Topic: Scheduling in an academic setting
Interviews
The 2 interviews I covered – 22 year old hispanic undergrad female and 22 year old asian undergrad female.
I learned the following:
- When to meet is not the only issue, where to meet also is
- Have to find empty places on campus (central for everyone)
- Someone offers their dorm’s lounge (can be in one corner of campus at times)
- Most people use Google Calendar to keep track of their schedule (no OS limitation)
- A lot of the action (even before when2meet’s are filled), happens in the group chat (iMessage, FB messenger, Whatsapp etc.). FB messenger is most preferred as not everyone has an iPhone and not everyone in the US uses Whatsapp.
- Not everyone uses when2meet or scheduling tools
- Biggest problem is people who don’t reply with their availability for long periods of time
- 6-8 hours is the acceptable response time (24 hours is too much)
- When you provide your availability, you are leaving those times open until a time is decided on
- This feels like putting your life on pause because other people are taking their sweet time to reply
- Smoothest experience is when meetings are scheduled in person (or zoom) – either after the last meeting or after class
- This way no one can leave the group on seen and decisions are made fast
- It would be so helpful if you could schedule meetings like you do in the corporate world. Just check everyone’s calendars and get suggestions of times that work for everyone
- This requires everyone to keep their calendars updated
- What about free and personal time? Just because someone has 1 hour free in their whole day, you can’t assume they would want to meet then.
- Perhaps they have only times they CAN meet set as available on their calendars?
- I wonder if people are willing to put in the effort
- Perhaps they have only times they CAN meet set as available on their calendars?
- There are usually 1-2 “schedulers” in the group who end up taking a lot of stress
- These usually end up being the people who are most invested in the class
- Meetings with friends are usually decided over a group chat and people are more flexible
Market Sizing
TAM – College affiliates in the US
SAM – 57% of US universities are willing to spend on Slack [Source]
SOM – Stanford affiliates which is about ~22K people [Source]
Pricing – Subscription model like Slack.
- $5 price per head billed annually
- $100K during the first year
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-forths 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.
