“Better Meetings” is a series on the Solid blog where we explore startups that, like us, strive to help meetings suck less. Today, we’re interviewing Matty Marianksy, co-founder at Meekan. Meekan is a Slack bot that schedules meetings for you. It received a lot of praise and attention during its launch on Product Hunt.
(Solid) Can you start by telling us a little bit about you and Meekan?
Matty Mariansky (Meekan): Hi I’m Matty, a co-founder and the product designer at Meekan. We believe it’s time that we stopped micromanaging our calendars. Instead, calendars should be smart enough to be sent out to negotiate and arrange our meetings for us.
For the last 18 month we’ve been building a very powerful scheduling engine, and a robot AI to help your calendar do the work for you. The robot currently works inside Slack and joins any existing group chat and accepts commands in plain English. Users can ask him to arrange meetings, reschedule, solve conflicts, or just check what the rest of the day looks like. When a meeting is booked, it immediately gets synced into everyone’s calendars.
What led you to Meekan?
We are three co-founders. Lior, our CEO, was the VP of operations for a large airline, and had to hire two full-time assistants just to handle his meeting scheduling tasks. Eyal, our CTO came up with a new concept to allow a computer to do this job. They were going to hire me as a freelance designer, but when I saw what they were working on, I wanted to come onboard. As a freelancer, I always hated wasting time on scheduling meetings - it was just an annoying overhead that no one was paying me for.
So what does Meekan do? How does it work?
Meekan takes the role of a scheduling assistant - instead of combing your calendar for free spots, and trying to match them with everyone else you need to meet, you just say “Meekan, we want to have lunch next week” or maybe “Meekan, schedule a phone call tomorrow afternoon with @john and @dan”.
The robot will then go ahead and ask everyone’s calendars for available times, and match them together with everyone’s preferences: who likes to push meetings as early as possible? Who prefers not to have meeting on Mondays?
Armed with all that information, the robot can find the best possible time for any group to get together. And if the meeting breaks, and someone can’t make it, the robot can quickly suggest a new time and reschedule in seconds.
The best thing is, it just works. You talk to him in plain English and he gets stuff done:
- Find the best time to have a meeting, and sync it into everyone’s calendars
- Reschedule meetings to a new time when someone can’t make it
- Edit or cancel existing meetings
- Tell you how busy you are tomorrow (or Thursday, or next week), and give you a list of all the meetings you have (which you can cancel, or reschedule or… well you get the point)
- Warn you when two of your meetings overlap on the same time, and offer to move or cancel either
What results do your users get with Meekan?
We always measure how effective our scheduling engine is. When we had our first iOS app, our Median Time to Schedule was around 4.5 hours. This means that from the minute that you requested a new meeting, to the time invitations were sent it took around 4.5 hours.
Since we launched our Slack chat robot, this number has dropped to an amazing 53 seconds!
It used to take me days to arrange a meeting with 3 people, and arranging meetings with a large group was close to impossible. Now it takes 53 seconds, sometimes less. This might be the reason we see words like “love” and “magic” appear a lot in the feedback mails we get from our users.
Once your meeting is scheduled, make sure to prepare it and get everybody on the same page before it even begins with Solid.