Hi everyone,

Here's the big news: based on the report and a demo we signed the first paying team for Rise. Huge milestone for us. Obviously the product is not completely ready yet, so we're starting with a small section of employees that we'll gradually expand.

Here's the other things that happened:

• Right after we sent the previous update we got verified by Google. This meant we could invite a lot more people – which we did.
• We have been ramping up the number of reports and ran it for ~16 different teams so far, sizing from 5-6 to over 100 calendars. Super interesting to see the results and tweak it.
• We have had a really nice second demo session of our salespitch with Duco, and we have had two real calls as well, of which one was immediately convinced. Biggest challenge we faced: in order to really prove the value of Rise, we need as many people on teams to use it. But in order to get teams to actually get on board with us, we can't force them to switch to Rise at once. If you have thoughts around this, let us know. We'll obviously do a lot of handholding in the onboarding phase, but some ideas besides that:
  • Start with a team that schedules mostly internal and mostly within the team
  • Start with a handful of key users (that schedule a lot) and define a company blueprint we adhere to. In that way the biggest offenders will start scheduling better.
• We have onboarded the first couple of users on the actual calendar, which was ... frightening. But super useful.

Product updates:

• We now show alternative times and allow rescheduling with one click. Here's an example of a meeting that was originally scheduled in my focustime on Monday (blue bar). Selecting the event instantly shows three alternatives that are in my meetingtime (yellow bar) and also fit snugly with either end of day or my weekly review on Friday. One click on either the proposed time in calendar or list of suggestions moves it.

  

• We now correctly know which events are read-only and which ones aren't, allowing us to decide between instantly changing events or sending a counter-proposal to the event owner (we'll build that next).

Milestones ahead:

• We want to have 6 conversations with potential clients about the report before Sept 1st (2 done, 4 to go)
• We want to have the first 20 friends onboarded in Rise before Sept 1st

What's next:

• We'll onboard more friends, collect feedback and get those issues fixed. As the TimeFinder is the core of our solution that should make the outcomes of the report a reality, we'll focus on improving that: making it more accessible, improving the suggestions and work on the flows afterwards.