How Cal.com CEO Bailey Pumfleet grew Cal.com to $5.1M revenue and 20K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is bailey pumfleet he's the co-founder of cal.com schedule infrastructure for absolutely everyone bailey you ready to take us to the top yeah all right cal.com how much does that domain name cost uh unfortunately we can't steal the exact number due to uh you know an nda uh which is which is a shame but um obviously you know well you know very expensive it was a it was probably one of the most significant purchases we'll probably ever make and you know personally i believe the most effective purchase will probably ever make when did you do it the deal was it this year or last year or what uh so it was last year um because i mean we officially launched the brandofcal.com on september the 15th last year um we actually bought it a few months prior so it was um it was very sort of like tantalizing how we had it you know sitting there in in the domain account and you know just waiting to use it and waiting to sort of push out the announcement but obviously we wanted to make sure that our because we coincided with our version 1.0 and a few other releases um yeah it was something that we sort of held on to for a little while before we made it public that's awesome um so so you get that done in uh last year uh did you guys i mean you must have raised a bunch of funding to get that deal done then yes um so earlier that year um i think around sort of july time uh we raised a 7.4 million series um series a seed round which you know really got started pretty well and obviously even to this day we have a low burn rate so we was looking for um you know a good domain name and we we wanted to invest well in that because you know we're a link sharing business um it's so much nicer to typecal.com than calendly.com or savvycal.com or acuityscheduling.com um so yeah it was it was definitely something which we knew we wanted to put some decent budget into but yeah ultimately without without the first round of run uh funding it wouldn't have been possible and that would just be clear you closed the round of funding last year in 2021 yes that was that was about june july 2021 and then since we've raised to series a which was announced about a month ago and how much was that uh that was a 25 million seriously okay so let's let's break down the sort of story here before we get too deep into the finances um what is cal if people want to use it what do they get what is cal um cal is essentially the the solution to all of our problems with calendly and you know any of the existing solutions out there the point is is you know i i used to use calendly um i did try savvy cow they're great products they are genuinely good products but the point is is you know scheduling is scheduling is like email it's one of those core foundational things that runs businesses runs the web um and the point is is that means that people from time to time have like complex use cases and things like that like telehealth or hiring marketplaces or you know anything that you can think of where scheduling takes part in um calendly and savvycal just don't really sort of fit all of their requirements i mean they're good products like if i just want to book one-to-one sales calls with me you know just a basic zoom uh setup that's great but the point is is you know if you're running a massive hiring marketplace and want to be you know integrating this fully into your platform you know have it completely white label push across 300 users it doesn't really scale well so this was literally a solution to a problem which me and my co-founder had had and it was literally just started as a side project but then we found that people actually really really liked this when did you guys write the first line of code [Music] oh so that that's a difficult i think i think i wrote the first line of coding like february it was so like i still had a nine to five job february of 2021 yeah 2021 and what was your nine to five bailey uh so i i worked at like a backup and disaster recovery company i was doing some like small in-house software engineering like customer portals oh my gosh and how how old were you last year uh last year i was 17. 17. okay so you're 18 today i'm 18 as of today yeah literally around around the time that we you know officially incorporated what then was kalenso and it's now cower.com that was just sort of around the the age of becoming 18. oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is 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let's jump back into the interview and and sorry who is your co-founder how did you guys meet um well interestingly so it was my co-founder peer that had the initial idea of this um he basically sort of specked out what he thought you know could be a more extensive or and open source scheduling solution um and then he he published a website out there just basic with like a wait list just kind of explaining the idea and then it was right around that time where his company uh actually got bought out by uh on deck and uh he moved into a role of head of product on deck and hence he didn't really have the time to to like work on it so he was looking for somebody to actually take over um and so what happened is he's like i was one of the first people on the wait list for this like super excited about it because this was just a genuine problem which i've faced and then basically you know he reached out i i replied back um and then we like we started off literally just with pure engineering work like i built the very first sort of pre-mvp you know just connecting to google calendar working out some availability that kind of thing um and then we decided to actually you know we work well together um you know let's put an official arrangement in place well wait bailey before the original arrangement how did he incentivize you to do this engineering work did he pay you something or did you get it yeah so it was literally just on a contractor basis um you know he literally like paid me for like two weeks of development how much how much uh i think he'll be okay so it was it was five it was five thousand dollars um so i love this i love this story so he goes bailey listen you're first on my wait list i'm busy as hell if i give you five grand show me what you can do in two weeks essentially that was the idea yeah he basically sent it out to everybody on the wait list and i replied back saying yeah i'd love to to take lead on this um and you know first of all it was just kind of work as a contractor as a trial um and then you know let's see if we work well together before actually you know committing to you know incorporating with you know both of us as founders which i think is is something which we both took as a good learning you know it...