I emptied my entire 401(k) to fund Calendly. Every penny of my retirement savings. My financial advisor thought I had lost my mind. That was the best investment I ever made.
Scheduling a meeting should not require 8 emails. That is insane. I built Calendly because the problem was so obvious and so universal that I could not believe nobody had solved it properly.
We were profitable before we raised a single dollar of venture capital. I bootstrapped for 7 years. The VCs did not discover us — we let them in after we had already won.
Every time someone sends a Calendly link, the recipient sees our product. Every meeting is a marketing impression. We spent almost nothing on advertising for our first 7 years because the product advertised itself.
I am a Nigerian immigrant who built a $3 billion company in Atlanta, Georgia. Not San Francisco. Not New York. Atlanta. You do not need to be in Silicon Valley to build something great. You just need to solve a real problem.
People say scheduling is boring. You know what else is boring? Plumbing. Infrastructure. Electricity. The most valuable companies in the world solve boring problems at massive scale.