[mr_puzzled]

The company I work for uses Outlook/teams for booking meetings and it works incredibly well. The scheduling part you talked about is almost exactly like the scheduling assistant feature in outlook and teams. Sorry if this comes across as a negative question, but what exactly does zync offer over outlook and teams which have scheduling assistant?

Can you also briefly talk about your traction? Eg- no of users, growth rate and at what stage you were in before YC and currently. Good luck.

[nilkn]

I haven't used teams, but from my experience Outlook's scheduling assistant just shows you a few open time slots. The biggest problem is when there aren't any acceptable open slots within a reasonable window into the future (e.g., this week), and the only way to make the meeting happen is to move stuff around. This then becomes pretty problematic if you have to start asking other folks if they can move conflicts around.

(I don't know to what extent Zynq resolves these issues.)

[ska]

There isn't a general solution to this, which is why the typical scheduling tools just punt back to user.

I suspect the real difficulty for a company trying to offer something more powerful is balancing effort/input the user has to take against dynamism and principle of least astonishment.

I don't think it would be hard to write a scheduling algorithm in this space that basically works but everyone hates, for example.

[user5994461]

The scheduling assistant shows you the timeline hour per hour, with a line for each employee and any meeting they have anywhere. You can even view what any meeting is, if their meetings are not set to private.

I think it's quite good to find a time, with the least conflicts. However given any meeting with more than 3 people in a large organization, it's simply not possible to gather everybody at once, without planning 3 weeks in advance.

one screenshot: https://technology.ku.edu/outlook2013/scheduling-assistant

[zerzar]

Our algorithm doesn't just try to find an open slot, it tries to choose a time that's most productive for everyone. This means maximizing everyone's focus time (stacking meetings as close together as possible) and in the future respecting preference as well (eg if you prefer meetings in the morning instead of the afternoon). As far as I remember, scheduling assistant still requires you to pick and time and room yourself although it gives you a view to do so more easily.

We came up with this idea halfway through YC and our paid version of the product has paying 2 customers and several others in the pipeline, including some big tech companies.

[athenot]

When I schedule a meeting with more than a few people, the number of open slots within business hours quickly converges to zero. So I have to manually make the decisions as to who is most important to have in that meeting (based on the topic), and who will be conflicting.

Curious how an automated algorithm can make that decision.

[ska]

Stacking meetings is helpful until it is harmful. How do you balance that, out of curiosity?