Kayak co-founder takes on Calendly with new Supercal scheduling platform

Kayak co-founder Paul English is back with a new venture—this time, he’s taking on Calendly. The entrepreneur has launched Supercal, a free scheduling platform that’s designed to make booking meetings more efficient and simple.

Supercal was born out of English’s personal experience with the challenges of booking meetings. As a member of eight boards of directors, English says he and others often struggled to coordinate schedules. He then set out to create an email system for booking group meetings and to challenge Calendly by building a similar tool that offered similar functionality, but for free.

“Instead of having the limited version of Calendly or the paid version, which is $12 a month, people can get all those features and more for free at Supercal,” English told TechCrunch in an interview. 

With Supercal’s group scheduling feature, you can email a group of people and CC the service’s AI, which reads everyone’s calendars, finds a time that works for all, books the meeting, and replies to the email thread with the details.

Supercal lets you sync up to six calendars, so you can keep work, personal, and other schedules in one place. It offers eight different meeting types, including 15-minute, 30-minute, and 60-minute slots, as well as a VIP meeting type that provides full access to your calendar for important situations.

There are also breakfast, lunch, coffee, and dinner meeting types. In the future, these meeting types will feature an Open Table integration that will allow you to book a meeting at a restaurant or coffee shop, English says. 

Supercal includes additional features like pre-meeting context forms, automatic guest time zone detection, reminders, and prebuilt templates to help you stay organized.

While SuperCal is free to use, English and the team plan to expand the service with premium features that users can unlock through a subscription, all while keeping the current features free.

“One of the things we’re really interested in long term is not just setting up the meeting, but also helping you make sure your meetings are really impactful,” English said. 

For example, if you’ve set up a transcription service for your meetings, SuperCal could provide feedback on how the meeting went. This could include insights like you spoke too fast at 150 words per minute, your volume was too low, or you used too many filler words. The goal behind this would be to help coach users to become more effective speakers in meetings. 

Additionally, English sees SuperCal as eventually being able to help users cut down on meetings and make them more impactful. 

He says that in the future, Supercal will be able to help make meetings more efficient by doing things like providing feedback on whether any action items or decisions were made. Plus, it will be able to identify meetings that have low participation and little progress, and suggest that they may no longer be necessary.

Supercal is available on the web. The company says it plans to explore browser and email plugins, as well as iOS and Android apps, in the future.