“Sometimes the feature you didn’t expect to be the breakthrough is the one that takes off.”
Caren Cioffi, co-founder and CEO of Agenda Hero, raised a $5.6 million seed round and now helps tens of thousands of parents, teachers, and team coordinators trade retyping schedules for actually using them. Before Agenda Hero, Caren spent more than a decade at Brightcove, helping grow the company from startup to public enterprise. She earned her MBA at Stanford.
TAKEAWAYS
Build for Users, Not Competitors
Some founders obsess over their competitors' product — they study every feature. I do the opposite. Our real competition was never another company. It was existing behavior.
So I intentionally don't look at what others in our space are building. I don't want to be biased in the wrong way about how to solve the problem we're solving. Instead, I trust the feedback from our users, and I trust our intuition. If I get inspired, it's by great products in entirely different spaces.
Pricing Isn't a One-Time Exercise
The one thing I can promise is that pricing will change. At Brightcove our very first pricing was built for one customer — it barely outlived that deal. We adapted and learned from there.
When we launched pricing at Agenda Hero, our free tier gave people everything they needed — minimizing reasons to upgrade. So we asked what people wanted that they'd actually pay for, while keeping our promise that eliminating manual calendar work should stay accessible to everyone.
We recently relaunched plans built around what people had been asking for. Now the upgrades — and the pricing — finally make sense. Pricing is iterative. You learn, you adapt, and that's expected.
