We are closing Sama and open sourcing the project
We started Sama around April last year with a big vision — help people find time. Today we are closing down the project. We have learned that people are either fine with scheduling meetings using existing products, or prefer to spend some time on personal message exchange. Although our users loved the feel of Sama and found it useful in certain cases, availability is so nuanced that it’s also ok to leave it to human communication.
Thank you everyone who tried out Sama, gave us feedback, shared openly about their time management habits, hacks and routines and supported us throughout the journey.
As a final step in Sama journey we are sharing couple notes on what we have enjoyed and learned along the way. We hope the community finds them useful too.
The bright side, what we loved.
Team. We have all worked together before for quite a few years and this was a great opportunity to get back together and build a great product. Team’s love for craft, shared values and each other’s support throughout the journey was the time well spent to say the least.
Zero to One. We have built a high quality tech and beautiful design in just a couple of months. Going from an idea to a real product that anyone out in the world can touch is an amazing feeling. We all love the craft. The building process was a joy for everyone in the team.
Fully remote. We were six people on the team from two nationalities distributed across four locations and time zones — Tokyo, Vilnius, Bolzano and London. Remote work is nothing new in the tech world, especially after 2020. There have been a couple moments where being physically together might have made things easier, however, Sama project was a great proof that fully remote teams can function effectively.
Experience. Although each of us have spent 10+ years in the startup ecosystem, this project still brought us some new insights. We have enjoyed the ride and now we are happy to share some notes we made for ourselves to be aware of when building the next product.
Notes for future, what we learned.
Truly validate the problem. Agreeing on a time to meet always felt a tedious unnecessary task, while receiving a link to book a slot in someone’s calendar felt impersonal and at times even disrespectful. We wanted to change that. While pitching our idea to friends and potential users, we saw a tone of nodding heads, eventually Sama got little traction for it’s MVP. We have only then done proper user research and realised that for people who do not want to open their calendars personal message exchange is not such a big of a pain after all. As immature as it might sound — reading the “Mom’s Test” book (which you can read in a day) helped us to understand the context of our users better and realise the initial problem didn’t have the potential we envisioned.
Align expectations and commitment early on. As we knew each other well, we jumped on the project together without big hesitations. However, we all had slightly different reasons and expectations — for some of us the project was supposed to turn into a full-time startup, while for others it was fun to work together and it was simply one of a couple side projects. We later learned this played a quite substantial role in our decision to close down the project.
Don’t expect magic after launch. We launched on Product Hunt expecting to instantly become the product of the day or at least be among the top three. We ended up receiving only 100+ upvotes and hanging in the Top 10. We later learned Product Hunt is the most beneficial for products that already have early traction and utilise the power of their existing user base to generate more buzz and virality. Overall, there is no such thing as a single marketing campaign that magically solves everything. You just have to continue building and exploring.
Nurture your new users. While we attracted close to 1000 users following weeks after launch, we did little to onboard them properly. We should have implemented basic things such as a welcome email, how-tos, weekly newsletters and tips early on. While this is obvious, it’s still worth remembering that user onboarding is simply part of your product.
Follow through your vision. We envisioned solving the scheduling problem through bringing everyone on the same network, where people could find mutually available times without the need to reveal their full calendar availability. We called this the Sama-Sama flow and it was supposed to be our MVP. Eventually, after a couple early discussions with potential users and VCs, we have decided to start with a product, which could be used even if there is only one user on Sama. While this might still have been the right choice, we feel we haven’t followed through our initial vision. Today we don’t foresee enough potential of the project to continue, we still note to ourselves next time to follow through the initial vision until it’s a success or invalidated.
We are open sourcing Sama
While we are not continuing with Sama ourselves, we are sure there is still plenty of space for innovation in the scheduling area. We also think it’s simply a good practice to keep things transparent. Thus, besides sharing our learnings we are also open sourcing Sama. Anyone is able to review and reuse. You can find it here (we will publish after the service is turned off on the 1st March, 2022).
Scheduling in 2032.
When discussing the lessons among the team, we gave ourselves a shot to predict how this whole area might look 10 years from now. Between us, the most common guess is that scheduling likely will be solved by an AI assistant communicating with users through text or voice. Example: the only thing I would need to do is to say — “I want to meet Kei next week”, the next thing I know is the meeting in my calendar at the time which works for both of us. OK, this might take slightly longer — until 2042. We permit ourselves to guess that it’s more likely this will come from platform owners (Google, Microsoft, maybe even Slack) rather than today’s scheduling tool makers. Meanwhile there might be the next level of innovation achieved by creating a new open standard protocol for sharing availability.
The end.
This is the end of the Sama project. We will be pulling the plug on 1st Mar, 2022. If you are looking for a scheduling tool, our team’s nominee is Savvycal. Thank you for trying out Sama and supporting us through this journey.
All the best,
Sama team — Tomas, Kei, Balys, Jonas and Viktoras
