Personal Interviews
During the two interviews I tried to capture the entire scheduling experience of a person. I asked questions ranging from scheduling for personal to professional, from small to large group meetings. The interviews revealed multiple findings, but below are the two main insights and a respective quote:
“The nicest part about scheduling is when the meeting is already scheduled.”
Scheduling within an academic setting was described as an annoying to-do that is always in the back of the head until it is done. The process is often lengthy and involves a lot of back-and-forth via emails or sending out reminders to people to finally fill out the when2meet.
“I take on the task of scheduling group meetings because that allows me to have the final say and then it fits my schedule best.”
Often not just the process of a scheduling is annoying, but even the outcome may be a compromise that you are unhappy about. It was mentioned that this leads people to being reluctant about filling out when2meets and responding to scheduling questions at all because they feel that their response will not influence the outcome anyway. In some sense a resignation on group scheduling.
Interview Synthesis and Market Opportunities
The interviews revealed that the process for scheduling private events is smooth and rather enjoyable. Scheduling a meeting with people within the same company also seemed straightforward as the same Calendar software is used and employees have access to the meeting attendees’ calendars. This way free time blocks can be identified across multiple people within the organization.
But the most painful scheduling experiences by far were related to semi-professional, academic settings where lengthy back-and-forth via email or scheduling tools such as when2meet add to the frustrations encountered during the scheduling process.
To estimate the pricing model for our product, we looked at how Slack charges organizations for its product suite. Slack operates with a subscription model and charges per head at an annual rate of $100. Since our product is less powerful but still provides value to the user, we estimate that an annual rate of $5 per head is realistic. Multiplying this price with the number of users we can capture gives us the TAM/SAM/SOM estimates below.
We defined our Total Addressable Market (TAM) as all college affiliates in the US, calculated by finding the sum of all college students and all employees in the US. Based on our pricing model, this market would yield $110 million per year in revenue.
We calculated our Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) by looking at the adoption rate of an analogous product in our TAM. A rough analog for our concept is the productivity and communication tool Slack. We found that about 57% of US colleges have adopted Slack and assume that our solution would see a similar trend. Based on our pricing model, this market would yield $62.7 million per year in revenue.
Finally, we defined our Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) as the population of Stanford’s campus. With a population of approximately 22,000, our pricing model projects a market that would yield $100,000 per year in revenue.
