lemcal

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.

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.

02What changed my mind

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.

03The 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.

04What changed

Concept to €50k ARR within six months of launch. More than 1,000 existing Calendly users switched to lemcal.

05What I’d do differently

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.

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.