Why Build Calendly Around the Customer?

Tope Awotona says the lesson 13 years into Calendly is to build a business around a customer and not a product, and he calls that shift maybe the biggest thing he thinks about differently 13 years on. First-time entrepreneurs who are still learning have a tendency to think product first. Customer first is the view now, and it is what guides the company while the product expands.

Once a customer is acquired, served really well, and given a brand, it is a lot easier to expand with that existing customer type than it is to go try to expand the different types of customers served. Ultimately, over time, a company needs to do both.