Case study
From concept to €50k ARR within six months of launch, against Calendly.
- Company
- lemcal
- My role
- Product Manager at lemlist
- Team
- Initial three-person product team
01The situation
lemcal is a scheduling product built inside lemlist. I joined its initial three-person product team and owned product, positioning, marketing and acquisition, working closely with engineering.
02The problem
Calendly owns the category and the word. Building a better scheduling utility is a losing argument: the incumbent is good enough, already installed, and free at the entry tier.
03My role
Product, positioning, marketing and acquisition. I did not build lemcal; the engineering team did. My job was deciding what it should be and getting people to switch to it.
04What the data showed
Treat the booking page as a piece of personal branding rather than a utility. A scheduling link is one of the most shared URLs a professional owns, and Calendly's is anonymous.
That reframes the comparison. You are no longer a cheaper Calendly; you are the version that looks like you.
05The decision
Aimed at people who already had a scheduling link and an audience that saw it, so switching cost was the only real objection and the product answered it visually.
06The result
Concept to €50k ARR within six months of launch. More than 1,000 existing Calendly users switched to lemcal.
07What I learned
Against an incumbent, the winning move was changing what the product is for, not what it does. Feature parity would have been a slower way to lose.
Owning acquisition as well as product made the positioning testable in weeks instead of quarters.
08What I would verify next
I can state the ARR and the number who switched. I do not have the conversion rate or the cohort behaviour behind them, and I would not claim either without the data.