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Comment by scottfr | Hacker News Reader

I think you and others on this thread are being much too harsh on their messaging.

Most people who have the need this product is meeting will have already encountered Calendly as it is ubiquitous in the space. It's basically a generic term like "Zoom" at this point. "I'll send you my Calendly link" is something people will understand to mean send you a meeting scheduling link.

So "An open source Calendly alternative" is quite clear for most people who want to make use of this.

Their messaging is focused on reaching people who might use it, not the people who won't. As you note, after going through the site, the product is not something relevant to you.

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yeah, it's pretty much how "Twitter clone" tells you as much about the expected feature set as half a page on microblogging, follow and share protocols, tagging and push notifications.

I think they could improve the below-the-fold description quite a bit, but the two words "Calendly alternative" convey the important bit about it being a customer-facing time-slot picker that connects to all your calendars, CRMs and webconferencing tools more precisely than "appointment scheduler" which might miss these features and lock you into various others, and probably gets more relevant search traffic too.

A strange take to say that was too harsh, when, the whole point was that it could be clearer? That's rather mild and constructive.

The counter argument that clear communication isn't all that necessary, because the people looking to receive this knowledge already should know this?

the message is clear, if you're in the target group.

that's good communication.

filters out non-prospects early.

Maybe I missed a sarcasm tag, but I found your statement to be puzzling, for a lack of less kind words.

What I'm saying, and others are saying, is that even for someone looking for exactly this, it would be easier for that person to know they found exactly this, with a more clear message about what this is.

And what you seem to be saying, unless I misunderstood, is that this is a good thing? Surely the non-prospects as you put it, would also more easily find themselves being non-prospects if they knew what this was?

Just in case this is perceived as stemming from annoyance, I can assure you that I'm not at all invested. However, I do find your take, puzzling. I hope this isn't a trend in IT-solution marketing I'm not aware of.

The 'trend' is that as an open source clone, Calendso doesn't have a marketing team behind it, so it's entirely true to point out that their landing page doesn't have the polish we've come to expect of a VC-backed unicorn company with a time-proven, expensive marketing firm taking pictures and writing website copy, and that it could do better.

What I think some are reacting to is that it's also unfair to expect that. The person looking for an "open-source Calendly alternative" knows they've found that because that's going to be what, by brand name, what they're looking for and will know they've found something that addresses that need, with those three words.

I'm honestly just confused by the comments here. No one is having unmet high expectations. There is also nothing unfair here.

You don't need a marketing team to write a single line giving a high-overview description of a solution. Pointing out that such a thing would be helpful is also absolutely ridiculous to reject to the extent as I've seen here.

If an open source project want to identify themselves exclusively through a competitor, then, I'm sure that's fine. However, to avoid sounding like a parrot, I'll leave it at that. Have a nice day

its not a trend. but when a project is early you don't want mass appeal. you want narrow appeal, only the folks that "lean in". so then you get a solid base to build from.

they are at level-1 and you are clearly a prospect once they are level-3+

and this is a good thing. for an early stage prospects like you are noise. filtering you out early improves their value chain (for now).

their message should (must) change as they grow to eventually attract the L2 and L3 type prospects

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