Changing the way online meetings are booked by designing and developing an app used by US Ivy League professors
Appoint.ly
About the project
The story behind Appoint.ly’s development goes back to 2016 when we identified the market need for an all-in-one easy to navigate solution for booking meetings online. Back then, meeting scheduling looked way different than it does today. Our team of developers in Neoteric decided to change it and develop a new product – a SaaS tool that would change the way people book meetings online.
Our tasks
Conducting market research & surveying target customers
To ensure that we build a product the market wants to use, the development phase was preceded by extensive market research that helped understand user needs better and account for product development.
Launching the product to the market and collecting feedback
The product development of Appoint.ly did not stop here. After launching a product on the market we kept collecting user feedback on its functionalities and continued with improving the product later on.
Creating a prototype
Before building a fully functional product with the key finding about the market needs we started with a prototype to later present it to real users and gather their initial feedback on the basic product functionalities.
Developing a functional tool
After gathering positive feedback on the prototype our team started a development process of the fully-functional tool – the first Neoteric’s own SaaS product, developed in-house.
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Challenges
1. Increasing the chances for the product success before developing the tool
2. Achieving product-market fit with a newly developed tool fast
3. Taking full ownership over product development
Creating applications that work with time zones is always extremely challenging. People usually don't pay much attention to those, outside of moving their clocks by 1 hour twice a year. Once your developers have to calculate time differences between Tokyo and New York in their heads, you realize how difficult it can be.
Daniel Wegner / Senior Developer
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Solutions
1. Discovering customer needs and creating a prototype
2. Developing and launching a fully functional tool with the right features
3. Identifying features market did not need and cutting time spent on development
Technology we used
Amazon SES
Angular
Docker
Java
Mongo DB
RabbitMQ
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Project Results
Growing the app to 27.000 registered users
27000 registered users reduce work hassle with Appoint.ly. Every month approx. 1000 new users sign up without huge marketing budgets involved in its promotion – the app’s popularity grew mostly due to content marketing and the activity on Quora.
Building the product according to lean development methodology
When building the application our team of developers understood the challenges target clients faced when booking meetings online, analyzed the feedback gathered from the market to later build a prototype in less than 3 months and launch a successful product that gained market traction fast.
Taking full ownership over the process of building the product
This has all become a great learning experience for our team that took ownership over the project and managed to launch a product easily gaining product-market fit within a short period of time… all by themselves.
Conclusion
Scheduling an appointment can be a challenge sometimes, especially when you don’t have time to do it. That’s why Appoint.ly has been created. This product offers various functions. We, however, set ourselves three goals that needed to be developed at the beginning: a basic feature to schedule appointments, a 2-way synchronization with an online calendar and time zone management. It was a hard nut to crack but despite this, the team has developed a ready-to-use solution. Now, our tool is live and helps many people save time!
Monika Ciemiecka / Product Manager, Appoint.ly
