Controlling Your Calendar with SavvyCal feat. Derrick Reimer

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the off systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:31
Welcome, everyone, welcome to another episode of The all systems go podcast. I’m your host, of course, Chris L. Davis, the founder of automation bridge. And on this episode, I’ve got a trippy, full circle story of our guest today. But I am excited to have him on and we reconnected, I thought we were connecting. We reconnected when I reached out to him via LinkedIn. And I saw just so many product updates coming from his from the platform that he had the software that he’s created. And it is Derek Reimer. And he is a full stack software developer, indie SAS founder and podcaster. He’s currently building savvycal, which is the topic of today with a small, scrappy team. Previously, he was the technical co founder of drip acquired by LeadPages in 2016. And code tree Derrick was the co host of The Art of product podcast, and is currently a regular contributor on startups for the rest of us. Derek, great to have you on the podcast. How are you doing?

Derrick Reimer 1:47
I am doing well. Thanks for having me, Chris. I’ve I was pleased when you when we when we reconnected on LinkedIn. And I think I remembered running into you in the office shortly after the acquisition, and at the time, I’ll be honest, my hair was on fire most of the time because we were dealing with with a scaling problem. So I think I was cordoned off in the corner of the office. Away from most of the other humans there. But yeah, great. Yes.

Chris Davis 2:12
Yes. So so funny, full story. Full Circle story for everyone. I was at there was an overlap with Derek is mentioning, when LeadPages acquired drip and my time at LeadPages. There was maybe a month overlap before I left. And we most definitely saw each other in passing. I’m 100% sure that. But Derek was on the engineering side. So we’re connected on LinkedIn. And he’s the founder of savvycal was super, super slick calendar software that we’ll talk about today. And he just had a regular product update video that he posted on on LinkedIn. But the feature I was like, Oh my gosh, this feature is amazing. We reconnected I extended the invitation and he’s here. And it wasn’t until we reconnected in the in the direct messages. I was like, hey, yeah, I was I was at at trip when you know, the co founder drip when it was acquired. I was like, wait a minute, and just kind of blew my mind. So it’s just funny, man. And here’s what I would say, Derek, I tell people this all the time, especially if you’re in the startup space, but it really applies to anywhere. I tell people do your best to treat people, right? Wherever you’re at. Don’t burn bridges, build them because you never know where you’ll be, or where that person will be. You know, so

Derrick Reimer 3:33
reputation is everything. And this industry is not that big. Honestly.

Chris Davis 3:38
You’re correct. Derek Yep, you’re correct. So you’re the co founder of savvycal. And before I give you the floor and kind of talk about your your journey, your founders journey, I just want to say this to everybody. You can always the quality of a product is always going to be contingent on the understanding that the founder or creator of that product has a variety of use cases. If you have a founder that does not have any kind of pulse to the market, or doesn’t know why would somebody use this but they have the ability money and coding to build something. You want to stay away from that software. And as we go through this through this podcast, you’ll hear that it’s so many it’s it’s a very you Tila tea based approach. I find your product development, which is what I absolutely love. And everybody I’m I’m on the verge of of migrating just so you all know right now so anyways, Derek, this is about you. Let us know you’ve got software developing background, your co founder times to you you’ve built companies, you’ve been a part of acquisition. Where did it Start, huh?

Derrick Reimer 5:01
Yeah, I. So I didn’t know, throughout my entire childhood that I wanted to be in the software industry. But I was definitely taught at a young age by my dad, he was a mechanical engineer, and very much, even though he wasn’t paid to write software in his work, he’s the kind of guy that taught himself how to code in order to make his job more efficient, and everyone else’s job around him more efficient. And so I can’t remember the exact age but we had a computer in the house. And he taught me das basic. And I remember playing around with basic conditionals statements in there and feeling like wow, this is, this is pretty incredible. And you know, this was the mid 90s at the time. And so I always toyed around with software, but always thought that in order to be a professional software developer, you would have to write in C Plus Plus and sit in a cubicle all day long. I just had this picture in my mind that that is what professionalized version of the hobby that I enjoyed looked like. And that stuck with me, actually, for a really long time. I don’t know, I don’t know what the block was there. But I just, you know, I went through high school loved math, majored in math in college, don’t there’s not a ton you can do with an undergrad and math unless you want to go on and get more education and teach or something like that. So it sort of is a general purpose degree. So I get to the end of college, and I’m looking around thinking, you know, what do I want to what do I want to do with my career? And I was always interested in entrepreneurship. I started following 37 signals. Basecamp? Yes, yeah, you know, around, I don’t know, 2009 2010 was when I really was just kind of watching every video they put out reading their books, and really drinking the Kool Aid of like, you can, you can build software companies that are really scalable, and really profitable without having to try to get into the venture capital ecosystem. And that really appealed to me, you know, being able to create my own destiny and be independent. And I saw this as the pathway like marrying this, this thing that I had enjoyed as a hobby for a long time. And actually, you know, starting to recognize the power of sass, and how scalable it is, and how much you can get done with one or two people. And that really, really appealed to me. So I started, started building things started participating in local competitions. One 110 $1,000, when I was fresh out of college, from a mobile coding competition, actually met Rob walling there, my future co founder of drip. And so sort of just stayed in the ecosystem, tried a bunch of stuff, made a bunch of mistakes, trying to build SAS apps back in 2010 2011. And, and then ultimately started working with Rob on on some projects, and then we co founded drip. And then, you know,

Chris Davis 7:51
the rest is history. Yeah, yes. So, so very interesting that you were able to be exposed to that engineering approach young, and you kind of like, selected which part of it that you liked, or what was intriguing to you. And as a as a parent, you know, one of the things that I try to do is expose my children to one as much as the stuff that I do. And to just stuff, different sports, different, different arts, just everything, because you never know what’s going to stick, you know, and you never know what to help guide them. So now you’ve got a ton of learning. I can only imagine the lessons. Well, first off, let me say was when you and Rob partnered, Was that your first SaaS application?

Derrick Reimer 8:43
No, I tried and kind of failed to launch a couple other things. Like I only really achieved, you know, maybe a couple $100 a month in MRR, I built a tool that integrated with Twitter. And it’s funny to watch now that there continues to be people dealing with platform risk integrating with Twitter, but at the time I built this thing that helps you filter for demand basically, like if you’re a local restaurant, and someone was tweeting about wanting a recommendation for a sushi restaurant, I had this tool that could monitor Twitter and let you know, when people are expressing demand for something. It’s kind of a novel idea. But then I think Twitter API restrictions kind of made that not feasible pretty quickly after I started working on it. So I got a taste of platform risk. But yeah, just had a couple couple projects like that, nothing that really took off. But I gained a lot of experience with learning how to develop SaaS applications, like the technical side of things, and that definitely carried carry that with me through my next steps.

Chris Davis 9:41
And it sounds like Rob was a partnering brain kind of like complementary, you know, to your skill set and expertise.

Derrick Reimer 9:49
Yeah, he. So I think as I reflect on, on how we kind of started working together, you know, at the time he was, he had acquired hittail, which was this search engine optimization tool. little

Chris Davis 10:01
trip down memory lane. Yeah,

Derrick Reimer 10:03
yeah. And it was it was like a, I don’t know, a couple $1,000 MRR and he had grown it like text it by applying, you know all the principles he had learned about building growing SaaS apps. And I think I think it was at that time, he was kind of looking for focusing his efforts on something else and looking for someone to kind of help do product management for hittail. And see how you continue to grow it. And that’s where he he recognized that I was at a place in my career where I was struggling to get traction with things, but I was hungry, and I wanted to, I wanted to learn more, I wanted to be a student of, of, you know, building SaaS applications, figuring out how to do this thing. And he caught me at a really good time where I was like, kind of between, like, I don’t know, maybe I’ll go get a job doing something else or start consulting for local businesses building websites or something. Which would have been fine. But I think he recognized like, No, I think you you have skills in this industry. And I think we, I think you can help me like you can kind of be an apprentice of mine, and also get paid to do, you know, do real work on hittail. And I was working on hittail, only for a couple of months. Actually, I bought I built some features for it and wrote an email course. And we actually kind of started workshopping, the initial idea for drip, which was started with like an email capture widget that you could install on all of your, all of your pages on your website. I don’t think anyone else was really doing that at the time. So he wrote this little JavaScript widget where you can capture email addresses and blanketed across all, you know, 900 Page SEO optimized pages on hittail. And then I think the wheels started turning with Rob, he was like, Oh, we could actually maybe turn this into a separate product. And I just started out as truly a contractor like I went from being kind of a contract, part time Product Manager for hittail. And then start Rob asked me basically do I am I interested in building the first version of drip and pitch me on it, I did that part time, part time on hittail, part time on drip, and then gradually moved to full time and then kind of adopted that co founder title once. That was basically how I was how I was operating in the relationship.

Chris Davis 12:10
I love it, man. And I love to hear your evolution and in it and unsaid, but I know it’s there, as you also learned leadership skills and team management skills, you know, along the way. And these are all skills that you would take into your you know, the latest endeavor and beyond. I mean, it’s not just savvycal that your your hands are in. But that’s the topic of discussion today. And let me give all the listeners a quick overview. It’s easy, savvycal is online scheduling software. All right there. We’ve got that out the way. The more important piece is this. You’ve got the big boys are the big guys out there, right? You have your Calendly you had acuity I think people use booked me now. I mean, you just name it put calendar and booking somewhere in the URL, and it’s a platform, app Sumo is flooded with new new new online scheduling apps. You have platforms like go high level that are all in one. They say, Hey, we’ve got schedulers in our CRM. So what Derek, what did you see what this is gonna be a two fold question. What did you see that the market was missing? And who gave you permission to build another calendar app? To work through that? Yeah.

Derrick Reimer 13:32
So I was, when I started, we’re gonna say, drawing board on I knew I wanted to build something else. But I wasn’t exactly sure what. And so I it started with with honestly looking through kind of old Journal notes, where I will periodically write down think about all the tools that I’ve used in my tool chest, and what what do I like what, what has been sort of deficient in my experience with those tools. And scheduling was an interesting one. I’ve been a calendar user for a long time, not a heavy user, myself, I’m mostly in maker time, and I don’t do a ton of meetings. But, you know, I built a, I built a calendar integration with drip in the early days. And we used it a bunch when we were doing demos. And so I, I was very familiar with the tool. And, you know, back in 2013 2014, it was, it was pretty amazing. Like, it was this simple, elegant tool that was way nicer than, than like other scheduling interfaces you deal with like, Doctor scheduling or something like Calendly was clean, crisp, modern. And it just felt like, felt like they were, you know, they were the way to go. And so very familiar with it, but then fast forward to you know, 2020 20 and I realized that Calendly kind of hadn’t changed much like it was very, very much the same as it was back in, you know, five, six years ago, and I started picking up on Some things that I noticed in my own patterns of meaning to you is that I go in seasons of needing to use it more when I’m booking a bunch of customer interviews or something. Yeah. And I always felt as a maker, I felt anxiety around sending out a booking link and then wrecking my schedule. Right. So like, what is Calendly doing to help protect my deep work time. And so that was something that that sparked my initial interest, I think was just recognizing, like, I need to use this tool from time to time, but there’s always some hesitation there. And why is that? So I started pulling on that thread. And, you know, that gave me the insight to, you know, when I’m configuring my link, I want to see an immediate preview of my calendar and the availability, it’s going to be shown to people right there. So I can quickly block out days or modify things on the fly if I need to, before I send out that link. So I can feel feel confident that, that I’m not going to wreck my calendar, and also infuse you know, more intelligence, like, can we encourage people to book in afternoons for example. And even though I want to make mornings available if they really need it, but I really prefer afternoons. So Can my scheduling link represent those preferences, and helped me to, to be accommodating, but also hopefully shield my my deep work as much as possible? So there was that. And I also noticed this, this thing that comes up, I feel like every other week on Twitter, someone’s talking about being offended by receiving a Calendly link, which I think is I think it’s mostly bogus, to be honest, like, people get way too precious about, you know, feeling like, Oh, you’re making me do work using your scheduling link. And so I think it’s, you know, people need to kind of take a step back and evaluate whether they’re getting getting worked up about the right things. But I will say that, out of that insight came this, this desire to create an experience that feels more collaborative, I think setting a Calendly link, just sort of, in many cases, it just feels like a power move, like, alright, you want to book time with me, well, here use my link, I will, you know, kind of hold the power position in this dynamic. So started thinking about ways to make it feel like it was just as convenient for the other person. And out of that came kind of our visual or visual calendar interface on the booking side, where the person receiving the link can can click a toggle and overlay their calendar on top of your scheduling link. And I don’t I’m not aware of any other tool that’s really doing it in this way where it’s both visual and available to people who aren’t already users of the of the product. And so, you know, that’s, that’s another thing where it’s like, anytime I’d receive a Calendly link, I pop open a tab to open my calendar, and then I’m clicking back, trying to find it. And so I wanted to see if we could do that a lot better. And so that was those are sort of the two key insights that sent me down this path of feeling it you know, I think there is, I think there’s other demand there for that.

Chris L. Davis 17:55
Yeah. And I’m so glad that you did, because I feel like these are small things. When I look at efficiency, I mean, the output of automating anything is efficiency, if you don’t become more efficient, and whatever that thing is, then automation hasn’t done its job. So I’m huge, huge advocate of efficiency. And and when you think about it, it’s a matter of saving seconds and minutes how wherever you can. So yes, somebody could say, well, I don’t have a problem, just pulling up my calendar before scheduling and seeing, well guess what I do? Because in the flow of things me going to pull up account. This is this decision fatigue. Maybe when I pull up my calendar, I’m distracted because I have another meeting. And now I’m looking at that. There’s just all types of things that that little bitty one second to one minute thing can can can potentially blow up. So when I when I gave savy Kalla a test run, you all didn’t have that yet. And have it yet it was just, you know what it reminded me of, there’s this feeling that I get with very lean flexible software. And I reflect on it. When I was using Infusionsoft at the time and went to Active Campaign, I was just like, it’s just so easy to get in it and do more. It’s too good to be true. So I had that feeling because you had it. Excuse me, let me go down a basic checklist, everybody if you don’t have an online scheduling software, first and foremost, it needs to integrate with your calendar software. Primarily Google account is what most people use, but it can go beyond and not just one calendar, it should be able to sync with multiple calendars. After that you will be able you should you need to be able we’re talking about the bare minimum, you should be able to create different appointment types. So me I’ve got an appointment for scheduling for the podcast, I got another appointment for maybe sales calls, things of that nature. And you should be able to Share that availability across all of them, as well as set availability differently for every calendar. Okay? Next, you should be able to have some some set the duration of the appointments, and then have some buffer time so that people can’t schedule back to back. If you check these boxes, let me say this, let it embed on your website. Like let’s, let’s check that standard box too. But if you do those things, everything else becomes more of how well do you do beyond the basics? Right? So some of the beyond the basics, I was using a savvycalbefore you introduce the overlay where the intake forms. And when I when I test the intake form, I want to see can I what kind of custom fields can I create before somebody schedules? And can I pre populate them? A Derrick, I thought I was gonna get you. I was like, surely they can’t do that. And sure enough, not only could I pre populate name and email, but also any answer. And it was extremely simple to so. So savvycal got my attention there. And then there’s something in there. Listen, everybody, this, again, I’m beyond the basics here. Usually, just by default, you send out reminders. Before beforehand, I was a acuity user in the beginning and then I migrated to commonly. So when I was using acuity, you could customize those reminders per appointment. And really, you know, granular how many you wanted to send in and when Kennedy has it too. But that’s really where I’ve got familiar doing it. But let me say this in savvycal, you blew me away with this. You can go in set up, there’s like before, there’s like three events, I’m going off memory here, I don’t have my account pulled up, it’s before the event, during the event. And after the event. Now everybody you’re like, Okay, what’s No, that is not standard, there is usually a before and after. That’s it. There is no during now. Now watch this, let’s just take it a step further. Not only can I select multiple actions to happen at any of those times, I can also integrate with Zapier and send a web hook. For my non techie people, what I just said is, I can make any software do anything that I want it to do by triggering time before the event, during the event, the event and after the event. I know this is advanced, but for my folks who who use scheduling software, you don’t see it. So this is why Calendly stays on my ami savvycard stayed on my radar while I was using Calendly. Then I get the email because I can’t wait to get emails from companies that are following are doing a product updates. And you said you I can’t remember how you were too. But it was overlaying your, your count. And I was like, yeah, right, that like makes so much sense. There’s a reason why it hasn’t been done. Right? Like, there’s no way this is possible. And then I go in short enough, if you’re, if you’re a savvycal user is easy, because it just detected automatically. But if you’re not all it does ask for your you to sign into Google. And it will display it right over there. And I say you know how many times I have been hesitant to schedule on somebody else’s link, because I just either was on the go and couldn’t pull up my calendar. So I have to wait till I get home to look at my calendar and to be able to display it. And not just that, because Calendly has a feature where it will show green the times that you’re available if you’re a Calendly user, right. And if you’re logged in, he’s got to satisfy both of those conditions. But it just says you’re available in the you got to click another one and it kind of like show you what, what events are there. But being able to see my entire week. The meetings that I have planned it Derek, it’s bigger than just being able to not overbook, I can plan my week effectively. Yeah. Right. I mean, I love it. I love it. Yeah, that’s

Derrick Reimer 24:17
I mean, that’s something that I definitely felt because I know for some people in some roles, they’re their main mode of operation is to just get their calendar booked up. Like if you’re a if you’re a salesperson, you want to like book calls as fast as possible, you know, as quickly as possible to make sure you can close deals. So you may be in a different little bit different mindset. But if you’re in if you’re juggling kind of balancing between focus mode and needing to take meetings with people, like I found, when I look at my week, I do have kind of subtle preferences on when I want a meeting to happen. And it’s a function of what is the flow of my week look like? And so that’s where I think the real power of the visual interface that I’m not seeing In any other tool, it allows the person scheduling to quickly at a glance, get a feel for. Yeah, the first part of my week is really busy. And Wednesday is my focus day. So I think Thursday, that’s going to be the ideal time, being able to get that much that high fidelity information at a glance, I think is is really powerful.

Chris Davis 25:20
Yeah. And it’s really control. You want to be able to control your calendar and not let your calendar control you. Derek, you said something while you were talking about how you came up with the idea of savvycal. And that was you kept a journal. You kept the Jarno just kind of like hey, what, what what am I enjoying about the software? What do I wish he could do? And you’re actually the first person that I met that does that because I do it. And since I haven’t met anybody that does it, um, I kind of keep it as a secret. You know, like, I don’t want people to think I’m too nerdy here. But I do, man I because sometimes it’s my defense against shiny object syndrome. Yeah.

Chris Davis 26:01
Right. Because marketers of marketers, man, and they’re good. They can put some up and you’re like, oh, my gosh, I need that. You know, they sold me a comb. What am I use a comb for it? I have no hair. One day, maybe it’ll grow back like Benjamin Button. No, it’s God, and it never happened. But that’s what marketers do. Especially good. Anyways, so I always need to make sure that I’m clear. What can this thing do? And what do I wish it could do? And what’s the priority of it? Is it important, and I rent funny enough? I ran through a similar thing with savvycal. So I’m like, and I actually I have it up. I just did this one like in a notepad because I was just like, Alright, let me I’m not gonna read it, everybody. But this is what I what I did. I said, What can savvycal do that? Calendly can’t. And then what can Calendly do? That savvycal can’t. That was that was my my listen, I just had some some bullet points. And truth be told the biggest thing that jumped out that Calendly does that savvycal doesn’t was a mobile app. Out of all of the features. That was the only thing that was on that I was like, wow. So then it became well, now it becomes a matter of how important is the mobile app? Right? Because what savvycal can do that Calendly can get like five bullet points. So now I just all I’m saying is I can make an intelligent decision now. And when I say yes, I know exactly why I’m saying yes. Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. Yeah. So one of the things I wanted to ask, well, one of the features, I wanted to just kind of do like a feature shoot off here and give you the floor and what what was the idea behind that? There’s a few things that I’ve got highlighted here. And one of them I’m going to mention that actually, there’s 222, believe it or not, that I was surprised that Calendly didn’t allow me to do. And I just want to kind of hear your thoughts on Were you aware of that when you set these features? Or was that just something like I scratch my own itch, and just so happened to be nobody had that it’s right. But one of them is when I schedule when I when I have an international community. So whether it’s a podcast, or somebody wants a scheduled call, if you’re in a different time zone, I don’t want to create the same meeting us times, and then this, clone it and do it for like international times. Because I can’t control where you’re at in the world. So what I usually tell people to do is find the day schedule on that day, and then send me an email on where you want me to move it to. And I’ll move it to whatever availability wasn’t in that time zone. Well, I thought it would be easy. You can’t do it. And Calendly as an admin, I am an admin to my own account, I should be able to override my time and availability, my buffer rules everything. I’m an admin, let me control it. I’m subject to the same restrictions as a end user. I can’t move that anywhere. And here’s the problem. Derek, I can go into my Google Calendar, duplicate it at the appropriate time. But guess what, then all of the reminders are broken. Right, right, because it’s tied to the original time. So in savvy Cal, of course, you can go in and move that meeting. You can reschedule it and move it to wherever you you need to. Were you aware of limitations of other platforms? Or was that just something that you knew needed to happen and take place?

Derrick Reimer 29:48
I actually was not. I was not aware that that limitation was in other platforms. I will be honest and say that when we first implemented our rescheduling, we made the same mistake where we were sort of presenting the availability, regardless of whether you were logged in as the owner of the link or not, it was just a representation of the scheduling link itself. And I will tell you, within gosh, I feel like within a couple of weeks of launching our reschedule functionality, which is really, which was really early on, because it’s one of those extremely basic essential features in a scheduling tool, our customers and I give all the credit to customers were pretty vocal about like, Hey, I, I own this link, I want to be able to move the meeting wherever I want. And I think this is, when you’re, when you’re David and Goliath, in the situation where David up against, you know, Calendly Goliath, one of the big advantages we have is we can be really nimble, and we can be really responsive to, to customer requests like this. And so, to me, when something as clear as this comes through write, or it just makes sense, you know, immediately when we hear like, Oh, of course, you should be able to do that. And I think the, this is something that we’ve been able to kind of set ourselves apart from Calendly with, like, Calendly has a little bit of a reputation for having, you know, feature request forums where things just sit there for years, unanswered or unaddressed. Right. And, and I understand why that happens when you become a company of a certain size, it’s really hard to turn that ship and to move quickly on things. And, you know, so I, I both feel for them, I feel for them in that respect, you know, that it just gets it gets more difficult when you have a large organization with hundreds of 1000s of customers. But it’s also something that we can we can leverage that to our advantage as a as an upstart, like, yeah, you’re you’re signing on to something that’s a little bit more. You know, it’s we’re newer, we, early on, didn’t have all the features that Calendly had. But what we did have was the ability to, to be really nimble and responsive to customer requests like that. And so we leveraged that a ton as we were kind of, I would say, playing catch up with kind of the the table stakes features that you would expect in a scheduling tool, because we launched a couple of months after, after first breaking ground in the codebase. So there was a ton of things we were missing for the first year, year and a half. And so the way we survived was by moving really quickly and trying to make sure when we solve something like like this one, we do it better than the competition does.

Chris Davis 32:26
Yeah, in that you did. And there’s there’s another one. And everybody I’m saying this from I’ve been doing online scheduling, I don’t know. But when time trade was like one of the only platforms is like time trading schedule, once, we’re the only small business link. So if you don’t know what those are just know, I dated myself and technical years. So I’m extremely familiar. And again, if you just need the basics savvycal can definitely do the basics. But I just want to make sure that I’m highlighting some of the more advanced features, because my user base is is a little more broad. And in that sense, one of the one of the things that was a pleasant surprise, and I didn’t really realize it was a limiting factor for me was when if I have a, let’s say sales call, okay. And I want to, we’ll use podcasts. There’s only so many podcasts I could do a week. You know what I’m saying? Like after that I’m just kind of like, alright, if I have three books this week, timeout. Okay, that’s enough. And in savvycal, what I realized is that you can do it now, commonly will do it per day. And that sounds cool until you realize like, Well, that just means some if I say no more than two a day, that means I can have a five week, that’s still stressful. But I need to be able to control. So I was extremely happy and surprised to when I saw that you have it to where you can do it per day, per week, and per month. So you can really and this is automated everyone you set your calendar and say, Okay, this, this event type, you can schedule no more than two of these a week or no more of two of these a month. And then once those two have been satisfied, is blocked off until the next month, next week, so on and so forth. So now that I haven’t seen again, in any other scheduling platform, was that another case of listening to the user base and saying, Oh, I can see I can see a use case for that.

Derrick Reimer 34:46
Yeah, I think that one was certainly something that I wanted because I’m coming from a again from the maker standpoint of you know, I have to do calls, but I’m trying not to overtax myself or let my let my calendar go wild. And so I knew I wanted frequency limits. And and I think that the insight about having more levels like that probably came from brainstorming with customers. That was also an early one. But I think, and I think it was partially in pursuit of looking for problems to solve that would set us set us a bit apart, right, like when you enter a market like this. You know, it’s, it’s really hard to get above the noise level, like, like you said, there’s hundreds of scheduling tools, many of which have been around for a really long time that have big SEO footprints. And so just breaking into the conversation is really difficult. And so I think it was, it was ultimately the, the main motivation is to deliver value to customers and do it in a way that’s, that’s kind of the best, right. And then there’s also the angle of like, you know, I, we need to pick some audiences that we really want to appeal to first and try to gain a foothold there. And then we can gradually expand. And for me, it’s just, you know, people who care about care about deep work, care about making sure their calendar stays saying that resonates really well with me, and I feel like I could, I could speak to that audience pretty well, like they’re kind of in my, in my circles of people that I can reach. And so I felt really, really strongly that we need to try to try to knock it out of the park for those folks early on.

Chris Davis 36:28
Yeah, I love that. Because when you start in everybody, this is why I have Derek on is so that you can kind of see the, the the heart of the founder and understand the motivations and the reason why it was created. Because if you share those same motivations, the software is going to be a lot more suited to you. Derek, I’ll admit, as you’re talking, this is resonating strongly with me deep work, really being able to control your your, your, your calendar, and there’s no secret why it’s been so appealing. And when I look at like Calendly. And remember everybody, I’m not throwing them under the bus, I use them but you know, support them good job on software. But you also have to realize who they’re building that software for. I feel like comedy is going more enterprise more sales base and all of that. And I’ll give you an example. I’m not just pulling this out of the air to say to say something on the podcast, watch this, to have the same features everyone. Okay? So it’s almost the same. But Calendly has a routing feature where they can enter, you can ask for some information upfront, and then depending on the the answers, it routes you to a different scheduling link, right. But for me, that information that you capture, I to this day, I haven’t tested Zapier, maybe it’s been updated or make or anything else, that that routing form doesn’t feed to Zapier, those responses cannot feed into my CRM, which is pointless to me. But I can see the use case for a sales team. You may not care about the information if they weren’t qualified. So just you know, whenever something’s on my calendar, I just call them in, you know, whatever. I think there’s a huge opportunity loss where as you go and look at at Savvycal, every one of the forms that you can create, it’s a little different because they’re not technically routing forms, but every form that you can create attached to an event. Yes, it does feed through to Zapier. So for me, if that was a, if I needed routing, like Calendly, and just because savvycal doesn’t have it now, I will still have the confidence because of how you built everything else. That when it if and when it is implemented, it would probably check that box a lot faster. them, you know, the bigger companies, you know,

Derrick Reimer 38:54
yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s so challenging. And I do want to say like, I owe a debt of gratitude to Calendly for, for kind of paving the path for tools like mine, like I say, we stand on the shoulders of giants here. They they educated the market on how these personal scheduling links work. And they kept it simple. They did a lot of things right early on and got a lot of well earned traction for that. And I especially now being several years into into building savvy Cal can recognize just how difficult it is to be a horizontally positioned tool, you know, like, we it’d be a lot easier if we could just say savvycal is a scheduling tool for sales teams or a scheduling tool for Customer Success teams or founders. But right now, we’re appealing to all of these groups and the sort of, I think right now that your your typical savvy customer may be in one of these buckets, but they kind of care about similar things. So we’re kind of heading across from a different, different angle. But still it’s it’s really difficult to to just figure out how to continue to build and shape the product in a way that, like kind of satisfies all of the different verticals that are using it. And that’s part of the challenge. I mean, I, I have fun doing it. And but it definitely, it’s definitely doing things on hardmode to certain extent. Yeah,

Chris Davis 40:17
yeah, if you could I know, you just said it’s not for any one individual, you’ve probably got a wide variety. But if you could, who do you think, you know, if they’re listening to this podcast, and they don’t have an online calendar, or they’re dissatisfied with the one that they have? Who would probably see the biggest value like actualized, that biggest value the quickest? Using self care? Is it the the founder, the solopreneur, the salesperson, the developer, you know, like, what is that profile that you all have seen thus far, and if you’re listening, say, hey, this would probably be the best scheduling for you.

Derrick Reimer 40:59
I would say just just because like I, you know, I, the tool is biased towards something that I would want, and I’m a independent founder, you know, I think it’s the tool is really, really good for for people like me, who are, you know, wearing many hats, and running a business and trying to manage their calendar? Well, that said, we, we do have, you know, a lot of sales teams closed CRM is using, using savvy Cal for all of their initial intake for for leads off their website. And that’s something that’s an area we’re increasingly interested in, partly because, I mean, the more that we can tie our a lot of the value that’s having, how can bring, we can tie that back to actually driving business, the more compelling the story is. And so, you know, we also have, I would say, consultants, people who do lightweight consulting or coaching, we have stripe integration, so you can charge on your links for for time slots. Just to give the kind of attacker from the other direction, one area that we’re interested in, improving on but we’re probably not fully up to par right now is, I think a lot of acuity users are kind of becoming a bit dissatisfied with acuity as a platform that they’ve been acquired. And maybe it’s getting a little, a little dated. But there are certain things like like Pac booking, like being able to sell a pack of time slots, and and spread those out. And, like kind of more almost like a lightweight Website Builder where you can kind of instrument a flow of walking through and picking packages and things. We’re missing a lot of that right now. And it’s something that we’re definitely thinking about trying to tackle and like, let’s try to make savvy khelo Really, really compelling acuity alternative. Certainly we are for some light, light duty use cases. But if you’re doing a lot of like, kind of running an entire consulting practice on acuity, that’s an area where we’re like, we’re a bit behind on I would say,

Chris L. Davis 43:04
Yeah, Derek, I wanted to share an experience with you, man, I hadn’t thought of this until now. And it was I went to somebody’s online calendar. And first off, the domain was mapped to their domain. So it was like meet dot their domain.com. And I was like, I wonder if they own this, or, you know, it just kind of sparked my interest, because I don’t see that often with online calendar software. But what it did was, of course, so I know that it was subdomain mapping. But then they had like, you know, kind of more like a card display with an image of all of the, excuse me appointment types that you can choose. And then you select it, and it’s your regular online scheduling. And then when I got the reminders, it was all pointing back to like, you’re receiving this reminder, because you schedule that meet that their domain.com. And I say, Man, that’s like a fully immersive Yeah, like, that’s what I thought white label. So I reached out to the person and lo and behold, they said, Oh, they just let they let us map the subdomain. I said, Oh, wow, that’s, that’s a cool feature. But you also can manage all of your appointments, too. Have you looked at something like that? Or is that similar to kind of like that online builder approach you’re thinking of?

Derrick Reimer 44:22
Yeah, I think that that’s. So again, that’s what just one of the challenges of being horizontal, it’s like, you find these little pockets. And, man, I would love to, in an ideal world, we could just be the best tool for all of these different use cases. And maybe we’ll get there someday. I don’t know. But yeah, I mean, I think like if it’s the type of experience where someone wants to be able to create an account and then login view, their past bookings create new bookings, like almost I think of like the system that my the guy who cuts my hair uses, you know, it’s like booking.com or something like that. And I can log into my portal and see past appointments and And then that starts to leverage it starts to lean more towards like Office scheduling. And I don’t know it’s heavy Cal might get there. But I think I think there is there’s a lot of wisdom in kind of focusing. And so I would say for probably for the time being savvy Cal is trying to be best at, you know, I’m a, I’m a professional person to founder and manager, partnership person salesperson, I need to find times book with external, external people, maybe looping in internal people from my team and including their availability on the link. Or maybe I want to be part of a round robin. Link, and I’m in a pool of, of reps that we need to spread load across. That’s where sabkha really shines.

Chris Davis 45:41
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So so as we as we close out, Derek, I wanted to give you the floor twofold here. I wanted to let you announce or speak to any new features that have launched or you plan on launch, and that maybe people will be excited about that. Also, how can people connect, find more about you, or savvycal sign up? Where should they go?

Derrick Reimer 46:04
Yeah, so something that we just released in the last month or so really excited about is the ability to share availability with people outside of your team. So if you’re familiar with something like Calendly, we have similar functionality, where if you’re on the same team, you can add multiple team members. And then the availability you present represents the combination of everyone’s you know, free times, basically. But that’s historically always been limited to just people internal to your team. And the thinking here is, and this is derived from from kind of customer demand, people who, maybe they’re in kind of a partnership circle here, and they’re meeting with Person A, but they want to factor in person B’s availability, who’s also going to attend the meeting. And rather than sending out, you could send out a meeting poll and and propose some slots and ask people to vote on times, you could do that. But if Person B is willing to just share their free busy time with you, as an external collaborator on savvy Cal, then you can just add them to your link, send the link over to person A, and now they’re picking a time that works well for all three of you. And that can extend to even beyond just three people. So we’re really excited about this, I think it’s it’s going to take a while for the market to fully grasp the power of this and start to use it. But my hope is that, that people will gradually start to kind of build their network of contacts in savvy Cal, so that, you know, if you and I say you and I are needing to book pretty regularly, we could send each other savvy Cal links and schedule a back and forth. Or we could kind of take it to the next step and say, Alright, we’re gonna mutually share our availability with one another at Savvy Cal being the kind of holding our availability in escrow. And then, and then I can just create events, similar to how you could create it with an internal person where, like Google workspace calendar sharing, you know, now like, because we’ve mutually shared this, we can, I can just create an event. And I know I’m not going to collide with one of your times that you’re busy. So really excited about this one. It’s it’s available now. And we’re, we’re kind of keeping our ear to the ground on parts of the flow that needs to be improved and trying to have quick feedback cycles on that. But yeah, I think I wanted to wanted to mention that one. And yeah, if folks want to keep up with me, I, I do blog occasionally at Derekreimer.com. I’m also still I’m still on Twitter, even though crazy. They’re tough at Derek Reimer on Twitter, and then of course, savvycal.com Is, is where the product lives.

Chris Davis 48:45
All right, appreciate it. And everybody will have the links to everything in the show notes. Derek, I can’t thank you enough for coming on to the podcast. It’s twofold. Again, for me, there’s a whole lot of twofold this episode, but partly, you know, reconnecting and just really hearing about the person and people behind the software. But also, I’m always excited to introduce software in an intelligent, responsible way to my audience, because it may be the missing piece. It may be that thing that saves them one hour times seven a week times four times 12. And before you know it, they’re like I’m so glad. So anytime we can do that. I’m thankful. So thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. listeners. Thank you so much for entrusting us with your ears for the time that you have. And everybody continue to automate responsibly my friends. Thanks for coming out there. Thanks for having me.

Chris L. Davis 49:45
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to and it can be found in Apple podcast, Google podcasts, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday, so make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out. And while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly. And you can access them all at allsystemsgopodcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly, my friends

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the off systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sell systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris Davis 0:31
Welcome, everyone, welcome to another episode of The all systems go podcast. I’m your host, of course, Chris L. Davis, the founder of automation bridge. And on this episode, I’ve got a trippy, full circle story of our guest today. But I am excited to have him on and we reconnected, I thought we were connecting. We reconnected when I reached out to him via LinkedIn. And I saw just so many product updates coming from his from the platform that he had the software that he’s created. And it is Derek Reimer. And he is a full stack software developer, indie SAS founder and podcaster. He’s currently building savvycal, which is the topic of today with a small, scrappy team. Previously, he was the technical co founder of drip acquired by LeadPages in 2016. And code tree Derrick was the co host of The Art of product podcast, and is currently a regular contributor on startups for the rest of us. Derek, great to have you on the podcast. How are you doing?

Derrick Reimer 1:47
I am doing well. Thanks for having me, Chris. I’ve I was pleased when you when we when we reconnected on LinkedIn. And I think I remembered running into you in the office shortly after the acquisition, and at the time, I’ll be honest, my hair was on fire most of the time because we were dealing with with a scaling problem. So I think I was cordoned off in the corner of the office. Away from most of the other humans there. But yeah, great. Yes.

Chris Davis 2:12
Yes. So so funny, full story. Full Circle story for everyone. I was at there was an overlap with Derek is mentioning, when LeadPages acquired drip and my time at LeadPages. There was maybe a month overlap before I left. And we most definitely saw each other in passing. I’m 100% sure that. But Derek was on the engineering side. So we’re connected on LinkedIn. And he’s the founder of savvycal was super, super slick calendar software that we’ll talk about today. And he just had a regular product update video that he posted on on LinkedIn. But the feature I was like, Oh my gosh, this feature is amazing. We reconnected I extended the invitation and he’s here. And it wasn’t until we reconnected in the in the direct messages. I was like, hey, yeah, I was I was at at trip when you know, the co founder drip when it was acquired. I was like, wait a minute, and just kind of blew my mind. So it’s just funny, man. And here’s what I would say, Derek, I tell people this all the time, especially if you’re in the startup space, but it really applies to anywhere. I tell people do your best to treat people, right? Wherever you’re at. Don’t burn bridges, build them because you never know where you’ll be, or where that person will be. You know, so

Derrick Reimer 3:33
reputation is everything. And this industry is not that big. Honestly.

Chris Davis 3:38
You’re correct. Derek Yep, you’re correct. So you’re the co founder of savvycal. And before I give you the floor and kind of talk about your your journey, your founders journey, I just want to say this to everybody. You can always the quality of a product is always going to be contingent on the understanding that the founder or creator of that product has a variety of use cases. If you have a founder that does not have any kind of pulse to the market, or doesn’t know why would somebody use this but they have the ability money and coding to build something. You want to stay away from that software. And as we go through this through this podcast, you’ll hear that it’s so many it’s it’s a very you Tila tea based approach. I find your product development, which is what I absolutely love. And everybody I’m I’m on the verge of of migrating just so you all know right now so anyways, Derek, this is about you. Let us know you’ve got software developing background, your co founder times to you you’ve built companies, you’ve been a part of acquisition. Where did it Start, huh?

Derrick Reimer 5:01
Yeah, I. So I didn’t know, throughout my entire childhood that I wanted to be in the software industry. But I was definitely taught at a young age by my dad, he was a mechanical engineer, and very much, even though he wasn’t paid to write software in his work, he’s the kind of guy that taught himself how to code in order to make his job more efficient, and everyone else’s job around him more efficient. And so I can’t remember the exact age but we had a computer in the house. And he taught me das basic. And I remember playing around with basic conditionals statements in there and feeling like wow, this is, this is pretty incredible. And you know, this was the mid 90s at the time. And so I always toyed around with software, but always thought that in order to be a professional software developer, you would have to write in C Plus Plus and sit in a cubicle all day long. I just had this picture in my mind that that is what professionalized version of the hobby that I enjoyed looked like. And that stuck with me, actually, for a really long time. I don’t know, I don’t know what the block was there. But I just, you know, I went through high school loved math, majored in math in college, don’t there’s not a ton you can do with an undergrad and math unless you want to go on and get more education and teach or something like that. So it sort of is a general purpose degree. So I get to the end of college, and I’m looking around thinking, you know, what do I want to what do I want to do with my career? And I was always interested in entrepreneurship. I started following 37 signals. Basecamp? Yes, yeah, you know, around, I don’t know, 2009 2010 was when I really was just kind of watching every video they put out reading their books, and really drinking the Kool Aid of like, you can, you can build software companies that are really scalable, and really profitable without having to try to get into the venture capital ecosystem. And that really appealed to me, you know, being able to create my own destiny and be independent. And I saw this as the pathway like marrying this, this thing that I had enjoyed as a hobby for a long time. And actually, you know, starting to recognize the power of sass, and how scalable it is, and how much you can get done with one or two people. And that really, really appealed to me. So I started, started building things started participating in local competitions. One 110 $1,000, when I was fresh out of college, from a mobile coding competition, actually met Rob walling there, my future co founder of drip. And so sort of just stayed in the ecosystem, tried a bunch of stuff, made a bunch of mistakes, trying to build SAS apps back in 2010 2011. And, and then ultimately started working with Rob on on some projects, and then we co founded drip. And then, you know,

Chris Davis 7:51
the rest is history. Yeah, yes. So, so very interesting that you were able to be exposed to that engineering approach young, and you kind of like, selected which part of it that you liked, or what was intriguing to you. And as a as a parent, you know, one of the things that I try to do is expose my children to one as much as the stuff that I do. And to just stuff, different sports, different, different arts, just everything, because you never know what’s going to stick, you know, and you never know what to help guide them. So now you’ve got a ton of learning. I can only imagine the lessons. Well, first off, let me say was when you and Rob partnered, Was that your first SaaS application?

Derrick Reimer 8:43
No, I tried and kind of failed to launch a couple other things. Like I only really achieved, you know, maybe a couple $100 a month in MRR, I built a tool that integrated with Twitter. And it’s funny to watch now that there continues to be people dealing with platform risk integrating with Twitter, but at the time I built this thing that helps you filter for demand basically, like if you’re a local restaurant, and someone was tweeting about wanting a recommendation for a sushi restaurant, I had this tool that could monitor Twitter and let you know, when people are expressing demand for something. It’s kind of a novel idea. But then I think Twitter API restrictions kind of made that not feasible pretty quickly after I started working on it. So I got a taste of platform risk. But yeah, just had a couple couple projects like that, nothing that really took off. But I gained a lot of experience with learning how to develop SaaS applications, like the technical side of things, and that definitely carried carry that with me through my next steps.

Chris Davis 9:41
And it sounds like Rob was a partnering brain kind of like complementary, you know, to your skill set and expertise.

Derrick Reimer 9:49
Yeah, he. So I think as I reflect on, on how we kind of started working together, you know, at the time he was, he had acquired hittail, which was this search engine optimization tool. little

Chris Davis 10:01
trip down memory lane. Yeah,

Derrick Reimer 10:03
yeah. And it was it was like a, I don’t know, a couple $1,000 MRR and he had grown it like text it by applying, you know all the principles he had learned about building growing SaaS apps. And I think I think it was at that time, he was kind of looking for focusing his efforts on something else and looking for someone to kind of help do product management for hittail. And see how you continue to grow it. And that’s where he he recognized that I was at a place in my career where I was struggling to get traction with things, but I was hungry, and I wanted to, I wanted to learn more, I wanted to be a student of, of, you know, building SaaS applications, figuring out how to do this thing. And he caught me at a really good time where I was like, kind of between, like, I don’t know, maybe I’ll go get a job doing something else or start consulting for local businesses building websites or something. Which would have been fine. But I think he recognized like, No, I think you you have skills in this industry. And I think we, I think you can help me like you can kind of be an apprentice of mine, and also get paid to do, you know, do real work on hittail. And I was working on hittail, only for a couple of months. Actually, I bought I built some features for it and wrote an email course. And we actually kind of started workshopping, the initial idea for drip, which was started with like an email capture widget that you could install on all of your, all of your pages on your website. I don’t think anyone else was really doing that at the time. So he wrote this little JavaScript widget where you can capture email addresses and blanketed across all, you know, 900 Page SEO optimized pages on hittail. And then I think the wheels started turning with Rob, he was like, Oh, we could actually maybe turn this into a separate product. And I just started out as truly a contractor like I went from being kind of a contract, part time Product Manager for hittail. And then start Rob asked me basically do I am I interested in building the first version of drip and pitch me on it, I did that part time, part time on hittail, part time on drip, and then gradually moved to full time and then kind of adopted that co founder title once. That was basically how I was how I was operating in the relationship.

Chris Davis 12:10
I love it, man. And I love to hear your evolution and in it and unsaid, but I know it’s there, as you also learned leadership skills and team management skills, you know, along the way. And these are all skills that you would take into your you know, the latest endeavor and beyond. I mean, it’s not just savvycal that your your hands are in. But that’s the topic of discussion today. And let me give all the listeners a quick overview. It’s easy, savvycal is online scheduling software. All right there. We’ve got that out the way. The more important piece is this. You’ve got the big boys are the big guys out there, right? You have your Calendly you had acuity I think people use booked me now. I mean, you just name it put calendar and booking somewhere in the URL, and it’s a platform, app Sumo is flooded with new new new online scheduling apps. You have platforms like go high level that are all in one. They say, Hey, we’ve got schedulers in our CRM. So what Derek, what did you see what this is gonna be a two fold question. What did you see that the market was missing? And who gave you permission to build another calendar app? To work through that? Yeah.

Derrick Reimer 13:32
So I was, when I started, we’re gonna say, drawing board on I knew I wanted to build something else. But I wasn’t exactly sure what. And so I it started with with honestly looking through kind of old Journal notes, where I will periodically write down think about all the tools that I’ve used in my tool chest, and what what do I like what, what has been sort of deficient in my experience with those tools. And scheduling was an interesting one. I’ve been a calendar user for a long time, not a heavy user, myself, I’m mostly in maker time, and I don’t do a ton of meetings. But, you know, I built a, I built a calendar integration with drip in the early days. And we used it a bunch when we were doing demos. And so I, I was very familiar with the tool. And, you know, back in 2013 2014, it was, it was pretty amazing. Like, it was this simple, elegant tool that was way nicer than, than like other scheduling interfaces you deal with like, Doctor scheduling or something like Calendly was clean, crisp, modern. And it just felt like, felt like they were, you know, they were the way to go. And so very familiar with it, but then fast forward to you know, 2020 20 and I realized that Calendly kind of hadn’t changed much like it was very, very much the same as it was back in, you know, five, six years ago, and I started picking up on Some things that I noticed in my own patterns of meaning to you is that I go in seasons of needing to use it more when I’m booking a bunch of customer interviews or something. Yeah. And I always felt as a maker, I felt anxiety around sending out a booking link and then wrecking my schedule. Right. So like, what is Calendly doing to help protect my deep work time. And so that was something that that sparked my initial interest, I think was just recognizing, like, I need to use this tool from time to time, but there’s always some hesitation there. And why is that? So I started pulling on that thread. And, you know, that gave me the insight to, you know, when I’m configuring my link, I want to see an immediate preview of my calendar and the availability, it’s going to be shown to people right there. So I can quickly block out days or modify things on the fly if I need to, before I send out that link. So I can feel feel confident that, that I’m not going to wreck my calendar, and also infuse you know, more intelligence, like, can we encourage people to book in afternoons for example. And even though I want to make mornings available if they really need it, but I really prefer afternoons. So Can my scheduling link represent those preferences, and helped me to, to be accommodating, but also hopefully shield my my deep work as much as possible? So there was that. And I also noticed this, this thing that comes up, I feel like every other week on Twitter, someone’s talking about being offended by receiving a Calendly link, which I think is I think it’s mostly bogus, to be honest, like, people get way too precious about, you know, feeling like, Oh, you’re making me do work using your scheduling link. And so I think it’s, you know, people need to kind of take a step back and evaluate whether they’re getting getting worked up about the right things. But I will say that, out of that insight came this, this desire to create an experience that feels more collaborative, I think setting a Calendly link, just sort of, in many cases, it just feels like a power move, like, alright, you want to book time with me, well, here use my link, I will, you know, kind of hold the power position in this dynamic. So started thinking about ways to make it feel like it was just as convenient for the other person. And out of that came kind of our visual or visual calendar interface on the booking side, where the person receiving the link can can click a toggle and overlay their calendar on top of your scheduling link. And I don’t I’m not aware of any other tool that’s really doing it in this way where it’s both visual and available to people who aren’t already users of the of the product. And so, you know, that’s, that’s another thing where it’s like, anytime I’d receive a Calendly link, I pop open a tab to open my calendar, and then I’m clicking back, trying to find it. And so I wanted to see if we could do that a lot better. And so that was those are sort of the two key insights that sent me down this path of feeling it you know, I think there is, I think there’s other demand there for that.

Chris L. Davis 17:55
Yeah. And I’m so glad that you did, because I feel like these are small things. When I look at efficiency, I mean, the output of automating anything is efficiency, if you don’t become more efficient, and whatever that thing is, then automation hasn’t done its job. So I’m huge, huge advocate of efficiency. And and when you think about it, it’s a matter of saving seconds and minutes how wherever you can. So yes, somebody could say, well, I don’t have a problem, just pulling up my calendar before scheduling and seeing, well guess what I do? Because in the flow of things me going to pull up account. This is this decision fatigue. Maybe when I pull up my calendar, I’m distracted because I have another meeting. And now I’m looking at that. There’s just all types of things that that little bitty one second to one minute thing can can can potentially blow up. So when I when I gave savy Kalla a test run, you all didn’t have that yet. And have it yet it was just, you know what it reminded me of, there’s this feeling that I get with very lean flexible software. And I reflect on it. When I was using Infusionsoft at the time and went to Active Campaign, I was just like, it’s just so easy to get in it and do more. It’s too good to be true. So I had that feeling because you had it. Excuse me, let me go down a basic checklist, everybody if you don’t have an online scheduling software, first and foremost, it needs to integrate with your calendar software. Primarily Google account is what most people use, but it can go beyond and not just one calendar, it should be able to sync with multiple calendars. After that you will be able you should you need to be able we’re talking about the bare minimum, you should be able to create different appointment types. So me I’ve got an appointment for scheduling for the podcast, I got another appointment for maybe sales calls, things of that nature. And you should be able to Share that availability across all of them, as well as set availability differently for every calendar. Okay? Next, you should be able to have some some set the duration of the appointments, and then have some buffer time so that people can’t schedule back to back. If you check these boxes, let me say this, let it embed on your website. Like let’s, let’s check that standard box too. But if you do those things, everything else becomes more of how well do you do beyond the basics? Right? So some of the beyond the basics, I was using a savvycalbefore you introduce the overlay where the intake forms. And when I when I test the intake form, I want to see can I what kind of custom fields can I create before somebody schedules? And can I pre populate them? A Derrick, I thought I was gonna get you. I was like, surely they can’t do that. And sure enough, not only could I pre populate name and email, but also any answer. And it was extremely simple to so. So savvycal got my attention there. And then there’s something in there. Listen, everybody, this, again, I’m beyond the basics here. Usually, just by default, you send out reminders. Before beforehand, I was a acuity user in the beginning and then I migrated to commonly. So when I was using acuity, you could customize those reminders per appointment. And really, you know, granular how many you wanted to send in and when Kennedy has it too. But that’s really where I’ve got familiar doing it. But let me say this in savvycal, you blew me away with this. You can go in set up, there’s like before, there’s like three events, I’m going off memory here, I don’t have my account pulled up, it’s before the event, during the event. And after the event. Now everybody you’re like, Okay, what’s No, that is not standard, there is usually a before and after. That’s it. There is no during now. Now watch this, let’s just take it a step further. Not only can I select multiple actions to happen at any of those times, I can also integrate with Zapier and send a web hook. For my non techie people, what I just said is, I can make any software do anything that I want it to do by triggering time before the event, during the event, the event and after the event. I know this is advanced, but for my folks who who use scheduling software, you don’t see it. So this is why Calendly stays on my ami savvycard stayed on my radar while I was using Calendly. Then I get the email because I can’t wait to get emails from companies that are following are doing a product updates. And you said you I can’t remember how you were too. But it was overlaying your, your count. And I was like, yeah, right, that like makes so much sense. There’s a reason why it hasn’t been done. Right? Like, there’s no way this is possible. And then I go in short enough, if you’re, if you’re a savvycal user is easy, because it just detected automatically. But if you’re not all it does ask for your you to sign into Google. And it will display it right over there. And I say you know how many times I have been hesitant to schedule on somebody else’s link, because I just either was on the go and couldn’t pull up my calendar. So I have to wait till I get home to look at my calendar and to be able to display it. And not just that, because Calendly has a feature where it will show green the times that you’re available if you’re a Calendly user, right. And if you’re logged in, he’s got to satisfy both of those conditions. But it just says you’re available in the you got to click another one and it kind of like show you what, what events are there. But being able to see my entire week. The meetings that I have planned it Derek, it’s bigger than just being able to not overbook, I can plan my week effectively. Yeah. Right. I mean, I love it. I love it. Yeah, that’s

Derrick Reimer 24:17
I mean, that’s something that I definitely felt because I know for some people in some roles, they’re their main mode of operation is to just get their calendar booked up. Like if you’re a if you’re a salesperson, you want to like book calls as fast as possible, you know, as quickly as possible to make sure you can close deals. So you may be in a different little bit different mindset. But if you’re in if you’re juggling kind of balancing between focus mode and needing to take meetings with people, like I found, when I look at my week, I do have kind of subtle preferences on when I want a meeting to happen. And it’s a function of what is the flow of my week look like? And so that’s where I think the real power of the visual interface that I’m not seeing In any other tool, it allows the person scheduling to quickly at a glance, get a feel for. Yeah, the first part of my week is really busy. And Wednesday is my focus day. So I think Thursday, that’s going to be the ideal time, being able to get that much that high fidelity information at a glance, I think is is really powerful.

Chris Davis 25:20
Yeah. And it’s really control. You want to be able to control your calendar and not let your calendar control you. Derek, you said something while you were talking about how you came up with the idea of savvycal. And that was you kept a journal. You kept the Jarno just kind of like hey, what, what what am I enjoying about the software? What do I wish he could do? And you’re actually the first person that I met that does that because I do it. And since I haven’t met anybody that does it, um, I kind of keep it as a secret. You know, like, I don’t want people to think I’m too nerdy here. But I do, man I because sometimes it’s my defense against shiny object syndrome. Yeah.

Chris Davis 26:01
Right. Because marketers of marketers, man, and they’re good. They can put some up and you’re like, oh, my gosh, I need that. You know, they sold me a comb. What am I use a comb for it? I have no hair. One day, maybe it’ll grow back like Benjamin Button. No, it’s God, and it never happened. But that’s what marketers do. Especially good. Anyways, so I always need to make sure that I’m clear. What can this thing do? And what do I wish it could do? And what’s the priority of it? Is it important, and I rent funny enough? I ran through a similar thing with savvycal. So I’m like, and I actually I have it up. I just did this one like in a notepad because I was just like, Alright, let me I’m not gonna read it, everybody. But this is what I what I did. I said, What can savvycal do that? Calendly can’t. And then what can Calendly do? That savvycal can’t. That was that was my my listen, I just had some some bullet points. And truth be told the biggest thing that jumped out that Calendly does that savvycal doesn’t was a mobile app. Out of all of the features. That was the only thing that was on that I was like, wow. So then it became well, now it becomes a matter of how important is the mobile app? Right? Because what savvycal can do that Calendly can get like five bullet points. So now I just all I’m saying is I can make an intelligent decision now. And when I say yes, I know exactly why I’m saying yes. Yeah. Yeah. That’s good. Yeah. So one of the things I wanted to ask, well, one of the features, I wanted to just kind of do like a feature shoot off here and give you the floor and what what was the idea behind that? There’s a few things that I’ve got highlighted here. And one of them I’m going to mention that actually, there’s 222, believe it or not, that I was surprised that Calendly didn’t allow me to do. And I just want to kind of hear your thoughts on Were you aware of that when you set these features? Or was that just something like I scratch my own itch, and just so happened to be nobody had that it’s right. But one of them is when I schedule when I when I have an international community. So whether it’s a podcast, or somebody wants a scheduled call, if you’re in a different time zone, I don’t want to create the same meeting us times, and then this, clone it and do it for like international times. Because I can’t control where you’re at in the world. So what I usually tell people to do is find the day schedule on that day, and then send me an email on where you want me to move it to. And I’ll move it to whatever availability wasn’t in that time zone. Well, I thought it would be easy. You can’t do it. And Calendly as an admin, I am an admin to my own account, I should be able to override my time and availability, my buffer rules everything. I’m an admin, let me control it. I’m subject to the same restrictions as a end user. I can’t move that anywhere. And here’s the problem. Derek, I can go into my Google Calendar, duplicate it at the appropriate time. But guess what, then all of the reminders are broken. Right, right, because it’s tied to the original time. So in savvy Cal, of course, you can go in and move that meeting. You can reschedule it and move it to wherever you you need to. Were you aware of limitations of other platforms? Or was that just something that you knew needed to happen and take place?

Derrick Reimer 29:48
I actually was not. I was not aware that that limitation was in other platforms. I will be honest and say that when we first implemented our rescheduling, we made the same mistake where we were sort of presenting the availability, regardless of whether you were logged in as the owner of the link or not, it was just a representation of the scheduling link itself. And I will tell you, within gosh, I feel like within a couple of weeks of launching our reschedule functionality, which is really, which was really early on, because it’s one of those extremely basic essential features in a scheduling tool, our customers and I give all the credit to customers were pretty vocal about like, Hey, I, I own this link, I want to be able to move the meeting wherever I want. And I think this is, when you’re, when you’re David and Goliath, in the situation where David up against, you know, Calendly Goliath, one of the big advantages we have is we can be really nimble, and we can be really responsive to, to customer requests like this. And so, to me, when something as clear as this comes through write, or it just makes sense, you know, immediately when we hear like, Oh, of course, you should be able to do that. And I think the, this is something that we’ve been able to kind of set ourselves apart from Calendly with, like, Calendly has a little bit of a reputation for having, you know, feature request forums where things just sit there for years, unanswered or unaddressed. Right. And, and I understand why that happens when you become a company of a certain size, it’s really hard to turn that ship and to move quickly on things. And, you know, so I, I both feel for them, I feel for them in that respect, you know, that it just gets it gets more difficult when you have a large organization with hundreds of 1000s of customers. But it’s also something that we can we can leverage that to our advantage as a as an upstart, like, yeah, you’re you’re signing on to something that’s a little bit more. You know, it’s we’re newer, we, early on, didn’t have all the features that Calendly had. But what we did have was the ability to, to be really nimble and responsive to customer requests like that. And so we leveraged that a ton as we were kind of, I would say, playing catch up with kind of the the table stakes features that you would expect in a scheduling tool, because we launched a couple of months after, after first breaking ground in the codebase. So there was a ton of things we were missing for the first year, year and a half. And so the way we survived was by moving really quickly and trying to make sure when we solve something like like this one, we do it better than the competition does.

Chris Davis 32:26
Yeah, in that you did. And there’s there’s another one. And everybody I’m saying this from I’ve been doing online scheduling, I don’t know. But when time trade was like one of the only platforms is like time trading schedule, once, we’re the only small business link. So if you don’t know what those are just know, I dated myself and technical years. So I’m extremely familiar. And again, if you just need the basics savvycal can definitely do the basics. But I just want to make sure that I’m highlighting some of the more advanced features, because my user base is is a little more broad. And in that sense, one of the one of the things that was a pleasant surprise, and I didn’t really realize it was a limiting factor for me was when if I have a, let’s say sales call, okay. And I want to, we’ll use podcasts. There’s only so many podcasts I could do a week. You know what I’m saying? Like after that I’m just kind of like, alright, if I have three books this week, timeout. Okay, that’s enough. And in savvycal, what I realized is that you can do it now, commonly will do it per day. And that sounds cool until you realize like, Well, that just means some if I say no more than two a day, that means I can have a five week, that’s still stressful. But I need to be able to control. So I was extremely happy and surprised to when I saw that you have it to where you can do it per day, per week, and per month. So you can really and this is automated everyone you set your calendar and say, Okay, this, this event type, you can schedule no more than two of these a week or no more of two of these a month. And then once those two have been satisfied, is blocked off until the next month, next week, so on and so forth. So now that I haven’t seen again, in any other scheduling platform, was that another case of listening to the user base and saying, Oh, I can see I can see a use case for that.

Derrick Reimer 34:46
Yeah, I think that one was certainly something that I wanted because I’m coming from a again from the maker standpoint of you know, I have to do calls, but I’m trying not to overtax myself or let my let my calendar go wild. And so I knew I wanted frequency limits. And and I think that the insight about having more levels like that probably came from brainstorming with customers. That was also an early one. But I think, and I think it was partially in pursuit of looking for problems to solve that would set us set us a bit apart, right, like when you enter a market like this. You know, it’s, it’s really hard to get above the noise level, like, like you said, there’s hundreds of scheduling tools, many of which have been around for a really long time that have big SEO footprints. And so just breaking into the conversation is really difficult. And so I think it was, it was ultimately the, the main motivation is to deliver value to customers and do it in a way that’s, that’s kind of the best, right. And then there’s also the angle of like, you know, I, we need to pick some audiences that we really want to appeal to first and try to gain a foothold there. And then we can gradually expand. And for me, it’s just, you know, people who care about care about deep work, care about making sure their calendar stays saying that resonates really well with me, and I feel like I could, I could speak to that audience pretty well, like they’re kind of in my, in my circles of people that I can reach. And so I felt really, really strongly that we need to try to try to knock it out of the park for those folks early on.

Chris Davis 36:28
Yeah, I love that. Because when you start in everybody, this is why I have Derek on is so that you can kind of see the, the the heart of the founder and understand the motivations and the reason why it was created. Because if you share those same motivations, the software is going to be a lot more suited to you. Derek, I’ll admit, as you’re talking, this is resonating strongly with me deep work, really being able to control your your, your, your calendar, and there’s no secret why it’s been so appealing. And when I look at like Calendly. And remember everybody, I’m not throwing them under the bus, I use them but you know, support them good job on software. But you also have to realize who they’re building that software for. I feel like comedy is going more enterprise more sales base and all of that. And I’ll give you an example. I’m not just pulling this out of the air to say to say something on the podcast, watch this, to have the same features everyone. Okay? So it’s almost the same. But Calendly has a routing feature where they can enter, you can ask for some information upfront, and then depending on the the answers, it routes you to a different scheduling link, right. But for me, that information that you capture, I to this day, I haven’t tested Zapier, maybe it’s been updated or make or anything else, that that routing form doesn’t feed to Zapier, those responses cannot feed into my CRM, which is pointless to me. But I can see the use case for a sales team. You may not care about the information if they weren’t qualified. So just you know, whenever something’s on my calendar, I just call them in, you know, whatever. I think there’s a huge opportunity loss where as you go and look at at Savvycal, every one of the forms that you can create, it’s a little different because they’re not technically routing forms, but every form that you can create attached to an event. Yes, it does feed through to Zapier. So for me, if that was a, if I needed routing, like Calendly, and just because savvycal doesn’t have it now, I will still have the confidence because of how you built everything else. That when it if and when it is implemented, it would probably check that box a lot faster. them, you know, the bigger companies, you know,

Derrick Reimer 38:54
yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s so challenging. And I do want to say like, I owe a debt of gratitude to Calendly for, for kind of paving the path for tools like mine, like I say, we stand on the shoulders of giants here. They they educated the market on how these personal scheduling links work. And they kept it simple. They did a lot of things right early on and got a lot of well earned traction for that. And I especially now being several years into into building savvy Cal can recognize just how difficult it is to be a horizontally positioned tool, you know, like, we it’d be a lot easier if we could just say savvycal is a scheduling tool for sales teams or a scheduling tool for Customer Success teams or founders. But right now, we’re appealing to all of these groups and the sort of, I think right now that your your typical savvy customer may be in one of these buckets, but they kind of care about similar things. So we’re kind of heading across from a different, different angle. But still it’s it’s really difficult to to just figure out how to continue to build and shape the product in a way that, like kind of satisfies all of the different verticals that are using it. And that’s part of the challenge. I mean, I, I have fun doing it. And but it definitely, it’s definitely doing things on hardmode to certain extent. Yeah,

Chris Davis 40:17
yeah, if you could I know, you just said it’s not for any one individual, you’ve probably got a wide variety. But if you could, who do you think, you know, if they’re listening to this podcast, and they don’t have an online calendar, or they’re dissatisfied with the one that they have? Who would probably see the biggest value like actualized, that biggest value the quickest? Using self care? Is it the the founder, the solopreneur, the salesperson, the developer, you know, like, what is that profile that you all have seen thus far, and if you’re listening, say, hey, this would probably be the best scheduling for you.

Derrick Reimer 40:59
I would say just just because like I, you know, I, the tool is biased towards something that I would want, and I’m a independent founder, you know, I think it’s the tool is really, really good for for people like me, who are, you know, wearing many hats, and running a business and trying to manage their calendar? Well, that said, we, we do have, you know, a lot of sales teams closed CRM is using, using savvy Cal for all of their initial intake for for leads off their website. And that’s something that’s an area we’re increasingly interested in, partly because, I mean, the more that we can tie our a lot of the value that’s having, how can bring, we can tie that back to actually driving business, the more compelling the story is. And so, you know, we also have, I would say, consultants, people who do lightweight consulting or coaching, we have stripe integration, so you can charge on your links for for time slots. Just to give the kind of attacker from the other direction, one area that we’re interested in, improving on but we’re probably not fully up to par right now is, I think a lot of acuity users are kind of becoming a bit dissatisfied with acuity as a platform that they’ve been acquired. And maybe it’s getting a little, a little dated. But there are certain things like like Pac booking, like being able to sell a pack of time slots, and and spread those out. And, like kind of more almost like a lightweight Website Builder where you can kind of instrument a flow of walking through and picking packages and things. We’re missing a lot of that right now. And it’s something that we’re definitely thinking about trying to tackle and like, let’s try to make savvy khelo Really, really compelling acuity alternative. Certainly we are for some light, light duty use cases. But if you’re doing a lot of like, kind of running an entire consulting practice on acuity, that’s an area where we’re like, we’re a bit behind on I would say,

Chris L. Davis 43:04
Yeah, Derek, I wanted to share an experience with you, man, I hadn’t thought of this until now. And it was I went to somebody’s online calendar. And first off, the domain was mapped to their domain. So it was like meet dot their domain.com. And I was like, I wonder if they own this, or, you know, it just kind of sparked my interest, because I don’t see that often with online calendar software. But what it did was, of course, so I know that it was subdomain mapping. But then they had like, you know, kind of more like a card display with an image of all of the, excuse me appointment types that you can choose. And then you select it, and it’s your regular online scheduling. And then when I got the reminders, it was all pointing back to like, you’re receiving this reminder, because you schedule that meet that their domain.com. And I say, Man, that’s like a fully immersive Yeah, like, that’s what I thought white label. So I reached out to the person and lo and behold, they said, Oh, they just let they let us map the subdomain. I said, Oh, wow, that’s, that’s a cool feature. But you also can manage all of your appointments, too. Have you looked at something like that? Or is that similar to kind of like that online builder approach you’re thinking of?

Derrick Reimer 44:22
Yeah, I think that that’s. So again, that’s what just one of the challenges of being horizontal, it’s like, you find these little pockets. And, man, I would love to, in an ideal world, we could just be the best tool for all of these different use cases. And maybe we’ll get there someday. I don’t know. But yeah, I mean, I think like if it’s the type of experience where someone wants to be able to create an account and then login view, their past bookings create new bookings, like almost I think of like the system that my the guy who cuts my hair uses, you know, it’s like booking.com or something like that. And I can log into my portal and see past appointments and And then that starts to leverage it starts to lean more towards like Office scheduling. And I don’t know it’s heavy Cal might get there. But I think I think there is there’s a lot of wisdom in kind of focusing. And so I would say for probably for the time being savvy Cal is trying to be best at, you know, I’m a, I’m a professional person to founder and manager, partnership person salesperson, I need to find times book with external, external people, maybe looping in internal people from my team and including their availability on the link. Or maybe I want to be part of a round robin. Link, and I’m in a pool of, of reps that we need to spread load across. That’s where sabkha really shines.

Chris Davis 45:41
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So so as we as we close out, Derek, I wanted to give you the floor twofold here. I wanted to let you announce or speak to any new features that have launched or you plan on launch, and that maybe people will be excited about that. Also, how can people connect, find more about you, or savvycal sign up? Where should they go?

Derrick Reimer 46:04
Yeah, so something that we just released in the last month or so really excited about is the ability to share availability with people outside of your team. So if you’re familiar with something like Calendly, we have similar functionality, where if you’re on the same team, you can add multiple team members. And then the availability you present represents the combination of everyone’s you know, free times, basically. But that’s historically always been limited to just people internal to your team. And the thinking here is, and this is derived from from kind of customer demand, people who, maybe they’re in kind of a partnership circle here, and they’re meeting with Person A, but they want to factor in person B’s availability, who’s also going to attend the meeting. And rather than sending out, you could send out a meeting poll and and propose some slots and ask people to vote on times, you could do that. But if Person B is willing to just share their free busy time with you, as an external collaborator on savvy Cal, then you can just add them to your link, send the link over to person A, and now they’re picking a time that works well for all three of you. And that can extend to even beyond just three people. So we’re really excited about this, I think it’s it’s going to take a while for the market to fully grasp the power of this and start to use it. But my hope is that, that people will gradually start to kind of build their network of contacts in savvy Cal, so that, you know, if you and I say you and I are needing to book pretty regularly, we could send each other savvy Cal links and schedule a back and forth. Or we could kind of take it to the next step and say, Alright, we’re gonna mutually share our availability with one another at Savvy Cal being the kind of holding our availability in escrow. And then, and then I can just create events, similar to how you could create it with an internal person where, like Google workspace calendar sharing, you know, now like, because we’ve mutually shared this, we can, I can just create an event. And I know I’m not going to collide with one of your times that you’re busy. So really excited about this one. It’s it’s available now. And we’re, we’re kind of keeping our ear to the ground on parts of the flow that needs to be improved and trying to have quick feedback cycles on that. But yeah, I think I wanted to wanted to mention that one. And yeah, if folks want to keep up with me, I, I do blog occasionally at Derekreimer.com. I’m also still I’m still on Twitter, even though crazy. They’re tough at Derek Reimer on Twitter, and then of course, savvycal.com Is, is where the product lives.

Chris Davis 48:45
All right, appreciate it. And everybody will have the links to everything in the show notes. Derek, I can’t thank you enough for coming on to the podcast. It’s twofold. Again, for me, there’s a whole lot of twofold this episode, but partly, you know, reconnecting and just really hearing about the person and people behind the software. But also, I’m always excited to introduce software in an intelligent, responsible way to my audience, because it may be the missing piece. It may be that thing that saves them one hour times seven a week times four times 12. And before you know it, they’re like I’m so glad. So anytime we can do that. I’m thankful. So thank you so much for coming on to the podcast. listeners. Thank you so much for entrusting us with your ears for the time that you have. And everybody continue to automate responsibly my friends. Thanks for coming out there. Thanks for having me.

Chris L. Davis 49:45
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to and it can be found in Apple podcast, Google podcasts, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday, so make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out. And while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly. And you can access them all at allsystemsgopodcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly, my friends