If I'm the Head of Growth of ... TidyCal
I believe most of you have used Calendly to schedule meetings before, but you might not know they’re already a 3 billion unicorn, a perfect example of the network effect. However, today's featured product is not Calendly , but TidyCal - #2 of Product Hunt in 2024 so far. Isn’t it interesting to study a product that finds its position in the market that we thought was already dominated by Calendly? And yes, we're going to be their Head of Growth today!
4 Facts about TidyCal
Business model
TidyCal has a straightforward business model, being discovered through paid advertising, affiliate marketing, and SEO. Users can sign up to enjoy the freemium model, and opt-in to a lifetime plan to enjoy multiple advanced features. Check out the User Journey Framework above to understand the user flow!
Based on my educated guess, those 2 use cases on the use case map below are what TidyCal is trying to win over in the market right now. Learn about what problems, alternatives, why TidyCal over the alternative, and ideal customers for each use case below.
The growth loop modeling is a great tool that makes it easy to communicate how you grow between the core team members and align the broader strategy before getting into Excel for quantitative planning. So the section on the bottom is called Habit Loops, which is about how the product habit is being built with Trigger, Action, & Reward, learn more about this here.
TidyCal is designed to solve multiple problems of Calendly, and they’re stealing the users at a much cheaper rate. The most killing feature is that they have a function to migrate all of the Calendly settings and events to TidyCal. Very smart!
领英推荐
Opportunity I - Discovery - Build TidyCal Own Brand
For now, TidyCal is mainly using the AppSumo page to promote and then land users on the AppSumo product page on Meta Ads, it might be because of the experiment result or because the team believes that AppSumo has a stronger branding. However, my perspective and PoV here would be, that to further 10X grow TidyCal, it's essential to build their own branding and treat TidyCal as an individual business. If not they will be forever being treated as just one of the many product offerings under AppSumo, but not TidyCal itself as a business, from the eyes of customers, or even internal teams.
TidyCal has its social media pages, but it only updates when there are flash sales and new product features. When it goes to social media branding, it's much more complicated than we all expected, identifying your target audience's demographics, conceptualizing the brand's content, creating a social media calendar to post regularly, tapping key influencers in the niche of your audience, and much more. Calendly can be a good example to be referenced here. Read this article to learn more on this topic!
Opportunity II - Activation - Reverse Trial
This should be quite a familiar term to some of you, so I will just briefly introduce the concept to illustrate why I think it can be useful for TidyCal. So the reverse trial is about allowing users to try the paid features right after signing up, they can either pay for it to continue enjoying the paid features, or switch back to freemium with certain restrictions. The benefit of this flow is that it will not cut off the usage if users don't want to pay yet while shortening the time it takes for them to get familiar with your full product.
TidyCal has been very kind to offer great freemium, I believe that more future developments or strategic adjustments of the paid and free features can help to increase the free to paid % significantly with the Reverse Trial model. Learn more from the article of Elena Verna here!
Opportunity III - Scale - Community
Grateful to see more and more people discussing and realizing the value of a community to a business these days. Community can be the best brand ambassadors to remove the friction of new customer onboarding, providing the most honest feedback to improve your product, and also keeping your team motivated when they see they are solving real-life problems.
Learn about some more reasons for building a community here. As mentioned in the previous article of Tally , they are doing an excellent job in this aspect, checking out their community page here!
I'm happy to brainstorm growth-related topics about your businesses and projects, click here to book FREE 30 mins. Hope you find this a great read, and see you again next week : )
Building small biz websites that help you sell (freelance for hire)
9 个月Hi there Jason! Glad I found you! I recently purchased TidyCal and it's fantastic! There's one thing missing that would take it to God-like levels of usability. I'm surprised no one else seems to be talking about this, and yes, I've submitted it as a feature request – several times – but it doesn't seem to be getting any traction. What am I talking about? I'm talking about the ability (or inability as is this the case here) to set my unavailability in one place (like a global override) which filters down to all the calendar booking types I've set up. Right now, I have five calendars, and I'm having to edit each of the five calendars to add my unavailability. It's a real chore. What can we do to get someone in product development to look at this? This is low hanging fruit. It's that one tweak that will make this product much more attractive than it already is. I have clients for whom I build websites, and part of my job is to help them operationalise and systemise their day-to-day life. What I don't want to do is put TidyCal on the table as an option but say "however, it has a caveat..." and then explain the thing I've been explaining to you. Patch this and you've got an amazing solution to the time management problem.
Chief Sumo at AppSumo.com | Helping entrepreneurs get started at noahkagan.com
1 年Epic write up. Now we have to get you to upgrade to tidycal.com yourself. we have 1-click calendly import :)
More growth, Less hassle | Growth Engineer @Vectify
1 年Exciting times ahead for TidyCal! Can't wait to see their growth journey.
CTO+COO | Building Voxloud 100% remotely to €3M ARR. Sharing insights from the journey.
1 年Fascinating insights on the potential of TidyCal! Excited to see how it competes with Calendly.
Full-Stack Growth Marketer | Data Analytics | Digital Innovation | Ex-CircleDNA | Ex-Techstars
1 年Well written Jason!