It may have gone unnoticed, but it's kind of weird that in the midst of AI and digital revolution, our calendars - a tool we all use on the daily - have gone without an upgrade for a while now. A few Israeli entrepreneurs, who were tired of wasting time with unnecessary meetings and unsuccessful apps, decided to develop a new calendar that’s adjusted to today’s way of life. Meet Magical, a calendar that can help you focus on getting work done.
A calendar for power users
Magical is a calendar app, but on steroids, and it looks like it's attempting to do what monday.com has done to project management apps. Magical uses automation and UI tools with systems like Slack, Zoom, Salesforce, and more, which according to the company, should help elevate your productivity.
Behind Magical stands a team of the community managers of super popular Facebook group Supertools, which counts already 30k members: CEO Tommy Barav, the former Director of Marketing at Argus, which was acquired by Continental for $450 million; CTO Tal Peretz, who founded the data science sector at the Israeli military’s Air Force Intelligence. According to the duo, the idea for Magical came following feedback from the Supertools community.
“We reverse engineered the startup process”
“Those same community members told us that their calendar was broken. It needs some rethinking. We quickly realized that they have a choice - or to go off individually and implement various complicated calendar tools, or they can bring in personal assistants and time management consultants, who probably cost a pretty penny and a good chunk of resources to not deliver a long-term solution. So, we decided to quench their calendar thirst,” explains Barav in a conversation with Geektime.
“We reverse engineered the startup process. First a strong community of users and then we developed products and services to solve their specific needs.” He states that on average an employee will waste 31 hours a month on redundant meetings, therefore Magical uses machine learning algorithms to recommend meeting organizers the optimal time for a team meeting, so as not to affect workflow.
Join the meeting, after the meeting?
Additionally, the platform allows you to be part of the meeting, even if you’re hundreds of miles away. “Anyone participating in a meeting can convert their status to ‘follower’ and receive all the info from the meeting through remote access,” explains Barav. “We’re not limiting teams to just schedule meetings via calendar, but manage the entire session through it. For the first time, teams can capture meeting and agenda summaries through the event page on the calendar, while utilizing automation tools that connect to their existing programs,” he adds.
The company built an architecture called Timeblock, which allows users to attach data from external apps to the event page. “For example, a sales team meeting can introduce blocks from Salesforce and automatically see the sales team’s performance, updated according to the time of event,” explains Barav.
He also notes that everything developed at Magical has been initially configured to help users keep focus. “Employees can schedule work for their empty calendar slots to help focus better. Magical implements automation and synchronization tools combined with project management tools to help team members seamlessly prioritize their tasks and manage their day,” Barav tells.
Magical runs a classical SaaS business model, and unlike traditional calendar apps, will charge a monthly subscription. “This may sound surprising, but we’re going to charge for the product we developed,” jokes Barav, who also notes that down the line, the company plans to turn into an ecosystem of “time related apps… We want to be the Slack of organizational time management.”
Aspiring to spark an ecosystem of scheduling apps
The Magical platform had been developed throughout this past year, and is now accepting users for a closed beta program. “We have a 5-year product roadmap, and plan to prioritize advanced technologies, and integration with popular tools, to make Magical the next generation of calendar apps,” sums up Barav.
Magical recently left stealth mode with a $3.3 million Seed round, led by Resolute Ventures, who invested in Clubhouse, as well as in Sunrise, which sold to Microsoft in 2015 for $100 million. Others who participated in the round included Ibex Investors and Aviv Growth Partners. Magical also scored funding from private investors, and from Fusion LA and Homeward Ventures as part of the Pre-Seed round. The company noted that the funds will be used to increase the product development team.
