Scheduling times to use conference rooms can be a hassle. Just as often as rooms are double-booked, some rooms never get booked at all. Roomzilla is a web-based application, born in Cambridge, that runs on Android and Apple tablets, as well as other portable devices, that makes booking and tracking conference room schedules a simple and painless process.
In 2010, Tim Rowe and Geoff Mamlet of the Cambridge Innovation Center contracted John Norman, an old colleague, to solve a scaling problem. The CIC was expanding quickly and the existing system that was being used to book conference rooms couldn't handle the influx. The goal was to "write a system that would provide the functionality of [the old system] but in a manner that would scale better," Norman told BostInno. So, with Mamlet's help, he developed Roomzilla: a network that runs on tablets mounted outside of conference rooms and is centrally controlled by almost any platform.
But, tech moves at the speed of light. In early 2012, Rowe put out a public call to action at the CIC to find someone who could update Roomzilla. The person they landed on for the job was Michelle Darby, who had recently graduated from the University of Washington, moved back home, was contracting as a software engineer at a bio-tech startup and coaching rowing at Phillips Andover Academy.
By the time Darby started full-time, Roomzilla had begun spreading to buildings at MIT and was turning heads as visiting companies saw the system in action.
"People were requesting it," Darby said. "They said, 'Hey, this is cool. What is it and can we use it?'"
After a series of conversations, which were all centered on the question, "Where do we take this?" the CIC leadership team decided that Roomzilla would become its own company with Darby as CEO.
Today, it has almost been one full year since that decision was made and, as the only full-time employee, Darby services 10 customers with many more looking to take advantage of Roomzilla.
Interestingly, the CIC is still counted as one of these customers.
"I work in one of our customers every day," Darby said, laughing. "They are part of the team. People say, 'You should talk to at least one customer a day' but, for me, it's really, 'You should talk to two a day,' because I talk to one customer a day no matter what."
As a result, the feedback, and therefore the tweaking of the product, never stops. It is constantly being tested at one of the premier incubators in the world.
Looking forward, Darby can't wait to scale the business. "It's the perfect product," she said. "It had a three, almost four-year pilot run at the CIC. Now it's just a matter of tailoring it to customers."
Norman shares her enthusiasm, saying:
One thing we validated with a fair amount of user testing is that people are quite comfortable looking at a grid of rooms, and then picking a time and then inviting people. This is quite different from the meeting model in Outlook and Google Calendar, where you typically invite people, and then, based on their schedules, find a room and time. It may be that this is how startup people think about time and space. They want the cool room first, and then shape the meeting to fit.
And why shouldn't they think this way? Sensible and sexy is a rare combination in the startup world.
