How I hacked my Calendly for child care coverage

I’m always tinkering with my calendar and figuring out new ways to get more out of it. It’s one of my favorite tools at work and home to organize my time and visualize my commitments. At work, I use Calendly pretty regularly to schedule external meetings, since it’s a quick and easy way to carve out availability and share it with others to book. But I had never used Calendly in my personal life until recently, when I tried using it for child care. 

Context: my spouse works in academia and every spring he packs a year’s worth of teaching commitments into one quarter. Most of the classes he teaches are during nights and weekends, when we don’t have any regular child care. I’m pretty used to this schedule, but this was our first year doing it with two kids, so I knew I’d want extra help. We’re fortunate to live near family who are happy to pitch in, but I sort of dreaded coordinating the times I wanted help via group chat. So, I decided to give Calendly a try.

Here are the steps that I took to use Calendly for family child care signups.

Step 1: Add Tyler’s teaching schedule to my calendar

This first step was tedious - manually adding my spouse’s teaching schedule to my personal Google calendar. He gets his course schedule in Excel format, which he shares with me via Google sheets. To add complexity, he has a co-instructor, so only some of the courses are his responsibility. So every year, I manually go through the sheet line by line and manually add each class to my calendar as an event. They have to do this too - there’s no way for faculty (or students) to add their classes to their calendar. It goes without saying that I wish there was an easier way to sync his teaching schedule to my calendar!

Feels wild in 2022 that we are still sharing schedules this way.

Step 2: Figure out when I’d want help

Once I had his schedule in my calendar, I could compare it with my own and figure out when I’d want or need help. This included times I wouldn’t be home because I had an existing conflict, or times I would be home but wanted an extra set of hands for dinner, bath or bedtime with the kids.

Step 3: Create an event in Calendly

Since I already have a Calendly account, I created a new event called “Hanging with Webb & Jackson.” I set the event location to our home address, and made the event private so that it wasn’t publicly available on my Calendly booking page.

Then I built my “availability,” e.g. when I wanted family to sign up for shifts. This part proved to be a bit trickier, since the class lengths varied by day/time and Calendly doesn’t allow for dynamic event lengths. I ended up solving this by making the event itself 179 mins (I initially set it for 3 hours, but had some issues with booking consecutive slots). On evenings, I created availability from 5:30-8:30pm, so only 1 slot would be available. On weekends, depending on how much help I wanted, I created availability starting at 9 or 10am and showed available start times in increments of 3 hours.

Step 4: Share it with my family

This part was easy! I shared the Calendly link on our group text thread.

I did run into one snag here, which is that I’d marked the classes in my calendar as busy, and as a result Calendly didn’t recognize the slots as available. Once I went into my calendar and changed the event visibility to “free” for each class, the issue was resolved.

The outcome

Overall I’m really glad I tried using Calendly for family family child care signups. Even though Calendly was designed for a different use case - booking meetings - it achieved all of my objectives: to share time slots with others easily, to coordinate care without a ton of back and forth communication, and to ensure that the appointment was added to my calendar.

If Calendly were designed for booking child care, here are the features I would have wanted to see, in no particular order:

1. A different social share picture: ideally, one of the kids! It would have been great to assign a unique photo for this event in Calendly.

2. Home-or-not indicator: there was no great way to share with family whether or not I’d be home during the shift in question. Anyone who’s babysat knows that this is critical information!

3. Unique time slot notes: since some of these were during dinner time, it would have been nice to be able to share a note associated with a particular time slot or set of slots - eg, I’ll order pizza from the place down the street, please pick it up on your way here.

4. Variable event length: this wasn’t a huge issue for weekends, but it would have been nice to not have to commit to 3hr shifts for the whole schedule - I would have preferred that the booker could design their own event length (e.g. 2 hours or 5).

5. Automatic color coding: it would have been great when scanning my calendar quickly to see which nights and weekends I did/not have help with the kids. I ended up manually changing the confirmed slots to a different color for this reason.

6. Better shared visibility: I wish there’d been an easy way for family members to see who had already signed up so that they could swap shifts or even double up. 

7. A custom title: the default naming convention for an appointment booked through Calendly is “John Smith and Jane Doe” when John is booking an appointment on Jane’s calendar. It would have been nice to assign a custom name to these events, eg “Reed hangs with Webb and Jackson.” 

Given that Calendly was built for booking meetings, I didn’t expect it to be a perfect tool for babysitting signups. But I still think it worked better than what I imagine the alternative would have been (text coordination + Google sheet signup + manual calendar invites).

Now that I figured out how to use Calendly for child care, the next personal thing I want to try is a social calendar for friends, where they can book a weeknight dinner or weekend hang/hike. I’d probably use the same process: create a private Calendly event, add availability (3hr blocks would work well here), and share it with friends via text. This is an easy way to cut down on the back and forth coordination and guarantees that our plans make their way onto my calendar. 

Five things I learned fundraising as a first-time founder

Earlier this year, I raised a pre-seed round for my company, Arrange, a platform that makes it easy to add reminders and to-dos to your calendar. I’m a first-time founder, it was my first time fundraising, and it all took place over Zoom. I wrote about the fundraising process and how I went about it over here. 

This post is meant to capture something else – namely, how wrong some of my assumptions were going into fundraising and what I learned along the way. Here are 5 surprising things I learned while fundraising for Arrange:

1. I was terrible at predicting investors’ behavior.

I ran a pretty intentional fundraising process, and spent a lot of time researching firms and partners and identifying the best person in my network to make a warm intro where possible. So based on any given firm’s investment stage and thesis, as well as the strength of the mutual connection/introduction, I felt confident in my ability to predict which investors would be the most interested in me and in Arrange. I couldn’t have been more wrong. There were pre-seed firms with strong mutual connections that I thought would be slam-dunk convos who turned down an email intro. And there were big, well-known, usually-later-stage firms with less-strong intros that moved really quickly. (In fact, I almost didn’t pursue Arrange’s largest investor because another founder swore they “wouldn’t touch” a company this early). The lesson here? Check your assumptions and shoot your shot since you never know how people will respond.

2. I got very little pushback on being a solo founder.  

The overwhelming consensus view in Silicon Valley is that two founders are better than one, and that tech startups in particular need a technical cofounder to be viable. The truth is that being a solo founder hardly ever came up as an issue at my stage. Of all the investors I met with, only two cited lack of a technical founder as a reason for passing on Arrange, and both investors were technical themselves. On the other end of the spectrum, one well-known investor went so far as to tell me he “loves solo founders.” The moral of the story? Don’t treat finding a cofounder as a box to check before you start fundraising. Cofounder (and investor!) relationships are like marriages, and having no partner is better than having one (or worse yet, the wrong one) solely for the sake of doing so. 

3. I never had any success with cold outreach.

This one bums me out to even write since I had the privilege of having warm intros to many of the investors on my target list. But the truth is that I did not raise a single dollar from people or firms that I reached out to directly. This included angel investors who advertise open DMs on Twitter, and even a VC firm that had once targeted me(!) in their cold founder outreach. I don’t take any of it personally, but I couldn’t help but feel disappointed that, from what I can tell, VC is still a relationship business. So, if you’re a first-time founder, my overwhelming advice would be to invest in building relationships with investors and/or people who can open doors for you however possible.

4. I didn’t encounter a single bad actor. 

I’ll be honest: I entered the fundraising process cautiously optimistic, but also prepared for the worst. There are tons of horror stories about pulled term sheets, predatory terms, and more. I’m happy to report that this was not my experience at all – in fact, I loved fundraising. The worst I encountered was an awkward call or two, but the vast majority were enjoyable. A few investors ghosted me, and others took a long time to say no, but in no case did they mean any harm – people are just busy or unorganized (or both). 

5. I really enjoyed the process. 

I enjoyed fundraising a lot more than I thought I would. I didn’t expect to hate it – I like sales – but I managed my expectations and didn’t anticipate feeling strongly about it one way or the other. What I failed to appreciate is how much I’d enjoy meeting and having interesting conversations with so many smart people, many of which I still think about. Overall, fundraising exceeded my expectations, and not just because I was happy with the outcome.

It’s worth noting that this was my personal experience, and surely others have had different (and harder) ones. But overall, the fundraising process exceeded my expectations, even if some of my assumptions turned out to be wrong. If you’re embarking on a fundraise for the first time, hopefully this was helpful.

Interested in learning more about Arrange? Join our beta here and check out our open roles here.

How I ran my pre-seed fundraise

Earlier this year, I raised a pre-seed round for my new company, Arrange, a platform that makes it easy to add reminders and to-dos to your calendar. Here’s how I ran my fundraising process. 

The first slide in my fundraising deck.

Background

A little bit about me and the company:

• I’m a first-time founder, and this was my first time raising venture capital

• I’m a solo founder, and at the time of fundraising, I didn’t have any employees

• Stage-wise, I was post-idea but pre-product. I’d spent ~6 months doing user validation and testing a handmade alpha version of the product. At the time of fundraising, I had some Figma designs of what the product would look like based on my alpha version, but no working product.

I had a few things working in my favor:

• I have a compelling background for a startup founder. Prior to founding Arrange, I was on the founding team of Common, the nation’s largest coliving operator (though it certainly wasn’t when I joined). I stayed at Common for 5 years through a lot of growth and held a variety of executive roles, and even though Common is in a different industry, my operating and growth experience translated nicely to founding a startup.

• I had a network of people who could make warm intros to investors. Not Stanford or Uber alum level, but strong enough to find a connection to 2/3 of the firms I targeted. 

Process

There is no one right way to fundraise. That said, I was pretty intentional about how I ran my fundraising process, and believe any founder can run a good process, regardless of background.

Step 1: Define your fundraising strategy.

Before you actually start fundraising, the first step is deciding whether to raise money at all, and if so, determine if venture capital is the best source of financing for your business.

For me, fundraising was about more than raising funds – in addition to capital, I wanted to recruit the best partners and advisers possible for Arrange’s business. So I defined early on what I was looking for in investors:

• I wanted to raise money from people who invest in early-stage companies for a living because I wanted investors who (a) had helped companies move from zero to one, and (b) had navigated the highs and lows of working with startups (in other words, not their first rodeo).

• On top of that, I had a particular bias toward founders-turned-investors – I believe in the VC apprenticeship model, but I sought out former founders and early joiners/builders because I was betting on their company-building expertise and empathy. I also wanted sparring partners – as a solo founder, I considered investors an extension of my team.

A number of founders have asked me how I handled friends and family. I was fortunate to have a lot of interest from personal contacts, some of whom were strategic to Arrange from an advisory perspective (other founders, execs at large tech companies, etc.) and others who were less so. My criteria for evaluating this pool of investors was different: I wanted people I trusted who would do no harm. If you’re considering how to fit F&F into your fundraise, keep in mind that there’s a very real chance these people will never get their money back, so picture yourself delivering that news to them, and if you can’t imagine it, you probably shouldn’t take their checks. 

Step 2: Do your homework.

Good news for founders: there are thousands of investment firms, each with unique teams, investment theses, geographical emphases, and ideal check sizes.

Bad news for founders: sifting through them all, and finding the right targets for you and your business, takes time.

I treated my fundraise like a sales process and borrowed best sales practices to run it efficiently. I started building out my CRM months before my first call, and invested a lot of time in researching early-stage firms and culling my target list.

Here is the information I captured in my CRM:

• Firm info: firm name, partner name, title, location

• Investment info: target stage (eg pre-seed vs seed vs later-stage), ideal check size, lead rounds or follow, etc.

• Lead score: my own rating of the partner/firm based on investment info + my own weights (former founder, how much I admire the partner or firm, etc)

• Mutual connections: who could intro me to the firm (more on that below)

• Funnel info: the status of each conversation + next steps

• Elimination: reason + notes. I actually eliminated many firms prior to starting fundraising, but I kept them in my CRM to maintain a record of why I’d eliminated them since I would lose that context if I’d just deleted them. Also, it’s very possible that firms I eliminated because they don’t invest in pre-seed financings could be a strong potential fit in the future.

A quick plug on tools: do yourself a favor and use whatever you’re comfortable with. I used Google Sheets for my fundraising CRM and it worked just fine. Adopting a new tool for the sake of doing so because it seems better or more feature-rich (be it Airtable, Notion, or whatever else) will only slow you down if you’re not yet versed in it. Use whatever you have the most comfort with. 

Step 3: Put your best foot forward.

Once you’ve researched firms and defined your target list, you’ll need to figure out the best way to get in front of X person at Y firm.

This part took me almost as long as Step 2. 

For each partner, I researched our mutual connections on LinkedIn. In many cases, I had multiple points of entry into a firm, and while this is certainly a good problem to have, I spent a lot of time figuring out who would make the strongest intro since it was not always obvious – the person who knows me best may not know the investor well, or vice versa.

My introducers were mainly:

• Fellow founders: these intros were usually to their investors (as opposed to ones that had passed or that they were actively pursuing)

• Former classmates/teammates: people who could vouch for me professionally

Once I determined who could make the best intro, I sent a personalized email that could be forwarded to each investment target with a little bit about why X partner at Y firm was on my radar. This also takes time, but definitely pays dividends – nobody (VCs included) wants to feel like they’re getting a generic mass email. Take the time to craft a unique note for each.

Another best practice that gets overlooked is keeping your introducers updated – if people in your network took the time to connect you to a potential investor, let them know how it went. Depending on your audience, these can be 1:1 notes or more general fundraising updates to the broader group.

One thing worth noting: loose ties played a really important role in my fundraising process, whether it was people I crossed paths with years ago (and very little since then) or people I’d connected with really recently. In a few cases, people I met after I began fundraising ended up making great intros to potential investors. So if you feel like you don’t have a deep pool of strong connectors, you can absolutely keep building this in real time. 

Step 4: Set a timeline and pace accordingly.

Like any good project, fundraising has a start date and should always have a target end date that you are working against. 

Here’s how I thought about pacing and timeline:

• I tranched my fundraise into 3 parts. I started with ~30 targets and set a goal of moving through them (getting to a yes/no) in about a month. At that time, if I hadn’t gotten a yes yet, I’d move on to targets 31-60, and repeat for 61-90. 

• With this in mind, I told myself that if I hadn’t gotten a yes in 3 months/~100 calls, it would be a signal to me that something was not resonating, and I’d put the process on hold to step back and re-evaluate.

In terms of meetings/week, this was not a particularly aggressive timeline, and I’ve seen founders do it much faster, packing into a week what I did in a month. Again, there’s no right answer here, but this pacing worked for two reasons:

• I started my fundraise in March of this year, when meetings were occurring by default over Zoom. And while it made it easy to meet with VCs regardless of location, I found myself needing more padding between meetings to take a breather. 

• I didn’t yet have a team (save for a few part-time contractors) and knew that I needed to carve out time to continue moving the business forward – since I was still working alone, if I spent all my time fundraising, I wouldn’t be making any product progress. I tried to balance these.

Just like having sales targets informs BD activities, having a clear timeline and milestones for your fundraise will help you understand how you’re performing against your own goals and know when it’s time to make a change in your approach. 

Step 5: Get in the right mindset.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by fundraising for the first time. Here’s how I got in the right place mentally:

• I’m a big fan of Brené Brown’s FFT framework. Doing new things is hard and scary. The good news is that it’s only the first time once! You can do it. Keep in mind that every successful VC-back founder you admire also had to navigate their first fundraise.

• Remember that you’re looking for a market of one. You don’t need broad adoption to be successful – you just need one investor to say yes, and the rest will almost certainly fall into place. (It took me 6 weeks to get first yes and less than 2 weeks to get fully subscribed.)

• By this math, prepare yourself for the vast majority of investors saying no. No one likes being turned down, but it’s not personal – so many stars need to align for an investor to say yes and the bulk of the reasons why it’s not a fit have nothing to do with you or your company. Don’t take it personally. 

So much of being a founder is managing your own psychology and for better or worse, fundraising is no different – so make sure you’re in the right headspace before you start.

Conclusion

In the end, I was happy with the outcome of my fundraise – I raised the bulk of my round from three early-stage firms I really admire: Unusual Ventures, Flybridge, and XFactor Ventures. And yes, having a compelling background and strong network certainly helped. But the good news for founders and first-time fundraisers is that anyone can run a good process, regardless of prior experience. 

If you’re embarking on your fundraising journey for the first time, hopefully this was helpful. And if you enjoyed this post, check out my other fundraising post on what I learned fundraising.

Interested in learning more about Arrange? Join our beta here or check out our open roles here.

The Next Episode

I know, I know – long time no blog.

A lot has happened in the last few months: I graduated from business school, moved to New York City, and embarked on a new adventure (more on that soon).

In my last post, I wrote about why I wanted to work in venture capital. I was in the thick of recruiting, and laser focused on landing in VC post-grad. I was fortunate enough to work on projects with two VCs I really admire – one a deep dive on blockchain technology (a humbling exercise, I might add), and the other, customer interviews with startup founders. As graduation neared, I decided to broaden my scope, and given my background in commercial real estate and interest in technology, I met with several awesome, venture-backed CRE tech startups.

And then something funny happened. After much job-related research and planning, I found myself in the right place at the right time. Brad Hargreaves and his wife, Amanda Moskowitz – both serial entrepreneurs – came to SOM to give a talk about startup marketing. I missed the actual talk, but had a chance to catch up with them on campus later. Jen McFadden, my good friend and mentor who had invited them to come, casually mentioned that Brad was starting a new real estate venture.

Suffice it to say that one thing led to another – Brad and I kept in touch, continued to meet, and in May, I signed on as his second hire. Common is building flexible, community-driven housing by offering furnished, month-to-month memberships, starting in New York City. Just like he helped address the digital skills gap as a founder of General Assembly, Brad is passionate about solving another big problem: creating a better user experience around housing.

I couldn’t be happier to be a member of the Common team. I’m surrounded by people who come to work each day excited about what we’re doing, and I feel honored to have the chance to help build this company. Our first properties open in Brooklyn this fall, and while I don’t know what the future holds, I can’t wait to find out. 

Common Team, 8/18/15.

Why VC? 20 Questions

As some of you might know, I’m currently in my last semester of my MBA at Yale, and (still) looking for a full-time job in NYC. (All the interesting ones come at the end, right?!) I’ve predominantly been targeting VC firms, as well as a couple of startups, mostly in the commercial real estate space.

I recently answered the following questions for a seed stage firm in New York, which was meant to get at the question: why VC? Since then, I’ve shared it a number of times, so I figured I’d put it up here.

What has been your favorite job you have held and why? Tenant Rep Brokerage group at CBRE Chicago – in a very short period of time, I watched early-stage, high-growth companies completely transform the face of the city.

What accomplishment are you most proud of in your life? Becoming fluent in Khmer – the hardest and most rewarding thing I have done.

What are your 3 core values? Respect, Integrity, Gratitude

Why are you interested in venture capital? What motivates you? I love learning new things, meeting new people, and helping entrepreneurs be even more awesome. I’m also passionate about bringing more diversity to the face of tech and VC.

Have you ever been #1 at something? What? I won the award for the best senior honors thesis at Berkeley… on the history of Cambodian dance.

How do you learn new things? By immersing myself in the issue. I also ask a lot of questions.

How do you set goals? When you don’t achieve a goal, what do you do? I’m a big believer in SMART goals. I set them regularly, and reevaluate them frequently. If I don’t achieve a goal, I try to understand why, learn from it, and move on.

What are your 3 favorite hobbies/pastimes? Cooking, photography, adventure travel

What thing about the internet/tech do you think is true that most people think is false? That people’s demand for constant connectivity and content will, at a certain point, begin to decline.

Are you in love with the internet? What about it are you in love with? I am not in love with the internet per se, but am rather in awe of its ability to reach a vast portion of the earth’s population and impact people’s lives. It is the epitome of scale.

If you were a VC, how would you start building a network in tech? What types of entrepreneurs would you focus on trying to connect with early? Having spent a considerable amount of time working with the faculty, staff, and students of SOM’s entrepreneurship program, I think that universities are a great untapped resource. I also think female entrepreneurs are an underserved market with large upside potential.

Why do you want to work in venture instead of working at a startup? Interpersonal and intellectual stimulation and diversity – lots of people, with lots of different ideas and experience/expertise, working in lots of different roles, companies, and industries.

What is 1 tech product you admire that you use for work? Google apps suite

What is 1 tech product you admire that you use for play? Trulia

What is 1 tech product we have probably never heard of that you like? http://www.bfmuir.com/home/2015/1/31/ski-tracks-a-love-story-of-apps-analytics-and-adoption

If you could invest in any private tech company right now at the valuation of the last round, which company would it be? Mattermark – I admire Danielle Morrill as an entrepreneur and think she and her team are building an incredible product with great potential for expansion into other markets.

What spaces that people focus on right now aren't interesting to you? bitcoin the currency (though I am interested in the underlying blockchain technology), cybersecurity, phablets

Name 3 examples of great online brands. General Assembly, Warby Parker, Harry’s

Name 3 examples of great offline brands. J.Crew, PUBLIC Chicago (hotel), Linus (bikes)

What is the coolest designed site on the internet? In its mobile form, Instagram – there are plenty of beautifully designed sites, but Instagram’s impeccable UI/UX allows users to get what they are looking and intuitively and efficiently.

Launch Lady Land

Last weekend, I attended Y Combinator’s second Female Founders Conference in San Francisco. Over 800 women filled SF’s Masonic Center to hear from past and current Y Combinator founders on topics ranging from how they started their ventures, to scaling their companies, to raising venture capital.

In total, we heard from 12 founders, all of them women. A few observations:

Women founders are keeping it in the family.

I was surprised to learn that almost half of the founders – 5 out of 12 – cofounded their ventures with a spouse or close family member. These include:

• Jessica Livingston, Y Combinator: cofounded with her husband 
• Danielle Morrill, Mattermark: cofounded with her husband
• Tracy Young, PlanGrid: cofounded with her then-boyfriend, now-husband
• Ruchi Sanghvi, Cove (acquired by Dropbox): cofounded with her husband
• Adora Cheung, Homejoy: cofounded with her brother

Not but a few days ago, I came across this article, which highlights three female founders – Julia Hartz (Eventbrite), Michelle Zatlyn (CloudFare), and Adi Tatarko (Houzz) – whose companies are among the 80 tech ‘unicorns’ that have passed the billion-dollar mark. Who are their cofounders? You guessed it – in two out of three cases, their husbands.

I was surprised to find that these women were starting such successful ventures with family members, since this seems counter to the conventional VC wisdom that family and startups don't mix. I can’t draw any immediate conclusions, but this trend strikes me as interesting, and worth further exploration.

Women are founding ventures across a variety of sectors.

When asked during a Q&A panel, Jessica Livingston told attendees that female applicants to Y Combinator are starting the same types of businesses as their male counterparts, and last weekend’s panelists were no different. The founders we heard from are leading both consumer and enterprise tech businesses in a number of different industries.

However, I would be remiss to say that this is the case universally. I recognize that there is selection bias in that YC represents some of the best tech startups out there, and even more so, that YC likely elected only the very best ones to showcase. Last summer, working at a seed fund that only invests in female founders, I got the distinct impression that women were founding consumer businesses targeted at women customers. I am hopeful that with time and more role models to emulate, women will tackle a broader set of problems and markets.

Founders of tech companies need not be technical.

Just like many male founders of well-known tech companies are not in fact programmers – PayPal’s Peter Thiel studied philosophy and law, and his cofounder Reid Hoffman, who would later go on to found LinkedIn, studied cognitive science and philosophy – an engineering degree need not be a criteria for women to start tech companies either. (For more on this topic, I highly recommend this article.)

This is also not to say that female tech talent was not featured: Ruchi Sanghvi was the first female engineer hired at Facebook, and went on to lead the company’s development and launch of Newsfeed; and Kimberly Bryant, who earned her electrical engineering degree in the 80s, has almost three decades of computer programming experience. But overall – counterintuitive as it may seem given the ongoing debate about women, STEM, and Silicon Valley’s pipeline problem – I was refreshed to see both technical and non-technical founders on stage.

I’m glad to have had the opportunity to attend the Female Founders Conference. In addition to the panel speakers, I got to meet a lot of great women founders working on a variety of interesting ventures. And even though only 23% of teams applying to Y Combinator have a female founder, I am confident that with time and precedence, Y Combinator and its peer accelerators will continue to attract awesome female-led teams.

Ski Tracks: A (love) story of apps, analytics, and adoption

Three weeks ago, I discovered a product that will forever change the way I snowboard. 

I’ve been snowboarding since 1993. In the last two decades, all of the products that snowboarders use – from boards and bindings to boots and apparel – have improved substantially. But year to year, changes in product design are fairly incremental, and hard to detect as a user.

This year was different. Enter Ski Tracks, a movement analytics app for ski and snowboard enthusiasts – a MapMyRun for the mountain.

Within 24 hours of downloading the app, I was hooked. For the first time in 22 seasons, I was armed with more data than I could have ever imagined – ski altitude and vertical, slope and distance details for each run, and, perhaps best of all, top speed. I was overwhelmed, and completely immersed, in all of this newfound information.

I’m admittedly not much of a quantified self type – I don’t own any wearable technology, and don’t use a ton of tracking apps. This has made me think a lot about my interaction with Ski Tracks. A few things stand out to me:

It changed my behavior. After just one run using Ski Tracks, I was resigned to the fact that I would never again get to the bottom of the hill and not check my phone. I wanted to know how fast I’d gone, how much vertical I’d covered. It made me more competitive, with myself and those around me. I was continuously pushing myself to break my own PRs – riding faster, riding longer, riding better. At the end of each day, I dove deep into the app, retracing my tracks and comparing them with past runs and days. I consumed my data voraciously, and boarded differently because of it. The moral of this story? Products have the power to change human behavior.

It solved a problem I didn’t know I had. My quick adoption of Ski Tracks caught me off guard – I hadn’t been aware that I wanted something like this, and yet here I was, practically addicted to the app. Had a friend not told me about it during my trip, I never would have found it, since I wasn’t looking for it in the first place. I discovered Ski Tracks by accident rather than out of any necessity to solve a burning problem. Unlike a lot of other wearable and digital QS products on the market, knowing my top speed on a snowboard may not seem as value-additive as knowing how many calories I’ve burned in a day. The takeaway? It’s hard to attract customers who aren’t looking for your solution.

Products don’t need to be perfect to deliver value. I must admit that Ski Tracks’ UI/UX is not the best I’ve seen; the interface is a little clunky, and the overall design could definitely use an upgrade. But room for improvement notwithstanding, Ski Tracks is evidence that delivering products early and often can bring tremendous value to users, even if they’re not perfect. As a (relatively new) student of software development and agile methodologies, I can appreciate that the makers of Ski Tracks are pushing their product out to users, and hopefully gaining meaningful feedback from them in return. The message for those launching new products? Don’t prioritize perfection at the expense of good enough.

The QS market might be larger than we think. It’s not a secret that both the wearable and digital QS markets are continuing to grow. In a report released earlier this month, Rocket Fuel found that 31% of adult US consumers currently use a QS tracking tool – including wearables, apps and websites – and an additional 25% of respondents that don’t currently use any QS tools are interested in doing so. But I will argue that the QS market may be even larger than we think – I did not fall in this 56%, but after having had a taste of my own data, there’s no going back. If my own experience is any indication, I’m convinced that the 44% of people who aren’t interested in QS tracking will eventually catch on. All signs point toward more data, and more empowerment, for more people.

In a few short weeks, I’ve undergone a small but meaningful personal transformation, from a member of the uninterested 44% to a QS enthusiast and frequent endorser of Ski Tracks. I’ve persuaded no less than 4 friends and family members to download the app – in part because I love using it, and in part because the experience is that much more fun when shared. Needless to say, given the growth in tracking hardware and software, I’m excited to see where QS takes us.