WhyMeet
Meeting cost calculator, analytics, and recommendations.
I shared some of my journey here on IH while working on Smithy.app. It was started together with a friend back in early 2020, and it was acquired via MicroAcquire in January 2022.
I spent a few evenings hacking something together recently and wanted to share it here...
I'm excited to announce the launch of WhyMeet, a new software designed to help you optimize your organization's meetings and make the most of your teams' time and resources. 👇
Meetings are a crucial part of any business, but they can also be a significant drain on time and resources. All too often, meetings are scheduled without fully considering their necessity, an optimal approach, or attendee relevance.
With WhyMeet, you'll have the power to make informed decisions about your meetings and optimize them for efficiency, productivity, and cost-effectiveness, taking into account the cost of salaries, meeting length, and participant involvement.
Team analyticss
You'll be able to:
- See the cost of all your meetings over time
- Determine the average cost of your meetings
- Optimize meeting length and participant list for cost-effectiveness
Calendar integration
And with its integration with Google Calendar, WhyMeet makes it easy to see the cost impact of your meetings in real time as you schedule them.
AI recommendations
But why stop there? Get actionable, AI-powered suggestions based on your unique organizational context, as well as playbooks and immediately usable resources for async communication and planning without meetings.
And more...
There's some cool stuff that I want to do by integrating into Zoom directly.
Why did I decide to build this?
Apart from needing a creative boost coming out of yet another depressing week of illness (this winter has been horrible), I've been on both sides of the costly meeting equation. Both as an IC and a leader. My time is valuable in the former, the company's time and runway are valuable in the latter.
Over 70% of meetings are considered to be unproductive! That's an insane statistic, especially considering that Zoom has over 200,000 enterprise customers and shares meeting volumes in the trillions of minutes. The financial impact of unproductive meetings is very real to any given company, as well as to the economy at large.
I believe that WhyMeet has the potential to make a real difference and I'm excited to see how it's used by businesses of all sizes. Sign up now for early access:
6 Comments
+1 to not having salary information.
Also - how do you know which roles are not needed?
I don't want to sound too pessimist, but did you validate the execution with other players? I see a lot of potential in the idea, but how you executed it makes me hesitant.
The issue I see is that in the corporate world, people don't want their salaries exposed. So even hiding the hourly rate of individuals wouldn't work because I can add them one by one and figure it out.
Maybe a medium-size range instead of the actual value could solve the issue. Even with the range, I still think it would achieve the goal psychologically speaking (Just my opinion, I don't have any psychology knowledge to confirm it).
Great point and this comes up often.
Masking the salary data is easy enough in one of several ways: using an average across the entire team, using ranges such as >$100 >$300 etc, or a number-free system entirely (red,yellow,green).
The calendar widget can be an optional component, with the meeting cost proposition being valuable more to higher level stakeholders who care about the visibility at the company level.
Good to hear your AI recommendations as well!
Do you have any plans to add image generation?
Hey Richard, thanks for the comment. What would be the use case for image generation in a meeting-focused B2B app?
Not sure, just curious if you were implementing it.