Product Market Fit is the moment when you have built software that solves an actual problem, people are willing to pay for it and they like it. For startup founders, there is a lot written on this topic.
For me, Belt is approximately my 6th product. At this point, I have very good intuition when we are about to hit that milestone. For Belt, that will be in August/September. As you can guess, we are pushing quite hard to be ready for #ILTACON and #AI4 conferences in mid-August.
The journey simply started with a complaint. “I am overwhelmed by the number of emails I receive, and I am worried about missing something important.”
We started interviewing many people across multiple industries and realized that this complaint was a universal problem stemming from hybrid work. To mediate the fact that individuals are in-office less frequently, the number of meetings and communications media has ballooned. What was once a simple “Can you respond to x?” or “What are you working on?” when people were physically located together in-office, has become much more difficult.
Based on this input, we began to build Belt. The key features we hoped to build upon were AI to find request language (“please do something for me”), automated alerts to prevent people from missing important emails, as well as a unified calendar that combines tasks, meetings and deadlines. A major element we put heavy focus on was making virtual task management work the way most people actually manage their tasks.
Why we chose a calendar and an Outlook add-in sidebar as our end user interface is simple. Every knowledge worker needs a calendar, and everyone lives in their email.
Neither Microsoft nor Google have significantly innovated their calendars in their core applications. In fact, Microsoft has picked Planner as the de facto location where tasks should be managed. Our decision became simple: to encourage adoption, you need to replace something, and the most logical choice was the calendar.
We began demonstrating Belt in January 2024. Many of the critical comments from people were things I should have known. Here are some of the key questions and takeaways prospective clients left us with:
1) “You need to able to use the application as much as possible from within Outlook.”
2) “What happens when an email is sent to multiple people, and everyone wonders who is going to respond or take on the task?” We call this the “hand raise problem”.
3) “When I use the Outlook add-in, make it more contextual.”
4) “If you are going to replace Outlook Calendar, you need to have a grid view.”
5) “What about all those tasks that exist in other systems, can you give me one pane of glass for my day in a calendar?”
Based on that feedback, the team has worked hard to build a product that provides tremendous value to its clients. This led us to hone-in on three themes - more sources, a better calendar and a single pane of glass.
From these three key themes, we expanded our vision. Some significant Belt highlights include:
- Expanding from email into Teams - We now support the ability to emoji a request and we now automatically import any Team call/huddle and all invited meetings and how long you have attended.
- A more inventive calendar UI to provide two flavors – a view that integrates tasks and events together, or a traditional grid mode with tasks on the side.
- Build an event from a meeting with minimal clicks – No more copy and pasting email addresses in infinitum.
- More flexible reporting – Managers can report on their team or project activity. Managers are better able to answer the question, “What are people busy doing?”
- Projects and Tasks located on your calendar - One of the challenges with project management, CRM and collaboration software is that people need to remember to go to those locations and update them. We are solving this by bringing the projects and the tasks themselves onto people’s calendars (aka single pane of glass).
- Providing the ability to send the task and meeting data from Belt
Belt offers all these features, and many more. Not only that, we are working daily to bring even more features and value adds to Belt, to help you tackle this modern hybrid world.
Catch us as at ILTA and AI4 this year, and please reach out if you would like to see what new features and offerings are on the horizon at Belt.
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