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SAAS

How Calday Bootstrapped to $5,000 a Month With a Simple Scheduling Tool

A bootstrapped scheduling tool making $5,000 a month by keeping things simple, useful, and just functional enough to get paid.

7 Min Read
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Pavlo Grinevich did not set out to disrupt the calendar space with fancy AI integrations or yet another productivity platform claiming to change your life, instead, he focused on solving a boring but persistent problem, solopreneurs and small businesses needed a no nonsense way to let people book time with them that did not look like it was designed in 2009 and did not require five different subscriptions just to work properly.

Contents
Building From Frustration, Not InspirationHow They Made Their First DollarScaling With Realism (and a Bit of Stubbornness)Lessons Learned Along the WayWhat’s Next

Calday launched in 2023 and now brings in $5,000 per month in recurring revenue, the product was bootstrapped with minimal investment and grown almost entirely through trial and error, scrappy SEO, and slow, consistent iteration. In the words of its founder, it is not trying to be the next unicorn, just a solid piece of software people will pay for.

We launched the free version first and asked the developer community (our colleagues) to try it.. their feedback helped us fix some bugs and greatly motivated our team.

Pavlo Grinevich

Building From Frustration, Not Inspiration

Pavlo was working as a developer and struggling to manage his own meetings. Existing tools either lacked basic features like a built-in calendar or felt like they had been frozen in time. He did not set out to build a company at first. He just needed something better for himself. When nothing out there fit the bill, he pulled together a small team and built the first version of Calday in about eight months.

They had no real budget, one of the designers was already working with them on another project and helped out for minimal cost. Their marketing spend was $500 for SEO help, that was about it. The first version looked basic, lacked video platform integrations, and had a bare-bones interface, but it worked. Sometimes, working is enough to get started.

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How They Made Their First Dollar

The first paying user found them in the most old-fashioned way imaginable, a local window cleaning company booked a call through Pavlo’s personal Calday link. They liked the experience, asked what the tool was, and then asked if they could integrate it into their own website, and that one user started paying $10 a month and never left.

Growth was slow, they leaned into Reddit and LinkedIn, not because it was part of a grand marketing plan, but because that is where Pavlo already spent time. That got them about 15 free users and 7 paying ones in the early days, pay-per-click ads brought in some additional traction, but they burned through budget quickly without much return.

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Eventually they landed on the classic SaaS fallback of SEO, they wrote five blog posts, built out some basic landing pages, and waited. To their surprise, it started working and hey went from a few organic visits a week to 5-9 signups a day. When they saw this, they doubled down, they bought the .com domain, expanded industry specific landing pages, and kept writing more content.

Scaling With Realism (and a Bit of Stubbornness)

The current version of Calday is cleaner, more functional, and has most of the features solopreneurs expect. It integrates with video platforms, supports more calendar types, and looks like something built this decade but the growth has not been the result of one viral moment or clever campaign, it has been the result of consistent, sometimes tedious work.

The team now brings in $5,000 per month, with just four people behind the scenes. They still have no outside funding and no plans to chase it, the focus remains on small businesses who just need something that works without drama. While plenty of founders dream of a billion-dollar exit, Pavlo is more focused on getting to $10,000 a month without burning out.

Lessons Learned Along the Way

One of the biggest realizations was that good software does not market itself. The team underestimated how hard it would be to get even a few hundred users. SEO turned out to be the most effective strategy, but only after months of groundwork, social ads flopped, PPC worked but was too expensive, content took time but had lasting value.

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Another takeaway was that feedback matters more than features, they improved the product slowly based on what users actually asked for, not what they thought would be cool, this helped conversion rates and kept churn low. If they could go back, they would have invested in content and SEO even earlier, they would also have hired a more experienced marketer sooner instead of trying to do it all in-house

We are proud of our achievements so far, but there’s always room for improvement. If I were to restart today, I would prefer to hire an expert marketing team from the start. The good thing was that we realized the importance of SEO and quality content very early on.

Pavlo Grinevich

What’s Next

The team plans to revisit social ads after their mobile app launches, hoping the new format will be a better fit, but they are not expecting a miracle, they will test, track, and adjust like they always have.

As Pavlo puts it, “We are not trying to build the next Google Calendar. We are just trying to build something people are happy to pay $10 a month for without emailing us every week about bugs. That’s hard enough.”

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