Farewell Sunrise.
Let’s build what’s next, together?
We’re out of time! Our beloved Sunrise is saying goodbye. Twitter is ablaze with determined replacement seekers and tech celebrities who little choice but to accept this new reality.
As professionals, our calendar is an essential tab in our browsers. It’s with us as we run from meeting to meeting. Sunrise was the first app to delight all of us with a digital calendar experience. Leaving behind Sunrise’s beautiful interface, multi-device support, and ability to consolidate all of our calendars will be tough for all of us. By listening to us as they built Sunrise, they made all of us feel like we were a part of the team building something we’d all love, together.
Yes, Sunrise is really leaving us but I want to build what’s next with you. I guess I should introduce myself, I’m Ashutosh, one of the founders of Sunsama. At Sunsama we’re building a calendar for teams. Our goal is to help you breeze through your meetings and tasks each day. I want your voice to be a part of our team as we continue to build. Amazingly, in beta we focused on solving meetings and built the “calendar for teams” without a single calendar-like view. We’re growing up and with Sunrise on it’s way out I wanted to hear your voices about how it made your life better and more productive.
What do we use next?
How do we fill the void created by Sunrise in our lives? There is still Google calendar, Outlook, Apple’s Calendar or Fantastical. But we’ve been down those roads, we know where they go. It’s not where we want to be.
All of our critical workplace tools have already joined us in the future. Every single application that helps us get work done and collaborate with our teammates has been revolutionized in the past decade. Slack rescued us from e-mail and horrible enterprise chat. Google docs, Dropbox and Box made sharing our work seamless. These companies built experiences that gave us what we really wanted: a frictionless way to collaborate so we can focus on building something great together.
And yes, I am saying that our calendars are collaboration tools. Every tiny, colored blocks on them lets us make a promise. With each block we make a promise to someone that we’ll show up and work together, share our expertise, our thoughts and our precious time. At Sunsama, we aspire to build something more than a visual database of time slots. We want to build a calendaring tool that helps you get work done better, together.
Former Sunrise Lover, will you help us?
I need your help. Building a calendar is hard. There’s the obvious technical challenges: timezones, synchronization, responsiveness, multi-device support, and load times. Yet the loftiest challenge is creating a delightful experience given how uniquely each one of us organizes and moves through our days. The best way for us to build something amazing is by learning from you about your job, your meetings, and how you use your calendar. While in private beta we actually got away without having any traditional calendaring view. But now we’re growing up and we want your help building calendar views that look great and feel great.
Ready to help?
I’ve created a private slack community for anyone who wants to work together with us to build a calendar for work (don’t worry we’ll do the coding). Here’s what goes down in the community.
- Share your expertise. You are an expert at your job, you know what it takes to be timely, detailed, and productive. Talk to me and my team about what you love about your calendar, what you hate about, and where it could improve. The Sunsama team will be the little calendar elves that help build our dream calendar for work.
- Join our design process. Join us for product brainstorms on google hangouts, add to our asana backlog, view early mockups in sketch and InVision and share feedback.
- Get Beta Access. We are still in limited private beta but are excited to give out invites to teams and individuals that are a good fit. Come chat with us in the Slack channel and we’ll figure it out!
Disclaimer: If you are looking for a complete Sunrise clone, this isn’t the place for you. We’re building something totally new to help you move through your meetings and tasks effectively.
Ready? Unsure? Let’s start by talking.
We’ve created a Slack community where we can get the conversation going. Hop on in whether you are excited to help or just want to find out a bit more about what we’re doing. You can auto-invite yourself via this link:
