Status

🥷 archived

Long story short

Meetmeasy was started as a Calendly clone for local Russian market.

I started the first version of this project together with a friend. Initially, we deployed one of the ready-made open-source projects on hosting. Barely thinking about branding, we went to conduct user interviews and sales, not knowing how to do either. We intended to find out what really mattered to people in 1:1 meetings.

The user survey showed that:

• People don't like to manually schedule meetings. This is a chore they prefer to delegate to someone else. In the case of the Russian market, where labor is quite cheap, these tasks are usually entrusted to personal assistants.
• Google calendar struggles to handle different time zones. This puts people in a situation where they risk missing important appointments due to scheduling errors or uncertainties.
• People would appreciate being able to distribute difficult appointments evenly throughout the week.

We deliberately did not go for the implementation of functionality for teams or b2b. The amount of functionality needed in this case would be many times greater, it's harder to sell (at least that’s how it appears), and the feedback cycle is longer.

It so happens that modern developers often do not not simplify life, but complicate it. When launching your own small projects, you don't have to choose solutions from big companies for big companies. Why don’t these solutions work for small companies?

Any team of tech guys starts the development of the project with the technical part. And the more techies in the team, the more they are subject to professional deformation, and the more complex architecture they create.

After all, you can't just pick up a virtual machine and start the project from one machine (although actually you can). We were no exception and started development on aws + serverless, using aws cognito for authentication.

Needless to say, the first version of the project was abandoned and we tried to make things simpler. The “cofounder” abandoned the project and did not want to waste his time, so the responsibility fell onto my shoulders.

After hiring 2 engineers we started to iterate the project from scratch. We launched an MVP in 1.5 month and I started to get users on board, but because of lacking selling proposition, we failed to retain our userbase.

After some iterations, I archived the project.

Tech Stack

Infra:

• terraform