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I got the chance to speak with John Li, founder and CEO of Vimcal, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.
Vimcal is the world's fastest calendar, beautifully designed for the prosumer - think Superhuman for calendars.
Exclusive To F2F Readers - John has given me a link to share with you all to try Vimcal early! The link allows you to skip the waitlist and get signed up for an onboarding call right away. Click the Vimcal Early Access button below to try out Vimcal!
As a Level 10 procrastinator in his entire childhood, juggling all the overlapping time horizons in Li’s life has been a struggle for as long as he can remember. He has built two calendar-related products in college just to help him manage his own life. Vimcal is the third iteration. Before Vimcal, Li worked at Twitter, Apple, and several startups as a software engineer.
Startup Spotlight: Vimcal
Problem: People feel overwhelmed with the increasing number of meetings being added to their workday, with calls now happening across more time zones than before. Coordinating these meetings is a growing pain and calendars have not evolved to help; they're just as slow, archaic, and basic in functionality as they were a decade ago!
Market: There are 1.5 billion Google Calendar and Outlook users, and growing!
Solution: Vimcal includes everything a modern calendar should have: instant availability sharing, time zone conversions, hotkeys, and so much more. We save our average user over an hour per week and teach them best practices during their onboarding.
Team: I met my cofounder Michael Zhao at Berkeley while playing basketball. Soon, we began scheduling the same CS classes every semester so we could be project partners, and ten years later, Vimcal is the 3rd company we've started together.
Recent Success:
Li: I'm very proud of the product we built. We've put so much effort into crafting a beautiful, fast experience and solving problems our users didn't even know they had.
This shows by how people are finding out about Vimcal: we've been growing 40% MoM, 100% through referrals and word of mouth. 80%+ of our onboarding calls convert to a paying customer.
Vimcal is even being recommended by one of the cofounders of Superhuman.
Recent Struggle:
Li: One thing we've been working on is carving out more time to plan ahead while fires are burning in the present. There's an impulse to react to every little problem and solve it immediately, which deters us from our long-term plans. We're slowly getting better at resisting this anxiety by prioritizing things that are more important and less urgent. This gets a bit easier with more reps as our tolerance for emergencies builds up over time.
Founder Advice:
Li: "Fast, not rushed." It's easy to conflate the two since they're so tied together. I've found that most rushed or forced decisions are self-imposed and will often lead to avoidable mistakes. You can move at a fast tempo by saying no.
Bonus: put GIFs or memes in your cold emails. More people will happily reply!
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Li: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Thomas Kunjappu, Founder of Cleary: Cleary is a company’s homepage that powers the entire employee experience.
Robert Yuen, Founder of Monograph: Monograph is project management software for architects and engineers.
Chen Chen Huo, Founder of A La Couch: A La Couch is a restaurant group designed for delivery.
Who should I profile next? Leave your suggestion in the comments:
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