Launch HN: Meetingbird (YC S17) – A Calendar for Teams | Hacker News Reader

Launch HN: Meetingbird (YC S17) – A Calendar for Teams

62 pointshdornier20 comments

Hi HN! We’re Henry and Paul, cofounders of Meetingbird (https://www.meetingbird.com) in the current YC batch. We're building a calendar for teams.

Calendars have traditionally been built for individuals, not teams. As teams grow, calendars become so busy that optimal scheduling and time management is nearly impossible without software. Meetingbird analyzes participants' availability, meeting rooms, and other constraints to quickly find the best meeting time and location. When team members' calendars are completely booked, Meetingbird understands which meetings can more easily be rescheduled than others, and inputs that to the scheduler. The scheduler improves as it better understands everyone’s calendar preferences. Our goal is a calendar that makes scheduling easy, allowing everyone to spend less time scheduling and more time getting things done.

For individuals, Meetingbird serves as a beautiful (we hope!) calendar that makes scheduling as easy as sending a link or picking a time from within Gmail with our Chrome extension (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/meetingbird/joheck...).

We first became interested in this problem because we experienced first-hand the pain of scheduling working at companies in a variety of industries, from tech to finance. The process of building Meetingbird and talking with hundreds of employees at mid-to-large-sized companies has confirmed how time-consuming and frustrating scheduling is for everyone.

We’d love to hear your feedback and your ideas about calendars and any frustrations of using them as teams!

One of the challenges I've always had with scheduling systems is travel across timezones. If I'm in NYC this week and London next week my calendar has to shift to that timezone and then back. How do you envision this working? Is it something you guys are thinking about?

Hi there -- timezones are something we've thought a lot about. We allow you to save a few favorite timezones like NYC and London, and then quickly toggle between those timezones from the Meetingbird calendar. By default, Meetingbird adjusts to the current timezone you're logging in from. For sharing availability through our Meet links, you can specify which timezone you are so that meeting requestors are notified if their timezones differs. Let me know if there are other timezone specific features you'd like to see!

The following scenario typical happens to me:

I'm in NYC and I send out a calendly link to someone to schedule a meeting A day goes by and I end up buying a ticket to London for next week. Person schedules a time on my calendar for next week based on my availability I've set up in NYC time. I don't realize this until next week when I'm in London and there's a call scheduled at 9pm London time / 4pm New York time.

Ideally I'd be able to drag across my calendar and tell you I'll be in London from Monday-Friday. During that period I want my availability to stay the same relative to London's timezone. So if I usually have slots from 2-4pm available for recruiting calls I want that same schedule to apply in London at the same time. Does that make sense?

Yes, that makes sense. Totally understand the use case - something we'll be working on.

Been using it for my company. Some good things, some things to improve.

- Even if I accept a meeting from my meetingbird(MB) email notificiation, the notification on the actual MB platform still remains.

- text is truncated. would be nice to see the full thing "on hover"

- when meeting request is pending, the invite shows "(pending)..". but even on accepting, it does not change.

- Meet was a great feature from Sunrise. Good you guys are trying to get a similar feeling here.

- noticed delays in event sync (nothing that is too distracting)

- using machine learning to suggest for best times for "coffee" meetings (based on user's previous calendar coffee events) will be awesome for Meet/Scheduler.

all the best! its tough to make something good.

Thanks for the feedback - these are each good points that we are working on addressing soon. Glad you're enjoying the share availability feature!

Glad to see someone tackling this issue. I too have been frustrated with this and many times thought about building a solution...

I have 10-12 recurring team meetings a week (10-15 minute calls to sync with different teams) and a challenge is there is only one meeting owner making managing them a nightmare. I've longed for a "Team Meeting" interface that would allow multiple people to manage a meeting - rescheduling, adding/removing participants, etc. A similar concept to a Email listserv where the email comes from List-Name@Company.Com and there is an web interface and/or understand the standard calendar email commands that could 'Accept/Subscribe', 'Decline/Unsubscribe', 'Propose New Time', etc. Each Meeting could have properties to show who is invited, subscribed (accepted), unsubscribed (declined). When a meeting invite is forwarded, the new invitee would subscribe to the original invite to ensure updates and changes to the meeting are broadcasted to all attendees. This would work for both one time meetings and recurring meetings and with external attendees.

Also, I'm frequently scheduling meetings with people outside my organization and sending my free/busy time isn't the greatest solution. Use Case: I need to schedule a meeting with UserA@Company1.com, UserB@Company1.com, UserG@Company2.com and UserH@Company2.com along with UserM@MyCompany.com and UserN@MyCompany.com.

Google Hangouts are great but not everyone is comfortable with them (yet). An integration with WebEx would be fantastic to handle creating & updating the meeting within WebEx to keep them in sync.

Great feedback. Adding editing permissions for other meeting participants outside the owner is definitely something we can do. We're also working on integrations with conferencing tools like Zoom, UberConference etc. We know how important it is to work well with the tools you're already using.

Currently trialing Meetingbird, mostly for scheduling interviews across two offices and finding time slots that work for all involved.

Aside from an invite snafu I've been impressed with the scheduler.

Great to hear it, thanks Matt!

Will this come to the phone?

Something like sunrise.am's scheduling keyboard is SORELY needed. Was the easiest way to schedule anything and then Microsoft bought it & killed it.

So disappointing.

Hi Joel - yes we'll be coming to mobile eventually although we don't have a set date for that yet. That scheduling feature that Sunrise had in which you select a few blocks and send them over is something we allow you to do in the web app, but no mobile app yet.

Wish it can support Exchange servers one day as it's a lot of corp are using, not fun, but $$ there.

Agreed!

I've been using Meetingbird as my personal calendar for a while now. Definitely check it out if you haven't used it!

Sure you did. And because you are a well known person (great posts) on here I will start using it now, too. Guys focus on your product instead of flaunting yourselves using fake Accounts.

I don't know who this person is, have never used fake accounts , and never asked for upvotes.

Love this idea...

Thanks Pranav. We do too :)

This is brilliant and actually very useful, great work guys! In addition to GMail & the Chrome extension, I'd like to suggest a Meetingbird Slackbot, so teams can schedule meetings right from Slack. This would also help remote teams who use Slack, alot.

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