Company attributes
Other attributes
Cron offers a calendar to help people manage their time. The company's software streamlines workflows, integrates other productivity tools, and enables collaboration. The features of the calendar include meeting scheduling, time zone conversions, multiple accounts, a clean interface, dark mode, and others. People at companies like Notion, GitHub, and Shopify use Cron as their default calendar.
Main Cron window
After finishing Y Combinator in winter 2020, Cron raised a $3.5M Seed round led by Garry Tan at Initialized Capital, with participation from Elad Gil (investor and advisor to companies like Airtable, Brex, GitLab), Jeff Weiner (former CEO of LinkedIn), Dylan Field (Co-founder CEO of Figma), Jeremy Le Van (Co-founder of Sunrise Calendar), and others.
The main Cron window has the features of a calendar app with a week view in the center, a month view in the corner and a list of active calendars on the left. The company directly mentions Sunrise, a calendar product acquired by Microsoft, as an inspiration. Cron also has a column on the right side of the main window. When a user clicks on an event, they get details about the event in that column. From there, they can change the time and date, add a participant, or a conference link and others. When users change the duration of an event or move it to another day, the week view is updated in real time for a preview before hitting Enter. If users haven’t picked an event, Cron shows the next event alongside a button to join the meeting if there’s a video-conferencing URL attached to that event. Cron lets users create an event with a command menu. They can use a keyboard shortcut to schedule the event with natural language.
Raphael Schaad articulated his vision for his startup:
“We want to build the time layer of the internet.”
Users can also search for events or people from that menu. They can share availability in an email or WhatsApp conversation. The scheduling feature involves using a keyboard shortcut to enter a different mode called “Share availability”. Users can select time blocks in their calendar directly. It generates a text block they can copy and paste in Gmail or Messages. Users can also see the availability of teammates. In the sidebar, they can add someone they’re working with, show and hide their calendar to see their availability, and click on their names in order to drag and drop those names in the calendar to create an event with them. Cron is available to some users in early access and the app supports Google accounts with plans to support Microsoft and iCloud accounts. Additionally, it supports Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Whereby, BlueJeans, Around, Skype and Google Duo.
