Hey Product Hunters! 👋
Excited to 🚀Woven Calendar today and share what we’ve made. We started Woven with the goal of helping everyone make the most of their time, whether at work, home, or play.
The v1 we’re launching today is designed especially for independent professionals and small businesses—people who do a lot of scheduling or traveling for their events. Our desktop and iOS apps sync with your existing Google calendar and provide a couple of unique new features to start: 1) we show your events on a map with automatic 🚘time calculations; and 2) you can collaborate with guests to find the best time and place to meet.
But we’ve also built a new backend for the calendar that will let us do lots of other interesting things. A few ideas we’ve talked about:
- Analytics for your time 📊
- Rich attachments (docs, videos, agendas) 📂 🎬
- Automated task/work time scheduling ☑️
So…what would you like your calendar to do for you? Looking forward to your ideas and feedback!
@bob_ryskamp Love the app so far.
Big feature ask: Integration to notetaking so the event becomes auto-linked to the note and you can go back and find it. Ideally that would be a push to Apple Notes, Evernote, or others. Also acceptable, but less ideal would be its own stripped-down note taker. Regardless, would love to see an icon on a meeting with notes so you know it has them (or doesn't.)
@mikeorren Thanks! What's your favorite note-taking app for meetings? We'll look into ways we could integrate there.
Also, any particular structure or features you use when taking notes? e.g. checklists, agendas, action items, etc?
@bob_ryskamp Congratulations on the launch. I'm excited to see the calendar continue to receive attention from makers. How sophisticated do you plan on going with suggested places? Personally that would be a big one for me. Finding places is more difficult for me than finding times. Even in NYC, that I know very well, it would be great if I could choose from 3-5 suggested meeting places based on my history. For example, if the calendar knew I went to LPQ for meetings often, it could suggest one close to the meeting for a meeting spot.
@bob_ryskamp congrats on the launch! I've been looking for a great calendar app since Sunrise shut down a while ago, and Woven looks very promising :)
Quick question: do you have a native desktop app for Mac? or by Desktop app you mean the browser app? thanks!
@bashkoff Great idea! Suggested places is still mostly just "recent" places, but with the calendar graph we're building we'll soon be able to be smarter about this. By looking at who you're meeting, where you're coming from, and what the event title is, we could suggest an LPQ for "Coffee with Jane", or perhaps a coworking spot for "Phone interview". Stay tuned!
Thanks @rrhoover ! One of our design goals is to give people more scheduling powers so that they *can* actually understand their time usage and manage their own schedules. Lots of opportunities to accelerate and streamline time management. Let us know how it goes!
@bob_ryskamp I just went to register but the app requires access to view my email. I'm too paranoid to give any apps access to that. Is there any workaround?
@rrhoover The current functionality combines email and calendar features, so unfortunately it's not possible right now to separate the permissions. One of the insights we've had working with beta customers is that, since so many scheduling requests start with email, it's hard to provide a complete experience without it.
If we had a version with reduced email integration (e.g. no email Assistant, no ability to view emails connected to an event) would that still be appealing to you?
I signed up, but stopped at the Google permissions (See and download your contacts; See, edit, share, and permanently delete all the calendars you can access using Google Calendar; Send email on your behalf; View and modify but not delete your email).
I've never actually dinged an app at this stage, but this does seem excessive. E.g. "permanently delete all the calendars you can access using Google Calendar", modify email? Hope this can get pared back a bit, or explained better.
@ryanstenson Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. One of the most helpful features for our test users was connecting their email and calendar workflows; of course that requires access to both products. And we plan to implement addition and sharing of calendars, though currently have no plans to delete Google calendars (and we'd never do that without you requesting it). To Google's credit, they're very careful and explain the most extreme possibilities that connecting apps could do.
We're also very careful with your data (here's our privacy policy: https://woven.com/privacy) and you can remove our access to your account at any time from your Google account settings if it's a concern.
Hope that helps and thanks for the comment!
@ryanstenson Thanks for the feedback. You are right we should have done a better job explaining how these permissions are used. Here is our current attempt, let me know if this helps explain things a bit better: https://support.woven.com/faq/ho...
@ryanstenson Yeah that stopped me too, well that and permission to read all emails has become a non-starter for me. No matter how much convenience the app might add to my life. I feel like the amount of apps asking for sensitive email information is becoming a ticking time bomb from a security standpoint.
I don't know exactly where the privacy balance is, but this app looks pretty awesome so great work guys.
@villeodell Appreciate the detailed feedback, we'll look into each of those suggestions. Definitely understand that many people have corporate policies that they need to follow; we want to support them too!
Woven is the only way I access my calendar now. I feel that Woven for iOS has almost made desktop calendaring obsolete - I can now do everything on my phone, no computer required
Pros:
It has significantly decreased the amount of back and forth with scheduling
It's the best calendar app since Sunrise! I know big call but i'm beyond impressed with the tool and the team behind it.
Their roadmap is impressive and they release new updates frequently.
Highly recommend.
Pros:
Templates, Keyboard shortcuts, Integration with Uber, Auto Timezone Support. The list goes on and on.
Really cool app. Slick.
But no Android!!???
Seems you are only catering for the vast minority ;-)
https://www.idc.com/promo/smartp...
Hope this feedback helps.
Cheers,
Herby
@herbyolschewski
It's always frustrating when initial launches overlook Android. It makes no sense to me given the market share of smartphone OS. That graph though. Why start the Y-axis at 75% ?
Sorry to hear that Juston. Two main features we currently offer on top of Google Calendar are 1) a map view with travel planning for days when you're on the road, and 2) shared scheduling, which lets you coordinate times and places to meet more efficiently. Give those a shot and let us know what you think!
Woven looks like a great time saver, good job guys! I like your idea and would like to offer you to publish an interview about Woven at https://startupradius.com/ please PM me at paul@startupradius.com for more details
Sorry @jose_ak , we're still too small to provide great support to customers outside of the U.S. But Mexico would be a great next step...I spent some time with startups in D.F. last year and it was a great scene.
Would love if there was natural-language based event creation, which is one of the primary reasons I use Fantastical. "Lunch /w Ben" should auto-populate an event for the most plausible time with the most plausible person.
@dilan Great idea. Right now the Woven Assistant will respond to natural language requests in emails (https://woven.com/assistant/) but it would be great to have that in the app UI as well. We could even give you a few options and let you choose which one fits best. Will look into it!
Interesting project. I do find it sad that no one has been able to come in and replace Sunrise. Many attempts, all falling short. Woven looks like a good start but not for me, at least not at this point. Lack of O365 support (on the roadmap it seems), lack of support for multiple accounts (can that be right?), and "iOS only" (saddened as an owner of several of the 2.3 Billion active Android devices on Earth.) For these reasons, Woven is out for me.
@just_s Our goal is to support each one of those use cases, so please check back in a few months. And all of them will have the same key features, since our apps use a shared and unique backend. Stay tuned!
@johngil Sounds good. Woven.com/app should work well in Safari, definitely let us know at support@woven.com if it doesn't! Hoping to create a more native desktop app for Mac soon.
Bob, guys, looks ok, but tried to sign up and unfortunately
"Google account 'nelson wells @ teamclermont.com' appears to be incompatible with Woven and cannot be used to sign up or sign in." I've had this google account for 10+ years. What do you suggest? i have a gmail account that I got before gmail launched, but have never used it.
Hi @nelson_wells , unfortunately Woven will only sync with accounts that use either a Gmail or G Suite email address. Google will let you convert any address to a Gmail one, but that would likely break your setup.
You could probably share your main calendar with the other Gmail account (using Google Calendar sharing) and use Woven that way if you'd like to try. Let us know if that works!
I can, (while I don't agree), see why you would go with Google Calendar as a platform - but it's a non starter for me - never liked Google Calendar much and their lack of updates over the years hasn't helped my thinking [and the interface/how it integrates can be a nightmare in some configurations]... (and I can't say that there handling of our privacy has helped change my mind much).
Will be interesting to see how this product grows though - who knows maybe with some traction you will evolved beyond Google/Microsoft's platforms - here's to hoping anyways... as I do like the layer of features/convenience that you are trying to offer -- as of right now just seems like it's something that Google/Microsoft would do for themselves or simply buy your out [then again that might be your plan :)]...
@exlemor I think the idea is that they are trying to improve on top of the Google/Outlook calendar systems. Like it or not (i agree that Google cal sucks) these are the platforms that companies have "locked" us into. Most companies today either use Microsoft Exchange/Outlook or G-suite/Google as a platform for mail and calendars.
I have no involvement with this company, but I think the whole idea is to add features on top of these platforms that are missing. So they are trying to improve the very broken calendar space by building tools on top of already universally adopted platforms.
@_jacurtis I get that - but seeing as the underlying platform is getting outdated nor isn't getting much love from Google - I would have thought building a better platform [with these great enhancements] would have been a better option - unless like I mentioned they are trying to get bought out by one of the platform they are enhancing of course. :)
@_jacurtis@exlemor Pretty much all of our current customers already have a Google or Outlook calendar they need to use for work, so syncing is an important capability for us. If your events aren't there, it's hard to be a good calendar!
That said, the most interesting opportunities do lie in extending beyond what those systems can do. The iCalendar standard they're based on just turned 20 years old, and our goal is to build new capabilities for the modern workplace. Stay tuned for more things like that.
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