I've been a long time Indiehacker on a few projects and only occasionally post in here because I rarely had anything I thought the community was really interested in. But I recently launched what I think is a game changer for Bubble Templates (an FYI, Bubble is the most powerful no code platform) which can help you start a niche business.
It is a fully functional Calendar/Scheduling application, like Calendly, that works across any Time Zones, Daylight savings times, etc. You can give the App a test drive here:
top-calendar.bubbleapps.io
What does this mean for you?
I started my own SaaS in an extremely small and targeted niche and truly believe that focusing on a specific & underserved market already paying for similar tools, in this case scheduling, but adding in some specific features they really need can be the difference maker to getting new customers easily. You can always expand and grow the market to something with more 'scale' later, but getting the first customers and traction is key.
Anyways, check out the demo page and play around, even if you don't have plans to use it I think it is a great example of the amazing apps you can build with Bubble (If it's not obvious, I'm a huge fan of Bubble)
Questions, comments, concerns, disbelief? Let me know!
i can see using this where i can pull data from Callrail and start scheduling customers right away where i don't have to ask their names or phone number.
how much custom coding would that need?
i can think at least 3-4 niche markets where simple calendar scheduling would make sense.
Hate to say the cliché answer, but it really depends.
Some factors include; how easy to use is the CallRail API, which and how much data integration is needed, what other features or integrations are needed, does there need to be custom design beyond the template, and most importantly it depends on the skill of the Bubble developer
What's the link for the template?
You can see the Template details from my Bubble contributor page here: https://bubble.io/contributor/top-shelf-templates-1459713470826x991867244476452500
And also the link in my write-up above is actually the Template in Live mode, so you can test it out fully before making a decision on whether to buy it. Run mode link: top-calendar.bubbleapps.io
thanks!
Love it! how easy is it to link it to your email provider and cross-check for any conflictions
Sorry for the late reply here, I am not overly active on IH anymore thanks to my projects taking off!
This depends on your Bubble skills, but I would say it's not that easy - which in Bubble terms means it's easy but just not a couple hours like most features type of thing. There are some good plugins and walkthroughs in the Forum for connecting Google and other calendars, and then you would just be running a Bubble workflow to create or delete the Calendar events as bookings in the Bubble database and feeding those into the TopCal plugin
Cool, when I got my first calendly-invite I thought the UX was pretty good and a novel approach, but rather easy copy to code. Interesting to see that this has happened now. Wish you success :)
My 2 cents from a Frontend-dev perspective:
Thanks for the good feedback!
The UX and everything was definitely the easiest part. The time logic, especially with time zones and daylight savings were the biggest pains.
I'll add in some fixes for those
Yeah I can imagine. Date/Time handling looks simple from the outside, but so far it has produced surprising issues in every team project I've worked in. So kudos to finishing that and getting it out the door! :)
I used Luxon.js to help and definitely recommend it if you ever need a lightweight and quality library