SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Is Reclaim the Next Calendly? 16,000 Users Keep Using Every Month, up 400% YoY
16 Dec 2021
Chapter 1: What is Reclaim and how is it different from traditional calendar tools?
Currently, right now, we're a free product. Yeah, we're pre-monetization. We're being used, as I mentioned, across a little over 6,000 companies today, meaning we have anywhere from several to dozens to hundreds of users inside of these companies, and we're spreading pretty quickly.
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 Henry Shapiro.
He's the co-founder of Reclaim.ai, an intelligent calendar assistant used by over 6,000 companies across the globe. Before starting the company, he led product and marketing teams at New Relic for five years. He's based out of Portland, Oregon. Henry, your day ticket's at the top. Yeah. Let's go for it. All right. So this is a super tough space.
X.ai came on the scene a couple of years ago, raised a boatload of money, and then basically flash sold. And no one made any money based on that deal recently. Calmy is very hot there, I think, on your cap table as well. What are you doing different in the space where you're seeing extreme stickiness on your customer base?
It's a great question. So I think the first thing is, and thanks for having me, by the way. Of course. The first thing is, I think we really, when we started the company, our intention was not, hey, let's go out and build a better calendar, or let's go out and build a better scheduling service.
We came out of, obviously, New Relic and had experienced the pain firsthand of being busy middle managers who were
constantly just trying to grapple to get every last little bit of time that we could for our priorities and constantly running into that challenge of the calendar sort of feeling like a debt you have to pay down every week instead of an actual reflection of the work you need to get done.
And so we actually came at this problem being sort of dev and monitoring nerds, not even thinking about the calendar. Initially, we only were thinking about this problem of how do you get people and teams focused on the right stuff?
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Chapter 2: What challenges do users face with traditional time blocking?
Yeah, we're in a good position in terms of monetization. We're basically, I'd say, a couple of years away from the edge of the cliff. And we're at a really good point in terms of product market fit and the demand for the product. And so we've actually had a pricing page up on our site for two years.
And we put pricing out there because we know that it's really hard for people to standardize on anything if they don't really know what to expect once the thing becomes a paid product.
So how does that work? You have it up, but you basically have a crossed out. It says free through 2021. And is this basically enabling you to drive urgency? So people are like, you're like, sign up this year because we're going to charge soon.
Not only that, we have a referral program where you can refer people to Reclaim and get future credit against paid Reclaim. And that's actually been a really successful program for us.
That's super interesting. Now you can only afford to do this though, because you've raised capital, right? So talk to me about your funding story. How much have you raised to date?
Yeah, we've raised $6.3 million in total. We had a pretty unconventional path, I'd say, to fundraising. We left New Relic. We had been working on this concept for a little while.
What year was that, by the way? When did you launch? 2019?
We launched in 2020. Our first feature was January 2020, but we incorporated in June of 2019, and we left New Relic in April.
Okay.
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Chapter 3: How does Reclaim ensure user stickiness and engagement?
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That's nathanlatka.com forward slash remote and promo code L-A-T-K-A. Check it out today before you miss out. So 1.5, I mean, what, fair to say like a six, seven million valuation or something like that? You sold 20%?
Uh, I'm trying to remember, I believe it was a capped note and I think the cap was 10 and I think we added, we added a discount as well.
Wow. That's nice. Okay. So you got little premium terms there. Cause your history, maybe at new rail, if you were close to the problem, that's great. Now you raise a little bit more after the 1.5, when was last round?
The last round closed, I believe we announced it in May of this year, and that was for 4.8. And that was across Index led the round, Shardul Shah at Index Ventures, and then Gradient, who we had actually spoken with in our first funding go-around, came in and added some to it as well.
And then we actually went through this pretty long process that I think made the round take a lot longer to close. How long? it probably took two, three months, I'd say in total to get everything fully, fully, fully closed. A big part of that was that we brought 40 or 50 other strategic angels, including Tope from Calendly into the cap table. And, you know, it's, It was one of those decisions.
I think our sense was like, this is really the time you get to bring those people into the cap table where it makes sense for them.
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Chapter 4: What is the current status of Reclaim's monetization strategy?
Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.
It was not a huge mistake to major in history.
Guys, there you have it. Reclaim.ai, a new approach to claiming your calendar. They started, call it, two, three years ago. They had 4,000 users about a year ago. Now up to 16,000 users. A 4.8 seed round raised recently. Team of 11 as they think about what a calendar in 2022 should look like.
Paywall not launched yet, but they have had a pricing page up just to understand user sentiment around pricing. Using it right now as urgency to drive those new users who stay pretty darn sticky. We'll see what happens in 2022. Henry, thanks for taking us to the top.
Thanks so much. Appreciate it.
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