There are plenty of calendar and scheduling apps that take care of your professional life and help you slot in meetings with your teammates and work collaborators. Howbout is all about finding time with your friends to catch up.
The company is banking on the fact that some Gen Z users are very happy to share their entire calendar with their friends. Howbout, which has a majority of the users aged 25 or below, said that more than 75% of its users share their full calendar with at least one friend.
The startup was founded in August 2020 by university best friends Neil Tanna, Jake Jenner, and Duncan Cowan. After university, Tanna became a corporate lawyer, Jenner was an investment banker and Cowan was a software engineer. They realized that it became difficult to catch up with each other. Tanna always wanted to build something of his own, and convinced the other two co-founders to build Howbaout with him.
The company is announcing today that it has raised $8 million in Series A funding led by Goodwater Capital, with participation from FJ Labs, Sequel and football player Harry Maguire. Existing investors, including Boost Capital and Angel Invest also put in money in the round. The company has raised over $13 million in funding until now.
“In my work life, time was a multiplayer experience where I could see other colleagues’ schedules and meet them accordingly. But in my personal lifetime, it was a single-player entity,” Tanna told TechCrunch over a call.
“There were a lot of apps to manage personal productivity. But I didn’t have a social graph on top of my social schedule. We wanted to make time a social entity.”
With the app, you can see your own schedule and the schedule of friends who have shared their calendars with you. You can also share your availability to a wider set of people without sharing your full calendar. Users can also make different groups with users if they hang out with that set of people often.
Howbout lets you schedule events and invite people through a link. People who are not on the app can see the invite. However, if they want to respond, they have to download the app. Tanna said that the company has also experimented with letting users respond on the web and can switch to that option in the future if they see merit in it.
The company also has tools like voting on a time for availability or a meet up — just like Doodle or Clockwise offers in a professional setting.
Users can add future events like gigs or adventures to their bucket lists and past events that they enjoyed to memories for recall value. Each event with friends has its own group chat for planning, so you don’t have to use temporary groups on other apps like WhatsApp.
Building a social product centered around time
The company, which has 13 employees, has over 4 million monthly active users with more than 50 million events created on the app. It has its largest audience base in the U.S., followed by the UK, Germany, Australia, and Canada. With the latest fundraise, it wants to expand further in the U.S. market.
Howbout thinks that its network effects will be triggered by chief friend officers — people who take initiative in a group to plan meet-ups and events. Tanna said that most people who visit the app stay active and add more friends.
The company has tried different strategies like branded event activations and subscriptions. But currently it is focusing on growth.
Chi-Hua Chien, co-founder and managing partner at Goodwater Capital, told TechCrunch that Howbout has an opportunity to build a successful social network over time. “Successful social platforms had a core content type like Facebook had updates from friends and Musically had looping videos with music. For Howbout, that is time,” he said.
He noted that Gen Z is a great target audience for the app because they are not hesitant in sharing their calendars and they realize that the alternative to that is not meeting or catching up with friends. While this might be true for some, it’s hard to know whether it’s the beginning of a new social trend or not. So let’s see whether shared personal calendars become a thing.
