Hi there,

This is our final update for this year. And what a year this was for Rise. From scrappy ideas from Emiel and myself we went through exploring funding in March this year, convinced Willem to join us, spent the summer building the first version and managed to secure enough money to be able to work on this exciting space for the foreseeable future (we’ll properly announce this early next year).

We are so very happy that you are all following along and thanks for all your help, big or small. Good luck with the final things to take care of before the end of the year and hope you have a fantastic time with your loved ones.

Our next update is scheduled for January 10th, since on January 3rd you probably have other things in your mind (so do we).

Here's what happened at Rise:

• We have been talking to the first bunch of candidates – after months of heads down product building and focus on fundraising it's good to be back at it. We're really excited. We launched our 'official' hiring page: hiring.risecalendar.com. And included a nice little gift for referrals (and yes you are eligible too!).
• Thanks for your help and the suggestions on hiring. We have been posting on YC Who is hiring and on Angellist. We also started playing with the positions a bit to see if that would change the responses. On the other hand a lot of people are winding down for the year so it makes sense that traffic is a bit low, but still good to plant some seeds.
• Product improvements:
  • Blueprint changes – improved display to make it a bit easier on the eyes while still being accessible
  • Improved timezone feature – added a way to dismiss the extra timezone, improved display and added a clickable element to add an extra timezone
  • Improved FAT UX – fixed an issue where backspace would cause the cursor to be positioned incorrectly
  • Improved rendering of calendar of colleagues – now also rendering their focus blocks, and tweaked rendering order: blueprint blocks are always on the lowest calendar level
  • Day settings – it is now possible to change your day start / day end / working days settings from the settings panel
  • Copy email – it is now possible to click ‘Copy email’ next to a specific attendee

What's next:

• We'll continue our hiring process and cold outreaches, tweaking our job posts and sharing with our network.
• Next to this we're mainly focussing on making sure users are able to quickly see and adjust both their availability and their blueprint. This is one of the issues we currently see when people use our Find a time feature.
• There's a long list of stability improvements and issues we've listed that we're slowly working through.

Thanks and until the 10th!

Rick