Magical Announcement
Introducing a collaborative calendar software for highly-effective teams magicalhq.com
At Magical, we’re dealing with the world’s most scarce resource, and it’s not gold or uranium — It’s time.
We’re building a new kind of calendar for highly-effective teams. We want our users to get focused easily, reduce the meeting chaos, and regain their sanity in the process. In other words, we’re building a time-making machine.
We’re doing it because the modern workforce is facing huge challenges, socially, structurally, and professionally, and we believe Magical has an important part to play in addressing them. This is why we’re so excited to announce that we raised a $3.3M Seed round, led by Resolute Ventures.
It’s a huge milestone for us, and its meaning goes beyond Magical. I’d love to take a moment to share with you what got us here, and where we’re heading next.
What got us here
This journey started in 2018 when, scratching my own itch, I founded the Supertools community. Over the course of 3 years, we grew from a single productivity enthusiast to a highly-engaged community of more than 30,000 time-hackers.
My personal passion uncovered a world of pain and possibilities — the passion and traction in the community signaled that something deeper was going on: there was something fundamentally flawed with how time is being managed and how work is being done.
These software gaps created productivity silos and gave birth to the prosumers: advanced, high-expectation users that demand specialized solutions to get work done effectively.
Armed with these insights and backwind from the community, I flew to LA, to attend Fusion LA’s accelerator program (Guy Katsovich, Yair Vardi) while being backed by Homeward Ventures (Omri Krigel). While there, I quickly gravitated towards one of the mentors — he was often the smartest guy in the room, but also the most fun to be around. One thing led to another, and I’m lucky to now call Tal Peretz a friend, a partner, and Magical’s CTO.
We initiated a deep analysis of the community’s needs, aggregating tens of thousands of posts and engagements. We then crossed it with the qualitative research we ran, participated by team leaders from fast-growing multinational companies including Notion, Facebook, Dropbox, and Wix.
The results?
A long, elaborate Manifesto containing tens of calendar pet-peeves and one clear insight: the calendar screams for an overhaul. As our research went deeper our initial insight was validated: even the most commonly used calendars — Outlook and Gcal — didn’t go through a significant overhaul and remained ill-adapted to how time is being managed in the 21st century.
We realized that the issue is not about being a better bookkeeper of your time, it is about being a better gatekeeper of your time. It is about redefining what the calendar is in the first place.
How are we going to do it?
We set out to build the most holistic calendar experience, designed to help teams plan ahead, coordinate frictionlessly, and reduce the meeting chaos.
- Consolidating time-management. Turning the calendar from a block of hours into the center of our workflow. Magical offers a holistic approach to time management, collaboration and scheduling, and provides automation tools to plan and run better meetings and work sessions. In a way, we are doing for the calendar what Notion and Airtable did for docs and spreadsheets.
- What you need, when you need it. Every calendar event in Magical is a sharable workspace, where you can store notes, tasks, videos, or pull time-based data blocks from your favorite tools (we just call it “Timeblocks”). We are not only modernizing the calendar, we are building an entire ecosystem for time-based applications.
- Built for focus and frictionless workflows. In a world obsessed with distractions, Focus is our superpower — it keeps us zoomed-in on what really matters and helps us avoid side quests and it’s this mental mode that we’re instilling in the product. Everything about Magical, from the UX to the minimalist interface, is built to help users turn intentions into actions.
Our investors.
We were blessed to partner with visionary investors to help us bring Magical to highly-effective teams. We are excited to partner with Resolute Ventures (Mike Hirshland) as our lead investors of the seed round. Resolute was an early investor of the beloved calendar app Sunrise and we are lucky they identified us as the next-generation calendar.
We are also excited to work with Ibex Investors (Nicole Priel), Aviv Growth Partners (Israel Ganot), ORR Partners (Dr. Zvi Guterman), and Zell Fund (Liat Aaronson).
While the funds’ involvement is critical, we knew that we’ll need some additional firepower if Magical is to fully realize its vision, and we’re proud to be backed by some of the world’s most prominent angel investors in the productivity space such as Prof. Yossi Matias, James Kong, Jonathan Machado, and Ben Lang.
Where we’re heading.
We are powered by our community values, and in our pursuit for a better, more productive, and more balanced work environment, we’ll be looking at them for inspiration.
We all have the same 24-hour days. It’s what we do with this time that makes or breaks us: we use our creative hours to build, test, and actively seek feedback that can make us better. Our short-term goal is to bring a ridiculously good calendar experience to power users, as part of our beta program, and then to redefine our relationship with the calendar. We will use the learnings from that launch to test hypotheses and start onboarding teams.
While doing so, we will supercharge our software with the most advanced and science-backed productivity methodologies and, in time, become not only your operating system of choice but for your team as well.
With that in mind, we’ll be growing our team, and currently hiring for several open positions, to join our ambitious, semi-distributed crew. If you consider professionalism & creative freedom core pillars of your professional identity, and if you’re ready to do the best work of your life, your place might be with us.
We owe everything we achieved to our community, partners, and team — if it wasn’t for them we’d be nothing more than a Slack channel.
Thank you for your support, involvement, and trust.
Even with $3.3M in the bank, your trust remains our most valuable asset. We’ll do everything that’s in our power to earn it, hour after hour.
And, lastly, if you and your team can benefit from a few extra hours each week to do meaningful work, join Magical’s waitlist and be amongst the first ones to enjoy it.
