Announcing our New Name: Meet CalendarHero
Today, Zoom.ai has a new name. This post discusses a few reasons behind the name change, our refined company mission, and what this means for our customers.
Welcome to the new us — CalendarHero! And by "new us" we mean a new name along with a sprinkling of updates to our brand: a new logo and expanded colour palette. For those of you who have been following us for a while, this name-change is likely not a shocker. It was the next step of our brand evolution, and as you'll learn, a better representation of who we are and what we do.
To be clear, we haven't changed our product. Our goal continues to be to help our customers work better through powerful, intelligent meeting scheduling automation. We're the same team doing the same thing under a new moniker.
Before we go further, here's what hasn't changed:
We still schedule meetings automatically — through our web scheduler, personal scheduling links, meeting directories, website embed, and our automated assistant for inbox and chat apps. We remain powered by artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP). None of our features have gone away (expect some new ones, though!), and we continue to maintain our 60+ app integrations.
What is different? Besides our name, we've changed the domains for our website, web application, and custom personal scheduling links.
Note to customers: your current personal scheduling links still work and automatically redirect to our new domain, so there won't be any disruption to your current meeting scheduling process. If you have questions, as always, our support team is happy to answer them. You'll also notice that the name "Zoom.ai" will continue to appear in our third-party app integrations during this transitionary period.
Now for the big question: why did we change our name?
In Summary
Our name no longer made sense: Over the years, our product evolved to focus on meeting scheduling, but our name didn't.
Our name didn’t help us stand out: Our former name didn’t have a strong connection to our new company focus (meeting scheduling automation) and it didn’t help us stand out.
We needed a name that sounded like us: If your team is spending more time explaining who you aren't rather than who you are, you know it's time for a rebrand. Our new name speaks to our values and our mission.
Our Name No Longer Made Sense
In 2016, when we first launched, we described ourselves as an automated executive assistant for every employee. Our CEO and founder, Roy Pereira, found that too many people spent too much time on admin tasks that took away from their actual jobs. As a result, people were less productive and less fulfilled.
“I used to work at a larger company, and a lot of people on my team weren’t happy because they got stuck doing admin work that wasn’t part of their job descriptions. I wanted to create something that would free up some of their time by automating lower-level tasks.”
That was the early impetus for Zoom.ai (now CalendarHero) — an automated executive assistant that handles admin tasks like finding documents, generating files, and scheduling meetings. Our former name "Zoom" represented the speed of what you could accomplish with our product: sell faster, hire faster, grow faster.
Although our product can still handle a myriad of tasks, meeting scheduling has become our focus. We found that our customers — primarily in sales, customer success, consulting, marketing, and recruitment — experience significant productivity and collaboration challenges related to meeting scheduling. With our new focus, we've released functionality like our group scheduling algorithm, web scheduler, and shared calendar availability to help teams book meetings faster and elevate their scheduling processes.
“[CalendarHero] has been a great success in being a seamless and comfortable [scheduling] tool for our leads.”
So in 2019, we officially became a meeting scheduler, but our brand stayed relatively the same. Our former name was associated with a general AI admin assistant rather than meeting scheduling software. Although our product still has an automated assistant — it is just one part of our product. Without changing our name, we found it challenging to communicate that distinction.
Our Name Didn’t Help Us Stand Out
Now, more than a year into the global pandemic, we know that remote work culture is here to stay, with many companies such as Shopify and Twitter having switched to remote working permanently. As a result, meeting scheduling solutions like ours have become essential to connect distributed teams and move businesses forward.
In 2020, we scheduled 26 times more meetings for our customers than the previous year and scheduled 120 times more video meetings. (2020 annual report)
As we continued to grow, we recognized that we would need a name to help us stand out. We weren't the only "Zoom" out there and by not changing our name, people could confuse us with other brands.
The New York Times even commented on it.
The article states that more than 120 start-ups (including our own) have names that sound like "zoom." Reading that was a good laugh and a reality check that our name problem had become a distraction from our mission.
We Needed a Name That Sounded Like Us
When your team is spending more time explaining who you aren't (rather than who you are), it's time for a rebrand. Ultimately, we needed a name that sounds like us.
Enter: CalendarHero. Our new name speaks to what we do in a clear and empowering way. If our product can be the hero of your calendar, then you can be the hero of your day. CalendarHero is much more evocative of our values of collaboration, balance, and respect than our previous name.
To accompany the new name, we redesigned our logo and refreshed our colour palette.
“The rebrand was an opportunity for the team to reflect on our values and how we’ve evolved as a company. We’re super excited about our product evolution over the last two years but had concerns that the original logo belonged to a different time. We needed a bold change to express who we are today and where we’re headed.”
After experimenting with several different intersecting shapes, the four balanced triangles connecting in the pattern of a 'C' (to signify our new name) quickly became a favourite. Do you see a rocket ship? A bird in flight? An open laptop ready for the day? We found the four connecting triangles left room for exploration, interpretation, and delight.
We've also modernized our colour palette to include more warmth and vibrancy. You’ll soon see more of our new colours in our illustrations and marketing content. Our word mark is in Europa — a modern geometric sans serif font that balances friendliness and professionalism.
The new name, logo, and colour palette are a fresh representation of our brand and purpose. And it's just the beginning. More than meeting scheduling, our mission as CalendarHero is to set a new standard in how people work and collaborate wherever they are.
Are decluttered, focused, balanced workdays possible? Absolutely.
We hope you like the new us!
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