Ask IH: Is my technology worthless?
I've been building a calendar bot that executes tasks from Google Calendar events: https://calpal.landen.co/
I'm feeling discouraged because, while this idea seems novel and the technology non-trivial, I'm not sure how to market the idea. Maybe nobody actually wants this.
What do you think? How can I find an audience for this, and ideally an audience who would pay?
Cheers,
Nah, don’t think so. Even in “boring” areas like scheduling, tools like Wellpin show people still want simpler ways to plan meetings. There’s always space to improve.
Oh i would love to see this integrate with stuff like twitter and facebook to schedule posts compared to be using something like buffer :)
Awesome! That sounds like a great use case. I'm not really familiar with this space though - do you mind explaining why specifically you would use this over Buffer?
I think the simplicity, and the fact that it could potentially combine more things. As an example, my mom has a small business. If i could connect it to her Facebook and something twillio, I could automate things like sending messages out like merry Christmas, the clinic is closed from here the there. Or on a more personal note on my own projects I would use it to plan ahead tweets for new things on my websites.
It’s just that I already have an calendar I use for planning my work and tasks, so it would be great to also use it for when the tasks are done ✅ It is just a general flow that I would plan to write an article or make a playlist, and then share it on social platforms afterwards. And hoot suite and buffer have their own calendars. Just nice to make it simple by having a single calendar for all of it.
Also when I was working in larger corporations, we had a lot of weekly meetings. We used google calendar to plan a weekly event. But people where on slack and not so much on the email if they where devs. So it would make sense to sync those things to slack to remind people.
I just really like the product you’ve made. And with a handful of more integrations, it could really expand the developer use cases (I’m a dev myself) and make the calendar a useful replacement for some of the tedious tasks that are now handled by products that are targeted specific audiences. Which in turn means it’s so many different tools that makes up running a business.
I think it would make a much more fair pricing point by nature as calendars are naturally made to be shared, where most sass products are prices per user and not the usage. In an organization this means that the knowledge of where and when things will occur is freely available to everyone who has access to the calendar, which is often everyone in the organization. Where with most other tools it requires invitations and a talk with the it department about why it’s important enough to grant more people access for them to spend more money .
So I see a lot of nice side effects from your tool :)
I think the integration with the calendar is pretty neat, but don't most IT & Engineer teams rely on cron, jenkins, rundeck, or any other cron management tool?
Right, I think they do. It's why I'm not sure who to market to - seems like it should be nontechnical people, but I'm not sure for what.
Post to HN. They like this kind of geeky stuff, and if you hit front page the traffic is decent. The landing page is not great fit for that audience tho, IMO.
I like it. I think if you're going to consumers, you are going to have to find all the specific uses, and then sell those. And that's a loooong road. Going to Enterprise or almost-Enterprise in sales-mode with use cases in hand, explaining how it solves a problem, is probably a faster route to earning on it.
Hi Jon! This seems like a good B2B product for devs or people with the capability to automate more through the webhook API feature. Just throwing out ideas, but in the tech/startup world this could be good for engineering managers (devOps teams specifically?) if there is clear value to them automating tasks. If possible, maybe it could tie into other services such as Slack & JIRA for easy automated tracking of the tasks if they fail or something. Others like product/project managers & senior leaders may appreciate the ability to simply create events when they need to & get certain repetitive tasks kicked off.
Maybe you can reach out to dev friends to explore how their companies handle tasks that come up often, like new deployments & stuff. Maybe check with past employers or think about your own experience with repetitive tasks in the workplace that could be made easier with CalPal.
Hope any of those ideas help! I think the GitHub & webhook features are really cool for exploring more possibilities with CalPal.
All the best!
Cheers, thanks for the detailed post. Are you a dev by chance, and can you think of a specific way you would use this?
On my current dev team for example, we would maybe use it as a quick display for our routine automations (daily backups, test runs, deployments). But it seems to not solve a big a problem for us specifically.
I am a dev, but I also wonder what other user types you can explore. I see you use the example of "publish weekly reports", that sounds like something an employee would set up for their boss or senior leader. Maybe devs are just the creators of automation for the benefit of their bosses.
One example of some automation at my last company was language localization using one service's API & Github to check diffs, but not everyone knew that and would always ask updates at random times. So you could schedule updates for something like this that automatically sends emails to interested parties with latest updates saving time for devs & other parties involved.