Atlanta Ventures just partnered with entrepreneur Tope Awotona and made a seed investment in Calendly — a cloud-based service that sits on top of Google Calendar making it super easy to provide self-service scheduling (no more sending several emails back and forth to find a time that works). Calendly has signed up thousands of users over the past few months and is focused on helping professionals save time and increase revenue.
Here are a few of the main benefits of Calendly:
- Reduce the friction to setting up a meeting (how many times have you gone back and forth over the phone or email to find a time that works?)
- Make it easy to cancel or reschedule a meeting (many meetings are changed and Calendly cuts down on the noise)
- More consistent meeting information and preparation (e.g. you can require certain information be provided as part of scheduling a meeting as well as have different meeting types)
- Automated integration with other systems like CRM (e.g. when a lead schedules a meeting, put it in Salesforce.com)
Anyone that schedules meetings on a regular basis (e.g. sales reps, customer success managers, support reps, etc) would do well to put a Calendly link in their email signature and make it easy for prospects and clients to schedule a meeting. We’re big fans of Calendly and are looking forward to working with Tope.
What else? What are some other thoughts on Calendly and self-service calendar scheduling apps?
David Cummings on Startups 
Calendly makes sense and looks seamless. I look forward to using this for my meetings. On another note, perhaps Tope should get on the trip with Mayor Reed to Nigeria and South Africa this fall: http://www.globalatlanta.com/article/26853/mayor-reed-africans-have-a-unique-feeling-about-atlanta/#largeBanner.
Not sure I want everyone to see how non-busy I am!! LOL Interesting product… thanks for the head’s up.
One of the cool features is that you can allocate only certain times/days that you want to accept meetings, so it won’t show your whole schedule (e.g. only have meetings in the afternoons on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday).
I have seen services like Time Trade but this looks very intuitive and user-friendly! I just signed up and will let you know how it goes.
All software ‘works’, Tope is unique in that his service attitude is great. I inquired as I’ve booked 989 appointments in 19 months, worldwide time zones and needed a solution. He’s great on the phone, and I hope to test drive the software soon as there are very few solutions out there.
how can I integrate Calendly and Salesforce
There’s been a lot of activity the past couple years in this space. I’ve seen Calendly evolve, X.ai open up, and my tool http://Appointment.one which has a niche of its own.
I’d love to see some surveys showing actual uptake of tools to solve scheduling problems.