[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) - Calendar in your ...
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Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) - Calendar in your menu bar
Hey HN, I'm Jordan from Superpowered (http://superpowered.me/),
here with my co-founders Nikhil, Nick, and Ibrahim. We're building
a calendar app for the Mac menu bar. A few months ago, we were
students from the University of Waterloo. We started YC as a video
lecture platform for professors but realized it was a horrible
idea. We needed a new problem. We settled on one we all faced
during our remote internships. Our calendars became more important,
yet meetings took ten clicks to join and were easy to miss. So, we
built a Mac app to bring the platform we check the most, Google
Calendar, into the menu bar. We've made common actions, like
joining Zoom meetings and checking what's coming up, a click away.
We've only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS
platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn't
take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on
top of everything. We're now looking to bring Slack and GitHub
into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to
better organize everything you use as we've done with Google
Calendar. For those who are curious, it's built using React +
Electron and designed to look as native as possible in the menu
bar. Sensitive user data like calendar events don't pass through
our servers. We're new to the productivity space and still have a
lot to learn, so we'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts.
Thanks in advance! Jordan Note: We're still early on and are
trying to figure out our pricing. We priced it towards the higher
end to see if we're delivering enough value to our users. PS -
Yes, we have keyboard shortcuts.
Author : jordandearsley
Score : 54 points
Date : 2021-03-11 15:53 UTC (7 hours ago)
| ahstilde wrote:
| Why was "video lecture platform for professors" a "horrible
| idea?"
|
| Segment started as a tool for professors, too [1].
|
| https://segment.com/academy/intro/measuring-product-market-f...
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Our idea was poorly timed and we lost passion for it. We were
| focused on making lectures better for the remote school
| environment. Unfortunately colleges have a hard time justifying
| a tuition's worth of value for online videos, so it was a tough
| sell, especially with the end of the pandemic around the
| corner.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| Let me get this straight. $10 a month of a calendar widget that's
| only available for a single platform? Plus, these quotes don't
| really help.
|
| > "No more looking for the Google calendar tab in Chrome."
|
| Maybe use the native calendar app then? Or make an app shortcut
| for Google Calendar in Chrome?
|
| > "I just joined a meeting 3 minutes late instead of 5 because of
| Superpowered, which is a resounding success in my book."
|
| Ummm. Probably not a good one to include.
|
| I just don't get the $120/yr value in this. On Windows, I have
| all my calendars synced with the stock calendar app, links to the
| meetings are automatically pulled into the notes section, and
| reminders are automatically set for 15 minutes. Whenever I get a
| notification for my next meeting, I click it, then click the link
| and I'm in my meeting. For macOS, same thing.
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback on those quotes! We'll look into
| changing them.
|
| > Maybe use the native calendar app then? Or make an app
| shortcut for Google Calendar in Chrome?
|
| I myself used to be an Apple Calendar user. Eventually I had to
| switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our users are in
| the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't support native
| functionality.
|
| You definitely could make a shortcut or find another workaround
| to replace one of our features, but given how many feature
| requests we get from users, that wouldn't be enough for a lot
| of people. We have customers who agree it's worth it for them.
|
| > $10 a month of a calendar widget that's only available for a
| single platform?
|
| We currently are a calendar widget, but we're now branching out
| of the calendar space to become a unified notification inbox.
|
| I understand for pricing purposes we're on the higher end, as
| mentioned in the note, this is intentional to validate we
| provide enough value.
| trinix912 wrote:
| > I myself used to be an Apple Calendar user. Eventually I
| had to switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our
| users are in the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't
| support native functionality.
|
| I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm using multiple
| Google Calendar accounts just fine with the built-in Calendar
| app.
|
| > We currently are a calendar widget, but we're now branching
| out of the calendar space to become a unified notification
| inbox.
|
| So basically, a calendar widget and a notification center
| (which is already a part of the OS)?
| jmarcher wrote:
| > I myself used to be an Apple Calendar user. Eventually I
| had to switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our
| users are in the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't
| support native functionality.
|
| Calendar.app works fine with GCal though (notifications,
| accepting/cancelling invites, etc.). I still go through the
| Web UI to create invites and what not (because I want my
| automatic zoom meeting and decent scheduling tools), but that
| happens seldomly.
| 1-more wrote:
| > Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work.
| Plenty of our users are in the same boat and Google Calendar
| doesn't support native functionality.
|
| Dog you can sync Google calendar with your built in calendar
| then run Next Meeting[0] in your menu bar. You can even have
| a global shortcut to open the meeting link. All my work
| meetings are in scheduled through Google Calendar and take
| place in zoom, and all I do is hit Hyper-Z[1] to open the
| correct meeting link.
|
| [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/next-
| meeting/id1017470484?mt=1... [1] Hyper being Cmd-Opt-Shift-
| Ctrl which is remapped to one key on my keyboard. You can
| make it anything you want, obviously. My point is I don't
| even have to touch my mouse to get into the meeting.
| trinix912 wrote:
| > Maybe use the native calendar app then? Or make an app
| shortcut for Google Calendar in Chrome?
|
| Exactly. The built-in Calendar app is adequate for most tasks
| (definitely adequate for just delivering notifications).
|
| Besides, there are quite a few decent _free_ calendar widgets
| out there already.
|
| > "I just joined a meeting 3 minutes late instead of 5 because
| of Superpowered, which is a resounding success in my book."
|
| Set your calendar to notify you 15 min before the meeting
| starts. It's a trivial problem to solve without paying $120/yr.
|
| > We priced it towards the higher end to see if we're
| delivering enough value to our users
|
| Sorry, but you're marketing your app as "luxury" without
| delivering any luxury.
| tesnirnat wrote:
| Wow! I love this. Unfortunately $10/month is a bit high for me,
| imo. Any plans to bring this down?
| kybernetikos wrote:
| Another 'cloud default pricing' casualty. I'd buy more than 5x
| as many services if the default price was $2/month.
|
| Maybe cloud infrastructure is still too expensive?
| tesnirnat wrote:
| But using the cloud probably got them here sooner, so I think
| the tradeoff is complex and not at all unreasonable for an
| early stage startup. I'm really hoping that they succeed
| though, and can figure out a business model at a lower
| subscription cost :)
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Thanks! As I mentioned in the note, the pricing is intentional
| to validate our product. If it helps, we just rolled out a
| referral program that gives you two free weeks for every friend
| that signs into the app.
| tesnirnat wrote:
| Totally understand, and I really do support you guys in your
| journey! Maybe consider offering a business (or family)
| license where you can buy multiple seats for slightly
| cheaper?
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Thanks so much! It's not listen on our landing page yet,
| but we offer team plans starting at 8/mo.
|
| We also have a referral program where you get two free
| weeks for every friend you bring to the app if that helps
| HHalvi wrote:
| I use Fantastical 3 which not just puts a calendar in your menu
| bar but also solves for most (if not all) of your calendaring
| needs. All of it for ~40$ a year which allows you to use it also
| on your Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.
|
| P.S: Not affiliated with Fantastical in any way, just a happy and
| paying user for a few years now.
| maxekman wrote:
| Fantastical really is fantastical! The quick entry and great
| integrations makes it truly great. It also has a really good
| menu bar item similar to this project.
| sam1r wrote:
| Awesome! Super stoked to try this. Couple of quick questions
|
| -- was the name a play on superhuman the email service? if so,
| smooth move. I've been waiting 3 years for SuperHuman -- it
| appears it's just soma users + the clubhouse inner circle.
|
| -- Was product hunt on your launch map? If so, to what extent on
| the radar.
|
| I ask because I have one to many micro-apps for the M1 Macbook
| Air [or tested on such] -- I haven't launched yet, but I don't
| want to worry about playing games on growth hacks when my focus
| went on the product experience - not the slick tricks to quickly
| tip subscribing "users" to use something in the near future that
| may not even exist beyond a page. Or a PH "landing page".
|
| I'm thinking, as of 2021, ... maybe HN is the most authentic way
| to go. [And of course, relevant reddit orgs that may find it
| useful with the consent of the respective subreddit admin].
|
| Anyways, I sidetracked, but wanted to reaffirm -- Great, simple
| app - wish there were more of these! Looks great next to the
| Caffeine icon ;).
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Thanks so much, that's really kind of you!
|
| > Was the name a play on superhuman the email service?
|
| It wasn't inspired by Superhuman, but the name sounded strong
| and gave us the flexibility to change product direction. We got
| lucky since a lot of people now have the association of Super-x
| being a tool to make you faster or more efficient.
|
| > Was product hunt on your launch map? If so, to what extent on
| the radar.
|
| Yes it was, it was our first public launch four weeks ago:
| https://www.producthunt.com/posts/superpowered-2.
|
| We launched the second we had something that provided a minimum
| amount of value to our users.
| petargyurov wrote:
| I'm sorry for being negative, but paying $10 per month for what
| is essentially a calendar widget is blowing my mind. The fact
| that this is even in YC and not just a side project is taking
| what's left of my brain and blowing it into the stratosphere.
|
| > We've only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS
| platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn't
| take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay
| on top of everything.
|
| Can someone give me an example of this problem? To me this feels
| so "extra"... Maybe I'm missing something.
| Skhalar wrote:
| I think what you're paying for is someone to sync your
| calenders for you.
|
| Similar to ring camera. You're just paying someone to make your
| cctv camera available to you over thr internet instead of you
| setting it up yourself.
|
| I personally hate these services but some people would pay
| $/month for this convince.
| joshuakelly wrote:
| The pro-sumer market is massive. It's really not that hard to
| deliver $10 worth of value to people whose time is very, very
| expensive.
|
| As far as YC goes, pivoting and working on new ideas really
| rapidly is downright normal. Sometimes that looks like taking
| weekend hacks and seeing how far you can get with them (this
| one being a canonical example:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819)
| forgotmysn wrote:
| ive had friends get into YC without an idea, just two guys
| looking to start a company
| jeremyis wrote:
| > Can someone give me an example of this problem? To me this
| feels so "extra"... Maybe I'm missing something.
|
| The business value of missing a notification or meeting can be
| really high. I feel like businesses would happily pay $10 per
| user-month to have all their employees on time to a meeting. Or
| even just closer. I imagine similar logic can be applied to
| other notifications.
| shakow wrote:
| > I feel like businesses would happily pay $10 per user-month
| to have all their employees on time to a meeting
|
| Maybe I'm being extremely naive, but isn't it already a
| solved problem with synchronized & shared calendars and
| notifications?
| jeremyis wrote:
| I don't think so because the notifications in chrome get
| buried for me. Email alerts for lost in the deluge of work
| emails. The Apple Watch helps a lot actually
| shakow wrote:
| Then won't notifications from this utility also get
| buried?
| jasode wrote:
| _> Then won't notifications from this utility also get
| buried?_
|
| I think the idea is that the upcoming
| calendar/appointment notification is _live and always on
| the menubar_. See example screenshot from their web
| landing page:
| https://superpowered.me/static/media/menubar.aaa56b48.png
|
| I'm building a similar calendar notification tool for
| personal use on Windows so I understand the value of
| this. Calendar notifications via email and "reminders" on
| the iPhone are not effective for my workflow and I need
| something that's always active on my menu bar.
| jeremyis wrote:
| Exactly - calendar notifications are "more important"
| than my frequent Clubhouse pings and having them in a
| more visible place is very helpful.
| austenallred wrote:
| I pay for it. It makes my life easier and saves me time.
|
| It's not really hard to make my life $10/month better, and who
| knows how many people that is true for? I wouldn't overthink
| it.
| tannedNerd wrote:
| Genuinely curious why not pay for fantastical? It has
| basically the same widget, plus an iPhone and Mac app for a
| 1/3 of the price? Not to be mean, but this seems like it only
| got traction because they got accepted to YC on another idea,
| otherwise would have been lost in the sea of dozens of other
| much more full featured or free calendar solutions?
| cced wrote:
| I bought fantastical quite a few years ago for something like
| $10... single payment. Still works. They have offerings for
| 6.99 cad a month.
|
| How many QoL are you willing to buy? You're essentially
| paying $10 for a netflix subscription only it's a calendar
| widget in the top menu bar.
| rsweeney21 wrote:
| For context, Austen Allred is the co-founder and CEO of
| Lambda School, so efficiency wins are going to be pretty
| valuable for him.
|
| Also, as a CEO you are constantly thinking in terms of ROI.
| It doesn't matter how much software costs if it pays for
| itself several times over. This spills over into personal
| purchases too.
|
| (BTW, big fan of what Lambda School is doing Austen.)
| jordandearsley wrote:
| No problem at all. Definitely does, it's a broad problem and
| we're still figuring it out too.
|
| As a dev, I almost always miss my GitHub notifications unless
| I'm constantly checking the platform in my browser. We want to
| bring all the platforms we use for work into one native place.
| Does that make more sense now?
| jeswin wrote:
| > As a dev, I almost always miss my GitHub notifications
| unless I'm constantly checking the platform in my browser.
|
| But why would anyone be constantly checking GitHub
| notifications? Isn't that a distraction?
| leits wrote:
| I am currently working on a service for GitHub project
| reports and analytics. Would you be interested in that? If
| so, leave your mail here and I'll put you in beta!
| https://sneak-peek.io/product/ohmycode
| foobarbecue wrote:
| > As a dev, I almost always miss my GitHub notifications
|
| Maybe I'm being dense here, but can't you use email?
| jmarcher wrote:
| http://ptsochantaris.github.io/trailer/ is wonderful to
| manage GitHub work and notification.
| bombcar wrote:
| Doesn't MacOS already have an elaborate notification
| implementation? Would not integrating with that work?
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Many people have the notification center on Do Not Disturb
| indefinitely. It's noisy and unactionable for a a lot of
| people, including myself.
|
| We want to integrate deeply into SaaS platforms to provide
| one-click access to features within those platforms. For
| example, viewing and resolving comments on a Google Doc.
| This just isn't possible through Mac's notification center.
| ftio wrote:
| How do you prevent your platform from becoming equally
| noisy and unactionable?
| fireeyed wrote:
| YC funds widgets ? What are the economics of this thing. A
| thousand developers can copy or open source similar
| alternatives.
| leits wrote:
| You will laugh, but a year ago I made same service in open
| source: https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar/
| nbclark wrote:
| I love Meeting Bar. Use it every day. I really like the
| applescript feature. A hotkey combo pauses my music,
| launches zoom or meet, and I'm good to go
| fireeyed wrote:
| Amazing, thank you. I will be using this. They were
| probably "inspired" :wink by your service
| qiyuxuan96 wrote:
| It's just a MVP... version 0.01 of their vision. The fact that
| they have paying users who use them daily is a very, very good
| signal - that's a hard thing to do! It's so much easier to add
| additional features to that group of users later.
|
| I see so many negative comments and can't help but think of
| this (first comment on DropBox's HN launch):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
| leits wrote:
| Even more absurd is that there are free and more functional
| alternatives: https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar
| johnstonnorth wrote:
| Thanks for point this out - it is amazing. Superpowered has a
| lot of catching up to do.
| jahewson wrote:
| Execution here is great. High level of polish. The pricing is a
| little hard to justify, you might want to consider segmenting
| your plans. 1 meeting per day personal plan, etc? Team features
| would help justify the price.
|
| Pro tip: for b2b sales, generic productivity enhancing tools are
| often discovered organically by high-load SME C-suite folks and
| they'll decide they want their entire team to have it. If I was
| in that role then I'd be thrilled not just to save time but to
| save all the time I spend waiting for my team members to find the
| link, log in, etc. Maybe you could run the math on how much time
| is saved and its value.
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Thanks! We try to put a lot of focus into design. We're
| currently thinking on free tiers, team features, etc.
|
| That's a great idea. Our current approach is bottom-up. We
| found people sharing it with their teams organically so we
| rolled out team plans to get more people on board. Open to
| other suggestions if you have experience!
| jahewson wrote:
| You're welcome. LinkedIn ads are a simple and relatively low-
| cost way to target job titles and company size. Banner ads
| work too but the complexity of operating them is high. You
| might want some way to capture Windows users' emails with a
| dedicated landing page. Oh and consider volume pricing.
| ballenf wrote:
| I really hope you're willing to share some metrics on your
| findings in regard what you said somewhere below was this
| exploration of the level of pain you're addressing. I would think
| that churn is going to be high and one of your bigger challenges
| unless there's stickiness that I don't see.
|
| Are you worried about iStat Menus, Bartender, Alfred or Better
| Touch Tool adding your product as a feature? Is there a hard
| problem that you've solved that they'd face in replicating the
| idea?
|
| FWIW, what I'd personally love is a physical stoplight on my desk
| with Green-Yellow-Red lights for whether a meeting is coming up.
| It should have a hotkey that launches the meeting. For that I
| _might_ pay $10 /mo.
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Yeah definitely! On average, our users use Superpowered 10
| times per day. It's an ingrained part of their workflows.
|
| It's not only a single button to join a meeting, but it's also
| the ability to peek at your calendar without opening a tab.
| That might sound minor, but it's worth it for people who do it
| 10+ times a day.
|
| I wouldn't say we're worried about another tool building one-
| click join. Other tools exist that do. We're branching out of
| the calendar space to bring work platforms like Slack and
| GitHub together into a unified platform. Our focus is on work
| platforms, theres is not.
| mrsuprawsm wrote:
| How does this compare to Meeter? (https://trymeeter.com/). It
| seems to solve a similar niche; but Meeter is currently free.
| ttul wrote:
| This sounds like a classic "in front of the steamroller" startup.
| Apple is likely building a similar capability into MacOS; it's
| just not yet released. One day, a new MacOS will roll out and the
| menu bar calendar will be one of 8,000 new features. Your market
| is gone overnight.
|
| If you are lucky, they will see your genius and acquihire you. If
| not, this company has a high likelihood of failing or becoming a
| lifestyle company with a small but valuable user base who cannot
| live without the few special things your menu bar app does that
| Apple's built-in feature does not.
|
| All this being said, you can also discover all kinds of things on
| the journey that take you away from the original idea into areas
| where a lot of growth can happen. Build things your customers
| love and you will find success. It's a great idea fundamentally.
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! Totally agree. That's why we're trying
| to branch out of the calendar space as fast as possible. First
| as a unified notification inbox for SaaS platforms.
| lesiki wrote:
| This looks really good! I'm a Meeter user so it's a real use case
| I have already spent time looking for solutions to.
|
| I agree with other commenters though - I'd pay a one-time $10,
| but $10 per month seems unreasonably high. For perspective Meeter
| is free, and Spotify is $4 for a family of 4 (in my country).
|
| Maybe it could be part of the bundle at https://setapp.com/ or
| similar? Or you could have a set-your-own-price monthly sub?
| bberenberg wrote:
| There is also MeetingBar [1] which is free and open source [2].
| I would say there is one feature that none of the competitors
| in this space have done is auto join next meeting. This sounds
| easy, but it is actually hard [3]
|
| [1] https://apps.apple.com/app/id1532419400 [2]
| https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar [3]
| https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar/issues/30
| Mistone wrote:
| just started using this yesterday and I'm hooked. I have to be in
| a ton of meetings and as much as wish meetings would go away, no
| such luck.
|
| being late less often. not having to check calendar and wonder if
| its a zoom or google meet, and seeing the days schedule from the
| menu bar all add up to compounded daily value.
|
| $10 a month is a little steep, but I don't think the "people that
| have a lot of meetings" audience is super price sensitive.
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Glad to hear it! I'd agree, our power users are product
| managers + founders.
| holistio wrote:
| Everybody is raging about the price here, and unfortunately I
| also have a rather negative take.
|
| And it's about YC in general.
|
| Wasn't YC about building the next billion dollar company? I have
| restrained myself from applying because my ideas and projects
| were rather indie-devvy smaller things and I felt like for YC I
| need to low key change an industry.
|
| Is YC also the incubator for menu bar widgets now? What does that
| speak about YC?
| jordandearsley wrote:
| We've been working on this product for two months. Three of us
| are engineers.
|
| We have a much larger vision for this product, becoming an all-
| in-one work platform, starting with Slack and GitHub
| integrations. We're still working out what that will look like.
| But it's a going to take a lot longer than two months to build.
| thelastinuit wrote:
| First, I apologize for the following, I mean no harm.
|
| Based on some of the comments about notifications.
|
| This whole thing hits me in the core of an issue I have with
| people and how they handle technology (especially when it comes
| to notifications). I can't stress enough how I hate to see
| people's email inboxes or the screen phones. I don't understand
| why there is so many pending notifications. When it comes to
| email, thousands, I'm not bloody kind, thousands of unread
| emails. When it comes to apps in their phones, hundreds. And
| don't get me started with group notifications (IMs)...
| Technology, in my view, supposes to enhance us... but I think
| people are becoming dumber and lazy.
|
| So... this app makes no sense to me. I wouldn't pay for it but
| clearly I'm a moron and way off the curve so not the ideal
| client.
| AlanYx wrote:
| >Sensitive user data like calendar events don't pass through our
| servers.
|
| This could be a selling feature, but it isn't clear from your
| privacy policy that calendar events don't go through your
| servers. You might want to make that clearer and upfront in your
| privacy policy (and possibly make that promise separate from the
| clause that lets you change the policy at any time, or at least
| commit to notifying users of changes to the privacy policy).
|
| Also, just generally, you might consider other edits to your
| privacy policy for clarity. For example, there's a heading that
| refers to "Personal information we collect" but then "personal
| information" is never actually defined; instead you define
| something called "device information". It's unclear (to me
| anyway) whether device information is the same as personal
| information. This makes it hard to interpret the rest of the
| privacy policy, which refers to personal information.
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Thanks for taking a look at our privacy policy! I appreciate
| you taking the time, we'll look into making those edits.
| Broussebar wrote:
| Maybe not exactly the same features but as 'calendar in your menu
| bar' I really love itsycal[1].
|
| [1] https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/
| cjlm wrote:
| 117 comments and Dato[0] isn't mentioned. Works great for me, I
| replaced the Fantastical menu bar with it 6 months ago. One-time
| cost.
|
| [0] https://sindresorhus.com/dato
| bengale wrote:
| Seems pretty expensive, considering fantastical gives me the same
| thing for half the price and it works on my phone/iPad too.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| The Google Calendar Slack App does a pretty good job at this, it
| pings me 10 minutes before every meeting, and has easy buttons to
| join a remote call. It works for me since I'm on Slack all day
| anyway.
|
| And ... it's free!
| asattarmd wrote:
| Why is it Electron based when it's not cross platform?
| jordandearsley wrote:
| We chose to use Electron both so that we could build faster
| coming from a web development background, and to leave the
| option open to being cross-platform in the future.
|
| Even though its Electron, making it completely cross platform
| is non-trivial. A bunch of things are still platform specific
| (ex. the Windows menu bar works completely differently).
| jeremyis wrote:
| I tried Superpowered and liked it! Congrats on building a cool
| product! I see the value in having calendar alerts on your menu
| bar. I am real bad at remembering meetings and find the default
| alerts to be annoying or forgettable - I recently got an Apple
| Watch that has helped a lot with this though. I was a little
| surprised there was no free version with premium features - in my
| mind, the main benefit of alerts in my menu bar isn't enough to
| pay. I may not be the right user (maybe businesses?). Could you
| share thoughts around the pricing? Are there other features I may
| be missing?
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Glad you like it! With the pricing, we wanted to validate
| whether or not we were solving a painful enough of a problem.
| We're still early on and figuring out the best model - we're
| thinking about pricing tiers for sure. Thanks for the feedback!
| iamunr wrote:
| I feel similarly.
|
| Great looking product, I'd love to have a free version to
| glance at in my menu bar...
|
| but for the most part Apple Watch covers my needs.
| mushufasa wrote:
| This does not seem helpful to me. Part of the value of opening
| the calendar is seeing the day plus the week, to recalibrate
| priorities based on upcoming meetings as well as immediate
| meetings. I have desktop notifications for immediate upcoming
| meetings. If I wanted, I could set my calendar to one-day view
| and only see today's meetings. But I don't do that because I
| don't want that.
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Thanks for your feedback. We've found our customers use Google
| Calendar in two modes, read mode (80%) and write mode (20%).
|
| What you're mentioning falls into write mode. Gather a ton of
| context then make a number of changes. This is best done in
| Google Calendar.
|
| We focus on read mode. 80% of the time I open Google Calendar,
| it's to check what's next or to get into my next meeting. When
| that's done 10+ times a day, it adds up.
|
| That's going to be different for different people. Some of our
| customers who are product managers open Superpowered 30 times a
| day. For them, it's worth it.
| codegladiator wrote:
| > "I just joined a meeting 3 minutes late instead of 5 because of
| Superpowered, which is a resounding success in my book."
|
| Not sure if borderline sarcasm.
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Thanks for pointing that out, would have never noticed!
| cinbun8 wrote:
| yup, I would not have that on the site. Or I'd reword it.
| khaledh wrote:
| I use Next Up: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/up-next/id1355117041
|
| Does the job, and only costs $19.99/yr.
| mschrage wrote:
| I started using Superpowered yesterday and it is great! (I'm so
| tired of waiting for Google Calendar to load!)
|
| One feature request: it seems like it's not possible to create
| new calendar events using the app. I assume this is on the
| roadmap?
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Glad you like it! We don't allow creating new calendar events
| yet, but it's on our list for sure.
| eitland wrote:
| Back when I used a Mac in 2009 - 2012 there were a couple of
| applications that I loved.
|
| One of them was very similar to this but had an extra very
| interesting feature: when you clicked on it and it dropped down
| it filled the screen horizontally and maybe 25% vertically. On
| that space it showed a timeline of the upcoming events crawling
| closer and closer towards the right side.
|
| The time scale might have been logarithmic - I can't remember -
| but I remember it motivating me.
|
| Agree with the others on pricing: I now have a general aversion
| against subscriptions and $10 a month is way too much (unless you
| offer perpetual license after 6 or 12 months or something,
| atleta wrote:
| Is Superpowered really a wise name choice? If you look at
| https://superpowered.com/ , you'll see that it's in use by
| another startup. They're doing something completely different
| (mobile sound SDKs), but still, it's not like it's a personal
| blog or niche webshop etc. that you may hope buying at a
| reasonable price one day.
| trinix912 wrote:
| Super- is just another one of those startup name enhancers like
| -ly/-fy. Superhuman, Superpowered, Super...
| atleta wrote:
| Yep, but in this case the name is exactly the same. (Although
| I never understood the choice for the original one either.
| But that's a pretty interesting story of a solo dev guy who
| really just cared about his product and not growing a
| business. Despite this, and with the help of a bizdev guy he
| made an exit.)
| thatoneguytoo wrote:
| Wow. I have more than 5 meetings a day, I miss meetings, and I
| still don't see myself installing it, let alone paying for it.
|
| Is it really such a big pain that you need to join a meeting on
| time? Usually someone messages me asking me to join in case I
| miss it.
|
| Someone at YC be: Ima give this $120K coz why not.
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning, it's definitely not for everyone. We've
| found a set of users who do care enough about this seemingly
| minor problem.
|
| We also have a much bigger vision for this than a calendar app.
| The Google Calendar integration we've built is the base for
| every other platform we plan to bring in, like Slack and
| GitHub.
| cinbun8 wrote:
| This is neat and will certainly be useful for folks that have
| loads of meetings everyday.
|
| About your expansion into other areas - The reason the menu bar
| works is because it is tailor made for one thing now, which is
| finding the next meeting to join. If you add more options, would
| that not move the clutter from the browser tabs / apps into the
| menu bar? Something to think about.
|
| Good luck with the product. I wish you the best.
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Great point, it's something we've thought a lot about. The
| reason we built Superpowered in the first place was because we
| felt Google Calendar was too cluttered. We took the 20% of it
| we use 80% of the time, and put it in the menu bar.
|
| We want to take that same philosophy with every other platform.
| Only show the essential parts you need to do your work.
|
| It's a big challenge, as you can tell we put a lot of thought
| into design, and we will continue to as the platform expands.
| pr0duktiv wrote:
| If you don't want to spend 10$/month for Superpowered, checkout
| trymeeter.com. My cofounder and I built Meeter about a year ago
| and it's fully free currently.
| ahstilde wrote:
| How will you continue developing your product if it is free and
| closed-source?
| lkurusa wrote:
| Congratulations on launching!
|
| How does this compare to Fantastical? It does the same for me,
| just puts a giant Zoom icon next to its menubar icon and clicking
| on it lets me join my next meeting.
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| We're not interested in becoming a full calendar app. We're
| planning to branch out to other platforms like Slack and Github
| to become an all-in-one platform for work.
| andreilys wrote:
| Sorry it's not clear to me why this needs to be subscription
| service?
|
| Mac has a native Calendar app that allows you to sync to Google
| calendar and includes notifications. So I'm not sure why this
| would have $120/yr value add.
|
| On another note I truly dislike this trend of SaaSifying every
| software product. Some things are a simple utility that don't
| need much maintenance and updates. I can't imagine this widget
| being drastically different a year from now
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Thanks for the comment! I used to be an Apple Calendar user,
| but then switched to just using Google Calendar full-time.
|
| The problem with building a calendar that hooks into other
| calendar platforms is the requirement of parity. In order for
| it to replace Google Calendar, it needs to do everything Google
| Calendar does, and more. I stopped using Apple Calendar because
| it was too hard to send calendar invites to the rest of my
| team.
|
| Our goal was never to replace Google Calendar, just to make the
| 20% you use 80% of the time easier to access.
|
| > I can't imagine this widget being drastically different a
| year from now
|
| I totally see why you'd think that. For us, we're done focusing
| on calendars. We're now planning to move horizontally to
| include more work platforms like Slack and GitHub.
| iujjkfjdkkdkf wrote:
| I'm just thinking aloud about what would make this valuable
| enough for me to pay for...
|
| I have several computers with different os's and a phone, that
| sometimes I call into meetings with, sometimes I use the apps.
|
| I have meetings on teams, zoom, google, webex, (Skype is dead
| right?)
|
| I may have presentations that I need to give in these meetings,
| in google docs, ppt, browser tab, etc.
|
| So if your app could unify all of this, so I can click once on
| whatever device I'm on to get into my meeting, and have my
| meeting materials at hand, that would be cool.
|
| I'm less big on notifications of any kind, I get too many
| already, making some new kind of extra important notification
| won't help.
| bigsparky wrote:
| 4 years ago by nathan
|
| https://apps.apple.com/au/app/next-meeting/id1017470484?mt=1...
| aquir wrote:
| It's a shame that is only for Mac :( Any plans for
| Windows(/Linux)?
| jordandearsley wrote:
| As mentioned in the post, we built this using Electron + React!
| Which means it can be ported over to those platforms if needed.
|
| At the moment, we're more focused on building a product that
| our current users (on Mac) love before prematurely expanding to
| other platforms.
| ipnon wrote:
| This thread is a great example of how you can run a profitable
| company while pissing off 99% of people.
| CSDude wrote:
| Trying to be constructive, but why would it even be a
| subscription model? Although it looks nice, I would think twice
| even spending 10$ once for it (mostly due to our currency's
| value). Also, since it's an Electron based widget, is the memory
| overhead considerable for just a calendar widget?
|
| Also, how does this YC Launch work? Does not seem related at all
| with your original idea (not sure if it's a deal-breaker though?)
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. We'd like to fall into the category of
| other consumer SaaS products like Superhuman and Vimcal.
|
| > since it's an Electron based widget, is the memory overhead
| considerable for just a calendar widget?
|
| Great question. In my menu bar right now, the app's using
| ~150MB.
|
| > Also, how does this YC Launch work?
|
| Every startup in YC gets one YC Launch where they're featured
| on the front page for the day. Doesn't matter what idea was
| applied to YC with, just what the startup's currently working
| on.
| danpalmer wrote:
| 150MB might not seem like much, but it really is a lot.
|
| iStat Menus, which is tracking a lot more data across my
| system to render its multiple graphs is using ~85MB total.
|
| Bearing in mind that many users are going to have 5 things
| like this in their menubar, they can't all use this amount.
| jordandearsley wrote:
| That's a good point. There's definitely ways to optimize
| for less memory usage. We've been prioritizing feature
| development, but plan to focus on this before we start
| scaling.
| hnnnnnnngggggg wrote:
| I love all the comments about the price. It lets me know people
| really think this looks great and would work for them, but they
| are just off-put by the price.
|
| Stick to the price, the ones that sign up will be loyal. Adjust
| later if need be.
|
| Good job. It seems to scratch an itch.
| jordandearsley wrote:
| That's a positive way of looking at it, thanks!
| [deleted]
| badams2527 wrote:
| The UI looks nice.
|
| An alternative for those looking:
| https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar
| pcwein wrote:
| for all who like the idea but think 10$ is insane,
| https://tryMeeter.com/
| plesiv wrote:
| It looks pretty. It's a shame it's only for MacOS.
|
| The way I'm addressing the problem for this solution is by having
| an OS-level / window-manager keystroke to open a new Chrome tab
| with Google Calendar URL. For example, you can accomplish this by
| adding following lines to your i3wm config:
| bindsym $mod+F1 exec google-chrome
| "https://www.google.com/calendar/render" bindsym
| $mod+Shift+F1 exec google-chrome --new-window
| "https://www.google.com/calendar/render"
| asadlionpk wrote:
| Wow, how is this is a YC company? Isn't this more of a weekend
| project?
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Great question. Right now that's how it looks. We started with
| Google Calendar as base since the calendar acts as a source of
| truth throughout the day for remote workers.
|
| Now that we've got the base down (which takes time), we're
| quickly branching out to include more platforms, to make us
| less of a widget and more of a platform ourselves.
| esilverman wrote:
| Great product, works well, but can't see the need for this to be
| a monthly cost. Should be a one time purchase
| jordandearsley wrote:
| You're not the first to comment on this! Consumer SaaS is still
| growing. We'd like to fall into the category of apps like
| Superhuman, Vimcal, and Fantastical.
| asutekku wrote:
| Fantastical is, what, $3 a month and has a much better value
| proposition. You're effectively outpricing yourselves with
| $10 a month when there are tools that do the exactly same
| with a single purchase or even for free.
| spraveenitpro wrote:
| Great side project you have here? what about making it free and
| open source? You could accept donations?
| nkotov wrote:
| I have on average about 3-10 Zoom calls daily and I definitely
| see the value for this. Right now, I'm literally bouncing between
| Outlook, opening calendar invite, pressing the link, having
| Safari launch a new tab, press Allow, and then Zoom opens up.
|
| Curious to know what the longer term plan is. How will this grow
| past being a calendar widget?
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Glad to hear you have the problem!
|
| > How will this grow past being a calendar widget?
|
| With Google Calendar, we took the most important parts, like
| joining Zoom meetings, and put them front and center. We want
| to do the same with all the platforms we use for work in one
| place.
| findjashua wrote:
| if you're targeting OSX, there's an Alfred workflow that does
| this: https://git.deanishe.net/deanishe/alfred-video-conferences
| king_magic wrote:
| There's no way I'd pay $120/year for this. It's cute, but... hard
| to see how this is a YC-level startup.
| jordandearsley wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback. It definitely isn't for everyone. As
| mentioned in the note, we priced it a bit higher to validate
| that we were delivering enough value to our users. So far, we
| have users who get enough value out of it to pay for it.
|
| We also have a much larger vision for this product, but we need
| to start somewhere. Bringing Google Calendar into the menu bar
| is the first step in bringing all the platforms we use for work
| together.
| king_magic wrote:
| Fair enough, I don't know the vision you have, so I somewhat
| retract my previous comments. Good luck!
| leits wrote:
| If you can use the open source alternative, why pay SO much for
| superpowered?
|
| https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar
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