Hi everyone,

One of the core principles for Rise: impacting work and productivity by things that do not require changing habits. Someone shared a great quote from Musk he uses to guide his teams: 'All input is error', so a Tesla would (should) automatically switch to reverse if it's impossible to drive off forward. Fitting idea for us as well.

What happened?

• We focussed our efforts in product on improving the TimeFinder further: more time window options and improving the responsiveness of the suggested slots, in addition to a batch of UX improvements when composing a query for our engine. We now show people you meet with most and allow specifying week numbers, for example.
• We set out to ship a feature to view the calendar of a colleague, which is nearly ready but required us to think about the access model between users and teams. We set on something simple (you can see events within the same domain – and respecting gsuite settings obviously –, everything outside that – eg personal calendar – is shown as free-busy). We'll refine that with feedback over the next couple of weeks. As said, all input is error, so we would like to stay away from settings as much as possible.
• We flipped the switch to send email notifications when scheduling/updating events. Currently we're using the default email that Google Calendar is sending, but we're planning on replacing that. 1) we think we can do better and 2) that email is a very important touchpoint to show that someone is using Rise in a subtle way. It will be an important driver for growth.
• We refreshed our deck and started having discussions with funds and angels as we're aiming to close our round before the holiday season and this is moving along nicely. If you signalled that you want to be part of that round as an angel we'll reach out to you individually in the upcoming weeks.

What's next?

• We're shipping the 'view calendar of colleague' feature
• We're finalizing the official structure for Rise and focussing on moving our funding round forward
• We're continuing our talks with a 100+ sized company next week that's interested to join Rise as a launching partner, which would be really nice
• As soon as we have the 'view calendar of colleague' feature we're ready to onboard some more users and we actually can't wait

How can you help?

• If you have feedback/thoughts on our deck, let me know. Anything comments are super helpful.
• Feel free to forward the deck to angels/funds that might be a good fit. Specifically looking for experts in the area of b2b sales and marketing. Bonuspoints if they have experience in the HR/productivity scene.