skorisep

This!!! This is exactly where we shine. There is still a lot of work that we have to do (especially on an individual level). But we try to understand as much about an industry, organization, culture, and person as possible to infer those human dynamics that make scheduling such a human problem.

And each industry differs with this respect. So we collect the data and generalize it across our customers if they fit the group: all while giving them enough flexibility to schedule their own individual way.

This is why we believe it is important to have a self-learning and adapting system as well.

Hahaha. Good question. It was actually inspired by the Sanskrit word referencing time or a unit of time.

But it also allows our customers to be lazy :).

Thats absolutely correct @arrsingh. Apologies for the gaps.

Great question! We have a lot of friends in the b2c space. What Vela is designed for is the subset of scheduling where nothing in the market works, specifically for businesses. Think a staffing firm coordinating across candidates, clients, recruiters, and client development to schedule interviews/meetings. Or another one doing 1,000+ interviews a week, wrangling across phone, SMS, and email. These are scenarios where companies tried every tool out there and eventually just did it themselves because tools couldn't meet their customers where they are and didn't handle the workflows/behaviors of their industries.

Thank you very much! We are actually already working with some of the largest US executive search firms (don't have a case study out yet), solving for that exact 'high-touch' scheduling hurdle. If you are ever curious, we would love to share more: https://tryvela.ai/book-demo

Thank you! Awesome question. There are a few factors at play here.

One is friction on the other side. With Doodle you're asking someone to click a link, open a UI, parse a grid of times, check boxes, and sometimes connect an account. That's a real ask, especially for someone external who has no relationship with the tool. With Vela they just reply "Tuesday works" in the thread they are already in.

But beyond reducing friction, Vela is also doing the actual coordination work: herding people, following up with non responders, suggesting specific times that work best (not just available ones), handling rescheduling, and closing the loop. It's closer to what a human coordinator does than what a poll does.

Our customers are mostly folks coordinating 30+ meetings a week across multiple people. For them, time spent compounds significantly.

Doodle is great too btw, but it really only works well when the people involved already know each other and at a small scale. Vela is built for the more complicated scenarios where companies have tried everything and decided nothing works but putting a team member on the job.

This is awesome! Completely agree: modeling each real life scenario as a constraint satisfaction problem is tricky in and of itself (especially with the diversity of non-intersecting constraints we encounter) and something we are actively working on. Using LLMs as a layer above has made it much more tractable. Curious how the bocce scheduling has fared in real world scenarios. How was the performance?

Absolutely! That's how we view scheduling as a problem as well. Much larger than finding times on calendars and more about coordination of systems and people.

Thank you! That's very interesting and something we are going to double click on. Are you referring to scheduling within a hospital or across hospitals?