28Apr

Presdo – Make time to *insert thing here*

By David in Launched, Startups

Presdo is a new online scheduling web application that makes scheduling extremely easy. Founder Eric Ly spent $35,000 of his own money developing Presdo, while coding most of the website himself. He quit his job at Linked In on Friday, and started developing Presdo on Saturday. That was back in April, 2006. Presdo was built using technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Ajax, and the LAMP stack.

The main page is a google inspired search box. It’s very simplistic, but works extremely well, and is straight forward to use. You just type in your upcoming event into the little search box, hit enter, and wait for the magic to happen.

Automatically Presdo stores the date (it knew when “next Saturday” was), and the people I’m meeting. I didn’t have to do anything – it was already there! It saved some of my precious time by not making me fill out those steps afterwords. Since Jon doesn’t wake up till 5pm, I’ll change our meeting time to 6pm. Again, very easy to do with a nice inline editor.

It’s very easy to add in a location, with the google map integration. If you’re a registered user, Presdo automatically shows public places at the location you registered with.

Presdo plans to impliment paid accounts in the future, and hopefully that will provide them with a steady revenue stream. I think Presdo hit upon a good market. Online scheduling is a competitive niche, but with the extreme ease of use, they achieved a good userbase. Without a lot of money and connections, you can’t (normally) target a niche head on. You need to put a new twist on an old idea, and that’s exactly what Presdo did.

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6 Responses to “Presdo – Make time to *insert thing here*”

  • Jon:
    April 28th, 2008
    2:39 am

    Looks like a similar concept to iwantsandy(.com) although iwantsandy works via email.

    This got an uncharacteristically positive review over at techcrunch, it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out.

    http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/25/presdo-the-magical-online-scheduler/

  • Seb:
    April 28th, 2008
    2:47 am

    $35,000 hardly seems like a “bootstrapping” startup to me. I thought you were covering lower-cost startups. Isn’t that the point of this site?

  • Jon:
    April 28th, 2008
    2:52 am

    The term “bootstrapping” doesn’t directly refer to the amount of money spent on a startup but refers to not having any external investors.

    See: http://is.gd/9xr

    Also, in the whole run of things, $35,000 is incredibly cheap.

  • Seb:
    April 28th, 2008
    11:45 am

    I disagree. I could get something similar done for $10k>. It’s a matter of who you know/what you think I guess. All i’m saying is i’d like to see people with small budgets (what we would consider virtually nothing) achieve big things.

  • Julian:
    April 28th, 2008
    1:30 pm

    Seb, $35,000 for an application of this calibur in the developing start-up world is very cheap. Startups are slowly learning to cut down on expenses, so what may seem like an incredibly overpriced sum to you, may be very inexpensive to some.

  • ali:
    May 6th, 2008
    10:05 am

    hi,

    i like this site, but this post has been the latest for over a week or something, … update your content

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