When I tell someone what I’m building, there’s a pause first, and then some version of the same sentence:
“A calendar? Calendars are boring. That space is saturated, and nobody wants another one.”
It’s always said kindly. It’s meant as a warning, and it is a fair one.
They’re also right about what is in front of them. Saturated is the right word for the shelf and the wrong one for the problem: there are dozens of calendars and they are all the same calendar, a grid you feed. After twenty years the kindest thing anyone can say about the category is that it works. So of course nobody asks for a better one. You don’t ask for a better version of something you gave up on.
Then I asked the people who’d applied what they actually wanted. I had a clever answer ready, and I wanted to hear them say it back to me.
Nobody said it. One after another, they told me a version of the same sentence:
“Make it fast. Planning one dinner should take seconds, not an evening of messages, and I don’t want to live in the app to do it.”
Nobody said the word calendar there either. They described one. Ask people cold and a calendar is the last thing they want; ask what is actually slow in their week and they describe exactly what a calendar was supposed to do. That gap is the whole reason I’m doing this.
It wasn’t what I’d been building either, and it took me a few days to stop arguing with it, but eventually I put down the fancier thing nobody had asked for and started building what they’d described.
Once I’d heard it a few times, I couldn’t stop seeing the reason for it. Every calendar you’ve ever used was built for work: meetings, invitees, a free half hour on Tuesday, one person managing their own job.
Your life isn’t shaped like that. Dinner with three friends takes a group chat and twenty messages before anything lands in a calendar, and the people you most want to see are somehow the hardest ones to find a time with. The tool that runs your life is the one doing the least for you.
So it’s not that time is a boring subject. It’s that everything ever built for it was built for work, and you were handed the work one for your life.
So Livnly is a calendar for your life, not your job.
The first one built like it is 2026 and not 2010, and nothing more exotic than that. The first thing you notice is the speed: planning something takes less time than explaining what you wanted. Three things carry it.
Say it, don’t schedule it. “Dinner with Sam on Thursday” is the whole interaction, and most of the time you won’t type even that. The slot is found and the invites are out before the month view would have opened.
Plan with anyone. You add the people who are coming from your contacts, or a whole group at once, and send one link that drops the plan into their own calendar. No app on their side, no account, and no email address you were never going to have.
Your week in one look. Colored by what it is for rather than by which account it came from, so you can see the shape of the week coming without reading a single title.
None of it has to be learned. Every flow goes where your hand was already going, and the speed does the rest: planning stops feeling like admin and starts feeling like saying what you want and having it be true.
So here is what I’m asking.
Livnly is closed while I build it, and while it’s closed it is free. No card, nothing to cancel. What I’m asking for instead is the thing I actually need and can’t buy: use it for real, on your own life, and tell me the truth about it, including the parts that are bad.
What you get for that is a real say in what I build next, and first claim on a price nobody after you will be offered. Livnly does become a paid product when the public beta opens, and I haven’t decided what it costs. That number is an output of this stage, not an input to it. The closed alpha is the product-market fit stage: it is how I find out whether this is worth paying for at all, and what it is worth, and I’d rather run that honestly than publish a figure now and spend the rest of the year defending it. When I know, I’ll say so, and alpha members get asked first.
Your calendar is the app you open the most and love the least. Or you stopped opening it, which is the same verdict said more quietly. That is what I’m trying to fix. I want it to be the one you actually like using.
So yes, a calendar. Of all things. Everyone already has one, I still think none of them has been built properly, and I’d rather be wrong about that in public than right about something smaller.
Founder of Livnly, a better calendar: the fastest way to plan your life, alone or with people. Building it so you spend less time in your calendar and more of what is on it. Based in Belgium.
Livnly is in closed alpha on iOS & Mac: invite or referral only, and free while it's closed. Apply if you really want an invite.
Still wondering
- What is Livnly?
- How is Livnly different from Google Calendar or Apple Calendar?
- Do I need everyone’s email address to invite them?
- Can Livnly stop my week from filling up?
- Is my calendar data private?
- How much does Livnly cost?
All the questions covers scheduling, planning with other people, held evenings, birthdays and what happens to your calendar data.
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