How many of us use Google Calendar? Many people reading this article do, and we use it for more than scheduling meetings. We use it for our task reminders, birthdays, blocking off time for deep work, and many other things. Our calendars contain so much data that can be translated into useful insights that could free up our time to focus on the other things that are important in life. That’s what motivated Jessica Blesdoe to co-found a Keyhorse-backed company called Pav*r. Pav*r is an app that integrates with your Google Calendar to provide reports that help you understand exactly where your time is going. We asked Jessica, the company’s CEO, to share her insights from her founder's journey.
Tell us about your team: Who’s on it, and how did you meet?
My co-founder is actually my husband, Adam Bledsoe—we are high school sweethearts. We've been dating since I was 14 years old, and we got married in 2008. In 2012 we started our first business together, which was an IT services business focused on helping small businesses with their technology needs.
How did you become interested in time efficiency?
We spent nearly a decade helping small businesses migrate to Google workspace, taught them how to use Google's tools, and then started integrating and automating all of their business processes together to help save them time. That's how we first became interested in time efficiency. It was from our own personal needs as running that small business required very good time management skills. Then, as we were working with these other businesses, we recognized that managing time is a problem everybody deals with. So we thought: How can we begin to automate their processes so they don't have to waste time on things like data entry and admin-related activities? And also, how can we help them better use the tools they're already using, like Google workspace, for example?
We believe that the first step to conquering your time is just to be more aware of how you're spending your time so you can make sure that you're actually achieving those big goals and not just putting out fires all day.
What inspired you to co-found a company?
What really inspired us to create Pav*r was seeing that all these businesses, regardless of what industry they were in, relied heavily on their Google Calendar. They were using it to track not just meetings and appointments but as a project management and task management tool. They were using time blocking and using the calendar in ways we hadn’t even considered before because they’d figured out a way to make it work for their specific needs. We realized people were putting all this data into the calendar, but then they couldn't extract any of that data out of the calendar. Even though all that data was in there, they had to manually go through and copy and paste things to create their own spreadsheets, copy and paste data out of the calendar into another software, or connect that calendar to that software. There was no single source of truth for managing or tracking that time and no way to get that data out of what they were using, and that's where we had the idea for Pav*r. We recognized that this was a problem that small businesses were struggling with because they rely so heavily on their digital calendar, so we wanted to make it really easy for them to continue to use that calendar but just get more data out of it and make it more useful to them than it currently was.
Where do you see the time management industry headed in the near future?
I think time management as a whole—when we look at tools like Calendly and all these other digital calendar startups, we see people becoming aware of how valuable their time is. I think, especially post-COVID, we realize that our time is the most valuable resource that we have. It's not just businesses; individuals are also becoming aware of that. Collectively, we're all becoming more aware of how important our time is and how important it is to manage your time more intentionally, so that you can get everything done but also have time left for doing things that aren't just work. We’re focused more on spending more time with friends and family and accomplishing personal goals outside of work. Inside of work, however, we have these big goals that we're always trying to accomplish, and those big goals can get kind of lost in the day-to-day sometimes. We believe that the first step to conquering your time is just to be more aware of how you're spending your time so you can make sure that you're actually achieving those big goals and not just putting out fires all day.
What does success look like to Pav*r in the short term and long term?
In the short term, we're focused on identifying exactly who our customer is. We're focused on honing in on our ideal customer persona, putting our go-to-market strategies into place to target those customers, and continuing to grow and learn through that process.
In the long term, our goal is to get acquired. We want Pav*r to be synonymous with calendar management in the same way people think of Calendly when it comes to appointment scheduling. Even if you don’t personally use Calendly, you likely know what it is because you’ve been sent someone else’s link. We’re trying to move beyond scheduling, though, and take a bigger view of how your time is stacking up as a whole.
Find out more about Pav*r at www.getpavr.com. Are you a startup based in or looking to relocate to Kentucky? Keyhorse’s current quarterly investment cycle is open until September 30th! Apply now.
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