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AM/FM RADIO/PODCAST & TV SHOW
With millions of listeners a month, Building the Future has quickly become one of the fastest rising nationally syndicated programs. With a focus on interviewing startups, entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, and more, the show showcases individuals who are realizing their dreams and helping to make our world a better place through technology and innovation.
Welcome to Building the Future, hosted by Kevin Horek. With millions of listeners a month, Building the Future has quickly become one of the fastest rising programs with a focus on interviewing startups, entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, and more. The radio and TV show airs in 15 markets across the globe, including Silicon Valley. For full showtimes, past episodes, or to sponsor the show, please visit building the future show dot com.
Kevin Horek:Welcome back to the show. Today, we have John Lee. He's the cofounder and CEO at VIM Cal. John, welcome to the show.
John Li:Thanks for having me, Kevin.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. I'm excited to have you on the show. I've been using VIM Cal for a number of years now. I think what you guys are building there is actually really innovative and cool. But maybe before we dive into all that, let's get to know you a little bit better and start off with where you grew up.
John Li:Yeah. I was born in Montreal, Canada.
Kevin Horek:Oh, very cool.
John Li:Yeah. I've been in Canada for ages. Yeah. Fellow Canadian. And I moved to the Bay area in California when I was 8.
Kevin Horek:Okay.
John Li:So from the ages of 8 to 30, I was basically in California. I had my formative years there. And, yeah, now I'm in New York.
Kevin Horek:Okay. So you went to university. What did you take and why?
John Li: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. I studied computer science, business, and French.
John Li:Oh, interesting. Okay. Computer science and business because those are probably things I wanted to do for work, but I had no idea which one, so I kept switching majors. And then France was because I grew up in Montreal, so French was actually my first language. It got a little rusty, so I wanted to just, you know, improve it again.
John Li:But, yeah, I graduated in 2015, and since then, it's just been, straight into tech.
Kevin Horek:Very cool. So walk us through your career, getting into Y Combinator, and then let's dive into how you came up with the idea for VIM Cal and what exactly it is.
John Li:Yeah. So in college, I had an internship at Apple, which I would say solidified a lot of the philosophies I have now, running a company. Can
Kevin Horek:you give us some examples? Sorry to cut you off.
John Li:Yeah. Yeah. My first year there, I think, was the last year that Steve Jobs was there. So, it was
Kevin Horek:Did you get to meet him?
John Li:We were supposed to have a I think an all hands for the intern class that year, but he was sick, unfortunately. Oh, that sucks. It was like 3 months before he passed. But Right. Yeah.
John Li:Just just basically, missed him. I would say some of the lessons I took away was just product first. You gotta be hyper focused on product. And then everyone around me was very good at pruning, just like subtracting in terms of getting having more focus on the 1 or 2 things you should be doing. So I saw that in my manager.
John Li:I saw that just in the culture internally. And so that's why even building Vimcal, we're very minimalistic when it comes to we have a lot of features, but when you just look at it, there's not much, you know, going on. We hide it away pretty well. We have everything harmonized. All the features harmonized with each other very well, and that's really something I took away from my experience at Apple.
John Li: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 Twitter. Just
Kevin Horek:Oh, wow. That was
John Li:great. Time. Yeah. And so I was at Twitter Twitter for 2 years, in the heyday of the 2016 election. So it's
Kevin Horek:pretty crazy time. Interesting. Yeah. You got some stories, I'm sure.
John Li: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, very interesting.
John Li:And then in 2018, my cofounder and I decided to apply to YC.
Kevin Horek:Okay. So how did you meet your cofounder before you dive into that?
John Li:Yes. That that's a great question. I should go I should go back to that. So we were actually buddies from college. Oh, cool.
John Li:Okay. We met, I think, like, 13 years ago now. Right. I think playing basketball, and then we ended up taking the same, I think, electrical engineering class and partnered up. And we liked working with each other so much that we actually would schedule the same computer science classes because he was also a computer science major.
John Li:Right. And we would be project partners. So I think I did half of my major with him as my project partner. So we've been coding for, like, 4 or 5 years before we even started a company.
Kevin Horek:No. That's awesome. Okay. So did you go to Icombinator with the VIM Cal idea, or walk us through applying to that and getting in?
John Li:Yes. Absolutely not. It was a very different idea.
Kevin Horek:Interesting.
John Li:So I was at Twitter. He was, I think, a PM at Microsoft at the time, and, you know, we loved our jobs. It was fun. It was challenging, but it was, you know, they were big companies, so we had a little extra time on our hands. We could, play around with new technologies.
John Li:So at the time, VR was getting really hot. Yeah. So on nights and weekends, we just started building fun VR apps. And Okay. The first half we built together, I'm really embarrassed to say it was v VR beer pong.
Kevin Horek:There's nothing wrong with that.
John Li:20 year old, you know, guys, single guys. So we we build VR beer pong for our friends and us to play. And then around that time, ARKit from Apple came out, and we're like, oh, we believe in AR, augmented reality more than virtual reality.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. K.
John Li:So we pivoted and decided to do an AR company. So we applied once to y c, got rejected, and then applied the following batch and actually got in.
Kevin Horek:Okay.
John Li:And, basically, the next day, we put in our 2 weeks notice. And yeah. Since since then, we we got in with our AR idea. We went to y c, and we were ecstatic. We're on top of the world.
John Li:And on the first day, our partner pulls us aside and says, hey. We like you guys, but we don't like your idea. So you guys need to pivot or you should consider pivot. Yeah. So that was a really crushing moment that, you know, being young and dumb and at that time, it's your 1st startup.
John Li:Your 1st startup, you're very stubborn about. I think once you've done it for a while, you realize that pivoting is actually, like, a good thing a lot of times. Yeah. But we were just like, no. We're gonna stick this to the end.
John Li:And basically halfway throughout the batch, with, like, 5 weeks left to demo day, we just stuck to the AR idea and finally decided to pivot because it was just going nowhere. Like, the the AR market was so nascent. Right?
Kevin Horek:Right.
John Li:So there was just, like, no activity. There's no daily usage of AR apps. So we pivoted mid batch to a fitness company.
Kevin Horek:And so
John Li:we graduated YC, did demo day, did all those investor meetings with a fitness company that 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 difficult emotionally because we're just trying to make this fitness idea work, and we tried, like, 5 different things in the fitness space. You know, just to go back, it was first Twitch for fitness, so live streaming fitness classes.
John Li:And then Right. Eventually, we pivoted to an app for improving posture. We just tried a bunch of different things. We tried to sell to companies, to individuals. And then with just a few months of runway left, we're we just decided, okay.
John Li:This is our last hurrah, so let's actually pivot to something that we would use ourselves.
Kevin Horek:Okay. And so this
John Li:would be the 2nd pivot, and the 3rd idea. So we try to find a problem in our life, and we try to find problems in our friends' lives. And it just turns out that, you know, we're fortunate enough for most people we know don't really have that many problems in our lives. So we actually thought about problems at work that we had. And I remember when I was fundraising for the fitness idea, 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 of investor meetings Right.
John Li:Just because of the whole rush. And I was scheduling, like, 30 investor calls a week.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. Oh,
John Li:man. Doing it manually and just messing it up so badly. Yeah. Because when you when you schedule an external meetings, you have two choices. You do it manually.
John Li:You type out, hey. Are you free Monday at this time, Tuesday at this time, Wednesday at this time? You have to do the time zone conversion by yourself,
Kevin Horek:and that's the worst
John Li:errors if you haven't done that before.
Kevin Horek:Oh, I still screw it up sometimes when they're, like, they're helping you.
John Li:Yeah. Tell me about it. I mean, that's why I started a company around it. Yeah. Yeah.
John Li:And your other option is to use something like a Calendly, like, you know, one of those booking link apps. Yeah. But the problem is there's a slight power dynamic that people feel and a lot of people don't talk about. When you give someone your county link depending on who it is like, if you're giving it to someone important, it kinda feels too transactional. Some people call it rude.
John Li:I think most people don't care, to be honest, but you don't wanna risk it. Right? If I'm asking you an investor for money, I don't wanna risk making you kinda, like, you know
Kevin Horek:It looks like you're giving them, like, a white glove service if you basically say, like, I'm free these times instead of just, like, here's a link. Have fun.
John Li:Yeah. Here's my robot EA. Right? Like, you don't you don't wanna do that. So I always say, there's a power dynamic.
John Li:I would never give an investor a accounting link, but they can totally give it to me. That's fine for both sides.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes sense. Interesting.
John Li:And so because I didn't wanna use that, I was manually booking, you know, 30 meetings at the same time. I booked one meeting at 4 AM on accident because the person was, you know, across the world. I double booked 2 or 3 meetings. I'm pretty sure I lost at least one potential investment because of just my scheduling mayhem. And so when we were thinking about the next idea we were doing, we wanted to originally build the best calendar for founders fundraising.
John Li:So very niche, very specific. And we're just like, if we can only solve that one use case, if our goal is, like, you know, YC demoed it, all the founders and all the investors are using VIM Cal to just schedule with each other, then, you know, we can go from there. But that's kind of our niche. So we launched, after 6 months of development, and we thought it was only gonna take 30 days, but it ended up taking 6 months. You know?
Kevin Horek:Just Yeah.
John Li:That's how things go. Yep. We launched, and when we launched, we had 50 days of runway. So it was
Kevin Horek:Really interesting.
John Li:Backing its wall, hail Mary. I remember we were at a an office hour with 1 of our YC partners with 2 you know, like a week a month or 2 months before launch, and we were just, like, just so beaten down. And so kinda, like, not depressed, but just, like, so sad and, like, alright. If this doesn't work, we're going back to the job market where it it this is it. So we launched and we luckily, in the founder community, people really liked it.
John Li:Sweet. And so we actually had me onboard every user over a 30 minute call.
Kevin Horek:So again, it's type onboarding type thing?
John Li:Superhuman type white glove, and people think it's because, you know, we we were our timeline was superhuman for counter at the time, which is
Kevin Horek:I remember that.
John Li:Yeah. But it wasn't because we want to copy superhumans because we literally ran out of time to implement a self serve onboarding and payments. So I had to do the onboarding for every single person, and I had to ask at the end. Alright. Here's a Stripe invoice for $15, and I had to watch them put the credit card in because because I don't wanna wait for them to do it over email and things get lost.
John Li:Right? So I did that with the first 1,000 users.
Kevin Horek:Thousand users. Wow. 1,000 users. That would have taken a ton
John Li:of time. And it got to the point and mind you, we launched this a month before COVID. So I was doing all this during the lockdown. So I think it was, like, late January we launched, and then mid March was obviously locked down.
Kevin Horek:Right.
John Li:Interesting. And then the my calendar was just 8 AM to 5 PM, just 30 minute calls nonstop for, like, 6, 7 months. And it actually got to a point that, I I did it's weird, but I did so many calls. I actually ended up, in the ER. Why?
John Li:And at that point, I'm like, okay. It's time to hire our first person. So I would do the calls on my bed because I was sharing an apartment with 4 people during COVID, so no one could leave the house, which meant, like, if you were working, you had to work in your room because everyone's on calls. Everyone's working remotely. Right.
John Li:And my back and my hips just got so stiff that one time I went for a run. I got really stiff, and then I sat down on a chair and just ended up on the floor for an hour. Wow. Yeah. Just because, like, I wasn't moving.
John Li:I was just, like, curled up on my bed 9 hours straight a day. Yeah. Wow. So, yeah, that that taught me to move my body more, and, also, it's time to hire a first employee.
Kevin Horek:Fair enough. Okay. So walk us through how kind of evolved. I wanna dive into your e a version. Like, walk us through what how what it was and to what it is today because you guys have added a ton of stuff over the last few years.
John Li:Yeah. Yeah. We add a lot of features. So at the beginning, we were really focused on catering to people who had a lot of external meetings. K.
John Li:And especially people with a lot of different types of, external meetings. So for regular, you know, work use cases, if you don't have a lot of meetings, then a regular counter, like a Google Calendar, Outlook Counter is fine. Yeah. Of course. But if you do end up having a lot of meetings, a lot of people find that they start needing something like a Calendly or, you know, one one of those booking link apps.
John Li:Yeah. And that works really well if you have one specific type of meeting. Right? Like, Kevin, if you're just booking podcast interviews or, that that's great because it's one very specific type for Yeah. Recruiters, for salespeople, for customer support.
John Li:It's really good because you have one defined role, office hours. But if you are, like, a founder or investor, you have, you know, customers here. You have investors there. You have legal meetings. You have all these types of meetings.
John Li:One link doesn't work for everyone, which is why when we built them, we built it with that flexibility where you can send different times to different people like you're doing it manually, but but it comes with a booking link. So you don't have to do any time zone conversion, any of that. So you are putting guardrails on your calendar, and you're basically designing your week as you go because you're offering specific times to specific people, but with a booking link.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. That's
John Li: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. So now we have a lot of features to help you not only schedule, you know, with all types of people, but if you and your cofounder or you and two members of the team need to meet with someone outside, you can offer times to them, and it will protect all three of your calendars from conflicts. Right?
John Li:So there's all these different dynamics now. We have a lot of, features for internal meeting. If you have 5 people that you need to get together and they're in different time zone, we just find times for you really quickly and really easily. So I think taking a step back, VIM Cal is really, really focused now on the work use case, whereas before it was a little more general. And we're really focused on people who have a lot of meetings.
John Li:And if you have a lot of meetings, usually your team has a lot of meetings. And so that is kind of where we've transitioned, into. But the core use case is there. It's for sending billable. It's just scheduling meetings.
John Li:Now when we were doing all the manual onboardings, and we're still doing a lot of manual onboardings. About 25% of our users are going through an onboarding call still.
Kevin Horek:How do you find that? Sorry to interrupt you, but, like, there was kind of obviously, that was a new thing a few years ago when you were doing it. Yep. More and more companies have been kinda doing it. Like, what's your experience with it, you know, because you've been doing it for so long?
Kevin Horek:Is it valuable? Is it not valuable? It really depends. Walk us through that.
John Li:Yeah. I think our philosophy with users is to find champions. It doesn't matter what stage you are. Like, yeah, I I you know, it doesn't matter if we're gonna be a huge company one day or, you know, if we're day 30 after launch. You want to create as many power users as possible, And nothing compares to getting on a 30 minute call with someone to walk through the app to answer every little, you know, question that they have.
John Li:And when they leave that 30 minutes, they're a pro. And Yeah. They usually really like the app. Right? You know, obviously, if you've done a good job billing billing application.
John Li:And we see that conversion is, like, 3 times higher. Retention is also much higher. Obviously, you can't do it at the same scale, so it really depends on how you qualify the users that get on the call.
Kevin Horek:Sure. Yeah. That makes sense.
John Li:Yeah. But we've done tens of thousands of these calls by now. So I would say that's something that's core to our d r DNA as a company. And you just learned like, that I think that's one reason why people say we ship fast and ship fix as fast is because we literally on the calls, we see it. Sometimes, I don't even have to ask us, and we just go back and fix it in the next 15 minutes.
John Li:Even even today, like, 4 years into the journey. And we also learn a lot about our customers and not just about their use cases, but all, like, the the, intricacies of scheduling, like, how they send emails when they schedule. Like, all these little things because they're sharing their screen and they're telling us, oh, I like to use this app for this reason, and here's how I write an email to someone. We just see thousands and thousands of examples. Right?
John Li:And that's why it's so valuable. And one of the learnings we made was that executive assistants are scheduling a ton, obviously, for very important people, And there's nothing built for them, which is Yeah. Mind boggling to me. Right? They are the elite of the elite counter users.
John Li:We call them the Navy Seals of counter users. And we've since, you know, early on, we've we've known that if we can build a counter for EAs, we can build a counter for anyone. Yeah.
Kevin Horek:Fair. Yeah. That's interesting. Okay. Keep going, sir.
John Li:An EA schedules nowadays for, like, I think on average, 3 executives. These are very busy people. These are people with every meeting is high stakes. One mistake you get yelled at, 2, you can get fired. Like, it's just so stressful.
John Li:They're also, like, you know, often very underpaid. And it's just like, you're on call 247 for multiple, like, really driven vocal people, right, with a lot of power. So it's a very stressful job, and we always knew that we would you know, from the calls, we learned that we would always build something for them and that they really liked FIM Cal when they saw it. But because they're scheduling on behalf of other people, the product needed a few tweaks to make delegation really work. So Right.
John Li:About a year ago, we decided to play around with the idea of an app for EAs. And, yeah, just the more we've been going down that route, the more our focus and our actually, I would say most of our go to market strategies today is around EAs.
Kevin Horek:Got it. Okay. That's interesting. Okay. So maybe walk us through some of the other use cases, that you found and and maybe give us some more of the the features that, you've added over the tie or over time and, people are actually really loving and using?
John Li:Yeah. Excuse me. So VIM Cal has always been like, our strong suit has always been for to help you send out times to other people. But one thing I'm really excited about and that our users really loved was when someone sends you time, you have to go back to the counter and check, okay, which one lines up. Or if someone sends you, like, a booking link.
John Li:The cool thing now is that if someone sends you a bunch of times, you can just either copy and paste that into VIM Cal. Like, you literally copy it, open VIM Cal, and just type command v or control v, and we'll just display those on your calendar. So that's our AI feature. That's cool.
Kevin Horek:That's super helpful,
John Li:actually. Screenshot it. Sorry?
Kevin Horek:That's super helpful, actually.
John Li:Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Because scheduling is 2 sided. Right?
John Li:You're not always the ones offering times. 100%. So for the other half, we wanna cater to that too. And instead of copy and paste it, you can also just screenshot it and drag it in. We'll do the same thing.
John Li:Sweet. Or if someone sends you, like, a link or a Calendly link, you can just copy the URL and paste it into VIM Calendly. We'll just show you all the times from that link with the duration, the time zone, everything. And, like, everything is figured out for you. So that's one thing I'm really excited about.
John Li:Not yeah. We we added odd AI features. Another AI feature we added is that we enrich information about the people you meet. So every meeting you have will give you details about their company. So if I see let's say you work at, I don't know, airbnb.com.
John Li:Right? And, yep, I I have a meeting with you on my VIN Cal, under your name, I will see information 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 heard of or, you know, if you're you're an investor, then I can just quickly see information about your startup or your fund, which, you know, we we do a lot of things in the background to get information about you, your your company online.
John Li:And then we also enrich your the attendees' contacts. So what that means is if, again, if I'm meeting with you on my VIM Cal, I will see your Twitter, your LinkedIn, you know, any web personal websites you have, and that's just there. Which is why people with a lot of external meetings also really like VIM Cal because we do the research for you. We basically hand you a dossier for every meeting you have.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. Which is super helpful. Right? Because everybody like, yeah, doing research for it's just time consuming. Right?
Kevin Horek:Like, it's not hard. Yeah. It's just being able to have it right there. Oh, okay. Yep.
Kevin Horek:Yep. Okay. This is cool. Yeah. That's sweet, man.
John Li:Yeah, exactly. And a lot of our users, they, they're just in back to back meetings all day, so they don't really have the time to quickly jump and, you know, look at look up who they're meeting with right before the call.
Kevin Horek:Sure. No. That makes a lot of sense. I'm curious. Any other features that you wanna cover that are kinda set you guys apart from your competition?
John Li:Yeah. One thing that a lot of very, I would say so when when you build a calendar, you find different pockets of users that I would really like to get feedback. One is the really busy pro you know, the the busy person, the founder, the investor. The other one is, I would say, the aesthetic user. So the I I would say this is like design Twitter.
John Li:This is people who care a lot about just to look and feel because a calendar, unlike email, unlike spreadsheets, it's a very visual, very, you know, very again, like, a very visual tool. Right? And it's it's like a it's like a grid. There's a lot of things happening. There's a lot of colors.
John Li:There's a lot of buttons. It's almost like a canvas more so than, like, tables and rows and text. Yeah. So Interesting. People have a lot of input about how they wanted to look and feel.
John Li:And a lot of times, it's conflicting between the groups.
Kevin Horek:Sure. I think what I sent you some of those. Yeah. I mean,
John Li:it's good. We're implementing them. So thanks
Kevin Horek:for the feedback.
John Li:One that I really like and that I just it makes me look at the counter. Just it just make gives me a happy feeling is when you, when you have 2 of the identical events on your calendar so let's say I'm looking up my coworker's calendar, and we're both on the same meeting. Yeah. In Google Calendar and Outlook, you would just see, 2 2 identical meetings of the same color. Right?
John Li:What we do is we combine it into 1, and we give you, like, a beautiful gradient of the 2. So it's like, if your counter is blue and theirs is red and it's the same meeting, you'll see one calendar, and it's like a blue to red gradient. It's just like looks like a rainbow. Your counter just looks like a rainbow. It's very appealing.
John Li:So that's, like, on the aesthetic side. We also cater to 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 then automatically color them green. Tag any meeting with the word 1 on 1 in the title and automatically color it red.
John Li:Right? I have I have it as orange. Right? So there's all these these ways you can just color code your calendar, and it takes, like, 15 seconds to set up one of these rules. And then at the end of each week, we send you a metrics report of your calendar.
John Li:We'll tell you you had 20 hours of meetings last week, 15 were external, 5 were internal, and then you spent 3 hours on 1 on ones and 5 hours on recruiting. You you know, all
Kevin Horek:Which is cool. Breakdown. Yeah. That's nice.
John Li:It's super handy. Yeah. Yeah. At the end of the year, we do something like a Spotify wrapped for your calendar. So a whole annual, like, statistic in a cool, like, IG story flow.
John Li:We call it them how we want. So that's every December, and people love that.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. That's cool. No. Yeah. It's it's super helpful, right, to have that kind of stuff.
John Li:Yeah.
Kevin Horek:So I'm curious. You you covered some stuff really early on that I think kinda demystified some of the stuff. Obviously, I think, like well, y Combinator is this, you know, YC is probably still the most popular tech incubator. At least top 3, top 2, doesn't matter. Like, you know, that's kind of the pinnacle.
Kevin Horek:Right? And it's interesting to me that you came in with a different idea. You pivoted through it. Like, it's not all just like you have this idea, you get in there, you raise 1,000,000 of dollars, and, you know, you IPO, and you're the like, you went through what a traditional people in startups kinda go through is, like, you struggled a bit. Right?
Kevin Horek:And Yeah. I'm glad that you talked about that. But what other lessons have you learned along the way that you'd like to kinda pass along to other people that you've learned and if maybe through some of the failures, which I I think everybody fails all the time. Like, I think the most perfect example of this is, like, Apple just said they're they're stopped doing the car. Like, if one of the biggest companies ever can still fail, like, everybody fails.
Kevin Horek:Right? Yep. Including Apple.
John Li:Yep. Yeah. I think one lesson I've had to learn over and over again k. Is not doubling down and tripling down on something that already works even if it's a little bit. It's like almost like you find something that works, whether it's a marketing channel, whether it's a feature that you just launched, and it works and, like, hooray.
John Li:Let's move on to the next thing. Like, I would go back and just milk milk it till I can't anymore if it works even a little bit. Because when you're running a startup, it's it's so hard. You're you're building something and trying to push it into the world and have it be used every day by people. Like, people are bombarded with stuff.
John Li:Right? So it's just hard to find one little, like, wedge into people's lives. And once you do That's interesting. Like, widen that wedge. Like, don't don't go somewhere else and try to find the next shiny object.
John Li:And so I would say early on, we were pretty good at focusing on people with a lot of meetings. Yeah. And I think maybe a year or 2 in a lot of competitors came out, and they were more I would say they were more like the focus on making things really aesthetic. And so I think, you know, obviously, you know, design is one of the top priorities for any counter company. But I would say because of that, we started focusing on different users almost.
John Li:We kinda strayed away from our core user base, which is people with a lot of meetings. And so we would launch features that really didn't help you if you had a lot of meetings. And then when we did launch features that were related to scheduling or, you know, actually putting meetings on the calendar, they worked. The launch went great, and, you know, we did a quick v 2 to fix some bugs, and that was it. But we should have gone back and just, like, added more features, added more support around it.
John Li:And so I would say the big lesson this year is that we're just focusing on, like, 2 or 3 things, and that's all we're doing because we know that they work. So one of them is our VIM Cal Maestro product Yeah. Which is the, the product for EAs. One is just booking links. We're just gonna make our booking links the best the gold standard of booking links.
John Li:And then, team features. Because we know that teams love using to schedule with each other even more than individuals.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. No. That makes total sense. The the interesting thing that you said there too is like, okay. You're building you built this product for a specific type of user, and then now you're starting to, like, go adjacent to that.
Kevin Horek: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 that's scheduling my calendar, obviously, I'm getting my calendar, but they're also scheduling into my calendar. So it's like you're just widening the net. Right? And the other thing that you're doing which is really smart with that is it's really hard to move to the competition if now 2 people are using it, and then it goes to my team.
Kevin Horek:And, like, just switching my own personal calendar to another competitor is a huge pain. But if I have to move me, my EA, my whole team, you're just, like, forget it. Right?
John Li:Kevin, that's such a good insight that you just had. And, well, when we started, we were basically focused on startups and younger companies, like, smaller companies.
Kevin Horek:Sure.
John Li:And you see we saw some of our users, like, they just experienced hypergrowth, and they got to a place a few years later where the company was big enough. The CEO was big, busy enough where they need to hire an EA. And all of a sudden, the person who's doing all their own, scheduling, who was a power power user of VIN Cal, basically, overnight does zero scheduling anymore. And Yeah. They have the same meetings on the calendar.
John Li:Right? It's not like they're less busy. It's not like they changed jobs. So the EA product, apart from the primary goal of actually catering to EAs and make them more productive, it's also to graduate with our user base because Yeah. It's the same busy calendars that will need that product.
John Li:It's just someone else is in the driver's seat. And, and that's the interesting part now is because now we're going up market. Now we're targeting, like, Fortune 500, whereas before, we were just Tech Twitter. And so we kinda have a 2 pronged approach where where it was, like, you have a marketing strategy for more of the PLG bottoms up part using just the VIM Cal product. And then we have, VIM Cal Maestro, which is our EA product, and that's more sales driven.
John Li:That's more trying to land entire teams of, like, 500 EAs, yeah, companies. Right? And then going from there because once you the the the key thing is once you have, the EA on VIM Cal, you basically also have the execs calendar. And so the true value is that, you know, if all of Fortune 500 is using VIM Cal Maestro, so are these x.
Kevin Horek:Well, yeah, the other thing too is you you need to basically get one exec and or EA at a big company well, any company really, and then the it just spreads like wildfire. Because if I can quickly get back to you, I send you the link, Other busy people or their EAs are gonna be like, how are you doing this? And then it's like, oh, you just use this app. And then it's like, it just it just snowballs from there. Right?
Kevin Horek:Because let's be honest, if you can automate and you can save people time in building a product 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 do you pay 30 well, it's like $40 Canadian a month for, basically, an email client. It's because I hate email. Normally, I was getting back to people sometimes, like, 2 or 3 weeks later.
Kevin Horek:And it's like, if I can get back to 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 I like, it's it's like it just makes my me look like like a better human being to other people if I'm getting back to them right away. Right? So for the dollar a day that it cost me or, like, cup more than that Canadian, but you get what I'm going at. Like, people don't think of it like that so much.
Kevin Horek:It's like, well, that's expensive for that. But it's like, is it? Right? If it's saving you x amount of time and it making you look not incompetent in a lot of cases. Because, like, if I book a bunch of meetings and I book them all at the same time or I mess with the time zone, like, some people forgive that and some people, like, it can wreck to your points.
Kevin Horek:Like, you potentially lost investment because of it. And sounds stupid, but it's not stupid. Right? Like, for the cost of it, it's like it's a no brainer, especially if you're busy.
John Li:Yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, I I think people think about pricing very in a very funny way because, like, oh, $30 is too much for this, but then they'll turn around, pay $30 for something completely Yeah.
Kevin Horek:Un I'll buy a $7 latte at lunch. Yeah. I live in
John Li:New York. Like, you walk out, it's $25 automatically. You step onto the sidewalk. Yeah. But, yeah, you you yeah.
John Li:You you have a good point there. I do think that another lesson we learned very, you know, close to what you said is that niching down just makes everything easier. When our when we decide to launch the EA app and we just focus on EAs, it is so much easier not only to reach out to them, to you know, all our marketing and sales got easier. The product was just more focused. Yeah.
John Li:And I would say that's similar to when we were unfocused with the regular with the flagship product, and then we decided to refocus on people with a lot of meetings. The same thing happened where it's just, like, all the marketing copy, all of the all of our numbers, the retention, the trial conversion, all went up because we're like, this is only for this type of people. Right?
Kevin Horek:Yeah. And you're solving a real pain. Those type
John Li: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, the most complex use cases, of the calendar. If you don't need something complicated, you have the free options.
John Li:That's totally fine. But that's why people come to VIM count and stay with VIM count. So niching down as much as you can. And, like, sometimes you get it right from the beginning, and then you just forget and lose focus, and then you have to, you know, kind of, like, recenter. So at the beginning, when our tag our goal was the best calendar for founders fundraising, that was so focused and niche.
John Li:And somewhere along the way, we started looking at, oh, should we do some things for college students and this and that. It's just like, no. Come back to center.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. That's actually really good advice in itself. Right? Because it's really easy to start building all these, like, verticals, and
John Li:Yeah.
Kevin Horek: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 help them save a bunch of time. Right? Because Yeah. Your college student idea, it's like I sometimes selling to maybe broke college students isn't your best idea. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.
Kevin Horek:Right? Mhmm. Where you can spend a ton of time chasing a vertical where there's not a lot of, like, paying users in. Right?
John Li:Yeah.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. That's interesting.
John Li: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's a, I think, a sharp contrast between those groups. And so we find that anyone we show them to, they would wanna use it. Yeah.
John Li:I think the amount of people that would use it if someone else paid for it is much higher than the amount of people that do pay for it, which is why you see every calendar startup that comes out, they basically get acquired within a few years. Right? No one really makes it as a calendar. And that's the reason because the majority of the market has so many good free options. And that's also why we built for the most complex use cases for the people that are willing to pay, the founders, the investors, the EAs, the executives, the business owners, agencies, people like yourself.
John Li:You might have clients at 5 different companies, and you need all those calendars on one view. Right? All these cases are really freaking difficult to build. And that is a mote for us because we spent the time we talked to tens of thousands of people manually to get to this point.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. No. Makes makes a lot of sense. So I wanna cover platforms you're currently supporting and then what platforms you're gonna support kind of in the near future.
John Li:Yeah. We currently support both Microsoft and Google accounts for both our VIM Cal and our VIM Cal, for EA product. Yeah. And we support iOS for mobile. K.
John Li:And then for the desktop app, you can use it on PC or Mac or anywhere in browser. Yeah. Android is on a road map, and, we hope to have, iCloud integration in the future as well.
Kevin Horek:Interesting. You also have an iPad app too.
John Li:We also have an iPad app. Yeah.
Kevin Horek:I'm curious. Like, I have an iPhone and an Android phone. I'm I'm curious obviously, like, a lot of companies release for iOS, first, and I get why they do it. Like, is there actually a market for, like, a VIM Cal for, like, Android? Like, is that a real you like, are you getting that request?
Kevin Horek:Because why I ask is because it's it's a lot of work to build for, like, one platform, never mind multiple platforms. And just from people listening, you know, that are thinking, like, what do I do here? Like, what have you actually found? Like, it sounds like you've got the request if you're building it, but what's been your experience and feedback from your users in that space?
John Li:Yeah. I was talking to another just fellow founder CEO a while ago, and, he mentioned something that I can't forget. He said I told him what I was working on. He's like, oh, you have the mother of all TAMs because everyone and their mothers use a calendar. Yep.
John Li:And any job, personal or work, you know, white color, blue color, you need a calendar, you need email. Those are kind of the, you know, the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of work tools or life tools. Right? Work and email. Sorry.
John Li:Email and calendar. So, there's absolutely a big market in the Android market.
Kevin Horek:Sure. Just because of the user base.
John Li:Just because of user base and just everyone needs a calendar. Right? Everyone wants a better calendar. I would say that we do something very unique with our pricing where, actually, our mobile app is completely free. So our iOS app is completely free.
John Li:You can try the the desktop version. You know, it's $15 a month. And then if you try that, decide it's not for you, you don't wanna pay for it, you can still use the iOS app for free forever. And so if we do Android, it would be the same thing. So I do think we will have a big market, and we we have seen, like, a lot of people, go back to using desktop after iOS.
John Li:And our goal with the mobile calendar is to build the absolute best mobile calendar and give it out for free. Because if I mean, I don't you've probably taken more time than most people to look at counters on the App Store.
Kevin Horek:I've tried it all. Yeah. Everyone I've tried it all.
John Li:Good for work. Right?
Kevin Horek:Terrible.
John Li:The it's it's all really bad, and they're trying to monetize it or they have ads or it just, like, doesn't load. So we are trying to build the state of the art mobile calendar, and we are building it for work. Like, I think VIM Cal is still the only calendar in the mobile app store where you can look up a teammate's calendar on your phone. Like Yeah. I
Kevin Horek:think so.
John Li:Can't do that anywhere else. Right? It is just mind boggling. Everything is kind of designed for personal or family life, not for work. Yep.
John Li:And so we're building it again. I've said this. I'm sound like a broken record, but building the best work calendar and giving it out for free. So Android, we definitely want to do that as well.
Kevin Horek:Makes sense. Well and and maybe this is a bad assumption. I'm assuming that some of the AEAs are running Android phones just for whatever reason. Right? Not iPhones.
Kevin Horek:I'm assuming that. Have you found that?
John Li:Yes. We've also found that EAs do everything on the computer. Just because
Kevin Horek:it's Yeah.
John Li:It's so so most people with mobile counters the mobile counter is like a read only device, like a platform
Kevin Horek:for them.
John Li:Like, they're just seeing what's coming up, what's their day like. We've done things where we made it very easy to schedule on the go. Like, you can schedule NLP, like, you know, coffee meeting tomorrow at 5 PM. We'll just put it on your calendar. Yeah.
John Li:But EAs, because it's so complex, like, they don't trust the phone to schedule.
Kevin Horek:That's actually really interesting advice because and I would put myself in this boat 99% of the time or 90% of the time. I always want the same features in a desktop that are on a mobile experience. But the more and more complicated some apps get, you almost don't want some of those things because if you screw it up on a phone in certain cases, you don't you almost, like, have to push them to the desktop. Or you do, like, a simple version, and then maybe you have to verify it or do something when you get back to your your desktop. Right?
Kevin Horek:Because it's challenging or it can be challenging. Right? You know what you're trying to do.
John Li:It it's funny. Most people will see a notification, like, in their email
Kevin Horek:Yeah.
John Li:On their phone Yeah. And then wait till they get to a computer to actually schedule a meeting.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. Which is interesting. Right? Yeah. Just from a user testing perspective, that's an that's a fascinating, like, use case.
Kevin Horek:Right?
John Li:Yeah. So one of our goals is to just remove all the friction where to the point where you're actually scheduling the meeting on your phone. And I would say we probably we probably make it, like, I would say, 30% easier, but some people just have hardwired habits. Yeah. That's
Kevin Horek:fair. It's hard to break. Well, especially when if your laptops are, like, right next to you, just like, ah, just
John Li:grab it. But Exactly.
Kevin Horek:Cool. But we're kinda coming to the end of the show, but is there any other advice you'd like to pass along to founders or something you wish you maybe learned earlier on in your career?
John Li:Yeah. I think I I've been doing this for 6 years now. Yeah. I would just think if I'm thinking back to the first 2 or 3 years and the last 2 or 3 or last 3 years, it does feel different in the way my cofounder and I work and because it's a very high stress environment. Sure.
John Li:Everything is high stakes. Every it's just weird. Like, everything feels like it's the end of the world if it doesn't work even if, like, a button is a wrong shade of purple. Right?
Kevin Horek:But You're also dealing with an interesting type of clientele. Right? Like, you can't really push buggy software because if you delete one of their meetings, for example, by accident Yeah. With, like, a code push Yeah. Like, you're gonna hear about it.
John Li:The calendar is the most, I would say, pristine app you use and that there's no typos. Nothing is wrong. Everything is put on there correctly the first try. And Yeah. Unlike your email, which might have typos, your notes app just has a bunch of junk that you never look at.
John Li:Right? Your counter is pristine because it holds, like, important information with other people that you don't really know well. Yeah. Yeah. Because of that, just everything feels really high stakes.
John Li:And you have bug reports sometimes. They're like, oh, this meeting is gone. This meeting is deleted. It happens very rarely. It happened more in the beginning here and there.
John Li:But Sure. The accuracy of your calendar at all times is something that we've really honed throughout the years. But I I would say, you know, looking back at what's different the first few years and now is that, I feel like at the beginning, we were just trying to do everything, and everything felt really rushed. And, like, we felt like we had to work 9 AM to 9 PM nonstop. Otherwise, we weren't it was just, like, all these, like, preconceived notions.
John Li:Yeah. Whereas, you know, part of it is learning along the journey, but now it just feels like we're doing way more even if I'm working less hours, even if I'm not feeling rushed or stressed. If I'm not feeling rushed or stressed, if I'm relaxed, before I would have been like, okay. That means you're not doing enough. But now it's like, okay.
John Li:This is the steady state. This is equilibrium. And think part of it is you just have to go through it and learn it. Like, I can I can tell you these things, but, focus on going fast, not on rushing? And Yeah.
John Li:Being fast and rushing through things look very similar, but it's there's a huge difference. Like, you don't have to be stressed all the time to be productive, and you don't have to have a 20 item to do list for every day. Right? A 2 item to do list could probably grow your business more.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. That's actually really good advice. I'm curious then. What's your QA process like?
John Li: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 I are, like, the quote, unquote PMs. Yeah.
John Li:We'll talk about the feature itself, design it right out of spec, and then it goes to an engineer. And then we found that maybe this is because we're a small company and we're still learning, but we found that sometimes things in the spec might get understood differently by the engineer even if we've had a meeting about it. So we do a 50% check when, like, you know, the code is barely working, and we just all get together and we just see, okay. Are you going in the right direction? Are you maybe oh, did you misconstrue this this word the wrong way so that the engineer doesn't, like, spend 2 days doing something that we didn't mean them to do?
John Li:And so we do a 50% check-in and a 50 75% check-in and then basically, like, a 100% check-in, which is when it's ready to demo. And then we'll get a war room together. We we call it a war room, but it's basically, like, 3, 4 people get together and actually just try to break it, and break the app. And then, you know, we go staging production, and after production, we do some more testing. But because of because we onboard the users from the early days, manually, we have just a habit of talking to our users, getting on calls with them.
John Li:So if anyone has a bug, like, we usually respond within you know? You you get a response almost immediately from our team if you support it, if you put in a ticket. And then we're the engineering and the customer support are like one.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. Especially when you're seeing people use the app. Like, you're almost testing your app while you're demoing the app and get onboarding them. Right? Which is an actually really interesting use case for, like, doing that hand holding onboarding, right, in itself.
Kevin Horek:Yeah.
John Li:We don't need user interviews. Just Yeah. New users will tell us.
Kevin Horek:Yeah. You're doing user research on top of that at the same time. That's interesting. That's a good reason to do the onboarding the way you guys
John Li:are doing the onboarding. The onboarding is the one thing that fixes, like, 10 other things.
Kevin Horek:Yeah.
John Li: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 do it.
Kevin Horek:No. I I think that's actually really good advice, but how about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about yourself, VIM Cal, and any other links you wanna mention?
John Li:Yeah. You can find out about VIM Cal at vimcal.com, vimcal. You can learn about our EA product atvimcal.com/ea. And, yeah, you can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn. My Twitter is very hard to spell, so I will leave it for the show notes.
Kevin Horek:Perfect. Alright. Thanks, man. Well, I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to be on the show, and I look forward to keeping in touch with you, and have a good rest of your day.
John Li:Awesome. Thank you so much, Kevin. This was really fun.
Kevin Horek:Thank you. Take care.
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