The Problem With Traditional Calendars
Vimcal was co-founded by Berkeley classmates John Li and Michael Zhao when they were struggling to deal with multiple time zones while fundraising for their first startup. While you might not be an entrepreneur, chances are that you have found yourself dealing with many of the other shortcomings traditional calendar applications possess, especially when it comes to dealing with time zone differences. Not great for productivity!
Data suggests that 26% of all employees in the US are currently working remotely, with many more working under a hybrid model. With this number expected to continue to increase over the next few years, especially if you work for a startup, we need to continue to improve work functionality in these settings.
Thistransition means global teams are likely to become an even more popular trend across the world, so ensuring all team members are on the same page will be more important than ever. Once this occurs, you will be likely to experience the challenge that Li and Zhao experienced firsthand… That is unless their push succeeds, which seems to be the case.
Taking Different Time Zones by Storm
Today, Vimcal is used by executives at companies like Figma, Instacart, Twitter, Netflix, and Uber, as well as remote teams all over the world. In addition to its rapid growth, Vimcal has been recognized by outlets like Product Hunt, earning several awards in the process like the Golden Kitty Awards’ “Product of the year”.
While Vimcal was born from the need to deal with multiple time zones when scheduling, the application continues to tackle all of the shortcomings that other calendar tools present. With powerful and versatile features like availability sharing, natural language event creation, personalized booking links, time traveling, quick commands, templating, and a videoconference launchpad, all intended to make connecting with peers easier, Vimcal was able to onboard thousands of users in a matter of months due to their dedication to solving customer pain points.
Today, Vimcal is considered the world’s fastest, most versatile, and most powerful calendar for remote workers by many. All of this is achieved while also offering a beautiful, yet streamlined, design that makes it easy to find out what you need when you need it, making for a great user experience.
A New Product for an Underserved Group
Speaking of customer pain points, I mentioned that Vimcal launched a new product earlier this month specifically tailored to the needs of Executive Assistants, chiefs of staff, and administrators in general: Vimcal Maestro. With features like multi-time zone conversion, unique tabs for each executive, group polling, keyboard shortcuts for every operation, and customized event templates, Maestro saved over an hour a day in early tests for these individuals… or about 5 work shifts.
Maestro is the result of the close relationship between Vimcal’s co-founders and their users, which has resulted in continued feedback that leads to new features and quality-of-life improvements. In the words of CEO John Li:
“After onboarding our first thousand users personally, I noticed there was a clear dilemma amongst calendar products — all scheduling software is designed for personal use, not for scheduling on behalf of other people. There are nearly 10 million executive assistants in the world, but even after the rise of remote work, next to no tools are built for their daily use — we’re changing that with Maestro.”
While a waitlist is still in place for those interested in using Maestro, the new platform has picked up the interest of hundreds of thousands of users already. Given the track record of Vimcal with its previous product, this is hardly surprising. If Maestro’s success is anywhere close to Vimcal’s success, the future of calendars is likely to change for the better forever for these executive assistants and the entirety of Vimcal’s user base.
