Derrick Reimer

Derrick Reimer is the founder and CEO of SavvyCal, a scheduling tool that competes with Calendly. A programmer and designer, he earlier co-founded the email marketing company Drip with Rob Walling.

Writing SavvyCal in Elixir

SavvyCal is an Elixir app built on the Phoenix web framework, and Reimer wrote much of it himself. “I will say that that is, definitely a choice that I don’t regret. Elixir has been fantastic,” he said on The Tuple Podcast in May 2024.

He calls the road a tricky one, because scheduling is a very horizontal product: it can be sold to small teams, midsize companies or large enterprises, and SavvyCal chose positioning much like Calendly's.

Choosing Craft Over Enterprise Sales

Reimer describes himself as “predominantly a craftsperson” and has said openly that he is unsure how far a carefully made product for small teams can grow without enterprise sales. Faced with the usual choice between raising prices to sell to enterprises and staying a small lifestyle business, his answer on the Tuple podcast was “how about neither?”