AddEvent is an online platform that helps organizations promote their events and increase attendance by making it incredibly easy for people to add those events to their personal calendars. Pulse 2.0 interviewed AddEvent founder and CEO Michael Nilsson to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
Michael Nilsson’s Background
What is Michael Nilsson’s background? Nilsson said:
“In my past life before AddEvent, I was working for a design firm in Copenhagen as a developer. Despite what you might think (we know about the reputation we carry as devs), I have always loved working and talking with customers to learn about their pain points, their needs, and their dream scenarios. It was, and still is, a passion of mine to take requirements and turn them into a beautiful experience for clients and users.”
“Aside from being a developer, I think of myself as a constant learner and have a curious mind. I love learning about how and why things work, and building things from the ground up, both physically and in business. I’m lucky enough to get to bring both of these core joys of my life together to build software.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Nilsson shared:
“Well, one of the clients asked if we could include an Add to Calendar button for their event page. Next thing I knew, I was going down the Google rabbit hole and couldn’t find any existing solutions that would work, so, I decided to create my own Add to Calendar button that other developers could use.”
“From there, I continued to maintain the button and improve it to offer the best solution that I could. As I was still with the design firm, this Add to Calendar button side project began taking more and more of my time. I was taking feedback into consideration from other users and built out new features. It was a bit of a whirlwind, I watched it grow from a few developers using it to eventually seeing Fortune 500 companies using it!”
“Before I knew it, 2016 rolled around and two business advisors were reaching out to me to see if I would be interested in moving to the U.S. and scaling this thing. So, my family and I decided we would be crazy not to take the opportunity, and we moved from Copenhagen to the San Francisco Bay Area, where we officially established AddEvent’s headquarters.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Nilsson reflected:
“Ah, this is so hard to answer! I think seeing those first Fortune 500 customers really solidified that I had something worthwhile and validated a lot of what I was feeling.”
“But if I think about more recent times, one of the core values of our company is building relationships both internally and externally, so every time our team gets together, I really love those times. We try to do about 3 company off-sites a year and get the entire team together since we are distributed all over the world. Our team really values the chance to connect on a personal level while also getting to dive deep into meaningful work. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that we have a tradition of doing a boat day whenever we do an offsite.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Nilsson explained:
“Originally, our platform was built with developers in mind, offering a simple Add to Calendar button that could be seamlessly integrated into websites. This feature made it easy for users to add events to their personal calendars with a single click.”
“After listening to user feedback, we quickly recognized the need for additional functionality, such as adding events to calendars directly from emails. In response, we launched Add to Calendar links for emails and introduced custom event landing pages. These landing pages can be shared on social media, driving increased visibility and engagement for events.”
“In response to requests for better event attendee tracking, we rolled out RSVP functionality, enabling users to easily confirm their attendance and providing organizers with insights into who is attending their events.”
“To help users manage multiple events, we introduced the subscription calendar feature. This allows users to subscribe once and automatically receive updates to their calendars whenever new events are added, ensuring they never miss out.”
“With the rise of the no-code movement, many customers requested the ability to easily integrate our components—like event widgets and full calendars—into their websites. We responded by offering embeddable events, event lists, and calendars, allowing users to incorporate these features without any coding skills required.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since its launch? Nilsson noted:
“We started out with a focus on developers, but over time, we’ve found that at least 70% of our customers today identify as non-developers. To keep up with this shift, we’ve adapted to serve both groups. Developers still get the full flexibility and control they expect through our APIs, while non-technical users can now easily navigate the platform without needing any technical know-how. This way, we’ve made sure everyone can get the most out of our tools. It’s all part of our ongoing commitment to making the platform more accessible and versatile for a wider range of users.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Nilsson cited:
“AddEvent has gone through such an evolution since its conception, and what you’ll notice is that the evolution reflects not only our future state, but who we are at our core; committed to providing the best user experience while continuing to expand our platform’s capabilities with our customers in mind.”
“When we first began, we were a developer-first add to calendar button with the goal of helping developers integrate our button into websites. From there, we brought every product manager and dev’s worst nightmare to light – customer feedback.”
“Introducing feedback options for users meant we could finally take our customers’ feedback into account when building out software. And while there were countless routes we could take for our next feature, the most common request was the ability to use Add to Calendar functionality within emails. Which, if you’ve ever coded an .ics file for an email, then you already know why this was top of the list.”
“Following email functionality came our next phase, custom landing pages for each event, giving power to users who want to share their events in places like social media to boost the event’s visibility without needing to rely on their internal teams to create a landing page.”
“But, what’s the ability to share the event without being able to RSVP? Nothing, if you’re most event organizers. Continuing to listen to our customers meant expanding from just adding events to people’s calendars and instead allowing event hosts to collect their own information to simplify their workflows.”
“However, as most organizations host more than one event, it became clear that what we needed to build out was a way for organizers to share multiple events at once, giving their audience the ability to add multiple events to their calendars in one go. Think about how many times you’ve been bombarded with calendar invites via email, SMS, or directly in your calendar. Surely, being able to take the action of saving it once is significantly less disruptive than getting pinged multiple times a day in every channel under the sun. And, the beautiful thing about using subscription calendars is that it has a daily sync between the organization’s calendar and the users’ calendar. What that really means is that any new events will appear on the users’ calendar and changes to existing ones are reflected, ensuring they never miss a moment!”
“The most recent phase we’ve been in has been offering our users not only a user-friendly app interface for non-technical users, but also the ability to embed their events on their websites or landing pages without the need to code. As the no-code customization movement has had an evolution of its own, so have our users and how they expect their software experience to be. We have previously and will continue to refine the design of our app to make it easier for our users to use. Our goal is always to make the app simple and streamlined while offering extensive customization options for those wanting additional control and flexibility.”
“Not wanting to stop there with no-code ease-of-use for our customers, we introduced embeddable events, calendars, and event lists, expanding our product offering once again. As we continue to build, we continue to come back to our core principle of listening to our users, helping guide us to our most recent product solution. With our embeddable solutions, we provide the code for our users to place on their websites and landing pages that are hosted outside of AddEvent. This has unlocked our customers’ ability to seamlessly integrate add to calendar, RSVP, and other calendar and event elements without needing coding experience.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Nilsson about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“I thought you’d never ask! The beauty of our solution is that AddEvent is industry-agnostic, so when we look at our customer base, it’s extremely diverse in not only industry, but company size and even use case.”
“One of my favorite customer success stories is that of Achievers, an industry leading employee recognition and reward software company, who host their own marketing events. Not only do they use AddEvent’s RSVP and Add to Calendar functionality to capture current and future customers’ registration, but they also embedded their event calendar in their company intranet to provide visibility for their sales and internal teams.”
“This internal calendar provides transparency for the entire organization, but more importantly gives sales the ability to leverage these events for potential customer engagement, while saving hours on internal communications between teams. Since they have implemented AddEvent’s solutions, the marketing team has seen over a 5% increase in attendance, and their embedded calendar has been subscribed to by sales, marketing, and communications teams.”
“Similar to Achievers, is one of our customers, Peter Swain, whose consulting business is all about digital transformation. His team leverages AddEvent’s RSVP and Add to Calendar tools for his introductory Mastermind sessions and our Subscription Calendars for his ongoing Mastermind customers.”
“When sharing his experience with why AddEvent is so powerful in his line of business he said, “Acquisition cost is everything… One quick way to half your acquisition cost on Facebook [ads], is to double the show rates to your webinar. So, do you want to spend 50k on Facebook, or 100k on Facebook?” And honestly, I can’t help but smile when I hear that, because it’s true. Why would you spend twice as much money for the same result as you can get when you implement AddEvent’s RSVP and Add to Calendar tools?”
“He went on to say, “If you want to be successful in any business that has more than one customer with any kind of repeat anything, you want to make it as easy as possible for people to show up for the stuff you do. And AddEvent is the best way I found to do that.” Since implementing AddEvent, he has been able to double his return on ad spend (ROAS), with 2x more registrants showing up thanks to our RSVP and Add to Calendar tools. Additionally, he has been able to keep his mastermind clients engaged and updated with subscription calendars to elongate their engagement with him.”
“I’ll share one last example and jump industries again, this time to healthcare appointments. Sono Bello, a top provider of body contouring procedures, was struggling with missed appointments, which was a big deal given how much they invest in leads and Patient Care Consultants, not dissimilar to Peter from the customer story above.”
“Their scheduling system didn’t have an add to calendar feature, making it hard for clients to remember appointments. After finding AddEvent, they decided to integrate it into their confirmation emails and booking page.”
“In just three weeks, they saw a 7% increase in clients showing up for consultations simply by making it easier for them to add appointments to their calendars. That number gets even more impressive when you consider that on average, a single Sono Bello session can cost anywhere from $1,500 to $4,000, depending on the area and procedure. And that’s just one session – depending on the treatment plan, clients can end up paying a total cost of $4,500 – $15,000 or more. Amazing, right? Just removing one friction point leads to a 7% increase in appointment attendance. Every time I stop to think about all of the different use cases for AddEvent, I can’t help but see a future where we are part of every event, appointment, course, school, and anything! AddEvent is all about ensuring no important moment is ever missed.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Nilsson affirmed:
“What really sets AddEvent apart is how simple and flexible our tools are across all systems and calendars. We make it easy for anyone to manage and share events, whether you’re a developer who needs powerful API access or someone without technical experience looking for no-code solutions. Our features, like add to calendar buttons, embeddable event widgets, and subscription calendars, work seamlessly across all major calendar platforms, so you can reach your audience wherever they are without having to code solutions for each different calendar provider.”
“Plus, we’re always listening to customer feedback and adding features—like RSVP options and custom event landing pages—that make a real difference. It’s this focus on ease of use, the flexibility to use and implement us anywhere, and constant improvement that makes us stand out.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Nilsson concluded:
“When we think about the future, we are thinking a lot about how we can help drive attendance across all industries, not just the obvious B2B webinar and marketing events play. We see AddEvent being incorporated into any and every event, meeting, booking, appointment, schedule, practice, and class an individual has in their day-to-day, so no important moment is ever missed.”
