TMCBAE - Avoid Bad Meetings

TMCBAE, short for This Meeting Could Be An Email, allow you to connect your Google Calendar and invite your teammates so everyone can vote if a meeting could be better or if its already effective.

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Inspiration

I have been working remotely for companies around the world for the last decade and it has been clear to me that the most productive teams are the ones who actively work to maintain their calendar schedule effective.

Imagine what a small team, with a significant amount of time dedicated to deep work every week, can achieve. The potential is truly incredible. Conversely, I've witnessed numerous teams struggle with productivity, despite having exceptional talent, simply because they don't allow for uninterrupted deep work. Instead, they are constantly interrupted by meetings, many of which add little value.

Not all meetings are bad, but many companies don't understand how to work in a remote environment, so scheduling a meeting for everything is their go-to process. Throughout my career, I could help some teams I worked with to improve their schedule, and the results were amazing.

These experiences inspired me to build TMCBAE. I wanted to build something that would help other teams experience how effective they can be by constantly evaluating their meetings and speaking up about the ones that are draining a lot of resources from the company without providing significant value.

What it does

TMCBAE allows you to invite your team and connect your Google Calendars so everyone can evaluate which meetings are already effective and which could be better. If enough people vote that a meeting could be better, it turns into a match, and the team can collaborate on improving it. The outcome can be turning that meeting into a different process, such as recording a Loom and sharing with the attendees, or even canceling it.

How we built it

TMCBAE is currently available for iOS only and was entirely implemented using Swift and SwiftUI. It also uses Firebase for authentication and a remote database, SQLite for storing information that doesn't need to stay on our servers locally, the Google Calendar API to fetch meetings, RevenueCat to manage the subscription purchase and unlock premium content, and Amplitude for analytics purposes.

Challenges we ran into

Building a "Tinder-like" application was challenging as a single developer. Here are some of the challenges faced during the development of this application:

  • Integrating with the Google Calendar API
  • Figuring out how to put together a matchmaking system by using Firestore alone, without Cloud Functions, to avoid high costs
  • Implementing a solid multi-team system to segregate data from different teams an user might be part of
  • Fixing Apple sign-in-related bugs :(

Accomplishments that we're proud of

From the technical perspective:

  • Implementing a functional "Tinder-like" application with a single developer working on it
  • Being able to ship the multi-team functionality in the v1
  • Being able to put together an one-to-many subscription format (Thanks to RevenueCat, it wouldn't be possible without them)

From the user's perspective:

  • To finally DO something to help a broader audience spend less time in meetings and more time building!

What we learned

Honestly, the biggest thing I have learned so far is how RevenueCat can help validate my ideas as actual businesses. All the other "tech stuff" I used in this project is pretty well-known to me, as I've already built many apps with them, but it was my first time with RevenueCat, and I'm super excited to create many subscription-based apps with it.

What's next for TMCBAE - Avoid Bad Meetings

The next step is to get it in people's hands, understand if it already helps them to have more deep focus time at work, and listen to how we can improve it.

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