Why we're building Aircal
And why we're building it in public
We've built a lot of products at Airdev over the years. Like, a lot.
We've built products for over 1,000 clients - everything from early-stage startup MVPs to enterprise-scale applications. We've also built products that keep our own business running. Our client portal handles everything from project scoping to billing. Canvas, our design framework, is the foundation for nearly every application we create. And then there are the products we built just just for the fun of it - like NotRealTwitter (in 2015), OnlyBots (in 2024), and lots of others.
Here's the thing though: while we've gotten really good at building high-quality products and thinking through complex product mechanics, we've never actually had to sell and scale our own software. We've watched our clients do it. Our internal tools get used because our team needs them. Our fun projects don't need to be sold because that's not the point.
But we've never needed to convince strangers outside of the Bubble ecosystem to pay for something we built. We've never had to figure out pricing, or marketing, or customer acquisition for SaaS. That's what we want to try with our next project, Aircal.
Aircal is an AI-powered scheduling tool and Calendly competitor, and here's why we're excited about the idea:
There's huge demand: Scheduling is something almost everyone needs to do. Calendly has millions of users, which proves there's clear market demand.
AI can actually help: We identified two specific issues that AI could help with. First, creating new booking links takes way too long - you have to configure duration, buffers, questions, availability windows, etc., which makes creating quick one-off links a pain. Second, most scheduling tools dump all your available slots on someone at once without considering that some of those slots might be more convenient for you than others.
Scheduling links aren't going anywhere: Everyone talks about how AI agents will handle scheduling in the future - you'll just copy your assistant on an email and let them figure it out. But to us that seems pretty awkward. Telling someone "hey, go chat with my AI robot to schedule our meeting" feels weird and impersonal. We think scheduling links are here to stay, at least for a while.
It seems simple: Looking at scheduling from the outside, it feels straightforward. You have a calendar, you have open slots, people pick one. How complex could it be? Spoiler: way harder than expected, but more on that soon.
Built-in virality: Every time you send someone a booking link, you're essentially giving them a product demo. If they like the experience, they might start using the tool themselves. That's powerful growth potential that most software doesn't have.
One more thing we're doing differently this time - we're building completely in public.
Over the next few weeks, you'll see our technical decisions, design challenges, business strategy, and marketing experiments. Why share all this? Because building in public lets us get quick feedback from real people as we go. And because, if we're asking people to trust Airdev with their product needs, they should probably know how we think about building software.
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