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Launch HN: Superpowered (YC W21) – Calendar in your menu bar
85 points by jordandearsley on March 11, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 200 comments
Hey HN,

I’m Jordan from Superpowered (http://superpowered.me/), here with my co-founders Nikhil, Nick, and Ibrahim. We’re building a calendar app for the Mac menu bar.

A few months ago, we were students from the University of Waterloo. We started YC as a video lecture platform for professors but realized it was a horrible idea. We needed a new problem.

We settled on one we all faced during our remote internships. Our calendars became more important, yet meetings took ten clicks to join and were easy to miss.

So, we built a Mac app to bring the platform we check the most, Google Calendar, into the menu bar. We’ve made common actions, like joining Zoom meetings and checking what’s coming up, a click away.

We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything.

We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar. We want to better organize everything you use as we’ve done with Google Calendar.

For those who are curious, it’s built using React + Electron and designed to look as native as possible in the menu bar. Sensitive user data like calendar events don’t pass through our servers.

We’re new to the productivity space and still have a lot to learn, so we’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts.

Thanks in advance! Jordan

Note: We're still early on and are trying to figure out our pricing. We priced it towards the higher end to see if we're delivering enough value to our users.

PS - Yes, we have keyboard shortcuts.



Let me get this straight. $10 a month of a calendar widget that's only available for a single platform? Plus, these quotes don't really help.

> “No more looking for the Google calendar tab in Chrome.”

Maybe use the native calendar app then? Or make an app shortcut for Google Calendar in Chrome?

> “I just joined a meeting 3 minutes late instead of 5 because of Superpowered, which is a resounding success in my book.”

Ummm. Probably not a good one to include.

I just don't get the $120/yr value in this. On Windows, I have all my calendars synced with the stock calendar app, links to the meetings are automatically pulled into the notes section, and reminders are automatically set for 15 minutes. Whenever I get a notification for my next meeting, I click it, then click the link and I'm in my meeting. For macOS, same thing.


> Maybe use the native calendar app then? Or make an app shortcut for Google Calendar in Chrome?

Exactly. The built-in Calendar app is adequate for most tasks (definitely adequate for just delivering notifications).

Besides, there are quite a few decent free calendar widgets out there already.

> “I just joined a meeting 3 minutes late instead of 5 because of Superpowered, which is a resounding success in my book.”

Set your calendar to notify you 15 min before the meeting starts. It's a trivial problem to solve without paying $120/yr.

> We priced it towards the higher end to see if we're delivering enough value to our users

Sorry, but you're marketing your app as "luxury" without delivering any luxury.


Thanks for the feedback on those quotes! We'll look into changing them.

> Maybe use the native calendar app then? Or make an app shortcut for Google Calendar in Chrome?

I myself used to be an Apple Calendar user. Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our users are in the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't support native functionality.

You definitely could make a shortcut or find another workaround to replace one of our features, but given how many feature requests we get from users, that wouldn't be enough for a lot of people. We have customers who agree it's worth it for them.

> $10 a month of a calendar widget that's only available for a single platform?

We currently are a calendar widget, but we're now branching out of the calendar space to become a unified notification inbox.

I understand for pricing purposes we're on the higher end, as mentioned in the note, this is intentional to validate we provide enough value.


> I myself used to be an Apple Calendar user. Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our users are in the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't support native functionality.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm using multiple Google Calendar accounts just fine with the built-in Calendar app.

> We currently are a calendar widget, but we're now branching out of the calendar space to become a unified notification inbox.

So basically, a calendar widget and a notification center (which is already a part of the OS)?


> Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our users are in the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't support native functionality.

Dog you can sync Google calendar with your built in calendar then run Next Meeting[0] in your menu bar. You can even have a global shortcut to open the meeting link. All my work meetings are in scheduled through Google Calendar and take place in zoom, and all I do is hit Hyper-Z[1] to open the correct meeting link.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/next-meeting/id1017470484?mt=1... [1] Hyper being Cmd-Opt-Shift-Ctrl which is remapped to one key on my keyboard. You can make it anything you want, obviously. My point is I don't even have to touch my mouse to get into the meeting.


Can you elaborate on mapping a keystroke to opening a meeting link? Outside of google cal + google meet calendar apps don’t typically recognize meeting links as something to promote.


Sure. When we create meetings in Google Calendar (in the desktop browser; never tried anywhere else) we can add a video conferencing link to the invitation. These can either be a Google Meet link, or a Zoom meeting link (through our Zoom integration with Google Calendar). I have linked macOS's Calendar.app with Google Calendar. In Calendar.app this link is still present inside of the calendar event in the LOCATION field[0] although you can't actually see or edit it in there, odd. Then Next Meeting makes a drop down menu in my menubar where the title is the name of my next meeting. Clicking any of the items in the menu opens Calendar where I need to click the Zoom link in the text of the description of the meeting. However if I hit my shortcut key (with or without Next Meeting's menu open) it opens up the meeting link in the browser which then, in JS, does something like

    window.location = `zoommtg://us02web.zoom.us/join?action=join&confno=${meetingIdFromUrl}`
thusly opening my meeting in zoom. I'm guessing that all Next Meeting does is run the command line utility `open` with the contents of the LOCATION field from the ICS file corresponding to the entry. Actually I looked at the version history and since it used to always open them in Chrome that's probably not the case. Also I tried to write an app that would call command line utilities and it was a bear to get the permissions. Possibly impossible.

The only public code[1] I could find for this project by this author is 13 years old and lacks any code to open the meeting links or handle hotkeys of any kind. The github user has a different name than the project author (who has his own empty github profile elsewhere) so

[0] In fact we can see this by using a recursive grep in ~/Library for the name of one of my meetings. This turned up ~/Library/Calendars/<some UUID>.caldav/<some other UUID>.calendar/Events/<Unique identifier in a format I don't recognize><ISO 8601 timestamp>@googlecom-<different ISO 8601 timestamp>.ics

[1] https://github.com/imagine/nextmeeting


For just the tiniest part of a second I held hope that you were Sequoia Capital and you were very cross that this project existed. I see now that you are not. This whole thing is still hilarious.


> I myself used to be an Apple Calendar user. Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our users are in the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't support native functionality.

Calendar.app works fine with GCal though (notifications, accepting/cancelling invites, etc.). I still go through the Web UI to create invites and what not (because I want my automatic zoom meeting and decent scheduling tools), but that happens seldomly.


As a reference: Creative Cloud Photography Plan Includes Lightroom with 20GB (or more) of cloud storage, Lightroom Classic, and Photoshop. US$ 9.99/mo

Do you think you provide value in the range of Photoshop, Lightroom and 20GB online storage?

If not, please revise your pricing. I would gladly pay $10 for your app once (!). But surely not monthly.


> I understand for pricing purposes we're on the higher end, as mentioned in the note, this is intentional to validate we provide enough value

What exactly do you mean by "validate we provide enough value"?


> I myself used to be an Apple Calendar user. Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our users are in the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't support native functionality.

Huh? I’m using the native calendar app all the time since I got my first macbook 7 years ago. I was using google calendar before and it was seamlessly migrated. I am using multiple google accounts and also the icloud account for calendars, never had a problem. It syncs back to google and between different devices, it works with inviting other people and so on.

The only feature that google calendar UI does better is help to find a scheduled time. But I always agree for a time before creating a calendar event, so that’s not something I’d miss. Also, it generates the google meet link, which is again useless since I use zoom or whereby. But even if I wanted that, I’d either have to use the google calendar UI or an app that replicates this feature.

What I nice about the native macos calendar app is that it does natural language parsing, for example, “Meet with X on Monday at 12” will create “Meet with X” event and set the date to the closest Monday, the time to 12:00 and duration to a default 1h. It’s basically like you’re making a note, but it becomes a calendar event.


> I myself used to be an Apple Calendar user. Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work.

Why didn’t you just connect your Google calendar to Apple Calendar and keep using Apple Calendar?


> Eventually I had to switch to Google Calendar for work. Plenty of our users are in the same boat and Google Calendar doesn't support native functionality.

My company uses Google for calendar but I still use the native Apple Calendar app on both macOS and iOS. Am I missing something groundbreaking that requires using GCal natively?


Being mac-only does not really affect the pricing. Most mac users only use mac, and so for them it wouldn't be worth more if it was also available for PC. HAving said that, the price is ridiculous.


They probably have phones, though. Or tablets. Or smart watches. Or home assistants.

Mac and PC haven’t been the only two platforms in a long time.


Only desktop OS:es have menu bars though.


Trying to be constructive, but why would it even be a subscription model? Although it looks nice, I would think twice even spending 10$ once for it (mostly due to our currency's value). Also, since it's an Electron based widget, is the memory overhead considerable for just a calendar widget?

Also, how does this YC Launch work? Does not seem related at all with your original idea (not sure if it's a deal-breaker though?)


Thanks for the feedback. We'd like to fall into the category of other consumer SaaS products like Superhuman and Vimcal.

> since it's an Electron based widget, is the memory overhead considerable for just a calendar widget?

Great question. In my menu bar right now, the app's using ~150MB.

> Also, how does this YC Launch work?

Every startup in YC gets one YC Launch where they're featured on the front page for the day. Doesn't matter what idea was applied to YC with, just what the startup's currently working on.


150MB might not seem like much, but it really is a lot.

iStat Menus, which is tracking a lot more data across my system to render its multiple graphs is using ~85MB total.

Bearing in mind that many users are going to have 5 things like this in their menubar, they can't all use this amount.


That's a good point. There's definitely ways to optimize for less memory usage. We've been prioritizing feature development, but plan to focus on this before we start scaling.


This should be a very high priority issue. The more features you'll add, the harder it'll be to perform any heavy optimizations without rewriting major parts.

~150MB is a huge memory footprint for something that just sits in my menubar idle. Not all Macs have >16GBs of RAM (and even if they did, this is pretty wasteful). I'm also concerned about the battery life.

I'm pretty sure you'll eventually reach a point where it's no longer possible to optimize it any more (nonetheless Electron is just a Chrome instance). If you suddenly realize the whole thing would be twice as good if you'd just make a native app instead, it's better to have no features than have to rewrite all of them.

I know this doesn't sound constructive, but why go with Electron in first place? It's a menubar widget which the users are expected to be running all the time. There's a difference between running a simple applet and a whole browser instance.


I don’t think it should be very high priority for them.

They’re a startup, they need to focus on the fastest and most effective way to create value for their users, today. No point optimising the product if the company dies before it starts slowing down.


If they aren't a "good platform citizen" at the beginning, it's unlikely they will be later on. This might be something they're willing to accept as it's unlikely to affect them directly, but in aggregate, every growth-focused startup building is JS today because it's quick, will result in high powered machines being saturated with slow software.

I suspect the effect will be that Apple gets hate for not making fast enough computers with enough battery life, and people reluctantly spend another $1500 on a laptop after 2 years because it's too slow.

My advice to the company would be that their target device is almost certainly the base model MacBook Air with 8GB RAM running Slack, a large Excel spreadsheet, and Chrome with 100 tabs of Gmail and documents, and that if they aren't _lightning_ fast on that now they need to optimise soon, because they'll get slower over time.


Oh it does seem a lot.


On my macbook air M1 it is using close to 600MB. https://i.imgur.com/xRyQQOE.png

Might be somehow inflated by something I don't understand about apple silicon reporting memory usage. But it's concerning none the less. And I forgot to include the main process at 114 MB


No offensive, but using a subscription model because of how your company wants to be categorized is an awful justification to make a product decision at such an early stage. Instead of "we want to be company X, so we build Y", it should be, "the problem is Z, so we build Y to solve it".


> $10/mo for a mac exclusive calendar widget

... it's always hard to make a joke when someone already gave out the punchline.


This sounds like a classic "in front of the steamroller" startup. Apple is likely building a similar capability into MacOS; it's just not yet released. One day, a new MacOS will roll out and the menu bar calendar will be one of 8,000 new features. Your market is gone overnight.

If you are lucky, they will see your genius and acquihire you. If not, this company has a high likelihood of failing or becoming a lifestyle company with a small but valuable user base who cannot live without the few special things your menu bar app does that Apple's built-in feature does not.

All this being said, you can also discover all kinds of things on the journey that take you away from the original idea into areas where a lot of growth can happen. Build things your customers love and you will find success. It's a great idea fundamentally.


Thanks for the feedback! Totally agree. That's why we're trying to branch out of the calendar space as fast as possible. First as a unified notification inbox for SaaS platforms.


I use Fantastical 3 which not just puts a calendar in your menu bar but also solves for most (if not all) of your calendaring needs. All of it for ~40$ a year which allows you to use it also on your Mac, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.

P.S: Not affiliated with Fantastical in any way, just a happy and paying user for a few years now.


Fantastical also has a great click-to-join button. When I first saw this, I thought the post was someone who discovered that feature... it's the same feature.


Fantastical really is fantastical! The quick entry and great integrations makes it truly great. It also has a really good menu bar item similar to this project.


I'm sorry for being negative, but paying $10 per month for what is essentially a calendar widget is blowing my mind. The fact that this is even in YC and not just a side project is taking what's left of my brain and blowing it into the stratosphere.

> We’ve only solved a small part of a bigger problem. The SaaS platforms we use for work don't work well together. It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything.

Can someone give me an example of this problem? To me this feels so "extra"... Maybe I'm missing something.


It’s the YC model. Throw money at smart upper-class kids in good schools with some ambition. Once in a while, those kids make Dropbox or Airbnb, most of the time they make calendar widgets and leverage the experience to jump the line at some FAANG and start out their careers a decade ahead of their peers. It doesn’t make sense to you and I because it doesn’t make sense. It’s a lottery ticket for the investors. YC just games the system by buying most of the lottery tickets.


I understand Dropbox and Airbnb, but the long-term growth potential was clear to begin with - here, I just don't see it. It's a stupid calendar widget on a subscription.

I understand the potential for future expansion, but wouldn't it make sense for YC to wait until an MVP for said expansion is released before investing in it?


Even more absurd is that there are free and more functional alternatives: https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar


Thanks for point this out - it is amazing. Superpowered has a lot of catching up to do.


It's just a MVP... version 0.01 of their vision. The fact that they have paying users who use them daily is a very, very good signal - that's a hard thing to do! It's so much easier to add additional features to that group of users later.

I see so many negative comments and can't help but think of this (first comment on DropBox's HN launch): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863


The difference is that DropBox didn't have lots of free and better competitors.


The V in MVP stands for viable. Things that aren’t viable aren’t MVPs they are steps getting to an MVP. Part of the value of testing stuff is to check and see if what I think is an MVP is, actually is. When it clearly isn’t, if I call it an MVP then I’m either insane or a marketing person.

Prototypes are perfectly cool as long as expectations are met. Of course, charging $10 for a prototype doesn’t frequently work


The pro-sumer market is massive. It's really not that hard to deliver $10 worth of value to people whose time is very, very expensive.

As far as YC goes, pivoting and working on new ideas really rapidly is downright normal. Sometimes that looks like taking weekend hacks and seeing how far you can get with them (this one being a canonical example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9087819)


ive had friends get into YC without an idea, just two guys looking to start a company


I pay for it. It makes my life easier and saves me time.

It's not really hard to make my life $10/month better, and who knows how many people that is true for? I wouldn't overthink it.


Genuinely curious why not pay for fantastical? It has basically the same widget, plus an iPhone and Mac app for a 1/3 of the price? Not to be mean, but this seems like it only got traction because they got accepted to YC on another idea, otherwise would have been lost in the sea of dozens of other much more full featured or free calendar solutions?


It's been a while since I used fantastical but I didn't like it. I don't remember why to be honest.


Fantastical has this feature though. It would be overkill, but you could only use it for this feature and it would be half the cost!


For context, Austen Allred is the co-founder and CEO of Lambda School, so efficiency wins are going to be pretty valuable for him.

Also, as a CEO you are constantly thinking in terms of ROI. It doesn't matter how much software costs if it pays for itself several times over. This spills over into personal purchases too.

(BTW, big fan of what Lambda School is doing Austen.)


You forgot to mention they're also a YC company...


I bought fantastical quite a few years ago for something like $10... single payment. Still works. They have offerings for 6.99 cad a month.

How many QoL are you willing to buy? You’re essentially paying $10 for a netflix subscription only it’s a calendar widget in the top menu bar.


are you an investor as well?


No, he's _just_ a fellow YC alum.


I'm not


No problem at all. Definitely does, it's a broad problem and we're still figuring it out too.

As a dev, I almost always miss my GitHub notifications unless I'm constantly checking the platform in my browser. We want to bring all the platforms we use for work into one native place. Does that make more sense now?


> As a dev, I almost always miss my GitHub notifications

Maybe I'm being dense here, but can't you use email?


> As a dev, I almost always miss my GitHub notifications unless I'm constantly checking the platform in my browser.

But why would anyone be constantly checking GitHub notifications? Isn't that a distraction?


http://ptsochantaris.github.io/trailer/ is wonderful to manage GitHub work and notification.


I am currently working on a service for GitHub project reports and analytics. Would you be interested in that? If so, leave your mail here and I'll put you in beta! https://sneak-peek.io/product/ohmycode


Doesn’t MacOS already have an elaborate notification implementation? Would not integrating with that work?


Many people have the notification center on Do Not Disturb indefinitely. It's noisy and unactionable for a a lot of people, including myself.

We want to integrate deeply into SaaS platforms to provide one-click access to features within those platforms. For example, viewing and resolving comments on a Google Doc. This just isn't possible through Mac's notification center.


How do you prevent your platform from becoming equally noisy and unactionable?


YC funds widgets ? What are the economics of this thing. A thousand developers can copy or open source similar alternatives.


You will laugh, but a year ago I made same service in open source: https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar/


Amazing, thank you. I will be using this. They were probably "inspired" :wink by your service


I love Meeting Bar. Use it every day. I really like the applescript feature. A hotkey combo pauses my music, launches zoom or meet, and I'm good to go


I think what you're paying for is someone to sync your calenders for you.

Similar to ring camera. You're just paying someone to make your cctv camera available to you over thr internet instead of you setting it up yourself.

I personally hate these services but some people would pay $/month for this convince.


> Can someone give me an example of this problem? To me this feels so "extra"... Maybe I'm missing something.

The business value of missing a notification or meeting can be really high. I feel like businesses would happily pay $10 per user-month to have all their employees on time to a meeting. Or even just closer. I imagine similar logic can be applied to other notifications.


> I feel like businesses would happily pay $10 per user-month to have all their employees on time to a meeting

Maybe I'm being extremely naive, but isn't it already a solved problem with synchronized & shared calendars and notifications?


I don’t think so because the notifications in chrome get buried for me. Email alerts for lost in the deluge of work emails. The Apple Watch helps a lot actually


Then won't notifications from this utility also get buried?


>Then won't notifications from this utility also get buried?

I think the idea is that the upcoming calendar/appointment notification is live and always on the menubar. See example screenshot from their web landing page: https://superpowered.me/static/media/menubar.aaa56b48.png

I'm building a similar calendar notification tool for personal use on Windows so I understand the value of this. Calendar notifications via email and "reminders" on the iPhone are not effective for my workflow and I need something that's always active on my menu bar.


> See example screenshot from their web landing page: https://superpowered.me/static/media/menubar.aaa56b48.png

If this is all you need, why not just use an open source alternative? I'm using MeetingBar (https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar) and it covers all of these "issues". It even sends notifications, it's lightweight, scriptable and doesn't cost me as much as a Photoshop subscription.


Exactly - calendar notifications are "more important" than my frequent Clubhouse pings and having them in a more visible place is very helpful.


> is live and always on the menubar

I spend my time in fullscreen apps. The menubar is never visible.


This is ridiculous, just use Itsycal, it does all of that. Make sure to send a tip to the author!

https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/


That doesn't support Google Calendar, from what I can gather

edit: oh, it does. I never knew macOS native Calendar can sync to GCal. The more you know!

OK this is quite useless then. Especially as it is an Electron app.


It uses the OS-level calendar account integration, so it supports whatever MacOS does, including Google Calendar - that's functionality I actually use, on a daily basis, right now.

That said, Itsycal doesn't seem to play well with meeting links - for example, I've never been able to click a Webex link from the Itsycal UI and have the meeting actually open; I think it's not passing the URL exactly, or something, but I always have to visit the Calendar app and click the link from there. Not sure if Zoom has the same trouble in Itsycal, but I can definitely see a potential win in something that does better with meeting integrations.

I'm still sticking with Itsycal at least for now; meeting link issues aside, it works really well for me and I'd rather wait for a real killer feature to switch. That aside, congrats and best of luck to the Superpowered team!


What do you have against electron?


I for one am okay with the idea of spawning an entire headless browser for something that uses a full window - slack, spotify, etc. but for drawing a toolbar? That's a bit much.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26437249


Electron apps don’t really look or work right on a Mac.


There is plenty of reasons to not like Electron apps, but that they don't look right is not one of them, as Electron apps don't come with any styling built-in, it's all up to the developers of the apps to style things.


Yeah, that’s the problem: I don’t want to use apps written in frameworks that let the developer style the basic controls. If I’m ok a Mac, I want to see Mac buttons, dropdowns, etc. and I want them to be provided by the OS so I can rely on OS services working: the Cocoa input system is pretty sophisticated and I inevitably run into edge cases with attempts to emulate it in electron apps.


I see. I take it you never use a browser either then? Because most of the web apps don't have Mac styling, AFAIK.


To be fair, OP was clearly talking about native apps. My 2c: an Electron app looks "alien" (for lack of a better word) on every platform that supports it. Especially so when it implements deep integration like a menu bar widget. One would expect it to obey the operating system human interface guidelines. This in itself makes it unsuited for the task. Even more so when the main reason to use electron (code reuse and ease of porting to other platforms) is not fully realized (as this appears to be mac-only).


I mean, it’s hard to avoid, but I try to use native apps whenever possible.


They have a big CPU and RAM usage.

...which is not an issue on M1 macs, so far, but that's for now.


itsycal FTW!


If you’re going to charge me $10 a month at least have some class and build it with Cocoa


Indeed. An Electron app sitting there in the menu bar using 500Mb of memory is just a waste. Sums up modern development unfortunately.


Sorry it's not clear to me why this needs to be subscription service?

Mac has a native Calendar app that allows you to sync to Google calendar and includes notifications. So I'm not sure why this would have $120/yr value add.

On another note I truly dislike this trend of SaaSifying every software product. Some things are a simple utility that don't need much maintenance and updates. I can't imagine this widget being drastically different a year from now


Thanks for the comment! I used to be an Apple Calendar user, but then switched to just using Google Calendar full-time.

The problem with building a calendar that hooks into other calendar platforms is the requirement of parity. In order for it to replace Google Calendar, it needs to do everything Google Calendar does, and more. I stopped using Apple Calendar because it was too hard to send calendar invites to the rest of my team.

Our goal was never to replace Google Calendar, just to make the 20% you use 80% of the time easier to access.

> I can't imagine this widget being drastically different a year from now

I totally see why you'd think that. For us, we're done focusing on calendars. We're now planning to move horizontally to include more work platforms like Slack and GitHub.


How does this compare to Meeter? (https://trymeeter.com/). It seems to solve a similar niche; but Meeter is currently free.


The UI looks nice.

An alternative for those looking: https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar


First, I apologize for the following, I mean no harm.

Based on some of the comments about notifications.

This whole thing hits me in the core of an issue I have with people and how they handle technology (especially when it comes to notifications). I can't stress enough how I hate to see people's email inboxes or the screen phones. I don't understand why there is so many pending notifications. When it comes to email, thousands, I'm not bloody kind, thousands of unread emails. When it comes to apps in their phones, hundreds. And don't get me started with group notifications (IMs)... Technology, in my view, supposes to enhance us... but I think people are becoming dumber and lazy.

So... this app makes no sense to me. I wouldn't pay for it but clearly I'm a moron and way off the curve so not the ideal client.


“I just joined a meeting 3 minutes late instead of 5 because of Superpowered, which is a resounding success in my book.”

This must be a joke. Please tell it is just a joke


> “I just joined a meeting 3 minutes late instead of 5 because of Superpowered, which is a resounding success in my book.”

Not sure if borderline sarcasm.


yup, I would not have that on the site. Or I'd reword it.


Thanks for pointing that out, would have never noticed!


Wow, how is this is a YC company? Isn't this more of a weekend project?


Great question. Right now that's how it looks. We started with Google Calendar as base since the calendar acts as a source of truth throughout the day for remote workers.

Now that we've got the base down (which takes time), we're quickly branching out to include more platforms, to make us less of a widget and more of a platform ourselves.


There's no way I'd pay $120/year for this. It's cute, but... hard to see how this is a YC-level startup.


Thanks for the feedback. It definitely isn't for everyone. As mentioned in the note, we priced it a bit higher to validate that we were delivering enough value to our users. So far, we have users who get enough value out of it to pay for it.

We also have a much larger vision for this product, but we need to start somewhere. Bringing Google Calendar into the menu bar is the first step in bringing all the platforms we use for work together.


> validate that we were delivering enough value to our users

This seems like an odd and ineffective way to validate that. It seems more likely that you will just mix in price insensitive users who aren’t making conscious decisions.

Would it be better to validate value by seeing usage levels, referrals, and drop offs?


Fair enough, I don't know the vision you have, so I somewhat retract my previous comments. Good luck!


I tried Superpowered and liked it! Congrats on building a cool product! I see the value in having calendar alerts on your menu bar. I am real bad at remembering meetings and find the default alerts to be annoying or forgettable - I recently got an Apple Watch that has helped a lot with this though. I was a little surprised there was no free version with premium features - in my mind, the main benefit of alerts in my menu bar isn’t enough to pay. I may not be the right user (maybe businesses?). Could you share thoughts around the pricing? Are there other features I may be missing?


Glad you like it! With the pricing, we wanted to validate whether or not we were solving a painful enough of a problem. We're still early on and figuring out the best model - we're thinking about pricing tiers for sure. Thanks for the feedback!


I feel similarly.

Great looking product, I'd love to have a free version to glance at in my menu bar...

but for the most part Apple Watch covers my needs.


If you don’t want to spend 10$/month for Superpowered, checkout trymeeter.com. My cofounder and I built Meeter about a year ago and it’s fully free currently.


How will you continue developing your product if it is free and closed-source?


Meeter still earns subscription revenue via SetApp. The company running Meeter now is funded and builds it into a larger ecosystem [0]

[0] https://bardeen.ai


Wow. I have more than 5 meetings a day, I miss meetings, and I still don't see myself installing it, let alone paying for it.

Is it really such a big pain that you need to join a meeting on time? Usually someone messages me asking me to join in case I miss it.

Someone at YC be: Ima give this $120K coz why not.


Thanks for mentioning, it's definitely not for everyone. We've found a set of users who do care enough about this seemingly minor problem.

We also have a much bigger vision for this than a calendar app. The Google Calendar integration we've built is the base for every other platform we plan to bring in, like Slack and GitHub.


This does not seem helpful to me. Part of the value of opening the calendar is seeing the day plus the week, to recalibrate priorities based on upcoming meetings as well as immediate meetings. I have desktop notifications for immediate upcoming meetings. If I wanted, I could set my calendar to one-day view and only see today's meetings. But I don't do that because I don't want that.


Thanks for your feedback. We've found our customers use Google Calendar in two modes, read mode (80%) and write mode (20%).

What you're mentioning falls into write mode. Gather a ton of context then make a number of changes. This is best done in Google Calendar.

We focus on read mode. 80% of the time I open Google Calendar, it's to check what's next or to get into my next meeting. When that's done 10+ times a day, it adds up.

That's going to be different for different people. Some of our customers who are product managers open Superpowered 30 times a day. For them, it's worth it.


I don't resonate with that dichotomy. What I am describing is not thinking about what new calendar events to add -- it is reading. I want to see the full context of the week in addition to immediate upcoming meetings. For example, as a manager, what else is happening on the team and do I need to be sending emails or slack messages during a meeting? Do I really need something important done tomorrow so I ask someone else to take the upcoming meeting instead of me, or vice versa?


I really hope you're willing to share some metrics on your findings in regard what you said somewhere below was this exploration of the level of pain you're addressing. I would think that churn is going to be high and one of your bigger challenges unless there's stickiness that I don't see.

Are you worried about iStat Menus, Bartender, Alfred or Better Touch Tool adding your product as a feature? Is there a hard problem that you've solved that they'd face in replicating the idea?

FWIW, what I'd personally love is a physical stoplight on my desk with Green-Yellow-Red lights for whether a meeting is coming up. It should have a hotkey that launches the meeting. For that I might pay $10/mo.


Yeah definitely! On average, our users use Superpowered 10 times per day. It's an ingrained part of their workflows.

It's not only a single button to join a meeting, but it's also the ability to peek at your calendar without opening a tab. That might sound minor, but it's worth it for people who do it 10+ times a day.

I wouldn't say we're worried about another tool building one-click join. Other tools exist that do. We're branching out of the calendar space to bring work platforms like Slack and GitHub together into a unified platform. Our focus is on work platforms, theres is not.


Is there a plan to address notification fatigue? It's less of an issue with calendars because calendar events tend to be important and synchronous. I'm worried that aggregating more data sources would add a lot of noise, but I can see a lot of value in being able to surface high priority items.


Not the founder but I imagine the strategy here is to move first with a notification that has a big market like email. If they can prove that quickly, you've landed and now you expand to other kinds of notifications and suddenly you're much more defensible.


Execution here is great. High level of polish. The pricing is a little hard to justify, you might want to consider segmenting your plans. 1 meeting per day personal plan, etc? Team features would help justify the price.

Pro tip: for b2b sales, generic productivity enhancing tools are often discovered organically by high-load SME C-suite folks and they’ll decide they want their entire team to have it. If I was in that role then I’d be thrilled not just to save time but to save all the time I spend waiting for my team members to find the link, log in, etc. Maybe you could run the math on how much time is saved and its value.


Thanks! We try to put a lot of focus into design. We're currently thinking on free tiers, team features, etc.

That's a great idea. Our current approach is bottom-up. We found people sharing it with their teams organically so we rolled out team plans to get more people on board. Open to other suggestions if you have experience!


You’re welcome. LinkedIn ads are a simple and relatively low-cost way to target job titles and company size. Banner ads work too but the complexity of operating them is high. You might want some way to capture Windows users’ emails with a dedicated landing page. Oh and consider volume pricing.


Maybe not exactly the same features but as 'calendar in your menu bar' I really love itsycal[1].

[1] https://www.mowglii.com/itsycal/


Me too, it is very good.


I tried out Superpowered and while it's more polished than its competitors, it has a few downsides other commenters have already touched upon (pricing, memory use, and personally, the name hits too close to home to Superhuman.)

I've found that the best alternative is Slapdash. [0] Connect your calendar and then just hit cmd + J and boom -- Zoom is running. Many more connections are amazing as well, eg. deep Dropbox and Drive integration.

[0] https://slapdash.com


117 comments and Dato[0] isn't mentioned. Works great for me, I replaced the Fantastical menu bar with it 6 months ago. One-time cost.

[0] https://sindresorhus.com/dato


Great product, works well, but can't see the need for this to be a monthly cost. Should be a one time purchase


You're not the first to comment on this! Consumer SaaS is still growing. We'd like to fall into the category of apps like Superhuman, Vimcal, and Fantastical.


Fantastical is, what, $3 a month and has a much better value proposition. You’re effectively outpricing yourselves with $10 a month when there are tools that do the exactly same with a single purchase or even for free.


Consumer SaaS may be growing, but that doesn't mean you are a natural fit. Also, subscription fatigue is growing even faster.


The Google Calendar Slack App does a pretty good job at this, it pings me 10 minutes before every meeting, and has easy buttons to join a remote call. It works for me since I'm on Slack all day anyway.

And ... it's free!


If you can use the open source alternative, why pay SO much for superpowered?

https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar


for all who like the idea but think 10$ is insane, https://tryMeeter.com/


Seems pretty expensive, considering fantastical gives me the same thing for half the price and it works on my phone/iPad too.


Why is it Electron based when it’s not cross platform?


We chose to use Electron both so that we could build faster coming from a web development background, and to leave the option open to being cross-platform in the future.

Even though its Electron, making it completely cross platform is non-trivial. A bunch of things are still platform specific (ex. the Windows menu bar works completely differently).


It looks pretty. It's a shame it's only for MacOS.

The way I'm addressing the problem for this solution is by having an OS-level / window-manager keystroke to open a new Chrome tab with Google Calendar URL. For example, you can accomplish this by adding following lines to your i3wm config:

    bindsym $mod+F1 exec google-chrome "https://www.google.com/calendar/render"
    bindsym $mod+Shift+F1 exec google-chrome --new-window "https://www.google.com/calendar/render"


This looks really good! I'm a Meeter user so it's a real use case I have already spent time looking for solutions to.

I agree with other commenters though - I'd pay a one-time $10, but $10 per month seems unreasonably high. For perspective Meeter is free, and Spotify is $4 for a family of 4 (in my country).

Maybe it could be part of the bundle at https://setapp.com/ or similar? Or you could have a set-your-own-price monthly sub?


There is also MeetingBar [1] which is free and open source [2]. I would say there is one feature that none of the competitors in this space have done is auto join next meeting. This sounds easy, but it is actually hard [3]

[1] https://apps.apple.com/app/id1532419400 [2] https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar [3] https://github.com/leits/MeetingBar/issues/30


Wow, YC truly is the leader for investing in innovative companies. This is disruptive as hell!


Your app actually solves exactly the right problem for me and it looks and acts exactly how I’d want it to. I think you really nailed it and your mention of unifying slack and github comments sounds very appealing.

$10/month is priced way too high. That’s the combined price of slack and github for just a more efficient way to see notifications.

If I was in a smaller startup I might consider paying $1-$2/month out of pocket or expensed to my productivity budget at a bigger org, if you had the github+ slack thing and the calendar thing.

If I’m paying monthly then I expect lots of very rich updates or new products added to the lineup.

I personally think either $10/year with more widgets and tools is a good price point but it also limits you to the people who need all the tools you’re building which shrinks every time you add a new tool.

So maybe instead go with a one-time purchase option of $10 for just this calendar widget, and any new significantly better version or other tool would be another $10 to upgrade or buy the other widget. That’s effectively recurring pricing if you continue to deliver new features but it lets users value each thing individually and only buy what they want


At first glance, yea, this company is trying to do something that could be done as a side project. The fact that they "are new to the productivity space" doesn't bode well either, and this pitch isn't helping the problem. However, there is one line of the post that grabbed my attention:

"We’re now looking to bring Slack and GitHub into a unified notification inbox in the menu bar"

I've had this exact problem (too many notification from too many sources) and don't have a tool to give myself good control over what notifications get my attention now, and what notification I can read in a digest later. Right now I have to use N app's setting to set N notification policies, and toggle a "master-switch" silent mode, only be be deluged when I turn silent mode off. The tricky thing, IMO, is that they'll be creating an application that competes with iOS functionality, and you can probably guess who wins in those situations.

The idea, "manage notification and free peoples attention" is a good one, and I wish the founders luck.


Also, the pricing on this is pretty far off base (obnoxiously so). IMO a "fair price" for the value should be something like $10 for a site license, a price I've observed people pay countless times for similar tools[1] I don't get why this would be selling at such a premium, especially in the growth phase, and couldn't imagine how expensive this would get when they try to improve revenue/user in later iterations!

[1] https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus/


Love the fact you can click Zoom etc links straight from the bar, thats super handy

Would pay maybe $2-3/month, $10 just seems way too heavy right now. Maybe in future for your whole SaaS notifications piece and I can see the value if it essentially shows me all of the valuable things going on in my business and nothing superfulous , but sadly $10 I can't justify for just the calendar


I recommend Dato [1] for joining zoom meetings quickly from the menu bar. And it does all the Itsycal stuff too. It's a $6.99 one-time purchase.

[1] https://sindresorhus.com/dato


Great rec, thanks !!


Is this the onion? actually lmfaoing at how ridiculous this is. yc has lost it


Awesome! Super stoked to try this. Couple of quick questions

-- was the name a play on superhuman the email service? if so, smooth move. I've been waiting 3 years for SuperHuman -- it appears it's just soma users + the clubhouse inner circle.

-- Was product hunt on your launch map? If so, to what extent on the radar.

I ask because I have one to many micro-apps for the M1 Macbook Air [or tested on such] -- I haven't launched yet, but I don't want to worry about playing games on growth hacks when my focus went on the product experience - not the slick tricks to quickly tip subscribing "users" to use something in the near future that may not even exist beyond a page. Or a PH "landing page".

I'm thinking, as of 2021, ... maybe HN is the most authentic way to go. [And of course, relevant reddit orgs that may find it useful with the consent of the respective subreddit admin].

Anyways, I sidetracked, but wanted to reaffirm -- Great, simple app - wish there were more of these! Looks great next to the Caffeine icon ;).


Thanks so much, that's really kind of you!

> Was the name a play on superhuman the email service?

It wasn't inspired by Superhuman, but the name sounded strong and gave us the flexibility to change product direction. We got lucky since a lot of people now have the association of Super-x being a tool to make you faster or more efficient.

> Was product hunt on your launch map? If so, to what extent on the radar.

Yes it was, it was our first public launch four weeks ago: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/superpowered-2.

We launched the second we had something that provided a minimum amount of value to our users.


>Sensitive user data like calendar events don’t pass through our servers.

This could be a selling feature, but it isn't clear from your privacy policy that calendar events don't go through your servers. You might want to make that clearer and upfront in your privacy policy (and possibly make that promise separate from the clause that lets you change the policy at any time, or at least commit to notifying users of changes to the privacy policy).

Also, just generally, you might consider other edits to your privacy policy for clarity. For example, there's a heading that refers to "Personal information we collect" but then "personal information" is never actually defined; instead you define something called "device information". It's unclear (to me anyway) whether device information is the same as personal information. This makes it hard to interpret the rest of the privacy policy, which refers to personal information.


Thanks for taking a look at our privacy policy! I appreciate you taking the time, we'll look into making those edits.


Here is my linux version that probably not does exactly the same set of features and not as pretty but good enough for me (show me the next meeting and quickly join it with one click) :

https://github.com/chmouel/gnome-next-meeting-applet


Why was "video lecture platform for professors" a "horrible idea?"

Segment started as a tool for professors, too [1].

https://segment.com/academy/intro/measuring-product-market-f...


Our idea was poorly timed and we lost passion for it. We were focused on making lectures better for the remote school environment. Unfortunately colleges have a hard time justifying a tuition's worth of value for online videos, so it was a tough sell, especially with the end of the pandemic around the corner.


I seriously don't want to deride the product (and it is just a product right now, not much else) but personally - even if this widget was doing 10x the functionality it is now, the internal debate I would have about paying $10 a month for yet another SaaS would make it almost impossible for me to pay that $10 a month. The truth is 99% of people who work for corporate jobs wouldn't pay their own money to enhance their productivity at work. I can -maybe- see freelancers and consultants using this. But then again, there are so many free alternatives as people have pointed out. I think there is an identity crisis here. Y'all need to take to heart that backlash you're getting here because HN is full of early tech adopters and if even these people can't see the point of the product, no one else will.


I have lots of zoom, teams, webex and meet meetings everyday right now, and I only have to click on the item in the calendar, then click a link.

That's at most a double-click followed by a single click. The second or so this takes is nothing compared to the time it takes to actually connect to the meeting.


Wow! I love this. Unfortunately $10/month is a bit high for me, imo. Any plans to bring this down?


Another 'cloud default pricing' casualty. I'd buy more than 5x as many services if the default price was $2/month.

Maybe cloud infrastructure is still too expensive?


But using the cloud probably got them here sooner, so I think the tradeoff is complex and not at all unreasonable for an early stage startup. I'm really hoping that they succeed though, and can figure out a business model at a lower subscription cost :)


Thanks! As I mentioned in the note, the pricing is intentional to validate our product. If it helps, we just rolled out a referral program that gives you two free weeks for every friend that signs into the app.


Totally understand, and I really do support you guys in your journey! Maybe consider offering a business (or family) license where you can buy multiple seats for slightly cheaper?


Thanks so much! It's not listen on our landing page yet, but we offer team plans starting at 8/mo.

We also have a referral program where you get two free weeks for every friend you bring to the app if that helps


if you're targeting OSX, there's an Alfred workflow that does this: https://git.deanishe.net/deanishe/alfred-video-conferences


I love all the comments about the price. It lets me know people really think this looks great and would work for them, but they are just off-put by the price.

Stick to the price, the ones that sign up will be loyal. Adjust later if need be.

Good job. It seems to scratch an itch.


Why does it say that? I have never considered getting a widget like this and haven't even checked out the website, but I still think it's to expensive. I imagine most people feel similarly.


That's a positive way of looking at it, thanks!


Back when I used a Mac in 2009 - 2012 there were a couple of applications that I loved.

One of them was very similar to this but had an extra very interesting feature: when you clicked on it and it dropped down it filled the screen horizontally and maybe 25% vertically. On that space it showed a timeline of the upcoming events crawling closer and closer towards the right side.

The time scale might have been logarithmic - I can't remember - but I remember it motivating me.

Agree with the others on pricing: I now have a general aversion against subscriptions and $10 a month is way too much (unless you offer perpetual license after 6 or 12 months or something, and even then it is expensive..)


I'm just thinking aloud about what would make this valuable enough for me to pay for...

I have several computers with different os's and a phone, that sometimes I call into meetings with, sometimes I use the apps.

I have meetings on teams, zoom, google, webex, (Skype is dead right?)

I may have presentations that I need to give in these meetings, in google docs, ppt, browser tab, etc.

So if your app could unify all of this, so I can click once on whatever device I'm on to get into my meeting, and have my meeting materials at hand, that would be cool.

I'm less big on notifications of any kind, I get too many already, making some new kind of extra important notification won't help.


With so many of these widgets now (most of which are free and/or open source) I’d be very surprised if this doesn’t show up as a feature baked directly into the next macOS.

I use Meeter. It was the first I came across and it is free. It’s rather useful but not life changing. I’ve recently noticed that Siri notifications have started appearing, prompting the link to join meetings and they usually appear a fraction of a second before Meeter’s notification.

I get that Superpowered is an MVP (and a very very, maybe too, polished one at that!) and now I’m quite fascinated to see how this turns in a YC growth business.


4 years ago by nathan

https://apps.apple.com/au/app/next-meeting/id1017470484?mt=1...


Congratulations on launching!

How does this compare to Fantastical? It does the same for me, just puts a giant Zoom icon next to its menubar icon and clicking on it lets me join my next meeting.


Thanks!

We're not interested in becoming a full calendar app. We're planning to branch out to other platforms like Slack and Github to become an all-in-one platform for work.


Is Superpowered really a wise name choice? If you look at https://superpowered.com/ , you'll see that it's in use by another startup. They're doing something completely different (mobile sound SDKs), but still, it's not like it's a personal blog or niche webshop etc. that you may hope buying at a reasonable price one day.


Super- is just another one of those startup name enhancers like -ly/-fy. Superhuman, Superpowered, Super...


Yep, but in this case the name is exactly the same. (Although I never understood the choice for the original one either. But that's a pretty interesting story of a solo dev guy who really just cared about his product and not growing a business. Despite this, and with the help of a bizdev guy he made an exit.)


This is neat and will certainly be useful for folks that have loads of meetings everyday.

About your expansion into other areas - The reason the menu bar works is because it is tailor made for one thing now, which is finding the next meeting to join. If you add more options, would that not move the clutter from the browser tabs / apps into the menu bar? Something to think about.

Good luck with the product. I wish you the best.


Great point, it's something we've thought a lot about. The reason we built Superpowered in the first place was because we felt Google Calendar was too cluttered. We took the 20% of it we use 80% of the time, and put it in the menu bar.

We want to take that same philosophy with every other platform. Only show the essential parts you need to do your work.

It's a big challenge, as you can tell we put a lot of thought into design, and we will continue to as the platform expands.


Everybody is raging about the price here, and unfortunately I also have a rather negative take.

And it's about YC in general.

Wasn't YC about building the next billion dollar company? I have restrained myself from applying because my ideas and projects were rather indie-devvy smaller things and I felt like for YC I need to low key change an industry.

Is YC also the incubator for menu bar widgets now? What does that speak about YC?


We've been working on this product for two months. Three of us are engineers.

We have a much larger vision for this product, becoming an all-in-one work platform, starting with Slack and GitHub integrations. We're still working out what that will look like. But it's a going to take a lot longer than two months to build.


It's clear from the comments that a lot of people don't have the problem that this product solves. But I certainly do. I spend most hours of most of my days in meetings. This looks like a much better solution than my browser calendar. I would estimate that there are hundreds of thousands of people in roles with very high meeting overhead for whom this solves a big pain point.


A great free alternative in the widget-only space on macOS is Next Meeting [0]. Works wonders if you want just the menubar overview, not switch your full calendar app out for something else.

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/next-meeting/id1017470484


$120/year I can't... YC has a lost it...


I've been using Superpowered for the past 2 weeks and can honestly say the experience is great. I don't live in the browser and the Mac calendar app is pretty awful, so this has been a definitely workflow improvement for me. I probably click on it 10-20x per day.

That said, when my trial expired today I elected to not upgrade in no small part to the insane memory usage.


“No more looking for the Google calendar tab in Chrome.” Gustaf Alströmer

Said nobody ever!

It is literally three clicks away...

1. New Tab 2. Click dotted square 3. Click cal button


I have on average about 3-10 Zoom calls daily and I definitely see the value for this. Right now, I'm literally bouncing between Outlook, opening calendar invite, pressing the link, having Safari launch a new tab, press Allow, and then Zoom opens up.

Curious to know what the longer term plan is. How will this grow past being a calendar widget?


Glad to hear you have the problem!

> How will this grow past being a calendar widget?

With Google Calendar, we took the most important parts, like joining Zoom meetings, and put them front and center. We want to do the same with all the platforms we use for work in one place.


This thread is a great example of how you can run a profitable company while pissing off 99% of people.


> It shouldn’t take cycling through ten different apps and Chrome tabs to stay on top of everything.

Since it's mac-only - have you tried command+space to get to the calendar?


just started using this yesterday and I'm hooked. I have to be in a ton of meetings and as much as wish meetings would go away, no such luck.

being late less often. not having to check calendar and wonder if its a zoom or google meet, and seeing the days schedule from the menu bar all add up to compounded daily value.

$10 a month is a little steep, but I don't think the "people that have a lot of meetings" audience is super price sensitive.


Glad to hear it! I'd agree, our power users are product managers + founders.


Electron?

So, you’re going to build a complete copy of Chrome into my menu bar?

Uh, no thanks.


For the price, how would you be delivering more value than Fantastical, which is literally fantastic?


It's a shame that is only for Mac :( Any plans for Windows(/Linux)?


GNOME's defaults do this for you. Can't speak for KDE or Windows


As mentioned in the post, we built this using Electron + React! Which means it can be ported over to those platforms if needed.

At the moment, we're more focused on building a product that our current users (on Mac) love before prematurely expanding to other platforms.


yawn.


I started using Superpowered yesterday and it is great! (I'm so tired of waiting for Google Calendar to load!)

One feature request: it seems like it's not possible to create new calendar events using the app. I assume this is on the roadmap?


Glad you like it! We don't allow creating new calendar events yet, but it's on our list for sure.


I didn't know Aprils Fools was moved 3 weeks in advance.


I use Next Up: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/up-next/id1355117041

Does the job, and only costs $19.99/yr.




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