Cal.com - Scheduling Infrastructure For Everyone

Company & Team Introduction

Cal.com is an open-source software company that provides calendar scheduling for everyone. The company was founded in 2021 by serial entrepreneur Peer Richelsen with multiple prior ventures, including leanhire.com, which OnDeck acquired in January 2021. The idea for Cal came after Peer spent a couple of days sifting through an “open-source Calendly alternatives” Google search and found no relevant results. After initially launching as calendso.com, Peer later brought in now Co-CEO Bailey Pumfleet and swapped domains to the much cleaner “cal.com”. Cal has chosen to build out their team remotely to broaden its potential talent pool with employees currently in the US, Canada, Serbia, Mexico, and the United Kingdom; even Richelsen is building the company as a nomad. From the first day the company was founded Peer set ambitious goals for cal.com like connecting 1 billion people by 2031 through scheduling.

Product Overview

Cal.com’s product stands out from the competition in the scheduling space due to its ease of use and high-quality design language. Cal’s codebase is open source and can be self-hosted, which allows them to cater to a massively underserved market of Government, healthcare and other industries facing high regulation that often recommend or even require employees to utilize secure products. Being open source also allows their customers to modify/improve the codebase, building new features they need or fixing bugs. Further solidifying their position as the most secure option in the market, their managed offerings are hosted on highly secure cloud providers such as AWS Govcloud or Google Cloud for Government and the company has received ISO 27001, SOC 2, CCPA, GDPR, and HIPAA certifications. Cal’s white-label offering gives companies a highly tailored scheduling solution equipped with company branding and colours. The company has recently focused on “an app store for time” where companies can build different products on Cal’s platform to sell.

Total Addressable Market

The online scheduling software market presents a vast opportunity for cal.com to capture massive economic value. In 2020, the total addressable market for online scheduling was estimated to be $393.4M in 2020 and is estimated to grow at a 9.7% compound annual growth rate through 2030 to just shy of $1B. The team at Calendly believes these numbers are far too small, as they estimate their addressable market is as large as $20B.

Business Model & The Numbers

Cal.com uses a simple multi-tier freemium SaaS pricing model with a generous free tier to aid their bottoms-up go-to-market motion and product adoption through the inherent virality of scheduling products. 2 parties are connecting through the cal.com link, the meeting creator uses Cal, and the invitee either already uses Cal or just got introduced to it. This creates a powerful organic flywheel that compounds as cal.com grows its customer base. Their paid tier is priced at $12/seat/month and unlocks features such as team hosting, single sign-on, unlimited event types, routing forms, etc. For more tailored solutions, they offer an enterprise tier that is priced based on unique requirements. Usually contracts start around 150k/year, but bigger deals can be well into the 7 figure range. There is also a platform tier for companies building on Cal’s technology. The company also sells premium usernames for $349/year and has sold over 200. The current ARR for Cal is unclear, but sources say the company has already surpassed 1.5M ARR, which is impressive considering the late value capture strategy that Cal and many open-source companies follow.

Traction

The early adoption of Cal’s platform has been extremely promising. The company already has over 105k users with over 9k MAUs. Cal also has strong support from the open-source development community with over 22k GitHub stars. The company also has a substantial list of enterprise customers such as Deel (~2200 employees), Vercel (~450 employees), Supabase (~60 employees), displaying that Cal has the functionality and security that larger-scale enterprises require. Thanks to its strong SEO optimization, the company receives 10-25k in Google search impressions daily. There are already 62 applications being built on top of Cal’s platform to be offered in their app store, with applications ranging from Telehealth, online learning, conferences, etc.

Competitors

Cal has its sights set on capturing massive market share in the scheduling software industry and creating a business that expands the market as a whole. The company faces several competitors with an enormous market presence, calendly.com, but also more minor threats like doodle.com.

Calendly is a simple-to-use scheduling platform that has dominated the market since its founding in 2013 by Tope Awotona. The company is estimated to have captured as much as 30% of the scheduling market. The company has over 20M free & paying users and 100k businesses spanning over 230 countries. This massive user base has allowed Calendly to grow to over 100M+ in ARR. Calendly uses a multi-tier freemium business model, with the free tier used to help drive new user adoption, a $10/seat/month essential tier for more frequent users that allows users to create group events (e.g. webinars), set reminders, multiple different calendars, and live support. Their $15/seat/month professional tier offers analytics, customizable branding, and routing forms. Lastly, their $20/seat/month teams tier provides tools to help with team workflows and more integrations. The company had raised only a 550k seed round from Atlanta Ventures before building a massive war chest in 2021, raising $350M at a $3B valuation from Openview Partners and ICONIQ Capital. Calendly has no official headquarters, as the company’s workforce is entirely remote.

Doodle is another scheduling solution founded in 2007 by 2 ETH Zurich students, Michael Naf and Paul Sevinc, with the goal of eliminating the hassle of back-and-forth email scheduling. Doodle has over 20M monthly users, and their Cal.com competitor Doodle booking page recorded over 1.5M organized meetings in 2022, a 55% increase from the prior year. Doodle follows a simple multi-tier SaaS pricing model and is more of a price-based competitor scheduling option. Like Cal.com and Calendly, Doodle also offers a free tier to drive new users to the platform to convert them to paying users later. For paid plans, the company offers a $15/seat/month pro tier that gives users custom branding options, unlimited 1-1s, no ads, a team tier that offers authorization features, an admin console, and an enterprise tier with custom pricing. Doodle was acquired by publicly traded Switzerland-based TX Group in 2014 to add to its portfolio of digital assets.

Deal Terms

Cal.com has robust financial backing. The company’s last funding round was their $25M Series A in April 2022. The round was filled with notable firms such as Seven Seven Six, OSS Capital, Obvious Ventures and numerous notable angels such as Tobi Lutke (Founder/CEO of Shopify) and Jack Altman (Founder/CEO of Lattice). They also raised a $7.4M seed round at a $60M post-money valuation in December 2021 led by OSS capital with participation from Naval Ravikant (Co-founder of AngelList), Chad Hurley (Co-founder of YouTube), Balaji Srinivasan (Former CTO of Coinbase, ex a16z). The newly raised capital will be used to help developers launch exciting new applications through their new app store as they continue their transition into becoming more of a platform business.

Cal is hiring a principal full-stack engineer! Check out the amazing opportunity here: https://cal.com/jobs

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