GTFO Ventures Launches Calmighty – A New Take On Social Calendars

Helsinki-based GTFO Ventures has launched a new calendar app Calmighty, which they call the “Twitter of Calendars”. Calmighty is designed to integrate with your native calendar with the option to follow events you like.

The app has the “follow” feature to provide more value to calendar users – you can add Hockey, NFL, NBA, Formula 1 and other sport schedules to be shown visually in your calendar. “We currently partner with the Finnish National Basketball League, Mestis, Salibandyliiga, Koff [SM-liiga hockey] and UFC fighter Anton Kuivanen. So Finland is covered already, and user data will be used for international expansion in the following months.” says Tomi Kaukinen, CEO and founder.

“We’re offering ‘a too good to be true’ deal for sport clubs. We tell them that they can get their club’s events in a calendar that syncs with your native calendar for free and without any strings attached. We basically tell them to give us your logos and game schedules. The only thing we need for them is to market it in their social media. It’s not a lot of work and there’s a huge upside,” says Kaukinen.

“You’ll probably be getting more people to your game or watching it on television, meaning you’ll get better business,” adds Laakkonen.

“Choosing AC Milan games in your calendar tells you a lot more about what you like than just a “Like” on Facebook making it attractive for advertisers. So, in a nutshell – fans use it, clubs market it and Mad Men pay for it” Kaukinen ends.

Calmighty also offers a new take on calendar visualization by showing a clock face with a hand showing the current time. All of your future events appear as wedges on the clock face, helping you easily visualize what’s happening in the next 12 hours.

If you want to look further in the future you can spin the clock hand to move forward in time. I find it intuitive because it helps you immediately picture the busy parts of your schedule and it’s kind of fun to scroll through event descriptions. From the company’s perspective, this style of visualization is handy because it offers the ability for Calmighty to brand the clock face, or the space around the clock. Finnish Basketball League will be the first party to use this option to brand the app with the team logos and colours you’re following.

When you need to see your events and meetings in a different format, you can also view them as a list, or on a standard calendar month format. In addition to this Calmighty has deeper Facebook integration than iOS6 providing an option to just get Accepted events to your calendar rather than the “all or nothing”-approach iOS6 offers.

If it’s not apparent in the name, for marketing GTFO Ventures is going for the “unnecessarily rude” aesthetic. One example of their style is a picture of a rioter’s hand with stones with the tag “Calmighty – never miss your favourite events”. When pitching for the Start-up sauna the “Team” related picture was a picture where Aleksi and Tomi was in strip club with cigars in their mouths.

It will be interesting to see how this marketing style will work for them. Rather than being intrigued, my reaction to first their first press release (which included a picture of a Ku Klux Klan meeting) I got sent was, “Why is a calendar app getting all racist and swearing at me? I don’t have time to figure this out… Archive.”

But after talking to the guys, they seem like they’re having a good time pushing the limits of social calendars. “We think the app industry needs a little bit of shaking,” says Kaukinen. “When you look at other concepts and teams, they break out from their old jobs looking for freedom and start a firm but immediately adapt to the business world from which they fled.” Kaukinen says.

“We do all the things the way we could not do when working for JPMorgan or Procter&Gamble. We want to make app developers rock stars.” Kaukinen adds.

Calmighty can be found on the App Store right now, and on Google Play the second week of October. 

GTFO Ventures has secured funding from Tekes, ELY-keskus, Finnvera and three angel investors. Their intention is to secure additional financing for international expansion before end of the year.