Hi there,

Here’s what happened at Rise:

• Hiring: our first engineer (Cameron) started last week, which was a big milestone for us. We signed a second frontend engineer (Dany), he will start in a couple of weeks. We have one backend position to fill and we have quite a good pipeline for that.
• Strategy: with our announcement out of the way we started focussing on our roadmap for Q1 and back to building again. We decided to primarily focus on improving the core of the product, meaning focus time saving features, over the next couple of weeks. Biggest thing we want to validate: does Rise have a team wide impact on time to focus? This is all about finding the right balance because we also need to add a lot of new users to properly validate our solutions.
• Product:
  • We enabled Rise to Rise scheduling. Our scheduling engine can now find great slots to meet with any other Rise user without exposing private data.
  • We finally got approved by Google for using the extra permissions we needed to get proper names, profile pictures etc. from your colleagues.
  • Shipped a new way to input a query in Find a Time (this is where you say with whom you want to meet and when etc.) which is way more reliable and fast. We’re quite happy with this!
  • We built a helper that regularly checks if your events in Rise are in sync with Google. We discovered that in some cases we didn’t sync the events properly. We’ll have much better visibility on this now.
  • Cameron shipped a ton of nice stuff and got familiar with the code. It was incredible to see how fast he’s getting up to speed.

What’s next:

• If you use Find a Time now it happens quite often that we’re are not able to find a time. Sometimes this is because we have no access to an attendees calendar, someone is overbooked or simply not working. We’re building something that will still give you the opportunity to, under the circumstances, still find the best spot. But, we’ll also show you how you could change your query to find a really nice time to meet.

  

• We’ll also explore what happens when we add our suggestions to your colleagues calendar when you’re viewing this. Sometimes people still open to see what someone is up to and then even use this to schedule. Our goal is to have almost all meetings use one of our suggestions from the Scheduling Engine. This is our second entry point to make use of those suggestions.

Emiel