Savi Cal

Derek Reimer had been observing the scheduling link space for years as a user of Calendly, having even integrated it into Drip early on. But what fascinated him wasn't the core product—it was the *resistance* to using it. "There are some pockets of the industry where people just literally refuse to use them because it's just too faux pas," he explained. People feared offending someone by sending a scheduling link, so they'd fall back to inefficient back-and-forth emails. Derek sensed this was both a product problem and a people problem, yet saw little innovation happening on the product front to reduce this friction.

The timing was serendipitous: Derek started Savi Cal right around the beginning of the pandemic, when demand for scheduling tools skyrocketed. He also ran it against his refined rubric of constraints—single-player mode, not mission-critical if it goes down, MVP-shippable in months, existing market, minimal decision-makers, web-first. It checked nearly every box.

Unlike Level, Derek's previous failed venture, Savi Cal was built with explicit constraints in mind. He'd learned the hard way that market validation via manifesto and email signups could be deceptive. The Level manifesto against Slack had attracted thousands of interested people, but when it came time to convert them to paying customers, he hit wall after wall. People agreed the problem was real but weren't willing to switch wholesale—Slack switching was too risky, and smaller teams didn't feel the pain acutely enough.

With Savi Cal, Derek applied frameworks from "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick: ask questions that cut through optimism bias. He shipped quickly and focused on a problem he understood intimately from years of using Calendly himself.

Derek leveraged his existing audience—built over years of podcasting, speaking, and building in public. As he'd written in his post-Level retrospective, one of his explicit criteria was that "the market should overlap with your existing audience." This was a considerable unfair advantage. His audience of makers, founders, and indie hackers already understood the scheduling problem and were predisposed to try an alternative to Calendly.

By the time of this interview, Savi Cal had crossed into profitability: "We crossed 10K heading to 20K MRR." This milestone represented what Derek called "default, alive status"—the point where he could pay his own salary and cover all business expenses. He was at an inflection point, facing the same decision many bootstrapped founders face: keep growing, hire and scale, maintain pace, or pivot entirely. The key difference from Level: this time, he had a viable, growing business to show for his work.