Hi,

There’s a lot of cool stuff happening in the calendar space. We see that as a good thing – it only validates that we’re working on something more people are trying to crack. It’s also fascinating to see the different angles the other teams are taking. So far, it only reinforced our strategy: we’re deeply focussed on a) teams (helping them reclaim focus time and structure their time at work) and b) work (feature that help you navigate around what needs to happen to get the job done, instead of optimizing for social/personal events). We believe focussing on this has the best chance to solve a real pain point and build something companies are willing to pay for.

🏋️ Here’s what happened at Rise:

• Today we’ve grown from 4 to 5 officially, since it’s Dany’s first day! He’ll be joining Cameron and Rick on building out the Rise frontend.
• We have been ramping up the number of teams we’re giving early access. We now have first users from 5 different teams on board and ~10 others lined up for next couple of weeks. The goal for this Q was to onboard 10 users from 3 teams. While we surpassed the number of teams, we also run into quite a lot of day to day issues. Both in our key features (scheduling, scoring, autopilot) and in foundation (recurring meetings, notes, meeting rooms). Our first users are excited, but also still hesitant to have their complete teams onboarded. Good insight and solving those issues is now our top priority.
• Replied to Rise.com on the trademark issue. We’d like to see if we can get away with just changing our logo. But as mentioned before: if they want us to change our name it’s likely we’ll have to do this.
• We’re currently finalizing our Q2 plans and will share those in the next update. In it we’re also sharing a more elaborate roundup of feedback from our early teams.

🌅 Product updates:

• We’re using AutoPilot ourselves. Willem is now working on allowing AutoPilot for recurring meetings and we expect to give this to our users early this week.

• We shipped an improved rating that’s showing the actual focus time that can be won back instead of a couple of red/green bars. Although it’s helpful in a few cases we also see how its confusing in others. Since it’s relative to the option you’ve selected it might jump when selecting other options.

• We’ll highlight our suggestions to reschedule events a bit more aggressive when a meeting can improved a lot.

  

• The left sidebar is almost ready for our users. We expected to ship it without the colleagues section first but we’ll combine this update

• Multidomain support. Some of our users ran into trouble because their colleagues where using different domains and therefor couldn't look up someones calendar or use find a time with them.

🔮 What’s next:

• Roll-out AutoPilot and the sidebar to our users
• Improve the results you’ll get when using Find a time and it can’t find a time the matches your request. Some results aren’t that relevant and are confusing.