How Agenda Hero Is Using AI to Eliminate Manual Calendar Work

Speaker A: Hey, it's Mark Evans and you're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast for B2B SaaS, founders and marketers who want real talk about growth, grit and what actually works. And today's guest is Karen Chauthi. She's the co founder and CEO, uh, of Agenda Hero, a startup on a mission to save billions of hours in AI powered meeting tools before diving into startup life. Kara spent more than a decade at brightcove rising to EVP and GM after joining in the company's earliest days. And now she's tackling one of the most universal workplace frustrations, meetings that waste time. In this episode, we unpack the origin story of uh, Agenda Hero, what it took to go from executive to first time founder, and how Karen found traction, funding and early evangelists. Now, before we get started, it's always good to talk about we discovered new tools and I have to give credit to a guy named Robbie Fowler who publishes, uh, a weekly newsletter and at the start of every newsletter he highlights a really cool app or something that he really loves. An Agenda Hero popped up. I checked it out as I usually do and lo, behold, found it to be not only interesting, but a real productivity and utility tool. So here we are. Welcome, Karen, to Marketing Spark.

Speaker B: Awesome. It is so wonderful to be here with you, Mark. And thank you Robbie as Well for sharing AgendaHero with the world. Thank you.

Speaker A: Every entrepreneurial journey is different, which is why Entrepreneur is so interesting. You spent over a decade at brightcove joining just months after the company was founded and you eventually rose to EVP and GM. Um, 10 years is a long time, or 10 plus years is a long time at any position, especially these days. What made you decide to leave that trajectory and start something from scratch?

Speaker B: It was an incredible journey. I did join brightcove when it was really early. We did not have any customers. When I joined, I was there, there for the very first customer, which was such an exciting moment. And I was really lucky to grow with the company as it became bigger and ultimately a uh, global public company. When I left, I was running the enterprise business unit and I was really lucky to be the intrapreneur of the company. I did start really early, it was a startup and I just became the person inside Break Cove that would get the blank pieces of paper projects. So anytime there was ambiguity, we were going into a new market, we were going into a new geography. I was lucky enough to get to work on a project. So I've always been entrepreneurial and I've always wanted to start something Completely from scratch. I finally decided I was going to take a leap and do that and start something from zero.

Speaker A: I want to talk about your journey from idea to a gender Hero, but maybe we should provide some context and tell the audience. What is Agenda Hero? What does it do? Who's your icp? What are the biggest benefits? The typical. Here's what we do feel that you talk to all the time.

Speaker B: Yes. So Agenda Hero is an AI platform for dates and times. It is the most loved product I have ever worked on. It eliminates the world's manual calendar work. The core of our product is Agenda Hero Magic and we Convert text, images, PDFs into calendar events that you can get on Google Outlook, Apple Calendars or an Agenda Hero calendar. Everything from the jury duty notice you get in the mail that you really don't want to miss, take a photo and instantly get it on your calendar to the very gnarly school calendar PDFs that essentially take a PhD to even understand them. We can convert multiple events at uh, once with AI and then we also have a suite of products on top of that as well.

Speaker A: With the business model, as a startup

Speaker B: and as an entrepreneur, I believe that you're always figuring out your business model. I learned that at Braco. So at Braco we went through so many different iterations. So one thing I will say to other founders is, um, pricing and packaging will evolve. You have to start somewhere. But you're growing your product, you're building new products. You have to come up with new, different new business models. So Agenda Hero at the moment is a freemium business model. The majority of our users use our free product and then you can upgrade for additional usage as well as features. We actually initially I thought that the consumers would have the free product and the businesses would be the ones paying. We recently marked just in full transparency, we recently just launched pricing. So just last year. We're in January, now the second half of last year. But we're finding that the consumers and the businesses are paying. So this is pretty exciting to me. I think we're in a new era with AI where consumers are paying for value that they get. And the. We've priced our. We've priced our initial upgrade to be very inclusive and approachable. So it's just $30 a year. There are many consumers who think that is a fine price to pay. And then the businesses can also pay $30 a year or more depending on what they need.

Speaker A: That is the classic one, two punch when it comes to entrepreneurial success is create a product that people want and as important creative problem that people want to pay for. So, uh, it looks like you're starting to solve that. Crack that nut, which is great. Uh, curious about where the idea for Agenda Hero came from. Was it personal pain? Was there a specific moment of frustration or insight that sparked it? Uh, tell me that backstory, that origin story.

Speaker B: I was at lunch with my mentor, Katie Rae, who leads MIT's engine. Uh, she's incredible. And I was sharing a few ideas that I had, and she asked me, what are you spending your time on? Um, and I said, I'll tell you what I was spending my time on. I am spending all of my time managing time. And I was spending all of my Sundays essentially on the couch or at the kitchen table, just trying to figure out what our family needed to do the coming week. So I had two busy kids and a spouse who traveled for work. I traveled for work, and we just didn't even know where we were supposed to be or, uh, who was supposed to be where. I was spending my Sundays working hard and then having the weekend. And half my weekend was just on the schedule. And I just had this moment where I thought, wait, so is everybody else. I'm not the only one who, um, is doing this. And Mark, we were still failing. So I was spending all this time, and I was in tech, and I just thought, like, this problem has to be solvable. There can be a technological solution to it. That's. That was my motivation, and it still is my motivation for the people all over the planet. It started with me as a parent, but it turns out everybody, professionals, parents, students, have the same problem that we're solving.

Speaker A: It goes without saying there's a lot of hyperbole around AI and the magic of AI and the amazing things that AI can do. In some respects, it's true, and in many respects, it's probably more hype than reality. You hear people saying that the productivity gains that AI promised haven't materialized for whatever reason, whether it's due to implementation or internal knowledge or knowledge layers. And I juxtapose that to your mantra, which is your mission, as saving billions of hours with AI. Very ambitious. It sounds out in a crowd, certainly. If you can walk the walk and talk the talk, that's great. How did that vision evolve from the early days when, as you say, you were just trying to solve a problem, to building a company around it?

Speaker B: When we started, AI was not on the radar, only the problem was. And what's interesting, Mark, is calendars have not evolved since the Last century, it is 2026 and we are operating like it's 1999. There are billions of schedules being created every year in docs, sheets and PDFs that don't come with a calendar invite. Every person getting those schedules has, uh, to manually do the work. So the problem was really clear. But as I shared before, the solution was fuzzy. And what was fascinating and terrifying to me is when I made the leap, I started hearing from people that I knew and people that I didn't know that they were rooting for me because they too had tried to solve this problem. So if you think about it like 25 years, the problem hasn't solved. Here I was thinking, oh, no one's trying to solve this problem. No, it's actually technically complex. Dates and times are hard, there's time zones, recurrence. But if you think about it, even just creating a single calendar event is a form you have to fill in your title, your date, your location, your description. It was a hard problem to solve. The reality is that we couldn't solve it until AI came to market and neither could the founders. For the last 25 years, what AI has done for AgendaHero is it has eliminated that tedious manual form filling. Every time you go to create a calendar event, Agenda Hero extracts the right information, puts it into the right fields instantly. When I started Agenda Hero, people said, oh, it's a productivity tool. And I said, uh, it's like an anti productivity tool. I don't, I don't want people to do more calendar events because they have Agenda Hero. I want them to spend more time with the people in their calendar meetings, like this, family outings. I guess that was a little bit of a long answer to just say that AI is the only reason this problem can finally be solved.

Speaker A: Many entrepreneurs have great ideas. Some of them work, some of them don't work, some of them resonate and gain traction, most of them don't. But there's that gap between idea and actually building a product. These days with vibe coding and uh, some of the tools like Claude and ChatGPT, you can leap that gap. Non technical people like myself can code things and I can do it in days as opposed to, you know, weeks or hours. What was your journey? How did you go from saying, I got this idea for a product, I'm going to build this product. Are you a technical person? Did you build the prototype yourself? Do you have, did you look at friends and family? What was that? What did that path look like? Because obviously, if you can think it Then you got to build it. So how did that building happen?

Speaker B: I like to address the first part of first part of that mark. It's incredible what you can do with AI now. I use Lovable, which is one of my favorite AI tools out there, to get the vision in my mind on into something tangible that I can share with the team. I highly recommend leaning into these AI tools. If you're building something even just to prove out your own sort of idea to yourself, it's so easy to get something tangible. But even just a year ago that was not possible. I am not technical. I am on the go to market side. I've done everything from product to marketing, sales, partnerships, but not engineering. I was very lucky that I met some incredible people through my brightcove journey. I was able to convince some brightcove alums to join me on this journey on the engineering side and build this with me, people who believe in the problem and that we would be able to come up with a solution for the world.

Speaker A: Awesome. You mentioned that you got a lot of positive feedback and response to your idea when people talked about it. Everyone's got this problem. Of course people are gonna be enthusiastic about anything. At the same time, at the same time there is a bias because I suspect your colleagues and friends like you and they wanna support you and they wanna be seen as positive influences. But aside from that influence, how did you know that you actually had something that people wanted to use and buy as we talked about earlier, versus something that was a nice to have?

Speaker B: This is a great question mark and I think something that every founder has to figure out. We knew the problem really well, but we didn't know how we were going to solve it. And that is what we had to figure out, which is what is the solution. So when we started, we actually built the better calendar. One that was collaborative, one that multiple people could contribute to, but it was still work. Our adoption was real. There were strangers that were using the product, but it wasn't big. Then the moment AI came to market, we instantly knew that it could make a difference for our product. So we incorporated it, uh, on day one and we built this feature inside our calendar that let you basically just type your sentence and get the calendar event. And the people who are using the calendar platforms were so excited about it and they started telling us, I wish Google Calendar could do this. And we were hearing that more and more. So we have this beautiful platform, but we have this one little feature that people are saying, I wish my calendar could do it. So that was A moment. I still remember the exact chair I was sitting in when I thought, wait, what if we brought it out? What if we took this feature outside of our calendar and just made it available to every calendar? Is that crazy? Is that a crazy idea? We said, why not? This one little component of our product we called Agenda Hero Magic. We started really simple. We just let anyone type information and make a calendar event. And people loved it. And I think that as an entrepreneur, you just have to keep trying until that magic moment happens. And when it happens, it's really obvious. It's really different when people really love something versus they.

Speaker A: Like, I think this is a journey that a lot of entrepreneurs stumble upon or go through or discover. It harkens back to Stuart Butterfield when he was writing a gaming company and they're trying to figure out a way to communicate with each other, and they came up with this platform that eventually became Slack, and they realized that this was the product, not the game, not the multiplayer game, but this communications tool that they had developed by accident was the product. So excited that happened. It takes some courage and maybe some luck and intelligence to jump on the opportunity, but obviously it's worked out for you. One of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs, especially early stage entrepreneurs, is attracting those first users. Years ago, I was talking to someone who told me that the first hundred customers really matter. If you can get those first hundred customers and you can love them and turn them into advocates and they become loyal users, then you're on your way. We'd love to get some insight into how you acquired those first users and what marketing channels worked for you in the early days and the channels that you're using today.

Speaker B: That's a really great question. You start from zero. You start from no product, and then you have a product and you have nobody using it. Those are hard days because you have this vision and conviction and belief, but you've got to find people to. To use it. I think what a lot of founders do and what I did at first is you ask your friends and family, but that only gets you so far. That is a very short little sprint. So what I recommend and what I did is rather than say, I'm going to get a hundred people to use this by this date, you say, I'm going to talk to 10 people, because you can control that goal. What I did that worked well, and I recommend is I asked friends and families for introductions to people that I thought would have this problem so I could learn from them. Um, I would just say, okay, I'm going to have 10 calls. I'm going to have 20 calls. And then in those calls, I was getting insight. But then every once in a while someone say, actually, I really love what you're building. Can I use it? I guess in a way it's doing sales, but it didn't feel like it. It just felt like you're trying to learn. I would try to set like a tangible goal of a phone call rather than a, uh, tangible goal of how am I going to do these users. So that's how I would start. And then if you want to talk about what I would do next, we can expand on that.

Speaker A: What I would be interested is to look at your marketing approach, because obviously calling people, you can't scale that unless you hire a team of BDRs or you outsource that. But from a marketing perspective, it's great that you have a product that you think offers value, but it's another thing to make people aware that it exists. What was your marketing plan and what is your marketing plan today?

Speaker B: That was like true zero. How do you find your very first users? The marketing plan was build the best product that the world loves. So that actually was the marketing plan. I talked to really smart people around me about how early should I do marketing? And I just kept getting this advice that if you build a product that people want to tell each other about, that is going to be your strongest marketing. So that is the approach we did. I would say I would also. I do actually think that doing some early social, not spending a lot of money, even just $20 a day for a week, will let you reach people outside your network to validate that what you're building has reach. And we did a little bit of that. I would do more in the early days if I were to do it again. I was. A lot of the advice I was given is don't spend on marketing early. But I do think it's fair to spend a little bit just to get people because you, uh, can build this great thing and if no one knows about it, it doesn't matter.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: I think for me now, awareness and distribution is still the biggest thing, thing I'm trying to figure out. And again, building the best product, you do end up in newsletters. You do end up with strangers recommending you. And that, I guess, could be considered earned marketing. But you'd never even talk to these people, but they just love your product so much. I would say build something great and then make sure that people know about it. And that's. I'm still trying to figure that out.

Speaker A: Are you doing any marketing right now other than some social or what's your, what's on your plate these days?

Speaker B: Not everything is organic. And I would say I've been studying some of these AI startups and trying to figure out how they're growing. And there's this new marketing channel, newish called Influencer Marketing. And you'll hear startups, uh, say, oh, everything is organic. But then you hear them say that they're investing in influencer marketing. So I think to me that's spending on marketing. Our Influencer marketing has been organic. But I've been thinking about maybe we should be investing a little bit in that when it's a really good fit to just get more people to know about it. And then I am doing $30 a day test in social, um, just to get some insight. But we haven't spent in marketing. It's really been, it's really been people telling other people about it and then of course trying to build a product that invites other people to use it.

Speaker A: There's Influencer Marketing, to be truthful, has been around for a while and people get excited about it because they believe that they connect with somebody with a big reach or a big audience, that there'll be a spinoff effect and that people will rally around your product. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. To be honest, I'm a big believer in what I call advocacy marketing where you, you find somebody who may or may not have a big influence, but they're trustful advocates for a product and you rally around them and support them and you try to get inside their heads and see if they can help people. Guy like Robbie Fowler, the B2B marketer who is on a coaching community with me. I use Agenda Hero because he recommended it and I trust him and I believe him. And I think a program that embraces those types of people can be really powerful and not necessarily cost you a lot of money because they're not doing it for the money. They're doing it because they want to be as helpful and as insightful as possible and serve their audiences in the best way. So by recommending products like a gender Hero, a guy like Robbie is saying, I'm a go to resource, you can trust me. And that in turn helps him, but it also helps you at the same time.

Speaker B: So let me ask you a question, Mark, because that's awesome. Like Robbie, I had not met and Robb about Agenda Hero and we've had several others of those moments where, oh my Goodness. Just a couple weeks ago, we had Jeremy Caplan recommend Agenda Hero alongside, uh, Notebook LLM and another AI product by Canva. There were only five tools recommended and we're being recommended by these just incredibly large successful companies. It was a dream. And I did not know Jeremy before that newsletter. There's something about the organic discovery of good tools. Do you think that I, as a founder, could be doing more to be proactive in helping people like Robbie and Jeremy and JR Raphael know about Agenda Hero before they write about it?

Speaker A: There's two ways to go about this. Jeremy Caplan is the godfather of tools these days. I'm a subscriber to his newsletter. I saw him recommend a Gender Hero, which is validated. Robbie told me. So there's two ways to go. One is that there's outreach. So people like Tulafolio or people who are advocating and positioning themselves as tool experts or AI tool experts reach out to them because they're always looking for cool tools. And a Gender Hero is the real deal. Like it is. It's not vaporware, it's actually a tool that works. And then the other thing is when you pick up on somebody like a Jeremy or a Robbie, is that reach out to them and it's not just to pump their tires, but it's also to say thank you for advocating for a Gender Hero. And then how did you hear about the product? What do you like about the product? Where do you think we can improve it? What are some of the other places where we could distribute it? Because they're connected to other people in that world. So that in itself could be, ah, a very effective but, uh, a low cost way of marketing and leveraging other people's voices. And these are authentic voices as opposed to people that it's pay per play. Right. Which is really what influencer marketing is all about.

Speaker B: This is great, Mark. Thank you. I, I always say thank you. I'm always like genuinely, genuinely grateful for anyone who recommends Agenda Hero, whether it's an individual user or someone with a big platform. Uh, but proactively reaching out. I'm going to do that. Thank you, Mark.

Speaker A: Unlike a lot of early stage startups, Agenda Hero is not bootstrapped. You raised funding from Upfront Ventures, Canine Ventures and Precursor. How were you able to raise that money given the fact that you're early stage revenue? What was that fund journey? What was that fun, fun raising journey like? And what did investors see in a Gender Hero that gave them the conviction to actually put their money where their mouth was?

Speaker B: This was my first time raising this was a steep learning curve for me. But like anything else, you have a goal and you go figure it out. And the thing that I learned in fundraising is you just need one believer. So it's okay if funds are not at the right place at the right time to invest in you. That's okay. You just need to get one believer to see your vision and show interest. And the other, the other sort of epiphany that I had in this fundraising process is at one point I thought fundraising was about getting the money. And then I had this moment where I realized, wait, no, fundraising is about building your team. So just like you're going to recruit an engineer to join your startup or someone in marketing to join your startup, you're recruiting someone who, yes, brings money, right? Engineers bring their engineering talent, marketing brings, marketers bring their marketing talents. And investors do bring their value. They bring money, but they're also joining your team. So what you're really looking for is, does this person believe in the problem that we're solving, that we can solve it and should be part of this team? And once I had that switch, everything became easier because I know how to build teams, I know how to recruit people joining this team. That's the advice I would give to other founders, is just think about it like building, built, recruiting someone else that you want to solve this big vision with you.

Speaker A: And I suspect that part of their confidence in Agenda Hero is they're invested in you. You've got a track record. You've worked for a company that went from very small to very big. You had an important role though, there. And I think for early stage startups, they invest in people as much as they invest in ideas. I think you've benefited from that for sure. Three quick questions to end our conversation. Number one, if you could go back and give yourself one piece of advice when you were just starting Agenda Hero, what would it be?

Speaker B: I would say surround yourself with your believers. There will be a lot of people who doubt because most people don't have the ability to see what doesn't yet exist. Just trust your gut, your conviction, and go find other believers.

Speaker A: What's the hardest part of being a founder that no one really talks about?

Speaker B: One of the hard things about being a founder is even if you have the ability to do everything. So if you come from a product and a marketing and a sales and a partnership background, you cannot do it all at the same time. You have a really small team, sometimes a team of one. My recommendation is just to take focus Days where like, you're just working on the strategy and then you're like executing because it's, you might have the skills to do it all, but to uh, try to do everything in the same hour, it's actually just really hard.

Speaker A: Other than Agenda Hero, what is your favorite or go to AI tool?

Speaker B: I'm um, loving. Lovable. If I had to pick one, it would be lovable. I'm also really loving Claude and our entire team. So that's the other thing Mark we didn't talk about. But like our entire Agenda Hero team is using AI now to go faster and build more and create more value. It's just, it is the honor of a lifetime to be building right now in this era of incredible transformation. And I believe if we use AI responsibly, we will make the world better forever.

Speaker A: As an aside, I just started using Claude Cowork, which has been an absolute mind blowing experience. I built a Chrome extension. I'm doing like amazing things with workflows. I'm a big ChatGPT fan. But this is just raise it to another level because one of the things I think about with AI is that we barely scratch the surface in using AI. There's so much we can do, right?

Speaker B: So we're so early. We are so we feel like we can't keep up because we're in it, but we're just so early in this journey.

Speaker A: Final, final question. What's next for Agenda Hero and what are you most excited about?

Speaker B: I've never been more excited about Agenda, uh, Hero than I am today. So earlier I shared that every year billions of schedules are created in docs, sheets and PDFs. I want the next billion to be created in AgendaHero. So you don't even have to convert those to calendar events. They're already structured from the beginning and they look beautiful as well.

Speaker A: Where can people learn more about you and Agenda Hero?

Speaker B: Best way to find me is on LinkedIn or go to agendahero.com, sign up for an account and send me an email. I read every single email. It's one of my favorite things on uh, this journey is meeting the people who take the time out of their day to try our product and use our product.

Speaker A: I suspect you probably read my email which says when are you going to build a gender Hero for Opera? Which is why code the browser.

Speaker B: Yes, yes, I know I do. Uh, there's a technical limitation in terms of the sidebar of certain browsers, but our Chrome extension is.

Speaker A: It's the one reason why I use Chrome these days. Thanks Karen and thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you found this conversation valuable and interesting, let's keep the momentum going. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Drop a quick rating and share it with your network. You can reach me by email Market Ca connect with me on LinkedIn or visit marketingspark.co. i'll talk to you next time.