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“No more looking for the Google calendar tab in Chrome.” Gustaf Alströmer Said nobody ever! It is literally three clicks away... 1. New Tab 2. Click dotted square 3. Click cal button
I use Itsycal which is sensibly the same thing, and it really changed my relationship with my calendar. I would never pay a subscription for such a widget, but for the value is provides I would gladly pay a fixed price.
I clicked through thinking I'd agree this is silly, but this is an incredibly compelling app. Downloaded and got it set up in less than 2 minutes. Already in love. Weighing if $10/mo is worth it and my immediate reaction isn't "No"
Remember that Microsoft started with a BASIC interpreter. Apple themselves started with a niche computer back then that sold to less 500 hobbyists at a hobbyist computer shop. The next Apple would also have to build something extremely niche that no one is paying attention to. Something like this.
... and Tesla started out selling small-batch sports cars to rich people. Long-term strategy often involves stepping stones.
Tesla started selling electric cars, and its still selling electric cars.
Fast forward 3 years with this company and if they build their unified notification inbox product, with the benefit of hindsight you could say "Superpowered started selling productivity software, and its still selling productivity software"
I have no idea if this company will pan out or not. But I do know it's very easy to craft historical narratives that seem so clear after the fact. I have watched many founders do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed the founder says: >We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything. >We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.
Good luck to them with that. Maybe I’m too cynical but I remember back in the days of multiple IM services, MSN Messenger, Yahoo, AIM, etc. One company would try to implement interop with another, only to be shut out a few days later. I’d posit that if they are even remotely successful at building a unified notification inbox they’ll get their access shut off very quickly. These companies don't want to share.
https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/
Syncs to Google Calendar and just... works?
Literally every time you see a startup release a product that seems trivial it's because that's not the full story. You're judging without complete information. For example, the public face might be a simple Mac calendar widget, but that could be the gateway to calendar sharing, native office apps, meeting booking, event management, ticket sales, corporate flight sales etc. Building an audience with a cheap tool that…
On top of that: doing something that you could hack together 80% of the way over a weekend, but then providing careful attention to detail in terms of user experience and integrations, quality and responsive customer support, and a general intimate awareness of your customers' needs can make it into a valuable product. Many products could be dramatically amplified in their usefulness by way of a couple tiny UX tweaks…
Doing one thing well is so much better to me than 100 things poorly. And there's still a ton of complexity and work to do the one thing well, usually. Be it integrations, sub features, whatever - i vastly prefer a full experience with a narrow scope than a "out the door" experience with a huge scope.
People misunderstand YC's business model. They invest 125K for a 7% stake in the company. That's a <$2 million valuation. If this company sells a couple thousand (at $120/y), YC breaks even. If they sell a couple million, YC gets back 1000x on their money. It's a great investment.
No shot they are selling millions of these. But tens of thousands seems within the realm of possibility, and it would be a very profitable small enterprise if they managed it without a huge marketing budget.
Literally every time you see a startup release a product that seems trivial it's because that's not the full story. You're judging without complete information. For example, the public face might be a simple Mac calendar widget, but that could be the gateway to calendar sharing, native office apps, meeting booking, event management, ticket sales, corporate flight sales etc. Building an audience with a cheap tool that…
I think the best example is when Dropbox was announced and how many people scoffed at the triviality of cloning data around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they build a unified notification inbox, I will pay for that. I had one of those when I used a Blackberry and I miss it as I now have to check 10 sites periodically to stay on top of things.
As someone who has never owned a Blackberry, can you explain what this means? I'm not sure why you need to check sites for notifications, that seems like the opposite of a notification.
BlackBerry funnelled everything - email, BBM, tweets, Facebook messages, whatever - into a unified interface. Basically you didn’t need to care where a message came from, you saw it all in one place and could just reply from there. You would not need to check one app for email, another for IMs, another for tweets etc.