SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
18 year old raises $32m to build opensource version of Calendly
23 Jun 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main idea behind Cal.com?
You must have a general idea. What's like a general idea? 40, 50, 60,000 a month, something like that?
So we're actually, I think we're more towards the 15 to 20 in mind.
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. Hey folks, my guest today is Bailey Pumfleet.
He's the co-founder of Cal.com, schedule infrastructure for absolutely everyone. Bailey, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah.
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Chapter 2: How much funding did Cal.com raise and when?
All right, Cal.com. How much does that domain name cost?
Unfortunately, we can't spill the exact number due to an NDA, which is a shame. But obviously, well... you know, very expensive. It was probably one of the most significant purchases we'll probably ever make. And, you know, personally, I believe the most effective purchase we'll probably ever make.
When did you do it, the deal? Was it this year or last year or what?
So it was last year. Cause I mean, we officially launched the brand of cow.com We actually bought it a few months prior. So it was very sort of like tantalizing how we had it sitting there in the domain account and just waiting to use it and waiting to sort of push out the announcement.
But obviously we wanted to make sure that our, because we coincided it with our version 1.0 and a few other releases. Yeah, it was something that we sort of held onto for a little while before we made it public.
That's awesome. So you get that done in last year. Did you guys... I mean, you must have raised a bunch of funding to get that deal done then.
yes um so earlier that year um i think around sort of july time uh we raised a 7.4 million series um not series a seed um round which you know really got started pretty well and obviously even to this day we have a low burn rate so we was looking for um you know a good domain name and we we wanted to invest well in that because you know we're a link sharing business.
It's so much nicer to type Cal.com than Calendly.com or SavvyCal.com or AcuityScheduling.com. So yeah, it was definitely something which we knew we wanted to put some decent budget into, but yeah, ultimately without the first round of funding, it wouldn't have been possible.
And that was just to be clear, you closed the round of funding last year in 2021? Yeah.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Bailey face when launching Cal.com?
That was a 25 million Series A. Okay.
So let's break down the sort of story here before we get too deep into the finances. What is Cal? If people want to use it, what do they get?
What is Cal? Cal is essentially the solution to all of our problems with Calendly and any of the existing solutions out there. The point is, I used to use Calendly. I did try SavvyCal. They're great products. They are genuinely good products, but the
point is is you know scheduling is scheduling is like email it's one of those core foundational things that runs businesses runs the web um and the point is is that means that people from time to time have like complex use cases and things like that like telehealth or hiring marketplaces or you know anything that you can think of where scheduling takes part in um calendly and savvy how just don't really sort of fit all of their requirements i mean they're good
products like if I just want to book one-to-one sales calls with me you know just a basic zoom setup that's great but the point is is you know if you're running a massive hiring marketplace and want to be you know integrating this fully into your platform you know have it completely white label push across 300 users it doesn't really scale well so this was literally a
found that had had and it was literally just started as a side project but then we found that people actually really really liked this when did you guys write the first line of code oh so that that's a difficult i think i think i wrote the first line of coding like february it was so like i still had a nine to five job february of 2021 yeah 2021 and what was your nine to five bailey
So I worked at like a backup and disaster recovery company. I was doing some like small in-house software engineering, like customer portals.
Oh my gosh. And how old were you last year?
Last year I was 17. 17.
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Chapter 4: How did the first line of code get written for Cal.com?
And he moved into a role of head of product at On Deck. And hence, he didn't really have the time to work on it. So he was looking for somebody to actually take over. And so what happened is, is like, I was one of the first people on the wait list for this, like, super excited about it, because this was just a genuine problem, which I'd faced.
And then basically, you know, he reached out, I replied back. And then we like we started off literally just with pure engineering work, like I built the very first sort of Pre-MVP, you know, just connecting to Google Calendar, working out some availability, that kind of thing. And then we decided to actually, you know, we work well together. You know, let's put an official arrangement in place.
Wait, Bailey, before the original arrangement, how did he incentivize you to do this engineering work? Did he pay you something or did you get equity?
Yeah, so it was literally just on a contractor basis. You know, he literally like paid me for like two weeks of developing.
How much? How much?
Uh, I think he'll be okay with it. So it was, it was five, it was $5,000. Um, I love this.
I love this story. So he goes, Bailey, listen, you're first on my wait list.
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Chapter 5: What was the outcome of the Product Hunt launch?
I'm busy as hell. If I give you five grand, show me what you can do in two weeks.
Essentially, that was the idea. Yeah, he basically sent it out to everybody on the waitlist. And I replied back saying, yeah, I'd love to take lead on this. And, you know, first of all, it was just kind of work as a contractor as a trial. And then, you know, let's see if we work well together before actually
And committing to incorporating with both of us as founders, which I think is something which we both took as a good learning. It worked well. And we sort of now do that with our employees. We might touch on that a bit more later. But the idea is we don't just hire people off the bat. We work with them as contractors, then actually move into a proper arrangement with them.
ironically this was the foundation of the company which peer sold uh it was called lean hire and it's essentially like a contractor hire platform where you actually just work at a company as a full-on contractor for like two weeks a month something like that and then you move on to like a formal job offer so we kind of applied that concept to to sort of trying me out as um as a founder and you know naturally we found that it worked
Let's come back to that playbook you use with new employees, but I want to get back to the origin story here. So then you guys say, okay, let's make this official. Do you guys split equity 50-50 or does he keep the majority? Because he goes, Bailey, it was my idea.
No, essentially the idea was is originally it was going to lean towards him being like a minority share just because he wasn't able to put much time towards it. Obviously, he had quite a committed job. But then later on, we actually changed the agreement. Once he decided he was actually going to move to Cal.com full time, that's when we decided to split it 50-50.
So you are a nice guy. You were going to have 70, 80% because he was busy on deck. And then you start taking it off and he goes, wait, Bailey, let me back in. I want to do this full time.
Yeah, essentially, like I respected his position. Obviously, you know, he had a decent job on deck and was, you know, very occupied with that. But I think it was, you know, it was a clear it was a clear agreement from me to say that, you know, when he could devote his time to it, you know, it would have been massively helpful and massively beneficial to have him on board in a greater capacity.
That's amazing. Okay, let's fast forward a bit. What month did you guys get your first paying customer?
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Chapter 6: How does Cal.com differentiate itself from competitors?
I don't know whether it even translated time zones properly, but we launched it on Product Hunt because already there were people piling up with the wait list for this grew to like... I think it grew to like thousands before we'd even shared that we're actually building it. Um, and so we launched it on product hunt and literally that day we had a whole bunch of signups.
No Bailey quantify that for me. A lot of people use product hunt to launch. You guys launched April 30th, 2021. You got 2,500 upvotes. How much website traffic or signups did you get that day?
Uh, I'm not actually sure on the range. Um, To be fair, I mean, I think maybe up to 50, which at the time we didn't actually have... Customers?
50 customers?
Yeah, actual paying customers. How many signups though? Well, I mean, ultimately every signup was a paying customer.
No, no, but did you have any free?
No, no, we didn't do a free plan.
Wait, was that a mistake? You got all this traffic from product onto no way to capture their email address because you only had a paid option.
Yes. We basically, it was so early stage that we just didn't, we didn't even have a solid commercial foot for this. We only started to think about that at later stage. It was more of a kind of buy it if you're interested and to support the open source. Obviously, you can run this thing and self-host it for free. You still can to this day.
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Chapter 7: What is the current revenue model for Cal.com?
$12 a month. That's it. We now have a free plan, which same as Calendly, it gives you a couple of event types, restricts you on a few things, but yeah, it's always been $12 a month.
I love that.
However, something to note, and we'll probably touch into that again, is that we have both a consumer SaaS and an enterprise side to our app. So obviously enterprise pricing is
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Again, both plural founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations. So I guess you got your first customers from this product hunt launch, maybe a little bit before that. How many paying customers do you have now today?
I don't know the number of paying customers off the top of my head, but I know we've got about 25 to 30,000 users as of right now.
Those are free and paid?
Those are a mixture of free and paid. I believe paid conversion is somewhere around the 10% mark, which tends to be in line with general SaaS companies. Because obviously half of these free accounts, people sign up for it and forgot it or they were spam or something like that. So in terms of ratio, we're looking relatively on par.
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Chapter 8: What are the future plans for Cal.com regarding enterprise solutions?
You're making, you're making seven. I have to read some of this. You're making $70,000 salary. Peer makes 70,000 as well. Your is Alex, your lead software engineer makes a hundred grand.
One of the two. So we have Alex and Omar there. They're our two IC3 level engineers.
damn it, I wish I knew about this ahead of time. Okay, so I have a bunch of questions. Does this create conflict on the team? Someone goes, Joe's making more money than me. I do more work than he does. Pay me more.
Right. Yeah. Here goes into another one of our policies, which has worked pretty well. So we have three payback or in engineering, which is like 90% of our team, we have three pay bands and that's it. We got IC1, 2, and 3, like junior, mid, and senior. Doesn't matter where the hell you are in the world.
Doesn't matter what, like you don't negotiate a deal, whatever it's fixed pay bands, which means that if you're doing the same responsibilities as like anybody, you're not getting paid any different. So we have like complete equality on, you know, every, um, every demographic across the world.
So we have engineers in India who are making 1,132% of the average salary, and we're paying that same money anywhere in the world.
Yeah, that's super interesting. So it doesn't even matter if it's a copywriter versus head of product versus senior engineer. If it's IC1, 2, 3, 4, that's what determines your pay.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's pretty much the fixed bands for engineering. I mean, you know, there's me, Pierre and Kieran who are, you know, not within the engineering. So that's slightly different. But yeah, I mean, for like 90% of our team, which is engineering, literally it's just fixed bands. And we've had really good feedback from the employees about that.
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