Whether you’re trying to manage your personal life or your company, keeping track of everything can be a serious pain in the ass. Everyone has different calendars, you never know if anyone is actually reading their Facebook events unless they RSVP, and choosing between texting, emailing, tweeting, and Facebook messaging is just a headache.
Enter Eventable, a new, easy way for organizations and companies to sync and share their calendars. Eventable lets you upload your calendars and then place an embedded button on your site that people can link into and keep track of what you’re up to on their own calendars. Any changes to the event are made automatically for everyone, cutting out all the emails and texts and nonsense you’ve been dealing with. Is this the future of calendar sharing?
Co-founder Sameen Karim caught up with KillerStartups and gave us the low-down on what’s going on over there in Eventable headquarters.
How’d you come up with the name for your company?
We came up with the name Eventable when thinking of what exactly our service enables people to do. We help organizations share events with their followers.
What’s the very first thing you do at work everyday?
Check the analytics to see how many visits have taken place and see where we can improve in our user engagement flow.
How many people did you start the company with and how many people work for you now?
We started with two co-founders and are currently in the process of hiring additional employees.
Remember the early days starting up? Maybe you can share one anecdote that describe the struggle you went through?
We went through many different ideas and prototypes. We ended up building large systems that we threw away because the idea didn’t work–it really is a system of trial and error when you’re building a startup.
How do you handle frustration? When/how was the last time you dealt with frustration?
Stress balls help. But the best thing is to draw things out on a whiteboard. Visualizing the problem helps you communicate the situation to others, which allows for a collaborative problem-solving process.
What’s your office environment like?
We’re definitely not a traditional office. There’s music every now and then (to get us pumped up) and lots of toys and food.
How do you picture your company in 5 years?
Our goal is to have Eventable be the main way people organize and share their calendars online. Major organizations and businesses holds hundreds of events annually that often go unnoticed. Eventable helps them broadcast those events to their members.
Who or what inspires YOU? Role models? Quotes? Running? Video games? Snack food? Give us the deets, dude!
Being in the Silicon Valley, and particularly in Berkeley, it’s really inspirational seeing all the startup activity and the level of creativity and entrepreneurship in the community. You could say we could a bit of the startup fever and have been hooked on ever since.
How’d you fund this venture? VC? Self-funding? Crowd-funded? Where’d you get the money, man?
At the moment we’re self-funded and have been doing fairly well.
Got any great bootstrapping tips for the lean startups out there?
Make sure you keep a term sheet of your costs and be as lean as possible. Build in short iterations and deploy often. Don’t get hung up on a big release–split it up into little chunks and build in small increments.
What would you be doing if you had one year off and $500,000 to spend (and you couldn’t spend it on your current startup / projects)?
I would probably explore some other startup ideas I have in the advertising and human resources industry.
Do you consider yourself a successful entrepreneur right now? If not, what’s it gonna take to make you feel successful?
I would say we’re moderately successful, but it’s hard to tell since we’re only getting started.
Website you couldn’t live without and why?
Mixpanel. Their analytics platform is amazing. I’d highly recommend it to anyone looking for a good analytics platform that they can use to track user engagement.
Mobile App you’re in love with and why?
Thirst is an awesome mobile app that completely reinvents the way you read Twitter. It makes a newspaper out of the day’s most popular/relevant tweets. I would highly recommend it to anyone who feels a bit overwhelmed with the amount of data in your Twitter stream.
Dogs or cats?
Neither (I’m allergic to both). But if I had to choose, dogs.
iOS or Android?
iOS.
Number 1 country you’ve always wanted to visit but haven’t yet?
Brazil.
What’s the greatest thing about your company/website/idea?
The greatest thing about Eventable is that it is super easy to use. Calendar sharing is usually very difficult (especially when you have multiple calendar platforms like Google Calendar, Outlook, iCal, etc.). We make that process seamless and easy for anyone, regardless of what calendar they use.
Where can our readers get ahold of you? Facebook? Twitter? Google+? Personal blog? Any other projects you’re working on that we should check out?
We’re on Twitter, Facebook, and we have an awesome blog! (you can find out all about our recent news from there)
Photo Credits
Courtesy of the startup founder | Eventable
