Why Does Scheduling Have to Be So Difficult?
We live in 2026, but if you have to find a time to touch base with people, the process breaks down as soon as you have more than 2 people and hell breaks loose if anyone is outside your org.
Hello & Welcome back to my corner of the internet! 👋
I’m Adi, and this is my space where I share things I’ve learned, built, and occasionally broken as a product enthusiast. If you’re new here and interested in the world of Product & Business, welcome aboard, please do consider subscribing.
Now, if you’ve been here before, you’ll know it has been a while since my last post. Well, life happened in the best possible way. I quit my founding product role after raising (almost) 3 rounds, moved countries, got into one of the top MiM programs, spent some time consulting across a range of industries (for AI companies, Big Logos & also a few unexpected industry leaders), and most recently joined Stripe.
Plenty to unpack there, and I will get to it, just not today.
What today is, is a comeback. I’ve been wanting to find my way back to writing for some time now, and a Lovable hackathon last week gave me exactly the push I needed.
In today’s edition, we’ll dig into why scheduling is still such a broken experience in 2026, and how I attempted to solve it.
Let’s talk about the problem
Picture this. You need to set up a meeting with 4 people. Maybe it’s a partnership call, a product review, a catch-up with your advisory network - doesn’t matter. The moment you have more than 2 people involved, and at least one of them is outside your company, the whole thing becomes a logistical nightmare.
You send a message asking for availability. One person replies within minutes. Another replies 19 hours later saying next week works better. A third person asks you to “send a few slots.” And someone, inevitably, does not reply at all until you follow up.
You end up spending more time coordinating the meeting than the meeting itself is worth. And somehow, in 2026, we have collectively decided this is just... normal.
I find that genuinely strange. We have AI writing our code, agents booking our flights, and tools that can generate a 50-slide deck from a paragraph. But coordinating 5 people’s calendars still devolves into a Reply All thread.
Real problem isn't the tools, but the paradigm
Most of the scheduling tools that exist today are built around a specific mental model: one person is in charge, and everyone else submits to them.
Calendar infrastructure is organizationally siloed. Google Calendar, Outlook, and Apple Calendar are designed to manage one person’s time within one organizations ecosystem. When cross-org coordination is needed, the tools have no mechanism for mutual visibility. The result is a coordination vacuum filled by email threads, WhatsApp polls, and spreadsheets, all of which are asynchronous & anxiety-inducing.
Calendly, for example, is brilliant at what it does. You set your availability, you share a link, someone books a slot. Clean, fast, no friction. But that model assumes a hierarchy - the person sharing the link has authority over the time. It works wonderfully for 1:1 booking, like scheduling a sales demo or a coffee chat.
The moment you need to coordinate a group across organizations, it completely falls apart. There is no shared infrastructure. Google Calendar can find a free slot for your own team, but the moment someone on Outlook or from a different company is in the mix (which is fairly common in our kind of work), you're back to manual chaos.
This is what I'd call a paradigm error. Every tool treats scheduling as a permission problem, where one person grants others access to a window in their calendar. But group scheduling is actually a consensus problem, where multiple people need to find a mutual truth together. Those are fundamentally different challenges, and no one has really built natively for the latter.
That gap is where I wanted to play.
A hackathon, a notes app, and a very old idea
I have had this product idea sitting in my notes app for an embarrassingly long time. I kept coming back to it every few months, adding a bullet point or two, and then getting distracted by other things. It was one of those ideas that felt obvious but somehow hadn’t been built properly yet.
So when Lovable came to Dogpatch Labs for a hackathon, I finally had a forcing function. I sat down, opened that note, and started building.
The product is called Touchbase.
The core idea is simple. One person creates an event, marks their available times on a calendar canvas, shares a link, & everyone else layers in their own availability. No back & forth required and the best mutual slot just becomes obvious from the overlap.
You can try it here: Touchbase.
What made this fun to build was not just the “what”, it was constantly asking the “why” and the “how” behind every design decision. A lot of my product thinking over the years has been shaped by what I’ve picked up from Lenny’s Podcast, and I found myself running through those principles in real time while building.
Here are a few of the questions I kept coming back to:
What is the actual job to be done here?
The surface-level answer is “find a meeting time.” But the real job is to coordinate without creating friction or too much “work” for the other side. The organiser doesn’t just want a time, but they want a system that doesn’t make them look disorganised or demanding in the process. And the participant, doesn’t want to sign up to another tool or respond to 10 emails just to say they’re free on a friday afternoon.
The product had to respect both of those realities simultaneously.
What is the real MVP, and what is just what the AI tools calls “theater”?
It’s easy to add features that feel productive but don’t actually serve the core interaction. The grid, the heatmap, the real-time update when someone else responds, those are the product. Everything else is secondary. I tried to stay honest about what the MVP actually needed to do - find the time that works for almost everyone.
What should feel magical on first use?
For me, the magic moment is when a participant submits their availability and the heatmap updates live for everyone viewing the same link. No waiting for an email response or following up with everyone in the email thread. The grid just becomes more alive as more people respond. That moment of shared, real-time experience is what I wanted people to walk away remembering.
What I built and how it works
TouchBase works in three steps:
1. The organiser creates the event. They enter a meeting name, their name, and add in their preferred availability for the event. This they can do by dragging across the calendar grid to mark when they’re free. One click generates a shareable link.
2. Participants open the link and add their availability. No account required. They enter a name, drag across the same grid to mark their own free windows, and submit. The heatmap updates in real time as more people respond, showing which time slots have the most overlap.
3. The organiser locks in the time. Once responses are in, the best overlapping slots are surfaced clearly. The organiser picks one and locks it. Everyone gets a clear outcome, and the meeting can be added to their calendar.
The whole thing is no-login, and is designed to feel fast & lightweight.
Now, is probably a good time to ask if you have any feedback / requests / ideas?
Product Philosophy behind the build
A few principles that guided how I thought about & I think worth articulating:
Mutuality over authority. Every other scheduling tool implicitly communicates that one person’s time matters more than everyone else’s. TouchBase is designed so that everyone’s availability is equally visible and equally weighted.
Zero friction UX as product strategy. Small things matter a lot - the no-login flow, the product experience, heatmaps, visibility into other’s preferred slots. These are not nice-to-haves layered on top, but the product itself.
The product ends at coordination. TouchBase is not trying to be a calendar, a meeting notes app, or a project management tool (yet). It does one thing: it helps groups find a time to meet. Then gets out of the way.
Where it goes from here?
TouchBase in its current form is an early, functional version of the idea. There is a long list of things I want to build into it over time: Google Calendar integration to automatically map your availability & select your “preferred” slots or block out your focus times, a cleaner mobile experience, smarter best-slot recommendations that factor in timezones, locations & in-person meeting, & deeper integration with the tools people already use like Slack and Gmail, and even having an optional login flow to manage all your event, integrations & calendars.
For now, the most valuable thing is to get real people using it and telling me what breaks, what confuses them, and what they actually need.
What do I need from You?
If you’ve ever experienced the pain of coordinating a group meeting across companies or time zones, I’d love for you to try TouchBase: letstouchbase.lovable.app
Create a meeting, share the link with a few people, and see if it actually makes the process less painful. Then please come back and tell me honestly whether it’s better than the chaos we’ve all normalized, or where it still falls short.
Thank you for taking the time to read through this rather long newsletter. I hope this helped and I’m glad to be back to my writing phase. If you liked this, please subscribe to my newsletter and share it with your network.
I’m here to share my journey and resources with you, so feel free to reach out with your progress or any suggestions for future topics.
Let’s keep learning and growing together.
Best,
Adi the PM