How did the idea come about?

We had a hackathon inside our company Cloud Horizon and we decided to try to solve a problem the company was having by developing a software solution for it. Because at the time we were struggling keeping track of who was off and when, we decided to tackle this problem. And we came up with a crude prototype in 1 day of development where our whole team worked on this one idea.

And then we completely forgot about it.

Fast forward 1 year, and the opportunity finally arose for us to put 1 full time person on a product idea. So we decided to pull the Vacation Tracker product off the shelf and rework it, since we were still struggling with keeping track of when our team was off.

We decided we didn't want our team to use another tool and have to remember another website, so we basically scrapped everything we worked on during the hackathon and started from scratch. The major difference in our approach was that in the new version, requests, approvals and notifications would be done in Slack so our team could make and approve requests in their existing workflow.

Six months later, we launched the public beta of the product.