
Launch HN: Meetingbird (YC S17) – A Calendar for Teams - hdornier
Hi HN! We’re Henry and Paul, cofounders of Meetingbird (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetingbird.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.meetingbird.com</a>) in the current YC batch. We&#x27;re building a calendar for teams.<p>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&#x27; availability, meeting rooms, and other constraints to quickly find the best meeting time and location. When team members&#x27; 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.<p>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 (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;meetingbird&#x2F;joheckceackgilmpkgcihjfgggbnejcg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;meetingbird&#x2F;joheck...</a>).<p>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.<p>We’d love to hear your feedback and your ideas about calendars and any frustrations of using them as teams!
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anemitz
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?

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hdornier
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!

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anemitz
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?

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

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jharohit
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.

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

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dhekimian
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.

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hdornier
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.

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mrmch
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.

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hdornier
Great to hear it, thanks Matt!

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joelrunyon
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.

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hdornier
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.

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

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hdornier
Agreed!

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

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dna_polymerase
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.

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

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pranavpiyush
Love this idea...

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hdornier
Thanks Pranav. We do too :)

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dayve
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.

