What I learned building a scheduling tool while still doing the job it's meant to fix

I work as a conference producer. A reasonable chunk of the job involves coordinating meetings — briefing calls, panel planning sessions, stakeholder check-ins — across different organisations, often different countries, almost always different calendar systems.

At some point last year I started actually counting. How many emails does it take to confirm a single external meeting? How many days pass between the first "we should get on a call" and the invite landing in everyone's diary?

The answers were worse than I expected. Fourteen emails for one panel planning call. Eleven days from first message to confirmed meeting for another. Not because anything went wrong. Not because anyone was difficult. Just because that's how it works.

Why I built something instead of accepting it

What bothered me wasn't the effort. It was the type of effort. Every step of the process — gathering availability replies, working out the overlap, translating timezones by hand, confirming the time, sending the invite, following up with the person who hadn't responded — none of it required any real judgement. It was information processing. The kind of thing that should, in theory, just happen.

The tools that exist for scheduling had mostly solved a different problem: how to share your own availability with one other person. Useful in its own context. Not much help when you're trying to coordinate five people from five different organisations who don't share a calendar system with each other.

So I built something for that specific case. That's Whenn.

What building it while living the problem actually teaches you

There's something useful about building a tool for a problem you encounter every week. You have a very direct feedback loop. You can't convince yourself something is working when it isn't, because you're the one using it.

The part I spent the most time on was calendar connection. Most of the people being invited to a Whenn meeting wouldn't have heard of it before receiving the link. Asking them to connect a calendar needed to feel trustworthy and frictionless, not like handing over access to something private. The answer was to keep it genuinely minimal. Whenn reads free/busy information only — never event titles, attendees, or any other calendar details. Participants can disconnect at any time. What gets shared is anonymous availability, nothing more. That principle matters because the whole product depends on participants feeling comfortable doing it once, and then never having to think about it again.

The other thing building it taught me is how differently I think about scheduling compared with someone who does it occasionally. I notice edge cases that most people never encounter. I care about timezone handling in ways that probably don't register for someone booking a quarterly review with their own team. That's useful for building the right thing, but it also means I have to work harder to see the product through someone else's eyes.

What the product has taught me

The AutoWhenn confirmation — the moment when a meeting just confirms itself, with no one pressing anything — is the bit I find most satisfying. Not because it's technically impressive, but because I know exactly what it replaces. Hours of coordination work, collapsed into a notification.

First-time users don't have that context yet. To them, it's just an email that says the meeting is confirmed. Which is, of course, the point — it should feel completely unremarkable, because the meeting just sorted itself out.

The coordination overhead of group external meetings is real, it's consistent, and it's mostly invisible. It doesn't show up anywhere. It just shows up as time. If you work in events, recruitment, consulting, or anywhere that involves regularly pulling external groups of people together, you already know what I mean.

Whenn was built to take that off your plate. Free to start at meetwhenn.com.

Whenn handles the entire coordination process — automatically.

Add participants by email, they connect their calendar, AutoWhenn finds the best slot and sends everyone an invite.