How Agenda Hero Is Using AI to Eliminate Manual Calendar Work

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Mark Evans: It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast for b to b SaaS founders and marketers who want real talk about growth, grit, and what actually works. And today's guest is Karen Chawthi. She's the cofounder and CEO of Agenda Hero, a startup on a mission to save billions of hours in AI powered meeting tools. Before diving into startup life, Karen 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 Agenda Hero, what it took to go from executive to first time founder, and how Karen found traction, funding, and early evangelist. 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 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. MOPEHOW found it to be not only interesting, but a real productivity and utility tool. So here we are. Welcome, Karen, to Marketing Spark.

Karen Chawthi: Awesome. It is so wonderful to be here with you, Mark. And thank you, Robbie, as well for sharing Agenda Hero with the world.

Mark Evans: Every entrepreneurial journey is different, which is why entrepreneurs are 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. Ten years is a long time or ten 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?

Karen Chawthi: 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 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 global public company. When I left, I was running the enterprise business unit, and I was really lucky to be the entrepreneur of the company. I did start really early. It was a startup. And I just became the person inside Breckhove 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 projects. 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 and do that and start something from zero.

Mark Evans: I wanna talk about your journey from idea to Agenda 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 spiel that you talk to all the time?

Karen Chawthi: 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 AgendaHero 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 once with AI. And then we also have a suite of products on top of that as well.

Mark Evans: With the business model

Karen Chawthi: As a startup and as an entrepreneur, I believe that you're always figuring out your business model. I learned that at Brightcove. So at Brightcove, we went through so many different iterations. So one thing I will say to other founders is 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 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.

Mark Evans: That is the classic one two punch when it comes to entrepreneurial success is create a product that people want and as important, create a product that people wanna pay for. So it looks like you're starting to solve that, crack that nut, which is great. 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? Tell me that backstory, that origin story.

Karen Chawthi: I was at lunch with my mentor, Katie Ray, who leads MIT's engine, and she's incredible. And I was sharing a few ideas that I had, and she asked me, what are you spending your time? 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, a spouse who traveled for work. I traveled for work, and we just didn't even know where we were supposed to be or 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 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.

Mark Evans: 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?

Karen Chawthi: 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 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, the problem hasn't solved. Here I was thinking, oh, no one's tried 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 twenty five years. What AI has done for Agenda Hero 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, it's like an antiproductivity 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.

Mark Evans: 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 some of the tools like Claude and ChatGPT, you can leap that gap. Nontechnical 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 get this idea for a product. I'm gonna build this product. Are you a technical person? Did you build a 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 gotta build it. So how did that building happen?

Karen Chawthi: To 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.

Mark Evans: 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?

Karen Chawthi: 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 a 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 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 So do that was a moment that 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 like

Mark Evans: 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 a product. So excited that happened. It takes some courage and maybe some luck and some challenges 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 100 customers really matter. If you can get those first 100 customers and you can love them and turn them into advocates and they become loyal users, then you're on your way. Would 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?

Karen Chawthi: 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 gotta 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 gonna get a 100 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 introductions to people that I thought would have this problem so I could learn from them. I would just say, okay. I'm gonna have 10 calls. I'm gonna 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 tangible goal of how am I gonna do these users? So that's how I would start. And then if you wanna talk about what I would do next, we can expand on.

Mark Evans: What I would be interested is 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?

Karen Chawthi: 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 can build this great thing, and if no one knows about it, it it doesn't matter.

Mark Evans: But

Karen Chawthi: I think for me now, awareness and distribution is still the biggest 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.

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

Karen Chawthi: Not. Everything is organ. 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, called influencer marketing. And you'll hear startups 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 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.

Mark Evans: This 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 spin off 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 might 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 you. A guy like Robbie Fowler, the b to b marketer who is was 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 type of people can be really powerful and not necessarily cost you a lot of money because they're not doing it for the might. 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.

Karen Chawthi: So let me ask you a question, Mark, because that's awesome. Like, Robbie, I had not met, and Robbie told people about Agenda Hero. And we've had several others of those moments where it's, oh my goodness. Just a couple weeks ago, we had Jeremy Kaplan recommend Agenda Hero alongside Notebook LLM and another AI product by Canva. There were only five tools recommended and were 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 Rafael know about Agenda Hero before they write about it?

Mark Evans: There's two ways to go about this. Jeremy Kaplan is the godfather of tools these days. I'm a subscriber to his land newsletter. I saw him recommend Agenda Hero, which is validated, Robbie Tollbee. So there's two ways to go. One is that there's outreach. So people like Toolfolio 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 Agenda 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 Agenda 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 a very effective but a low cost way of marketing and leveraging other people's voices. And these are authentic voices as opposed to people that it's paper play. Right? Which is really what influencer marketing is all about.

Karen Chawthi: 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, but proactively reaching out. I'm gonna do that. Thank you, Mark.

Mark Evans: Unlike a lot of early stage startups, Agenda Hero is not bootstrapped. You raised the funding from Upfront Ventures, K9 Ventures, and Precursor. How were you able to raise that money given the fact that you're early stage revenue? What was that fun journey fund what was that fun fundraising journey like? And what did investors see in Agenda Hero that gave them the conviction to actually put their money where their mouth was?

Karen Chawthi: 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 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

Mark Evans: people

Karen Chawthi: for joining this team. That's the advice I would give to other founders is just think about it like building build recruiting someone else that you want to solve this big vision with you.

Mark Evans: And I suspect that part of their confidence in Agenda Hero is they're invested in you. You've got a track record. You worked for a company that went from very small to very big. You had an important role 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?

Karen Chawthi: 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.

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

Karen Chawthi: 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 act, 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 try to do everything in the same hour is actually just really hard.

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

Karen Chawthi: I'm 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.

Mark Evans: As an aside, I just started using Clawd Cowork, which has been an absolute mind blowing experience. I built a Chrome extension. I'm doing, like, amazing things with workflows. I I'm a big ChatGeePee fan, but this has just raised it to another level. Because one of the things I think about with AI is that we barely scratched the surface in using AI. There's so much we can do. Right?

Karen Chawthi: 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.

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

Karen Chawthi: I've never been more excited about Agenda 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 Agenda Hero. 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.

Mark Evans: Where can people learn more about you and Agenda Hero?

Karen Chawthi: 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 this journey is meeting the people who take the time out of their day to try our product and use

Mark Evans: I suspect you probably read my email, which says, when are gonna build the gender hero for Opera? Which is why I code the browser.

Karen Chawthi: Yes. Know. I do. It was a there's a technical limitation in terms of the sidebar of certain browsers, but our Chrome extension is bad.

Mark Evans: It's the one reason why I use Chrome these days. Thanks, Karen, and thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spurk. If you found this conversation valuable and interesting, let's keep the momentum going. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite pod podcast app. Drop a quick rating and share it with your network. You can reach me via email, Mark@MarkEdwards.ca. Connect with me on LinkedIn or visit marketingspark.co. Talk to you next time.