething that I can't forget.
He said I told him what I wasworking on. He's like, oh, you
have the mother of all TAMsbecause everyone and their
mothers use a calendar. Yep.
And any job, personal or work,you know, white color, blue
(41:31):
color, you need a calendar, youneed email. Those are kind of
the, you know, the bottom ofMaslow's hierarchy of work tools
or life tools. Right? Work andemail. Sorry.
Email and calendar. So, there'sabsolutely a big market in the
Android market.
Kevin Horek (41:48):
Sure. Just because of the user base.
John Li (41:50):
Just because of user base and just everyone needs a
calendar. Right? Everyone wantsa better calendar. I would say
that we do something very uniquewith our pricing where,
actually, our mobile app iscompletely free. So our iOS app
is completely free.
You can try the the desktopversion. You know, it's $15 a
month. And then if you try that,decide it's not for you, you
(42:13):
don't wanna pay for it, you canstill use the iOS app for free
forever. And so if we doAndroid, it would be the same
thing. So I do think we willhave a big market, and we we
have seen, like, a lot ofpeople, go back to using desktop
after iOS.
And our goal with the mobilecalendar is to build the
absolute best mobile calendarand give it out for free.
(42:33):
Because if I mean, I don'tyou've probably taken more time
than most people to look atcounters on the App Store.
Kevin Horek (42:40):
I've tried it all. Yeah. Everyone I've tried it
all.
John Li (42:44):
Good for work. Right?
Kevin Horek (42:45):
Terrible.
John Li (42:46):
The it's it's all really bad, and they're trying
to monetize it or they have adsor it just, like, doesn't load.
So we are trying to build thestate of the art mobile
calendar, and we are building itfor work. Like, I think VIM Cal
is still the only calendar inthe mobile app store where you
can look up a teammate'scalendar on your phone. Like
(43:07):
Yeah. I
Kevin Horek (43:08):
think so.
John Li (43:08):
Can't do that anywhere else. Right? It is just mind
boggling. Everything is kind ofdesigned for personal or family
life, not for work. Yep.
And so we're building it again.I've said this. I'm sound like a
broken record, but building thebest work calendar and giving it
out for free. So Android, wedefinitely want to do that as
well.
Kevin Horek (43:26):
Makes sense. Well and and maybe this is a bad
assumption. I'm assuming thatsome of the AEAs are running
Android phones just for whateverreason. Right? Not iPhones.
I'm assuming that. Have youfound that?
John Li (43:39):
Yes. We've also found that EAs do everything on the
computer. Just because
Kevin Horek (43:44):
it's Yeah.
John Li (43:45):
It's so so most people with mobile counters the mobile
counter is like a read onlydevice, like a platform
Kevin Horek (43:52):
for them.
John Li (43:52):
Like, they're just seeing what's coming up, what's
their day like. We've donethings where we made it very
easy to schedule on the go.Like, you can schedule NLP,
like, you know, coffee meetingtomorrow at 5 PM. We'll just put
it on your calendar. Yeah.
But EAs, because it's socomplex, like, they don't trust
the phone to schedule.
Kevin Horek (44:08):
That's actually really interesting advice
because and I would put myselfin this boat 99% of the time or
90% of the time. I always wantthe same features in a desktop
that are on a mobile experience.But the more and more
complicated some apps get, youalmost don't want some of those
(44:32):
things because if you screw itup on a phone in certain cases,
you don't you almost, like, haveto push them to the desktop. Or
you do, like, a simple version,and then maybe you have to
verify it or do something whenyou get back to your your
desktop. Right?
Because it's challenging or itcan be challenging. Right? You
(44:53):
know what you're trying to do.
John Li (44:54):
It it's funny. Most people will see a notification,
like, in their email
Kevin Horek (44:59):
Yeah.
John Li (44:59):
On their phone Yeah. And then wait till they get to a
computer to actually schedule ameeting.
Kevin Horek (45:04):
Yeah. Which is interesting. Right? Yeah. Just
from a user testing perspective,that's an that's a fascinating,
like, use case.
Right?
John Li (45:13):
Yeah. So one of our goals is to just remove all the
friction where to the pointwhere you're actually scheduling
the meeting on your phone. And Iwould say we probably we
probably make it, like, I wouldsay, 30% easier, but some people
just have hardwired habits.Yeah. That's
Kevin Horek (45:32):
fair. It's hard to break. Well, especially when if
your laptops are, like, rightnext to you, just like, ah, just
John Li (45:37):
grab it. But Exactly.
Kevin Horek (45:38):
Cool. But we're kinda coming to the end of the
show, but is there any otheradvice you'd like to pass along
to founders or something youwish you maybe learned earlier
on in your career?
John Li (45:51):
Yeah. I think I I've been doing this for 6 years now.
Yeah. I would just think if I'mthinking back to the first 2 or
3 years and the last 2 or 3 orlast 3 years, it does feel
different in the way mycofounder and I work and because
(46:15):
it's a very high stressenvironment. Sure.
Everything is high stakes. Everyit's just weird. Like,
everything feels like it's theend of the world if it doesn't
work even if, like, a button isa wrong shade of purple. Right?
Kevin Horek (46:29):
But You're also dealing with an interesting type
of clientele. Right? Like, youcan't really push buggy software
because if you delete one oftheir meetings, for example, by
accident Yeah. With, like, acode push Yeah. Like, you're
gonna hear about it.
John Li (46:45):
The calendar is the most, I would say, pristine app
you use and that there's notypos. Nothing is wrong.
Everything is put on therecorrectly the first try. And
Yeah. Unlike your email, whichmight have typos, your notes app
just has a bunch of junk thatyou never look at.
Right? Your counter is pristinebecause it holds, like,
(47:08):
important information with otherpeople that you don't really
know well. Yeah. Yeah. Becauseof that, just everything feels
really high stakes.
And you have bug reportssometimes. They're like, oh,
this meeting is gone. Thismeeting is deleted. It happens
very rarely. It happened more inthe beginning here and there.
But Sure. The accuracy of yourcalendar at all times is
something that we've reallyhoned throughout the years. But
(47:29):
I I would say, you know, lookingback at what's different the
first few years and now is that,I feel like at the beginning, we
were just trying to doeverything, and everything felt
really rushed. And, like, wefelt like we had to work 9 AM to
9 PM nonstop. Otherwise, weweren't it was just, like, all
these, like, preconceivednotions.
Yeah. Whereas, you know, part ofit is learning along the
(47:50):
journey, but now it just feelslike we're doing way more even
if I'm working less hours, evenif I'm not feeling rushed or
stressed. If I'm not feelingrushed or stressed, if I'm
relaxed, before I would havebeen like, okay. That means
you're not doing enough. But nowit's like, okay.
This is the steady state. Thisis equilibrium. And think part
of it is you just have to gothrough it and learn it. Like, I
(48:12):
can I can tell you these things,but, focus on going fast, not on
rushing? And Yeah.
Being fast and rushing throughthings look very similar, but
it's there's a huge difference.Like, you don't have to be
stressed all the time to beproductive, and you don't have
to have a 20 item to do list forevery day. Right? A 2 item to do
(48:37):
list could probably grow yourbusiness more.
Kevin Horek (48:41):
Yeah. That's actually really good advice. I'm
curious then. What's your QAprocess like?
John Li (48:47):
Yeah. We have a few so when we build any new feature,
we do this thing called 5075100.Okay. So, you know, our designer
and, usually my cofounder and Iare, like, the quote, unquote
PMs. Yeah.
We'll talk about the featureitself, design it right out of
spec, and then it goes to anengineer. And then we found that
(49:11):
maybe this is because we're asmall company and we're still
learning, but we found thatsometimes things in the spec
might get understood differentlyby the engineer even if we've
had a meeting about it. So we doa 50% check when, like, you
know, the code is barelyworking, and we just all get
together and we just see, okay.Are you going in the right
direction? Are you maybe oh, didyou misconstrue this this word
(49:32):
the wrong way so that theengineer doesn't, like, spend 2
days doing something that wedidn't mean them to do?
And so we do a 50% check-in anda 50 75% check-in and then
basically, like, a 100%check-in, which is when it's
ready to demo. And then we'llget a war room together. We we
call it a war room, but it'sbasically, like, 3, 4 people get
(49:55):
together and actually just tryto break it, and break the app.
And then, you know, we gostaging production, and after
production, we do some moretesting. But because of because
we onboard the users from theearly days, manually, we have
just a habit of talking to ourusers, getting on calls with
(50:17):
them.
So if anyone has a bug, like, weusually respond within you know?
You you get a response almostimmediately from our team if you
support it, if you put in aticket. And then we're the
engineering and the customersupport are like one.
Kevin Horek (50:33):
Yeah. Especially when you're seeing people use
the app. Like, you're almosttesting your app while you're
demoing the app and getonboarding them. Right? Which is
an actually really interestinguse case for, like, doing that
hand holding onboarding, right,in itself.
Yeah.
John Li (50:47):
We don't need user interviews. Just Yeah. New users
will tell us.
Kevin Horek (50:51):
Yeah. You're doing user research on top of that at
the same time. That'sinteresting. That's a good
reason to do the onboarding theway you guys
John Li (50:58):
are doing the onboarding. The onboarding is
the one thing that fixes, like,10 other things.
Kevin Horek (51:03):
Yeah.
John Li (51:04):
It's a little painful, but just just do it. Especially
at the early stages, just do it.You don't have to do it later if
you don't want, but just just doit.
Kevin Horek (51:12):
No. I I think that's actually really good
advice, but how about we closewith mentioning where people can
get more information aboutyourself, VIM Cal, and any other
links you wanna mention?
John Li (51:20):
Yeah. You can find out about VIM Cal at vimcal.com,
vimcal. You can learn about ourEA product atvimcal.com/ea. And,
yeah, you can find me on Twitteror LinkedIn. My Twitter is very
hard to spell, so I will leaveit for the show notes.
Kevin Horek (51:41):
Perfect. Alright. Thanks, man. Well, I really
appreciate you taking the timeout of your day to be on the
show, and I look forward tokeeping in touch with you, and
have a good rest of your day.
John Li (51:48):
Awesome. Thank you so much, Kevin. This was really
fun.
Kevin Horek (51:50):
Thank you. Take care.
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Kevin Horek (00:31):
Welcome back to the show. Today, we have John Lee.
He's the cofounder and CEO atVIM Cal. John, welcome to the
show.
John Li (00:37):
Thanks for having me, Kevin.
Kevin Horek (00:39):
Yeah. I'm excited to have you on the show. I've
been using VIM Cal for a numberof years now. I think what you
guys are building there isactually really innovative and
cool. But maybe before we diveinto all that, let's get to know
you a little bit better andstart off with where you grew
up.
John Li (00:54):
Yeah. I was born in Montreal, Canada.
Kevin Horek (00:57):
Oh, very cool.
John Li (00:58):
Yeah. I've been in Canada for ages. Yeah. Fellow
Canadian. And I moved to the Bayarea in California when I was 8.
Kevin Horek (01:07):
Okay.
John Li (01:09):
So from the ages of 8 to 30, I was basically in
California. I had my formativeyears there. And, yeah, now I'm
in New York.
Kevin Horek (01:18):
Okay. So you went to university. What did you take
and why?
John Li (01:22):
Yeah. I went to Berkeley. I studied a few things
because I was very indecisive.So I graduated in 5 years
instead of the typical 4. Istudied computer science,
business, and French.
Oh, interesting. Okay. Computerscience and business because
those are probably things Iwanted to do for work, but I had
no idea which one, so I keptswitching majors. And then
(01:45):
France was because I grew up inMontreal, so French was actually
my first language. It got alittle rusty, so I wanted to
just, you know, improve itagain.
But, yeah, I graduated in 2015,and since then, it's just been,
straight into tech.
Kevin Horek (02:01):
Very cool. So walk us through your career, getting
into Y Combinator, and thenlet's dive into how you came up
with the idea for VIM Cal andwhat exactly it is.
John Li (02:12):
Yeah. So in college, I had an internship at Apple,
which I would say solidified alot of the philosophies I have
now, running a company. Can
Kevin Horek (02:24):
you give us some examples? Sorry to cut you off.
John Li (02:26):
Yeah. Yeah. My first year there, I think, was the
last year that Steve Jobs wasthere. So, it was
Kevin Horek (02:31):
Did you get to meet him?
John Li (02:33):
We were supposed to have a I think an all hands for
the intern class that year, buthe was sick, unfortunately. Oh,
that sucks. It was like 3 monthsbefore he passed. But Right.
Yeah.
Just just basically, missed him.I would say some of the lessons
I took away was just productfirst. You gotta be hyper
focused on product. And theneveryone around me was very good
(02:58):
at pruning, just likesubtracting in terms of getting
having more focus on the 1 or 2things you should be doing. So I
saw that in my manager.
I saw that just in the cultureinternally. And so that's why
even building Vimcal, we're veryminimalistic when it comes to we
(03:19):
have a lot of features, but whenyou just look at it, there's not
much, you know, going on. Wehide it away pretty well. We
have everything harmonized. Allthe features harmonized with
each other very well, and that'sreally something I took away
from my experience at Apple.
And, you know, once I graduated,I worked at a start up for about
6 months as a software engineer,and then we got acquired by
(03:39):
Twitter. Just
Kevin Horek (03:40):
Oh, wow. That was
John Li (03:40):
great. Time. Yeah. And so I was at Twitter Twitter for
2 years, in the heyday of the2016 election. So it's
Kevin Horek (03:49):
pretty crazy time. Interesting. Yeah. You got some
stories, I'm sure.
John Li (03:54):
I got some stories. I was brought on call once for,
some election related stuff.Can't really talk about it, but,
Yeah. Fair. It's very, veryinteresting.
And then in 2018, my cofounderand I decided to apply to YC.
Kevin Horek (04:10):
Okay. So how did you meet your cofounder before
you dive into that?
John Li (04:13):
Yes. That that's a great question. I should go I
should go back to that. So wewere actually buddies from
college. Oh, cool.
Okay. We met, I think, like, 13years ago now. Right. I think
playing basketball, and then weended up taking the same, I
think, electrical engineeringclass and partnered up. And we
liked working with each other somuch that we actually would
(04:34):
schedule the same computerscience classes because he was
also a computer science major.
Right. And we would be projectpartners. So I think I did half
of my major with him as myproject partner. So we've been
coding for, like, 4 or 5 yearsbefore we even started a
company.
Kevin Horek (04:49):
No. That's awesome. Okay. So did you go to
Icombinator with the VIM Calidea, or walk us through
applying to that and getting in?
John Li (04:57):
Yes. Absolutely not. It was a very different idea.
Kevin Horek (05:00):
Interesting.
John Li (05:02):
So I was at Twitter. He was, I think, a PM at Microsoft
at the time, and, you know, weloved our jobs. It was fun. It
was challenging, but it was, youknow, they were big companies,
so we had a little extra time onour hands. We could, play around
with new technologies.
So at the time, VR was gettingreally hot. Yeah. So on nights
(05:23):
and weekends, we just startedbuilding fun VR apps. And Okay.
The first half we builttogether, I'm really embarrassed
to say it was v VR beer pong.
Kevin Horek (05:32):
There's nothing wrong with that.
John Li (05:33):
20 year old, you know, guys, single guys. So we we
build VR beer pong for ourfriends and us to play. And then
around that time, ARKit fromApple came out, and we're like,
oh, we believe in AR, augmentedreality more than virtual
reality.
Kevin Horek (05:48):
Yeah. K.
John Li (05:49):
So we pivoted and decided to do an AR company. So
we applied once to y c, gotrejected, and then applied the
following batch and actually gotin.
Kevin Horek (06:02):
Okay.
John Li (06:03):
And, basically, the next day, we put in our 2 weeks
notice. And yeah. Since sincethen, we we got in with our AR
idea. We went to y c, and wewere ecstatic. We're on top of
the world.
And on the first day, ourpartner pulls us aside and says,
hey. We like you guys, but wedon't like your idea. So you
(06:26):
guys need to pivot or you shouldconsider pivot. Yeah. So that
was a really crushing momentthat, you know, being young and
dumb and at that time, it's your1st startup.
Your 1st startup, you're verystubborn about. I think once
you've done it for a while, yourealize that pivoting is
actually, like, a good thing alot of times. Yeah. But we were
just like, no. We're gonna stickthis to the end.
(06:48):
And basically halfway throughoutthe batch, with, like, 5 weeks
left to demo day, we just stuckto the AR idea and finally
decided to pivot because it wasjust going nowhere. Like, the
the AR market was so nascent.Right?
Kevin Horek (07:02):
Right.
John Li (07:02):
So there was just, like, no activity. There's no
daily usage of AR apps. So wepivoted mid batch to a fitness
company.
Kevin Horek (07:11):
And so
John Li (07:12):
we graduated YC, did demo day, did all those investor
meetings with a fitness companythat was 5 weeks old, no app, no
traction. Basically, we raised,like, a tiny amount from people
that just believed in us. Okay.And that next year after YC was,
like, I won't say the darkest,but definitely the most
(07:35):
difficult emotionally becausewe're just trying to make this
fitness idea work, and we tried,like, 5 different things in the
fitness space. You know, just togo back, it was first Twitch for
fitness, so live streamingfitness classes.
And then Right. Eventually, wepivoted to an app for improving
posture. We just tried a bunchof different things. We tried to
sell to companies, toindividuals. And then with just
(07:59):
a few months of runway left,we're we just decided, okay.
This is our last hurrah, solet's actually pivot to
something that we would useourselves.
Kevin Horek (08:09):
Okay. And so this
John Li (08:10):
would be the 2nd pivot, and the 3rd idea. So we try to
find a problem in our life, andwe try to find problems in our
friends' lives. And it justturns out that, you know, we're
fortunate enough for most peoplewe know don't really have that
many problems in our lives. Sowe actually thought about
problems at work that we had.And I remember when I was
(08:34):
fundraising for the fitnessidea, I was talking because it
was after YC demo day, you know,even if you have a mediocre
idea, you're gonna get a lot ofinvestor meetings Right.
Just because of the whole rush.And I was scheduling, like, 30
investor calls a week.
Kevin Horek (08:50):
Yeah. Oh,
John Li (08:50):
man. Doing it manually and just messing it up so badly.
Yeah. Because when you when youschedule an external meetings,
you have two choices. You do itmanually.
You type out, hey. Are you freeMonday at this time, Tuesday at
this time, Wednesday at thistime? You have to do the time
zone conversion by yourself,
Kevin Horek (09:09):
and that's the worst
John Li (09:10):
errors if you haven't done that before.
Kevin Horek (09:12):
Oh, I still screw it up sometimes when they're,
like, they're helping you.
John Li (09:17):
Yeah. Tell me about it. I mean, that's why I started a
company around it. Yeah. Yeah.
And your other option is to usesomething like a Calendly, like,
you know, one of those bookinglink apps. Yeah. But the problem
is there's a slight powerdynamic that people feel and a
lot of people don't talk about.When you give someone your
(09:37):
county link depending on who itis like, if you're giving it to
someone important, it kindafeels too transactional. Some
people call it rude.
I think most people don't care,to be honest, but you don't
wanna risk it. Right? If I'masking you an investor for
money, I don't wanna risk makingyou kinda, like, you know
Kevin Horek (09:55):
It looks like you're giving them, like, a
white glove service if youbasically say, like, I'm free
these times instead of just,like, here's a link. Have fun.
John Li (10:01):
Yeah. Here's my robot EA. Right? Like, you don't you
don't wanna do that. So I alwayssay, there's a power dynamic.
I would never give an investor aaccounting link, but they can
totally give it to me. That'sfine for both sides.
Kevin Horek (10:13):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. Interesting.
John Li (10:15):
And so because I didn't wanna use that, I was manually
booking, you know, 30 meetingsat the same time. I booked one
meeting at 4 AM on accidentbecause the person was, you
know, across the world. I doublebooked 2 or 3 meetings. I'm
pretty sure I lost at least onepotential investment because of
just my scheduling mayhem. Andso when we were thinking about
(10:37):
the next idea we were doing, wewanted to originally build the
best calendar for foundersfundraising.
So very niche, very specific.And we're just like, if we can
only solve that one use case, ifour goal is, like, you know, YC
demoed it, all the founders andall the investors are using VIM
Cal to just schedule with eachother, then, you know, we can go
(10:58):
from there. But that's kind ofour niche. So we launched, after
6 months of development, and wethought it was only gonna take
30 days, but it ended up taking6 months. You know?
Kevin Horek (11:10):
Just Yeah.
John Li (11:11):
That's how things go. Yep. We launched, and when we
launched, we had 50 days ofrunway. So it was
Kevin Horek (11:18):
Really interesting.
John Li (11:18):
Backing its wall, hail Mary. I remember we were at a an
office hour with 1 of our YCpartners with 2 you know, like a
week a month or 2 months beforelaunch, and we were just, like,
just so beaten down. And sokinda, like, not depressed, but
just, like, so sad and, like,alright. If this doesn't work,
(11:40):
we're going back to the jobmarket where it it this is it.
So we launched and we luckily,in the founder community, people
really liked it.
Sweet. And so we actually had meonboard every user over a 30
minute call.
Kevin Horek (11:59):
So again, it's type onboarding type thing?
John Li (12:03):
Superhuman type white glove, and people think it's
because, you know, we we wereour timeline was superhuman for
counter at the time, which is
Kevin Horek (12:09):
I remember that.
John Li (12:09):
Yeah. But it wasn't because we want to copy
superhumans because we literallyran out of time to implement a
self serve onboarding andpayments. So I had to do the
onboarding for every singleperson, and I had to ask at the
end. Alright. Here's a Stripeinvoice for $15, and I had to
watch them put the credit cardin because because I don't wanna
wait for them to do it overemail and things get lost.
(12:31):
Right? So I did that with thefirst 1,000 users.
Kevin Horek (12:35):
Thousand users. Wow. 1,000 users. That would
have taken a ton
John Li (12:39):
of time. And it got to the point and mind you, we
launched this a month beforeCOVID. So I was doing all this
during the lockdown. So I thinkit was, like, late January we
launched, and then mid March wasobviously locked down.
Kevin Horek (12:55):
Right.
John Li (12:55):
Interesting. And then the my calendar was just 8 AM to
5 PM, just 30 minute callsnonstop for, like, 6, 7 months.
And it actually got to a pointthat, I I did it's weird, but I
did so many calls. I actuallyended up, in the ER. Why?
And at that point, I'm like,okay. It's time to hire our
(13:16):
first person. So I would do thecalls on my bed because I was
sharing an apartment with 4people during COVID, so no one
could leave the house, whichmeant, like, if you were
working, you had to work in yourroom because everyone's on
calls. Everyone's workingremotely. Right.
And my back and my hips just gotso stiff that one time I went
(13:38):
for a run. I got really stiff,and then I sat down on a chair
and just ended up on the floorfor an hour. Wow. Yeah. Just
because, like, I wasn't moving.
I was just, like, curled up onmy bed 9 hours straight a day.
Yeah. Wow. So, yeah, that thattaught me to move my body more,
and, also, it's time to hire afirst employee.
Kevin Horek (14:00):
Fair enough. Okay. So walk us through how kind of
evolved. I wanna dive into youre a version. Like, walk us
through what how what it was andto what it is today because you
guys have added a ton of stuffover the last few years.
John Li (14:17):
Yeah. Yeah. We add a lot of features. So at the
beginning, we were reallyfocused on catering to people
who had a lot of externalmeetings. K.
And especially people with a lotof different types of, external
meetings. So for regular, youknow, work use cases, if you
(14:38):
don't have a lot of meetings,then a regular counter, like a
Google Calendar, Outlook Counteris fine. Yeah. Of course. But if
you do end up having a lot ofmeetings, a lot of people find
that they start needingsomething like a Calendly or,
you know, one one of thosebooking link apps.
Yeah. And that works really wellif you have one specific type of
meeting. Right? Like, Kevin, ifyou're just booking podcast
(14:59):
interviews or, that that's greatbecause it's one very specific
type for Yeah. Recruiters, forsalespeople, for customer
support.
It's really good because youhave one defined role, office
hours. But if you are, like, afounder or investor, you have,
you know, customers here. Youhave investors there. You have
legal meetings. You have allthese types of meetings.
(15:21):
One link doesn't work foreveryone, which is why when we
built them, we built it withthat flexibility where you can
send different times todifferent people like you're
doing it manually, but but itcomes with a booking link. So
you don't have to do any timezone conversion, any of that. So
you are putting guardrails onyour calendar, and you're
basically designing your week asyou go because you're offering
(15:43):
specific times to specificpeople, but with a booking link.
Kevin Horek (15:47):
Yeah. That's
John Li (15:48):
sweet. Yeah. So that so that is still a huge focus for
us, but we have, over the years,shifted focus to building out,
features for the entire team. Sonow we have a lot of features to
help you not only schedule, youknow, with all types of people,
but if you and your cofounder oryou and two members of the team
(16:11):
need to meet with someoneoutside, you can offer times to
them, and it will protect allthree of your calendars from
conflicts. Right?
So there's all these differentdynamics now. We have a lot of,
features for internal meeting.If you have 5 people that you
need to get together and they'rein different time zone, we just
find times for you reallyquickly and really easily. So I
(16:33):
think taking a step back, VIMCal is really, really focused
now on the work use case,whereas before it was a little
more general. And we're reallyfocused on people who have a lot
of meetings.
And if you have a lot ofmeetings, usually your team has
a lot of meetings. And so thatis kind of where we've
transitioned, into. But the coreuse case is there. It's for
(16:55):
sending billable. It's justscheduling meetings.
Now when we were doing all themanual onboardings, and we're
still doing a lot of manualonboardings. About 25% of our
users are going through anonboarding call still.
Kevin Horek (17:09):
How do you find that? Sorry to interrupt you,
but, like, there was kind ofobviously, that was a new thing
a few years ago when you weredoing it. Yep. More and more
companies have been kinda doingit. Like, what's your experience
with it, you know, becauseyou've been doing it for so
long?
Is it valuable? Is it notvaluable? It really depends.
Walk us through that.
John Li (17:28):
Yeah. I think our philosophy with users is to find
champions. It doesn't matterwhat stage you are. Like, yeah,
I I you know, it doesn't matterif we're gonna be a huge company
one day or, you know, if we'reday 30 after launch. You want to
create as many power users aspossible, And nothing compares
to getting on a 30 minute callwith someone to walk through the
(17:50):
app to answer every little, youknow, question that they have.
And when they leave that 30minutes, they're a pro. And
Yeah. They usually really likethe app. Right? You know,
obviously, if you've done a goodjob billing billing application.
And we see that conversion is,like, 3 times higher. Retention
(18:14):
is also much higher. Obviously,you can't do it at the same
scale, so it really depends onhow you qualify the users that
get on the call.
Kevin Horek (18:22):
Sure. Yeah. That makes sense.
John Li (18:24):
Yeah. But we've done tens of thousands of these calls
by now. So I would say that'ssomething that's core to our d r
DNA as a company. And you justlearned like, that I think
that's one reason why people saywe ship fast and ship fix as
fast is because we literally onthe calls, we see it. Sometimes,
(18:44):
I don't even have to ask us, andwe just go back and fix it in
the next 15 minutes.
Even even today, like, 4 yearsinto the journey. And we also
learn a lot about our customersand not just about their use
cases, but all, like, the the,intricacies of scheduling, like,
how they send emails when theyschedule. Like, all these little
things because they're sharingtheir screen and they're telling
(19:06):
us, oh, I like to use this appfor this reason, and here's how
I write an email to someone. Wejust see thousands and thousands
of examples. Right?
And that's why it's so valuable.And one of the learnings we made
was that executive assistantsare scheduling a ton, obviously,
for very important people, Andthere's nothing built for them,
(19:26):
which is Yeah. Mind boggling tome. Right? They are the elite of
the elite counter users.
We call them the Navy Seals ofcounter users. And we've since,
you know, early on, we've we'veknown that if we can build a
counter for EAs, we can build acounter for anyone. Yeah.
Kevin Horek (19:42):
Fair. Yeah. That's interesting. Okay. Keep going,
sir.
John Li (19:47):
An EA schedules nowadays for, like, I think on
average, 3 executives. These arevery busy people. These are
people with every meeting ishigh stakes. One mistake you get
yelled at, 2, you can get fired.Like, it's just so stressful.
They're also, like, you know,often very underpaid. And it's
just like, you're on call 247for multiple, like, really
(20:12):
driven vocal people, right, witha lot of power. So it's a very
stressful job, and we alwaysknew that we would you know,
from the calls, we learned thatwe would always build something
for them and that they reallyliked FIM Cal when they saw it.
But because they're schedulingon behalf of other people, the
product needed a few tweaks tomake delegation really work. So
(20:32):
Right.
About a year ago, we decided toplay around with the idea of an
app for EAs. And, yeah, just themore we've been going down that
route, the more our focus andour actually, I would say most
of our go to market strategiestoday is around EAs.
Kevin Horek (20:49):
Got it. Okay. That's interesting. Okay. So
maybe walk us through some ofthe other use cases, that you
found and and maybe give us somemore of the the features that,
you've added over the tie orover time and, people are
actually really loving andusing?
John Li (21:08):
Yeah. Excuse me. So VIM Cal has always been like, our
strong suit has always been forto help you send out times to
other people. But one thing I'mreally excited about and that
our users really loved was whensomeone sends you time, you have
to go back to the counter andcheck, okay, which one lines up.
Or if someone sends you, like, abooking link.
(21:29):
The cool thing now is that ifsomeone sends you a bunch of
times, you can just either copyand paste that into VIM Cal.
Like, you literally copy it,open VIM Cal, and just type
command v or control v, andwe'll just display those on your
calendar. So that's our AIfeature. That's cool.
Kevin Horek (21:44):
That's super helpful,
John Li (21:45):
actually. Screenshot it. Sorry?
Kevin Horek (21:47):
That's super helpful, actually.
John Li (21:49):
Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Because scheduling is
2 sided. Right?
You're not always the onesoffering times. 100%. So for the
other half, we wanna cater tothat too. And instead of copy
and paste it, you can also justscreenshot it and drag it in.
We'll do the same thing.
Sweet. Or if someone sends you,like, a link or a Calendly link,
you can just copy the URL andpaste it into VIM Calendly.
(22:09):
We'll just show you all thetimes from that link with the
duration, the time zone,everything. And, like,
everything is figured out foryou. So that's one thing I'm
really excited about.
Not yeah. We we added odd AIfeatures. Another AI feature we
added is that we enrichinformation about the people you
meet. So every meeting you havewill give you details about
(22:29):
their company. So if I see let'ssay you work at, I don't know,
airbnb.com.
Right? And, yep, I I have ameeting with you on my VIN Cal,
under your name, I will seeinformation about airbnb.com.
What it is, what they do. And,you know, for big companies,
it's I don't need to look at it,but if you're at a small startup
that Yeah. No one's ever heardof or, you know, if you're
(22:51):
you're an investor, then I canjust quickly see information
about your startup or your fund,which, you know, we we do a lot
of things in the background toget information about you, your
your company online.
And then we also enrich your theattendees' contacts. So what
that means is if, again, if I'mmeeting with you on my VIM Cal,
(23:13):
I will see your Twitter, yourLinkedIn, you know, any web
personal websites you have, andthat's just there. Which is why
people with a lot of externalmeetings also really like VIM
Cal because we do the researchfor you. We basically hand you a
dossier for every meeting youhave.
Kevin Horek (23:27):
Yeah. Which is super helpful. Right? Because
everybody like, yeah, doingresearch for it's just time
consuming. Right?
Like, it's not hard. Yeah. It'sjust being able to have it right
there. Oh, okay. Yep.
Yep. Okay. This is cool. Yeah.That's sweet, man.
John Li (23:39):
Yeah, exactly. And a lot of our users, they, they're
just in back to back meetingsall day, so they don't really
have the time to quickly jumpand, you know, look at look up
who they're meeting with rightbefore the call.
Kevin Horek (23:51):
Sure. No. That makes a lot of sense. I'm
curious. Any other features thatyou wanna cover that are kinda
set you guys apart from yourcompetition?
John Li (24:01):
Yeah. One thing that a lot of very, I would say so when
when you build a calendar, youfind different pockets of users
that I would really like to getfeedback. One is the really busy
pro you know, the the busyperson, the founder, the
investor. The other one is, Iwould say, the aesthetic user.
(24:25):
So the I I would say this islike design Twitter.
This is people who care a lotabout just to look and feel
because a calendar, unlikeemail, unlike spreadsheets, it's
a very visual, very, you know,very again, like, a very visual
tool. Right? And it's it's likea it's like a grid. There's a
lot of things happening. There'sa lot of colors.
(24:45):
There's a lot of buttons. It'salmost like a canvas more so
than, like, tables and rows andtext. Yeah. So Interesting.
People have a lot of input abouthow they wanted to look and
feel.
And a lot of times, it'sconflicting between the groups.
Kevin Horek (25:02):
Sure. I think what I sent you some of those. Yeah.
I mean,
John Li (25:06):
it's good. We're implementing them. So thanks
Kevin Horek (25:08):
for the feedback.
John Li (25:11):
One that I really like and that I just it makes me look
at the counter. Just it justmake gives me a happy feeling is
when you, when you have 2 of theidentical events on your
calendar so let's say I'mlooking up my coworker's
calendar, and we're both on thesame meeting. Yeah. In Google
Calendar and Outlook, you wouldjust see, 2 2 identical meetings
(25:34):
of the same color. Right?
What we do is we combine it into1, and we give you, like, a
beautiful gradient of the 2. Soit's like, if your counter is
blue and theirs is red and it'sthe same meeting, you'll see one
calendar, and it's like a blueto red gradient. It's just like
looks like a rainbow. Yourcounter just looks like a
rainbow. It's very appealing.
So that's, like, on theaesthetic side. We also cater to
(25:55):
these, like, I also, like,advanced calendar users by
allowing automatic color coding.So we have a tagging system in
VIM Cal where you can say, okay.Tag all of my external meetings,
with an external tag and thenautomatically color them green.
Tag any meeting with the word 1on 1 in the title and
(26:19):
automatically color it red.
Right? I have I have it asorange. Right? So there's all
these these ways you can justcolor code your calendar, and it
takes, like, 15 seconds to setup one of these rules. And then
at the end of each week, we sendyou a metrics report of your
calendar.
We'll tell you you had 20 hoursof meetings last week, 15 were
(26:42):
external, 5 were internal, andthen you spent 3 hours on 1 on
ones and 5 hours on recruiting.You you know, all
Kevin Horek (26:49):
Which is cool. Breakdown. Yeah. That's nice.
John Li (26:52):
It's super handy. Yeah. Yeah. At the end of the year, we
do something like a Spotifywrapped for your calendar. So a
whole annual, like, statistic ina cool, like, IG story flow.
We call it them how we want. Sothat's every December, and
people love that.
Kevin Horek (27:06):
Yeah. That's cool. No. Yeah. It's it's super
helpful, right, to have thatkind of stuff.
John Li (27:10):
Yeah.
Kevin Horek (27:11):
So I'm curious. You you covered some stuff really
early on that I think kindademystified some of the stuff.
Obviously, I think, like well, yCombinator is this, you know, YC
is probably still the mostpopular tech incubator. At least
top 3, top 2, doesn't matter.Like, you know, that's kind of
(27:33):
the pinnacle.
Right? And it's interesting tome that you came in with a
different idea. You pivotedthrough it. Like, it's not all
just like you have this idea,you get in there, you raise
1,000,000 of dollars, and, youknow, you IPO, and you're the
like, you went through what atraditional people in startups
(27:54):
kinda go through is, like, youstruggled a bit. Right?
And Yeah. I'm glad that youtalked about that. But what
other lessons have you learnedalong the way that you'd like to
kinda pass along to other peoplethat you've learned and if maybe
through some of the failures,which I I think everybody fails
all the time. Like, I think themost perfect example of this is,
like, Apple just said they'rethey're stopped doing the car.
(28:17):
Like, if one of the biggestcompanies ever can still fail,
like, everybody fails.
Right? Yep. Including Apple.
John Li (28:25):
Yep. Yeah. I think one lesson I've had to learn over
and over again k. Is notdoubling down and tripling down
on something that already workseven if it's a little bit. It's
like almost like you findsomething that works, whether
(28:48):
it's a marketing channel,whether it's a feature that you
just launched, and it works and,like, hooray.
Let's move on to the next thing.Like, I would go back and just
milk milk it till I can'tanymore if it works even a
little bit. Because when you'rerunning a startup, it's it's so
(29:10):
hard. You're you're buildingsomething and trying to push it
into the world and have it beused every day by people. Like,
people are bombarded with stuff.
Right? So it's just hard to findone little, like, wedge into
people's lives. And once you doThat's interesting. Like, widen
that wedge. Like, don't don't gosomewhere else and try to find
(29:30):
the next shiny object.
And so I would say early on, wewere pretty good at focusing on
people with a lot of meetings.Yeah. And I think maybe a year
or 2 in a lot of competitorscame out, and they were more I
would say they were more likethe focus on making things
really aesthetic. And so Ithink, you know, obviously, you
(29:52):
know, design is one of the toppriorities for any counter
company. But I would say becauseof that, we started focusing on
different users almost.
We kinda strayed away from ourcore user base, which is people
with a lot of meetings. And sowe would launch features that
really didn't help you if youhad a lot of meetings. And then
(30:15):
when we did launch features thatwere related to scheduling or,
you know, actually puttingmeetings on the calendar, they
worked. The launch went great,and, you know, we did a quick v
2 to fix some bugs, and that wasit. But we should have gone back
and just, like, added morefeatures, added more support
around it.
And so I would say the biglesson this year is that we're
just focusing on, like, 2 or 3things, and that's all we're
(30:39):
doing because we know that theywork. So one of them is our VIM
Cal Maestro product Yeah. Whichis the, the product for EAs. One
is just booking links. We'rejust gonna make our booking
links the best the gold standardof booking links.
And then, team features. Becausewe know that teams love using to
(31:00):
schedule with each other evenmore than individuals.
Kevin Horek (31:03):
Yeah. No. That makes total sense. The the
interesting thing that you saidthere too is like, okay. You're
building you built this productfor a specific type of user, and
then now you're starting to,like, go adjacent to that.
And what I mean by that is,like, now you're building, like,
an EA project product, which is,like, a different user, but it's
actually for the same user.Because, like, if I have an EA
(31:26):
that's scheduling my calendar,obviously, I'm getting my
calendar, but they're alsoscheduling into my calendar. So
it's like you're just wideningthe net. Right? And the other
thing that you're doing which isreally smart with that is it's
really hard to move to thecompetition if now 2 people are
using it, and then it goes to myteam.
(31:48):
And, like, just switching my ownpersonal calendar to another
competitor is a huge pain. Butif I have to move me, my EA, my
whole team, you're just, like,forget it. Right?
John Li (32:04):
Kevin, that's such a good insight that you just had.
And, well, when we started, wewere basically focused on
startups and younger companies,like, smaller companies.
Kevin Horek (32:14):
Sure.
John Li (32:14):
And you see we saw some of our users, like, they just
experienced hypergrowth, andthey got to a place a few years
later where the company was bigenough. The CEO was big, busy
enough where they need to hirean EA. And all of a sudden, the
person who's doing all theirown, scheduling, who was a power
power user of VIN Cal,basically, overnight does zero
(32:37):
scheduling anymore. And Yeah.They have the same meetings on
the calendar.
Right? It's not like they'reless busy. It's not like they
changed jobs. So the EA product,apart from the primary goal of
actually catering to EAs andmake them more productive, it's
also to graduate with our userbase because Yeah. It's the same
busy calendars that will needthat product.
(32:59):
It's just someone else is in thedriver's seat. And, and that's
the interesting part now isbecause now we're going up
market. Now we're targeting,like, Fortune 500, whereas
before, we were just TechTwitter. And so we kinda have a
2 pronged approach where whereit was, like, you have a
marketing strategy for more ofthe PLG bottoms up part using
(33:19):
just the VIM Cal product. Andthen we have, VIM Cal Maestro,
which is our EA product, andthat's more sales driven.
That's more trying to landentire teams of, like, 500 EAs,
yeah, companies. Right? And thengoing from there because once
you the the the key thing isonce you have, the EA on VIM
(33:41):
Cal, you basically also have theexecs calendar. And so the true
value is that, you know, if allof Fortune 500 is using VIM Cal
Maestro, so are these x.
Kevin Horek (33:52):
Well, yeah, the other thing too is you you need
to basically get one exec and orEA at a big company well, any
company really, and then the itjust spreads like wildfire.
Because if I can quickly getback to you, I send you the
link, Other busy people or theirEAs are gonna be like, how are
you doing this? And then it'slike, oh, you just use this app.
(34:15):
And then it's like, it just itjust snowballs from there.
Right?
Because let's be honest, if youcan automate and you can save
people time in building aproduct in any vertical, it's
it's worth the money. Like, I,like, I also pay for superhuman.
A lot of people are like, how doyou pay 30 well, it's like $40
Canadian a month for, basically,an email client. It's because I
(34:38):
hate email. Normally, I wasgetting back to people
sometimes, like, 2 or 3 weekslater.
And it's like, if I can get backto somebody within, you know, 24
to 48 hours compared to 3 weeks,it's it's worth it to me.
Because then I don't then I Ilike, it's it's like it just
makes my me look like like abetter human being to other
people if I'm getting back tothem right away. Right? So for
(35:01):
the dollar a day that it cost meor, like, cup more than that
Canadian, but you get what I'mgoing at. Like, people don't
think of it like that so much.
It's like, well, that'sexpensive for that. But it's
like, is it? Right? If it'ssaving you x amount of time and
it making you look notincompetent in a lot of cases.
Because, like, if I book a bunchof meetings and I book them all
(35:24):
at the same time or I mess withthe time zone, like, some people
forgive that and some people,like, it can wreck to your
points.
Like, you potentially lostinvestment because of it. And
sounds stupid, but it's notstupid. Right? Like, for the
cost of it, it's like it's a nobrainer, especially if you're
busy.
John Li (35:43):
Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, I I think people think about
pricing very in a very funny waybecause, like, oh, $30 is too
much for this, but then they'llturn around, pay $30 for
something completely Yeah.
Kevin Horek (35:55):
Un I'll buy a $7 latte at lunch. Yeah. I live in
John Li (35:59):
New York. Like, you walk out, it's $25
automatically. You step onto thesidewalk. Yeah. But, yeah, you
you yeah.
You you have a good point there.I do think that another lesson
we learned very, you know, closeto what you said is that niching
down just makes everythingeasier. When our when we decide
(36:21):
to launch the EA app and we justfocus on EAs, it is so much
easier not only to reach out tothem, to you know, all our
marketing and sales got easier.The product was just more
focused. Yeah.
And I would say that's similarto when we were unfocused with
the regular with the flagshipproduct, and then we decided to
(36:45):
refocus on people with a lot ofmeetings. The same thing
happened where it's just, like,all the marketing copy, all of
the all of our numbers, theretention, the trial conversion,
all went up because we're like,this is only for this type of
people. Right?
Kevin Horek (36:58):
Yeah. And you're solving a real pain. Those type
John Li (37:00):
of people, it's gonna work for people that don't have
a lot of meetings. Right? Like,the it Yeah. It's we're building
for the advanced use cases, themost complex use cases, of the
calendar. If you don't needsomething complicated, you have
the free options.
That's totally fine. But that'swhy people come to VIM count and
stay with VIM count. So nichingdown as much as you can. And,
like, sometimes you get it rightfrom the beginning, and then you
(37:23):
just forget and lose focus, andthen you have to, you know, kind
of, like, recenter. So at thebeginning, when our tag our goal
was the best calendar forfounders fundraising, that was
so focused and niche.
And somewhere along the way, westarted looking at, oh, should
we do some things for collegestudents and this and that. It's
just like, no. Come back tocenter.
Kevin Horek (37:45):
Yeah. That's actually really good advice in
itself. Right? Because it'sreally easy to start building
all these, like, verticals, and
John Li (37:53):
Yeah.
Kevin Horek (37:53):
It it's also hard it's also building into
verticals that, let's be honest,like, are see the value in
spending a bit of money to helpthem save a bunch of time.
Right? Because Yeah. Yourcollege student idea, it's like
I sometimes selling to maybebroke college students isn't
your best idea. Maybe it is,maybe it isn't.
(38:14):
Right? Mhmm. Where you can spenda ton of time chasing a vertical
where there's not a lot of,like, paying users in. Right?
John Li (38:22):
Yeah.
Kevin Horek (38:23):
Yeah. That's interesting.
John Li (38:24):
Yeah. And and we found that in the calendar space,
everyone loves a good calendar.But whether someone's willing to
pay for it is you know, there'sa, I think, a sharp contrast
between those groups. And so wefind that anyone we show them
to, they would wanna use it.Yeah.
(38:46):
I think the amount of peoplethat would use it if someone
else paid for it is much higherthan the amount of people that
do pay for it, which is why yousee every calendar startup that
comes out, they basically getacquired within a few years.
Right? No one really makes it asa calendar. And that's the
reason because the majority ofthe market has so many good free
(39:07):
options. And that's also why webuilt for the most complex use
cases for the people that arewilling to pay, the founders,
the investors, the EAs, theexecutives, the business owners,
agencies, people like yourself.
You might have clients at 5different companies, and you
need all those calendars on oneview. Right? All these cases are
really freaking difficult tobuild. And that is a mote for us
(39:32):
because we spent the time wetalked to tens of thousands of
people manually to get to thispoint.
Kevin Horek (39:37):
Yeah. No. Makes makes a lot of sense. So I wanna
cover platforms you're currentlysupporting and then what
platforms you're gonna supportkind of in the near future.
John Li (39:47):
Yeah. We currently support both Microsoft and
Google accounts for both our VIMCal and our VIM Cal, for EA
product. Yeah. And we supportiOS for mobile. K.
And then for the desktop app,you can use it on PC or Mac or
(40:08):
anywhere in browser. Yeah.Android is on a road map, and,
we hope to have, iCloudintegration in the future as
well.
Kevin Horek (40:19):
Interesting. You also have an iPad app too.
John Li (40:22):
We also have an iPad app. Yeah.
Kevin Horek (40:23):
I'm curious. Like, I have an iPhone and an Android
phone. I'm I'm curiousobviously, like, a lot of
companies release for iOS,first, and I get why they do it.
Like, is there actually a marketfor, like, a VIM Cal for, like,
Android? Like, is that a realyou like, are you getting that
(40:45):
request?
Because why I ask is becauseit's it's a lot of work to build
for, like, one platform, nevermind multiple platforms. And
just from people listening, youknow, that are thinking, like,
what do I do here? Like, whathave you actually found? Like,
it sounds like you've got therequest if you're building it,
but what's been your experienceand feedback from your users in
(41:06):
that space?
John Li (41:08):
Yeah. I was talking to another just fellow founder CEO
a while ago, and, he mentionedsomething that I can't forget.
He said I told him what I wasworking on. He's like, oh, you
have the mother of all TAMsbecause everyone and their
mothers use a calendar. Yep.
And any job, personal or work,you know, white color, blue
(41:31):
color, you need a calendar, youneed email. Those are kind of
the, you know, the bottom ofMaslow's hierarchy of work tools
or life tools. Right? Work andemail. Sorry.
Email and calendar. So, there'sabsolutely a big market in the
Android market.
Kevin Horek (41:48):
Sure. Just because of the user base.
John Li (41:50):
Just because of user base and just everyone needs a
calendar. Right? Everyone wantsa better calendar. I would say
that we do something very uniquewith our pricing where,
actually, our mobile app iscompletely free. So our iOS app
is completely free.
You can try the the desktopversion. You know, it's $15 a
month. And then if you try that,decide it's not for you, you
(42:13):
don't wanna pay for it, you canstill use the iOS app for free
forever. And so if we doAndroid, it would be the same
thing. So I do think we willhave a big market, and we we
have seen, like, a lot ofpeople, go back to using desktop
after iOS.
And our goal with the mobilecalendar is to build the
absolute best mobile calendarand give it out for free.
(42:33):
Because if I mean, I don'tyou've probably taken more time
than most people to look atcounters on the App Store.
Kevin Horek (42:40):
I've tried it all. Yeah. Everyone I've tried it
all.
John Li (42:44):
Good for work. Right?
Kevin Horek (42:45):
Terrible.
John Li (42:46):
The it's it's all really bad, and they're trying
to monetize it or they have adsor it just, like, doesn't load.
So we are trying to build thestate of the art mobile
calendar, and we are building itfor work. Like, I think VIM Cal
is still the only calendar inthe mobile app store where you
can look up a teammate'scalendar on your phone. Like
(43:07):
Yeah. I
Kevin Horek (43:08):
think so.
John Li (43:08):
Can't do that anywhere else. Right? It is just mind
boggling. Everything is kind ofdesigned for personal or family
life, not for work. Yep.
And so we're building it again.I've said this. I'm sound like a
broken record, but building thebest work calendar and giving it
out for free. So Android, wedefinitely want to do that as
well.
Kevin Horek (43:26):
Makes sense. Well and and maybe this is a bad
assumption. I'm assuming thatsome of the AEAs are running
Android phones just for whateverreason. Right? Not iPhones.
I'm assuming that. Have youfound that?
John Li (43:39):
Yes. We've also found that EAs do everything on the
computer. Just because
Kevin Horek (43:44):
it's Yeah.
John Li (43:45):
It's so so most people with mobile counters the mobile
counter is like a read onlydevice, like a platform
Kevin Horek (43:52):
for them.
John Li (43:52):
Like, they're just seeing what's coming up, what's
their day like. We've donethings where we made it very
easy to schedule on the go.Like, you can schedule NLP,
like, you know, coffee meetingtomorrow at 5 PM. We'll just put
it on your calendar. Yeah.
But EAs, because it's socomplex, like, they don't trust
the phone to schedule.
Kevin Horek (44:08):
That's actually really interesting advice
because and I would put myselfin this boat 99% of the time or
90% of the time. I always wantthe same features in a desktop
that are on a mobile experience.But the more and more
complicated some apps get, youalmost don't want some of those
(44:32):
things because if you screw itup on a phone in certain cases,
you don't you almost, like, haveto push them to the desktop. Or
you do, like, a simple version,and then maybe you have to
verify it or do something whenyou get back to your your
desktop. Right?
Because it's challenging or itcan be challenging. Right? You
(44:53):
know what you're trying to do.
John Li (44:54):
It it's funny. Most people will see a notification,
like, in their email
Kevin Horek (44:59):
Yeah.
John Li (44:59):
On their phone Yeah. And then wait till they get to a
computer to actually schedule ameeting.
Kevin Horek (45:04):
Yeah. Which is interesting. Right? Yeah. Just
from a user testing perspective,that's an that's a fascinating,
like, use case.
Right?
John Li (45:13):
Yeah. So one of our goals is to just remove all the
friction where to the pointwhere you're actually scheduling
the meeting on your phone. And Iwould say we probably we
probably make it, like, I wouldsay, 30% easier, but some people
just have hardwired habits.Yeah. That's
Kevin Horek (45:32):
fair. It's hard to break. Well, especially when if
your laptops are, like, rightnext to you, just like, ah, just
John Li (45:37):
grab it. But Exactly.
Kevin Horek (45:38):
Cool. But we're kinda coming to the end of the
show, but is there any otheradvice you'd like to pass along
to founders or something youwish you maybe learned earlier
on in your career?
John Li (45:51):
Yeah. I think I I've been doing this for 6 years now.
Yeah. I would just think if I'mthinking back to the first 2 or
3 years and the last 2 or 3 orlast 3 years, it does feel
different in the way mycofounder and I work and because
(46:15):
it's a very high stressenvironment. Sure.
Everything is high stakes. Everyit's just weird. Like,
everything feels like it's theend of the world if it doesn't
work even if, like, a button isa wrong shade of purple. Right?
Kevin Horek (46:29):
But You're also dealing with an interesting type
of clientele. Right? Like, youcan't really push buggy software
because if you delete one oftheir meetings, for example, by
accident Yeah. With, like, acode push Yeah. Like, you're
gonna hear about it.
John Li (46:45):
The calendar is the most, I would say, pristine app
you use and that there's notypos. Nothing is wrong.
Everything is put on therecorrectly the first try. And
Yeah. Unlike your email, whichmight have typos, your notes app
just has a bunch of junk thatyou never look at.
Right? Your counter is pristinebecause it holds, like,
(47:08):
important information with otherpeople that you don't really
know well. Yeah. Yeah. Becauseof that, just everything feels
really high stakes.
And you have bug reportssometimes. They're like, oh,
this meeting is gone. Thismeeting is deleted. It happens
very rarely. It happened more inthe beginning here and there.
But Sure. The accuracy of yourcalendar at all times is
something that we've reallyhoned throughout the years. But
(47:29):
I I would say, you know, lookingback at what's different the
first few years and now is that,I feel like at the beginning, we
were just trying to doeverything, and everything felt
really rushed. And, like, wefelt like we had to work 9 AM to
9 PM nonstop. Otherwise, weweren't it was just, like, all
these, like, preconceivednotions.
Yeah. Whereas, you know, part ofit is learning along the
(47:50):
journey, but now it just feelslike we're doing way more even
if I'm working less hours, evenif I'm not feeling rushed or
stressed. If I'm not feelingrushed or stressed, if I'm
relaxed, before I would havebeen like, okay. That means
you're not doing enough. But nowit's like, okay.
This is the steady state. Thisis equilibrium. And think part
of it is you just have to gothrough it and learn it. Like, I
(48:12):
can I can tell you these things,but, focus on going fast, not on
rushing? And Yeah.
Being fast and rushing throughthings look very similar, but
it's there's a huge difference.Like, you don't have to be
stressed all the time to beproductive, and you don't have
to have a 20 item to do list forevery day. Right? A 2 item to do
(48:37):
list could probably grow yourbusiness more.
Kevin Horek (48:41):
Yeah. That's actually really good advice. I'm
curious then. What's your QAprocess like?
John Li (48:47):
Yeah. We have a few so when we build any new feature,
we do this thing called 5075100.Okay. So, you know, our designer
and, usually my cofounder and Iare, like, the quote, unquote
PMs. Yeah.
We'll talk about the featureitself, design it right out of
spec, and then it goes to anengineer. And then we found that
(49:11):
maybe this is because we're asmall company and we're still
learning, but we found thatsometimes things in the spec
might get understood differentlyby the engineer even if we've
had a meeting about it. So we doa 50% check when, like, you
know, the code is barelyworking, and we just all get
together and we just see, okay.Are you going in the right
direction? Are you maybe oh, didyou misconstrue this this word
(49:32):
the wrong way so that theengineer doesn't, like, spend 2
days doing something that wedidn't mean them to do?
And so we do a 50% check-in anda 50 75% check-in and then
basically, like, a 100%check-in, which is when it's
ready to demo. And then we'llget a war room together. We we
call it a war room, but it'sbasically, like, 3, 4 people get
(49:55):
together and actually just tryto break it, and break the app.
And then, you know, we gostaging production, and after
production, we do some moretesting. But because of because
we onboard the users from theearly days, manually, we have
just a habit of talking to ourusers, getting on calls with
(50:17):
them.
So if anyone has a bug, like, weusually respond within you know?
You you get a response almostimmediately from our team if you
support it, if you put in aticket. And then we're the
engineering and the customersupport are like one.
Kevin Horek (50:33):
Yeah. Especially when you're seeing people use
the app. Like, you're almosttesting your app while you're
demoing the app and getonboarding them. Right? Which is
an actually really interestinguse case for, like, doing that
hand holding onboarding, right,in itself.
Yeah.
John Li (50:47):
We don't need user interviews. Just Yeah. New users
will tell us.
Kevin Horek (50:51):
Yeah. You're doing user research on top of that at
the same time. That'sinteresting. That's a good
reason to do the onboarding theway you guys
John Li (50:58):
are doing the onboarding. The onboarding is
the one thing that fixes, like,10 other things.
Kevin Horek (51:03):
Yeah.
John Li (51:04):
It's a little painful, but just just do it. Especially
at the early stages, just do it.You don't have to do it later if
you don't want, but just just doit.
Kevin Horek (51:12):
No. I I think that's actually really good
advice, but how about we closewith mentioning where people can
get more information aboutyourself, VIM Cal, and any other
links you wanna mention?
John Li (51:20):
Yeah. You can find out about VIM Cal at vimcal.com,
vimcal. You can learn about ourEA product atvimcal.com/ea. And,
yeah, you can find me on Twitteror LinkedIn. My Twitter is very
hard to spell, so I will leaveit for the show notes.
Kevin Horek (51:41):
Perfect. Alright. Thanks, man. Well, I really
appreciate you taking the timeout of your day to be on the
show, and I look forward tokeeping in touch with you, and
have a good rest of your day.
John Li (51:48):
Awesome. Thank you so much, Kevin. This was really
fun.
Kevin Horek (51:50):
Thank you. Take care.
Intro / Outro (51:51):
Bye. Thanks for listening. Please visit our
website at building the futureshow dot com to join the free
community. Sign up for ournewsletter or to sponsor the
show. The music is done byElectric Mantra.
You can check him out atelectricmantra.com and keep
building the future.
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com