Building a $3billion Company: The Calendly Case Study...
This week's newsletter covers the inspiring story of Tope Awotona, the founder of the scheduling platform, 'Calendly'...
Happy New Week!
I recently came across the truly inspiring story of Tope Awotona, the founder of ‘Calendly’. Calendly is a scheduling platform that helps you schedule appointments smoothly without all the back and forth. The platform currently serves over 10 million monthly active users.
Tope grew up in Nigeria and moved to the US when he was a teenager. He graduated from the University of Georgia and got a job role at IBM. Before starting Calendly, Tope started a few business ventures. His first business was a dating site, then followed by an e-commerce website selling projectors but the margins were terrible and the sales weren’t great. He then started another e-commerce business selling grills but he noticed that just like the other two businesses, he didn’t have any passion for any of the businesses.
He noticed that he was just trying to find different ways to make money. The only way he could truly succeed was if he built a business around a problem he was passionate about. He decided to take a break from starting a business until he found a problem he could solve, something that made him excited and something he was committed to.
Tope was an account manager dealing with top companies and was always in meetings with them. He found it very difficult to arrange meetings with large groups of people because of availability clashes etc. He decided to solve this problem by creating a smooth software that shares your availability and makes scheduling meetings seamless and efficient. After months of research, he decided to go all in with his idea. He cleared out his 401k, and savings account, maxed out his credit cards, and took out some loans to create the first prototype.
He launched the company in 2013, his first breakthrough was when a school asked him to onboard 80 teachers, however, he couldn’t monetise it due to not having enough funds to pay a development team to implement a payment system.
Tope struggled to raise money for Calendly. While hustling to get some funding from venture capitalists he " watched other people who fit a different 'profile' get money thrown at them for shitty ideas.” The only thing he could attribute it to was that he was black. Tope finally raised $350,000 and then raised another $200,000 in 2015 which he didn’t use. Calendly now generates $70 million dollars annually. In January 2021, the startup closed off an investment of $350 million dollars which valued the start-up at over $3 billion.
Calendly’s growth was mostly due to a very organic strategy and word of mouth. Calendly invites become links to Calendly itself, so being sent an invite also gives someone new the opportunity to sign and start to use it too. This type of marketing works because people tend to trust the opinions of their friends more than those of a stranger. So if they see someone they know using a scheduling app, they naturally assume it’s good. Calendly grew much larger during covid due to the lockdowns and office closures meaning people had to set up meetings digitally.
There are many lessons to learn from Tope’s story. Once again, we are reminded that it takes a huge amount of patience and resilience to succeed. Tope has been working on Calendly since 2012 and he has been working on a number of businesses since graduating from university. Sometimes it takes a while for you to find what works, keep going. There is also a lesson on the importance of passion and problem-solving, if you want to stick at something long enough, passion is required. It is easy to give up at the first hurdle if the problem you’re solving doesn’t really matter to you. It is also important to solve a problem that matters, or else you’re creating something that people won’t really need.
“What amplifies luck is hard work, skill, resilience, and an appetite for risk-taking.” Tope Awotona