[Interview] WePopp CEO and Cofounder Julien Hobeika introduces their new ‘scheduling made easy’ app WeTime

Throughout the July / August vacation period, the Rude Baguette will be running a series of interviews with some of France’s top and rising startups, where their founders give us more insight into their business, their future plans and what sets them apart from the rest. In this installment, we talk with Julien Hobeika, WePopp CEO and Cofounder, who recently launched their new scheduling app WeTime at this month’s Paris Founders Event.

You debuted WeTime at the most recent edition of our Paris Founders Event. For those who were unable to attend, tell us a bit about WeTime, what it is and why you decided to develop it.

Scheduling a call or a meeting is a nightmare:

• Going back & forth between your Email app and your Calendar app.
• Finding time slots available in Calendar.
• Remembering it and typing it in an email.
• Making sure you don’t book anything that could create a conflict…

WeTime is streamlining this process. It removes all the friction: No more back & forth between emails and calendars. Suggest timeslots directly from your calendar, WeTime adds everything in your email. When someone responds to your invite, you’re one click away from booking the event.

We have a standalone iOS app (launched on July 17th) and the WeTime for Gmail is in public beta, while the WeTime Outlook plug-in is still private beta (however, users can register on the landing page).

Obviously there are other scheduling apps and tools on the market. What do you think sets We Time apart from the rest?

Basically we’re making it easier to use it. If we compare to doodle.com, our experience is way more streamlined on mobile, making it actually usable on a regular basis.

And the chrome and outlook extension is really integrating the scheduling into your calendar and email services.

How would you define success for We Time? How big do you think it can be?

The key to success is distribution and multiplatform/multidevice support. The success of WeTime is composed of several little successes. The first one is getting 10k users using the app/plugin on a daily basis. The end goal is ambitious: grow bigger than doodle.com

I understand that WeTime is available in 22 languages. How have you been able to support so many languages so quickly?

Yes! the iOS app is available in 22 languages. We have by the way 50% of our downloads in Asia. It is possible by paying translators! It’s a good investment because it unlocks huge markets that we can reach with the App Store.

However the plugins on outlook and Gmail are for the moment only in French and English. It more difficult to translate because one of the feature in those plugins is natural language dates detection in email. We need more linguistics knowledge to port this feature to different languages.

What about international? Which markets will you take this next?

We’re not focusing specifically on one market. We try to be international day 1. It’s the case for the iOS app and we’re looking closely at the traction we get in Asia.

The next step will be to add language support to our outlook and gmail plugins.

What’s the one thing that people should have in their mind when they think about WeTime?

Scheduling made easy on all your devices

What are the next big steps for you as a company?

The two big steps coming apart from product development will be:

1) Better defining our revenue model (we’re investigating specific services for businesses
2) Raising 400k by the end of the year