Love For Building Things Led Me To Create A $1,500/month Calendar Sync Tool Business!
This is a follow up story for SyncThemCalendars. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 6 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
So my name is Elad Shaham and I love building things. During the daytime I work as the CTO of a new startup company called myZorro, revolutionizing the healthcare insurance business; when night falls, I build something for fun. SyncThemCalendars is exactly such a project - it’s a service that allows you to sync your calendars together so that you can reflect your true availability across different calendars.
My project targets professionals with a complex schedule, such as consultants that work for several different companies, or entrepreneurs and investors. I started building it for fun, and it gained some traction, I mostly maintain it these days - though I wish I had more time to build some really important missing features.
The service is currently making close to $1500 MRR, and growing slowly.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?
Since our first interview, the business has been growing slowly and steadily.
Even though I’ve had thoughts about paid advertising, I haven’t done that yet. So growth is 100% organic. I am not an SEO expert, just an engineer who likes to solve problems - and so, I have tried to tackle SEO by reading relevant articles and recommendations online, and believe I have managed to improve the website’s SEO. I have also had a revamp the looks and messaging of the homepage, but it’s been hard to measure the impact given the low traffic numbers.
At some point, I will probably switch my focus to marketing and growth to get more traffic. While I do believe STC is a niche service, too many potential users have never heard of it.
In general, it seems like traffic sources have shifted a bit. In the past, a large percentage of the traffic came from answers I provided on Quora. These days, most of the traffic comes from answers I provided in Google support forums.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
One of the biggest moves for me was to hire another part-time software developer to help with some of the smallest tasks I could never get to. One of these tasks was, for example, the addition of a list of reasons to the subscription cancellation dialog, to help me better understand churn.
You need to be a problem solver - tackle one problem at a time, and don’t be fixated about the solution you came up with - it may not be the best one to implement.
While I don’t think the idea was bad, the whole thing kinda failed. I ended up spending more time maintaining that person than the value he gave me. I think it was mainly my expectation to get someone senior enough to be able to just get the job done without too much overhead on my behalf while keeping it under a tight budget.
I have super high expectations from the people I manage in my day job, I guess I was hoping to receive the same performance while not paying enough to hire the best talent. My main takeaway here is to either lower my expectations and choose the simplest tasks I have on my backlog or decide to exceed the budget and more senior engineers.
Happy to be trying again with another developer in the future, but for now I’m good.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
I still feel STC hasn’t reached its full potential. The lack of support for Office 365, Outlook, and iCal, as well as other really important features, is holding this service back.
I hope that in the coming year I’ll be able to add these important features.
At some point, I will probably switch my focus to marketing and growth to get more traffic. While I do believe STC is a niche service, too many potential users have never heard of it. Marketing has been my weak side with this project, and I’ve been trying to get some professional help from friends, but it somehow always fell between the cracks. I think that Google Ads should be the place to start since the intent is so specific for this niche product.
Another thing to share about the future is that I’ve also been considering selling the service, and even listed it in one of the SaaS acquisition marketplaces to test the waters. While I would have a very hard time letting it go, I thought I could try going down that path and see how it goes.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
You need to be a problem solver - tackle one problem at a time, and don’t be fixated about the solution you came up with - it may not be the best one to implement.
