Is this thing on?

Basically, we are building a Project Management tool for Marketing Teams focusing on Content Managers/Creators: Writers, Journalists, Designers, Bloggers and Social Media Managers.

We believe marketing teams will profit from a streamlined, simple tool that will help them organize ideas and ease the approval process to get new content shipped out to the public.

How it all started

The idea started back in 2015 while I was working in Digital Marketing and suffering the long and tedious feedback loops in marketing teams, the lack of one single source of truth for all marketing collateral that was being created in a fast-paced environment.

I decided that there should be a better way than sharing emails back and forth, attaching the latest set of assets or word document every time so our stakeholders would provide feedback on the right content versions.

I created a simple landing page — the one you can still visit at calendar.ly and tried to explain — the best I could — what I wanted to create. I shared the landing page in several sites and launched a tiny Ad campaign to drive some qualified traffic. I started surveying the leads to understand better what their own challenges were and how should Calendar.ly deliver on those.

I saw quickly some engagement and leads coming through quickly, more than I expected. I new Calendarly was needed, I just needed some free time to focus on it.

Our Vision

Calendarly makes the content creation process easy, streamlined and enables businesses to react with speed as stakeholders always see the big picture and hence have control of their public communications.

Members

As you could read in the first section I said “We”.
We represent, so far, 3 members working on Calendarly.

• Aditya Dewz as Angular / Front-end Developer
• Ravi Prakash as Python / Backend Developer
• Abhiseka Angular / Front-end Developer
• Miguel Cabeza as Founder

Our Simple approach

I decided to avoid reinventing the wheel. I needed a project management solution tailored to Content Marketing activities. As you can imagine there are several Project Management Tools out there.

I also want to it to be simple. Really simple. Simplicity is one of our core values.
Executive management and business stakeholders, in general, don’t care how you create content, but how good the content is.

They are not tech savvy, will not remember their login credentials to your project management tool, and will not need to understand how to provide feedback to your latest iteration on a piece of creativity.

Taking this into consideration we decided to become an open source project. We are building on top of Taiga.io — a great open-sourced-Scrum-oriented Project Management Tool — and give it a twist to make sure we tailor it to content creators and their stakeholders.

Transparency

Being open source means also, being open, transparent, sharing and giving back while letting others be part of the project.

We will be sharing our open road map with new features in the pipeline and letting anyone join the project by submitting bugs, code fixes and suggestions.

You are able to check our backend releases here: https://github.com/calendarlyapp/taiga-back

We plan to give back to Taiga by extending their platform and sharing our work with them.

Originally published at blog.calendar.ly on January 24, 2018.