Reflections on the sunset of the (sun)Rise

Today, Rise Calendar team announced that they are sunsetting their product by the end of March 2025. Even though I'm not particularly surprised, I am sorry to hear that they did not find their sustainable way to the market.

My experience with Rise Calendar

I discovered Rise Calendar somewhere in the middle of 2023 (when Raycast announced adding support for opening events from "My Schedule" in this app), and instantly adopted it. At that point, I was already dissatisfied with Fantastical and examining alternatives.

The app was very promising! On top of sleek and performant (Cron-like, one could say) user interface, it also integrated smart scheduling features:

• Seamless meeting creation flow (probably the best I've seen), where you start with whom are you inviting, then optionally change the duration, and then the app chooses the best time to meet for you, and suggests other slots when everyone is available.
• Focus Guard feature that analyzes your week and blocks some time slots for deep work automatically if it "sees" that you have too many meetings scheduled already.
• Flexible Meetings feature that automatically reschedules a meeting for you when necessary. This is useful e.g. if something more critical comes up (like rescheduling a 1:1 meeting with your teammate when your CEO invites you to a strategic discussion all of a sudden). Or, if it just notices some meetings that could be batched together, to give you more uninterrupted time for your deep work.

Moreover, they offered all of that for free! Because they were hoping to monetize the teams and businesses using Rise, and not individuals.

Their mobile app was in its early stages at that point, but the desktop app was decent, and I thought: "Yes, this is the calendar app for my upcoming years!"

The pivotal point

I remember writing this in their Telegram community about a year ago:

Speaking of Rise, its main focus is not combining task management and calendar, IMO.
The product's main vector of innovations is calendar management automation, and thus the closest competitor is probably Motion (but Motion's UX is far from being perfect in comparison to Rise, and it's a bit feature-bloated, IMO).
Key features of Rise that stand out are automatic meeting time suggestions, flexible meetings and focus guard. And, of course, polished speedy UX (Linear is a great analogy here, indeed).
Even though flexible meetings and focus guard sometimes feel unreliable to me (because of their sometimes unpredictable behaviour), I still think these features are remarkably promising and future-proof as a competitive advantage.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. The team found these innovative smart calendar features were not getting enough traction, and pivoted into transforming an outstanding calendar tool into a "calendar-based project management tool".

Personally, I don't think it was the best idea, as they could hardly compete with the other dedicated tools for that purpose, like Linear. I also did not feel like there is actually a need for such a tool on the market (but was hoping to be wrong).

The switch of focus influenced Rise UI heavily. I practically could not use just the calendar itself: they pushed tasks and projects forward too intensely.

That was the moment when I left Rise Calendar behind. I was still trying to come back to it occasionally… but it just was no longer a calendar app. And it could not replace task management or project management tools either, neither for me personally nor for my team.

Passion for the product is not enough

The team behind Rise Calendar has been very passionate about their product all along the way. They had the background of launching apps and communicating methodologies. They had the data-driven vision, friendly collaboration and the necessary skills. Furthermore, they poured their souls into the product. They designed, engineered, polished and optimized the app like crazy. They actively and openly communicated with their user base.

The team's original vision was not the one I thought it was, though. They were not trying to create just an astonishing calendar, like Cron or Amie (even though they actually excelled in doing that). They were trying to optimize the workplace, win back the wasted inefficient work hours of the teams across the globe.

But they did not focus enough on this problem, despite the initial positive feedback. Not because it was irrelevant, but because the solution they came up with (creating an outstanding calendar app) was too difficult to implement. It takes much, much more time than one can ever imagine building a decent calendar app.

Scheduling engine that was at the core of Rise was by itself a significant challenge that required huge amount of effort and innovation to make it actually valuable and usable.

I believe if the team focused their innovation effort around the engine they could have come up with a solution that achieves its original purpose without the need to build a complex UI for years.

Instead, they've built an outstanding calendar app (that could compete with Fantastical, Notion Calendar or Amie) with mediocre smart scheduling engine features that confused the users. And when that did not work, they pivoted even more, into a similarly complex product that could not possibly survive the competition with Linear or Jira or other project management tools.

I do not know how much effort and money was poured into the app marketing over the years. But I would argue that the problem with the product was not the weak marketing: it was the lack of focus on the product vision, which resulted in product strategy with multiple pivots, and with the users not understanding the real value that the product could potentially bring into their lives.

Farewell

With all due respect to the team, I appreciate their effort, and I'm glad that I used to be the part of their user base at some point. Good luck to them in their new efforts in fixing the future of tools for work!