Lessons from CommandDot

CommandDot was the world’s fastest and friendliest way to get more meetings you want.

CommandDot brought Calendar into Inbox, making sharing availability for meetings 17,465x faster than manually tabbing-and-typing. Its Availability Links let the people you wanted to meet see their own calendar events alongside your openings, offering the friendliest way to find overlapping availability.

In December 2019, it started as a Chrome Extension that connected Google Calendar to GMail, then grew to support Superhuman and Outlook 365 Calendar. Timezone support was one of its most beloved features, converting the user’s availability into any timezone on earth using city and country shorthand names to make the conversion in milliseconds. After getting confirmation of a meeting time, users could create calendar events directly from Inbox using the extension, including automatically including participants from the current email thread on the meeting invite. It supported attaching meeting links for Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams.

Version 2 brought fully interactive calendar views into the Chrome Extension so users could understand the availability slots they were sharing in the context of their existing schedules, and could customize their availability to add or remove slots based on the urgency of getting the meeting.

In 2021, it added Availability Links that shared a subset of available times in an inventively playful interface that included support for displaying the viewer’s calendar events from Google, Microsoft, Calendly, Cal.com, Cron, Motion, or, Vimcal, inline imposed on the available meeting slots, including offering an industry leading data-less connection guaranteeing recipients’ data stayed private.

It was available in six handsome colors that adjusted to match users’ light and dark mode settings. For every hour its users saved finding time for meetings, it sponsored a tree being planted in California.

It shut down at the end of 2022 when it was clear consumer scheduling behavior was not going to revert to pre-2020 norms, making its advantages over more rigid scheduling tools competitively moot.

Between 2019-2022, 19 people contributed their talents to its development. Most of the work was done in a sunny loft space near San Francisco’s South Park. It was backed by some of Silicon Valley’s best early-stage investors, including Bling Capital, BoxGroup, Foundation Capital, Tribe Capital, and 44 angel investors.