Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020)
How I Built This with Guy Raz
Guy Raz | Wondery
4.8 • 31.1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2024
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
After emigrating from Nigeria to the US to attend college, Tope Awotona worked as a door-to-door salesman and eventually set out to become a tech entrepreneur. He launched a series of e-commerce businesses that quickly fizzled when he realized he had no passion for them. But then he landed on an idea he was truly excited about: designing software that would minimize the hassle and headache of scheduling meetings. In 2013, he cashed in his 401k and went into debt to build Calendly, a scheduling service reportedly doing over $100 million in revenue.
This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner-White, with music by Ramtin Arablouei
Edited by Neva Grant, with research help from Daryth Gayles.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wundery Plus subscribers can listen to how I built this early and ad free right now. |
| 0:05.0 | Join Wundery Plus in the Wundery App or on Apple Podcasts. |
| 0:10.0 | If you need to hire, you need Indeed. |
| 0:13.0 | Indeed is your matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors, |
| 0:20.0 | according to Indeed Data, and matching technology that helps you find quality candidates fast. |
| 0:25.1 | Ditch, the busy work, use Indeed for scheduling, screening, and messaging |
| 0:30.0 | so you can connect with candidates faster. |
| 0:33.3 | And indeed doesn't just help you hire faster, 75% of employers claim indeed delivers the highest |
| 0:40.0 | quality matches compared to other online job sites. |
| 0:44.2 | And listeners of this show will get a 100 pound sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility |
| 0:51.5 | at indeed.com slash how I built. |
| 0:55.0 | Indeed.com slash how I built. |
| 0:58.0 | Terms and conditions apply. |
| 1:00.0 | Need to hire? You need, indeed. |
| 1:03.0 | This episode is brought to you by Pipe Drive, the easy and effective CRM for closing more deals |
| 1:09.6 | and driving small business growth. New Year, new targets. Pipe drive allows you to |
| 1:14.9 | automate your sales process so you can focus on your other business priorities |
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| 1:36.0 | Hey it's Guy here and I hope your new year is off to a great start. On today's show |
| 1:41.6 | we have an episode from the archives. It's about a founder who could |
| 1:45.1 | not come up with a compelling business idea until one day he tried to set up a meeting for 15 people. And he realized that is a really hard thing to do. And from that, |
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