Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar
I’m Jordan from Superpowered (http://superpowered.me/), here with my co-founders Nikhil, Nick, and Ibrahim. We’re building a calendar app for the Mac menu bar.
A few months ago, we were students from the University of Waterloo. We started YC as a video lecture platform for professors but realized it was a horrible idea. We needed a new problem.
We settled on one we all faced during our remote internships. Our calendars became more important, yet meetings took ten clicks to join and were easy to miss.
So, we built a Mac app to bring the platform we check the most, Google Calendar, into the menu bar. We’ve made common actions, like joining Zoom meetings and checking what’s coming up, a click away.
We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything.
We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.
For those who are curious, it’s built using React + Electron and designed to look as native as possible in the menu bar. Sensitive user data like calendar events don’t pass through our servers.
We’re new to the productivity space and still have a lot to learn, so we’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts.
Thanks in advance! Jordan
Note: We're still early on and are trying to figure out our pricing. We priced it towards the higher end to see if we're delivering enough value to our users.
PS - Yes, we have keyboard shortcuts.
206 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadGreat looking product, I'd love to have a free version to glance at in my menu bar...
but for the most part Apple Watch covers my needs.
Not sure if borderline sarcasm.
One feature request: it seems like it's not possible to create new calendar events using the app. I assume this is on the roadmap?
About your expansion into other areas - The reason the menu bar works is because it is tailor made for one thing now, which is finding the next meeting to join. If you add more options, would that not move the clutter from the browser tabs / apps into the menu bar? Something to think about.
Good luck with the product. I wish you the best.
We want to take that same philosophy with every other platform. Only show the essential parts you need to do your work.
It's a big challenge, as you can tell we put a lot of thought into design, and we will continue to as the platform expands.
At the moment, we're more focused on building a product that our current users (on Mac) love before prematurely expanding to other platforms.
Segment started as a tool for professors, too [1].
https://segment.com/academy/intro/measuring-product-market-f...
Maybe cloud infrastructure is still too expensive?
We also have a referral program where you get two free weeks for every friend you bring to the app if that helps
> We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything.
Can someone give me an example of this problem? To me this feels so "extra"... Maybe I'm missing something.
As a dev, I almost always miss my GitHub notifications unless I'm constantly checking the platform in my browser. We want to bring all the platforms we use for work into one native place. Does that make more sense now?
We want to integrate deeply into SaaS platforms to provide one-click access to features within those platforms. For example, viewing and resolving comments on a Google Doc. This just isn't possible through Mac's notification center.
Maybe I'm being dense here, but can't you use email?
But why would anyone be constantly checking GitHub notifications? Isn't that a distraction?
The business value of missing a notification or meeting can be really high. I feel like businesses would happily pay $10 per user-month to have all their employees on time to a meeting. Or even just closer. I imagine similar logic can be applied to other notifications.
Maybe I'm being extremely naive, but isn't it already a solved problem with synchronized & shared calendars and notifications?
I think the idea is that the upcoming calendar/appointment notification is live and always on the menubar. See example screenshot from their web landing page: https://superpowered.me/static/media/menubar.aaa56b48.png
I'm building a similar calendar notification tool for personal use on Windows so I understand the value of this. Calendar notifications via email and "reminders" on the iPhone are not effective for my workflow and I need something that's always active on my menu bar.
I spend my time in fullscreen apps. The menubar is never visible.
If this is all you need, why not just use an open source alternative? I'm using MeetingBar (https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar) and it covers all of these "issues". It even sends notifications, it's lightweight, scriptable and doesn't cost me as much as a Photoshop subscription.
It's not really hard to make my life $10/month better, and who knows how many people that is true for? I wouldn't overthink it.
How many QoL are you willing to buy? You’re essentially paying $10 for a netflix subscription only it’s a calendar widget in the top menu bar.
Also, as a CEO you are constantly thinking in terms of ROI. It doesn't matter how much software costs if it pays for itself several times over. This spills over into personal purchases too.
(BTW, big fan of what Lambda School is doing Austen.)
As far as YC goes, pivoting and working on new ideas really rapidly is downright normal. Sometimes that looks like taking weekend hacks and seeing how far you can get with them (this one being a canonical example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819)
I see so many negative comments and can't help but think of this (first comment on DropBox's HN launch): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
Prototypes are perfectly cool as long as expectations are met. Of course, charging $10 for a prototype doesn’t frequently work
Similar to ring camera. You're just paying someone to make your cctv camera available to you over thr internet instead of you setting it up yourself.
I personally hate these services but some people would pay $/month for this convince.
I understand the potential for future expansion, but wouldn't it make sense for YC to wait until an MVP for said expansion is released before investing in it?
Now that we've got the base down (which takes time), we're quickly branching out to include more platforms, to make us less of a widget and more of a platform ourselves.
> “No more looking for the Google calendar tab in Chrome.”
Maybe use the native calendar app then? Or make an app shortcut for Google Calendar in Chrome?
> “I just joined a meeting 3 minutes late instead of 5 because of Superpowered, which is a resounding success in my book.”
Ummm. Probably not a good one to include.
I just don't get the $120/yr value in this. On Windows, I have all my calendars synced with the stock calendar app, links to the meetings are automatically pulled into the notes section, and reminders are automatically set for 15 minutes. Whenever I get a notification for my next meeting, I click it, then click the link and I'm in my meeting. For macOS, same thing.
> Maybe use the native calendar app then? Or make an app shortcut for Google Calendar in Chrome?
I myself used to be an Apple Calendar user. Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our users are in the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't support native functionality.
You definitely could make a shortcut or find another workaround to replace one of our features, but given how many feature requests we get from users, that wouldn't be enough for a lot of people. We have customers who agree it's worth it for them.
> $10 a month of a calendar widget that's only available for a single platform?
We currently are a calendar widget, but we're now branching out of the calendar space to become a unified notification inbox.
I understand for pricing purposes we're on the higher end, as mentioned in the note, this is intentional to validate we provide enough value.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm using multiple Google Calendar accounts just fine with the built-in Calendar app.
> We currently are a calendar widget, but we're now branching out of the calendar space to become a unified notification inbox.
So basically, a calendar widget and a notification center (which is already a part of the OS)?
Calendar.app works fine with GCal though (notifications, accepting/cancelling invites, etc.). I still go through the Web UI to create invites and what not (because I want my automatic zoom meeting and decent scheduling tools), but that happens seldomly.
Dog you can sync Google calendar with your built in calendar then run Next Meeting[0] in your menu bar. You can even have a global shortcut to open the meeting link. All my work meetings are in scheduled through Google Calendar and take place in zoom, and all I do is hit Hyper-Z[1] to open the correct meeting link.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/next-meeting/id1017470484?mt=1... [1] Hyper being Cmd-Opt-Shift-Ctrl which is remapped to one key on my keyboard. You can make it anything you want, obviously. My point is I don't even have to touch my mouse to get into the meeting.
The only public code[1] I could find for this project by this author is 13 years old and lacks any code to open the meeting links or handle hotkeys of any kind. The github user has a different name than the project author (who has his own empty github profile elsewhere) so
[0] In fact we can see this by using a recursive grep in ~/Library for the name of one of my meetings. This turned up ~/Library/Calendars/<some UUID>.caldav/<some other UUID>.calendar/Events/<Unique identifier in a format I don't recognize><ISO 8601 timestamp>@googlecom-<different ISO 8601 timestamp>.ics
[1] https://github.com/imagine/nextmeeting
What exactly do you mean by "validate we provide enough value"?
Do you think you provide value in the range of Photoshop, Lightroom and 20GB online storage?
If not, please revise your pricing. I would gladly pay $10 for your app once (!). But surely not monthly.
Why didn’t you just connect your Google calendar to Apple Calendar and keep using Apple Calendar?
My company uses Google for calendar but I still use the native Apple Calendar app on both macOS and iOS. Am I missing something groundbreaking that requires using GCal natively?
Huh? I’m using the native calendar app all the time since I got my first macbook 7 years ago. I was using google calendar before and it was seamlessly migrated. I am using multiple google accounts and also the icloud account for calendars, never had a problem. It syncs back to google and between different devices, it works with inviting other people and so on.
The only feature that google calendar UI does better is help to find a scheduled time. But I always agree for a time before creating a calendar event, so that’s not something I’d miss. Also, it generates the google meet link, which is again useless since I use zoom or whereby. But even if I wanted that, I’d either have to use the google calendar UI or an app that replicates this feature.
What I nice about the native macos calendar app is that it does natural language parsing, for example, “Meet with X on Monday at 12” will create “Meet with X” event and set the date to the closest Monday, the time to 12:00 and duration to a default 1h. It’s basically like you’re making a note, but it becomes a calendar event.
Exactly. The built-in Calendar app is adequate for most tasks (definitely adequate for just delivering notifications).
Besides, there are quite a few decent free calendar widgets out there already.
> “I just joined a meeting 3 minutes late instead of 5 because of Superpowered, which is a resounding success in my book.”
Set your calendar to notify you 15 min before the meeting starts. It's a trivial problem to solve without paying $120/yr.
> We priced it towards the higher end to see if we're delivering enough value to our users
Sorry, but you're marketing your app as "luxury" without delivering any luxury.
Mac and PC haven’t been the only two platforms in a long time.
If you are lucky, they will see your genius and acquihire you. If not, this company has a high likelihood of failing or becoming a lifestyle company with a small but valuable user base who cannot live without the few special things your menu bar app does that Apple's built-in feature does not.
All this being said, you can also discover all kinds of things on the journey that take you away from the original idea into areas where a lot of growth can happen. Build things your customers love and you will find success. It's a great idea fundamentally.
I agree with other commenters though - I'd pay a one-time $10, but $10 per month seems unreasonably high. For perspective Meeter is free, and Spotify is $4 for a family of 4 (in my country).
Maybe it could be part of the bundle at https://setapp.com/ or similar? Or you could have a set-your-own-price monthly sub?
[1] https://apps.apple.com/app/id1532419400 [2] https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar [3] https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar/issues/30
What you're mentioning falls into write mode. Gather a ton of context then make a number of changes. This is best done in Google Calendar.
We focus on read mode. 80% of the time I open Google Calendar, it's to check what's next or to get into my next meeting. When that's done 10+ times a day, it adds up.
That's going to be different for different people. Some of our customers who are product managers open Superpowered 30 times a day. For them, it's worth it.
Is it really such a big pain that you need to join a meeting on time? Usually someone messages me asking me to join in case I miss it.
Someone at YC be: Ima give this $120K coz why not.
We also have a much bigger vision for this than a calendar app. The Google Calendar integration we've built is the base for every other platform we plan to bring in, like Slack and GitHub.
Also, how does this YC Launch work? Does not seem related at all with your original idea (not sure if it's a deal-breaker though?)
> since it's an Electron based widget, is the memory overhead considerable for just a calendar widget?
Great question. In my menu bar right now, the app's using ~150MB.
> Also, how does this YC Launch work?
Every startup in YC gets one YC Launch where they're featured on the front page for the day. Doesn't matter what idea was applied to YC with, just what the startup's currently working on.
iStat Menus, which is tracking a lot more data across my system to render its multiple graphs is using ~85MB total.
Bearing in mind that many users are going to have 5 things like this in their menubar, they can't all use this amount.
~150MB is a huge memory footprint for something that just sits in my menubar idle. Not all Macs have >16GBs of RAM (and even if they did, this is pretty wasteful). I'm also concerned about the battery life.
I'm pretty sure you'll eventually reach a point where it's no longer possible to optimize it any more (nonetheless Electron is just a Chrome instance). If you suddenly realize the whole thing would be twice as good if you'd just make a native app instead, it's better to have no features than have to rewrite all of them.
I know this doesn't sound constructive, but why go with Electron in first place? It's a menubar widget which the users are expected to be running all the time. There's a difference between running a simple applet and a whole browser instance.
They’re a startup, they need to focus on the fastest and most effective way to create value for their users, today. No point optimising the product if the company dies before it starts slowing down.
I suspect the effect will be that Apple gets hate for not making fast enough computers with enough battery life, and people reluctantly spend another $1500 on a laptop after 2 years because it's too slow.
My advice to the company would be that their target device is almost certainly the base model MacBook Air with 8GB RAM running Slack, a large Excel spreadsheet, and Chrome with 100 tabs of Gmail and documents, and that if they aren't _lightning_ fast on that now they need to optimise soon, because they'll get slower over time.
Might be somehow inflated by something I don't understand about apple silicon reporting memory usage. But it's concerning none the less. And I forgot to include the main process at 114 MB
An alternative for those looking: https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar
Curious to know what the longer term plan is. How will this grow past being a calendar widget?
> How will this grow past being a calendar widget?
With Google Calendar, we took the most important parts, like joining Zoom meetings, and put them front and center. We want to do the same with all the platforms we use for work in one place.
Based on some of the comments about notifications.
This whole thing hits me in the core of an issue I have with people and how they handle technology (especially when it comes to notifications). I can't stress enough how I hate to see people's email inboxes or the screen phones. I don't understand why there is so many pending notifications. When it comes to email, thousands, I'm not bloody kind, thousands of unread emails. When it comes to apps in their phones, hundreds. And don't get me started with group notifications (IMs)... Technology, in my view, supposes to enhance us... but I think people are becoming dumber and lazy.
So... this app makes no sense to me. I wouldn't pay for it but clearly I'm a moron and way off the curve so not the ideal client.
How does this compare to Fantastical? It does the same for me, just puts a giant Zoom icon next to its menubar icon and clicking on it lets me join my next meeting.
We're not interested in becoming a full calendar app. We're planning to branch out to other platforms like Slack and Github to become an all-in-one platform for work.
The way I'm addressing the problem for this solution is by having an OS-level / window-manager keystroke to open a new Chrome tab with Google Calendar URL. For example, you can accomplish this by adding following lines to your i3wm config:
Pro tip: for b2b sales, generic productivity enhancing tools are often discovered organically by high-load SME C-suite folks and they’ll decide they want their entire team to have it. If I was in that role then I’d be thrilled not just to save time but to save all the time I spend waiting for my team members to find the link, log in, etc. Maybe you could run the math on how much time is saved and its value.
That's a great idea. Our current approach is bottom-up. We found people sharing it with their teams organically so we rolled out team plans to get more people on board. Open to other suggestions if you have experience!