Atomcal
A calendar app designed to make scheduling fun
With the growth engine, it made sense to also start taking signups on a waiting list.
Until March I had talked with a bunch of users face to face on Google Meets while they share their screen using the platform and talk about their experience.
The response had been extremely positive so far and there is a list of features that users recommended which I focused on before launching the product on different marketing channels.
January was when I moved out to a new place in central London. It took me a while to settle down and find my productivity magic again.
After some research, I decided I need a solid marketing platform. Thus, I built an automatic engine of growth, where bots write feature blog posts and changelogs when a commit is made and schedule and publish these posts at the best possible time without any human input even on social media.
This is done via discord bots and Ghost (CMS) API.
This time I gave in more effort. I trusted the web platform and gave my all to build a calendar core that is easily extensible and fluid and fun to use. Took me nearly 4 months to finish it.
Around this time, though, I also started a full-time job at another startup as I was struggling to pay my bills. Working full time again was more positive than I thought as I found I had so much to learn in working in a new team environment.
I learned about things like typescript and feature flagging and automation and code reviews and collaborations.
I was trying to build a scheduling tool since the beginning of 2020 before I decided to build a full-fledged calendar called Atomcal.
I failed to launch that iOS scheduling app as nobody gave any positive reviews on the beta test flight. After this failure, I got busy working for another startup before leaving it in 6 months due to unforeseen circumstances.
This is when I had to go back to my roots (~ August 2021) to learn from my mistakes and start again. This time with more planning and a solid design foundation (and experience).
I wrote a blog post on my learning from that failure to build back in Jun 2020 https://xtabbas.com/next-step-when-design-fails/
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