双产品线调度SaaS，3人小团队实现五位数MRR

Two exits, one failure, and another success

I'm a software developer turned founder. I started Drip, an email marketing platform, which we grew and sold to Leadpages in 2016. After that, I took a swing at a team chat product called Level (a thoughtful alternative to Slack) that didn't pan out. Then, built StaticKit, a forms-as-a-service tool that found modest traction before I sold it. In 2020, I started SavvyCal, a scheduling tool that makes sending a booking link feel less one-sided. The product now serves thousands of customers and has been my main focus for the past six years, bootstrapped with backing from TinySeed. SavvyCal is now two products. The original scheduling link product (now SavvyCal Meetings) is alive and well. Over the past year, I've been building SavvyCal Appointments: an API-first, HIPAA-compliant scheduling infrastructure product aimed at healthcare and SaaS companies that need embedded scheduling but don't want to build (or maintain) it themselves. Think of it as scheduling as a building block rather than scheduling as a destination. I'm also focusing on what I'd call the "agentic" layer — we shipped an MCP server, so AI assistants can book, reschedule, and look up user availability. My hunch is that a meaningful chunk of scheduling activity will shift from humans clicking calendars to agents negotiating times, and I want SavvyCal to be natively good at that. We're at 5-figure MRR. The vast majority of that comes from SavvyCal Meetings. SavvyCal Appointments is earlier in its revenue journey. It's a higher-touch, higher-ACV sale — infrastructure contracts with BAAs attached move slower than $12/month self-serve signups — so the revenue mix looks different: fewer customers, bigger contracts, longer sales cycles, and a lot of potential. My team includes me, full-time in the US, a full-stack developer, and a support specialist. Small team, deliberately.

Finding the right market

SavvyCal came from a search for the right-sized problem. After Level didn't work out, I spent a few months deliberately auditing SaaS markets. I sought something with proven demand, recurring revenue, and room for a differentiated angle, rather than trying to will a new category into existence. Scheduling checked those boxes, but a social observation truly hooked me: Sending someone your booking link carried a stigma. It felt one-sided — "Here, do the work of finding time on my calendar". I saw an opening for a scheduling tool that made the experience feel more considerate, treating the recipient as a participant instead of a supplicant. That became SavvyCal's founding wedge: features like overlaying your own calendar on top of someone else's availability so booking feels collaborative. My deeper motivation, though, was the kind of company I wanted to run. Level was a big swing, with a potentially huge market but much uncertainty and probably too many headwinds for a bootstrapper. With SavvyCal, I wanted to build something calm and durable: bootstrapped (with TinySeed backing), profitable, small team, long time horizon. Six years in, that's still the shape of it. The market has shifted under us, with AI agents starting to change how scheduling happens, and what keeps me motivated now is that the "right-sized problem" turned out to have a much bigger second act than I expected.

Falling in love with Elixir

I wrote the first line of code in early 2020 and spent roughly six months getting to a private early-access version. The stack was Elixir and Phoenix. I fell in love with Elixir during the Level days and never looked back. Six years later, it's still the foundation and one of the best technical decisions I've made: The platform has scaled with me without ever demanding a rewrite. Today, the stack is Elixir/Phoenix on the backend, React on the frontend, and Inertia.js wiring the two together. The trickiest part of building a scheduling tool is the calendar sync logic and time zones (of course!). Two-way syncing with Google Calendar (and later Outlook), handling time zones, recurring events, buffers, and all the edge cases of "when is this person actually free" is gnarly infrastructure work. I spent a big chunk of those first six months getting that plumbing solid, because a scheduling tool that double-books someone even once has lost that customer forever. On the product side, I resisted the temptation to reach feature parity with Calendly before launching. Instead, I built around the wedge: the polished booking experience, a calendar overlay allowing recipients to compare against their own schedule, and personalized links. The bet was that a smaller product that nailed the feeling of scheduling would beat a bigger product that treated it as a commodity checkout flow.

Charging from the start

I charged from the start. Early access users paid, which kept the feedback signal honest. People tell you very different things about a product when their credit card is attached to the opinion. SavvyCal Meetings is a classic self-serve SaaS: monthly or annual subscriptions, priced per user. SavvyCal Appointments flips the model: it's sales-assisted, usage-and-contract-based, and aims at companies embedding scheduling into their own product. Fewer customers, larger contracts, longer cycles. Meetings taught me that a good product in a crowded market can win a durable niche, but later-stage growth can be difficult when competition is aggressive, and price points are low. Appointments answers that, moving down the stack into infrastructure where the buyer has a harder problem, compliance creates real switching costs, and contract sizes reflect it. I enjoy playing in both spaces.