Notes app to business plan: How one mom grew a multi-million dollar tech company

It began as an idea jotted in a notes app and grew into a successful, Nashville, Tennessee-based business generating several million dollars in revenue.

Artful Agenda, a calendar app that aims to combine the convenience of online calendars and the aesthetics of paper planners, was created by Katy Allen in 2016, launched in 2017 and has since been downloaded 1.9 million times.

It currently has 80,000 active subscribers, and last year's revenue alone added up to $2.5 million.

Origin of Artful Agenda

“I always wanted to own my own business. I went to school for marketing, and I was always very into the idea of bringing a product or a service to market,” Allen said. “I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I didn’t really know what my product or service would be. I used to keep a list of random business ideas in the notes app on my phone. Most of the time I would write them down, and then I would tell somebody about them, and we would poke holes in it and realize, ‘yeah, that wouldn’t be that profitable’ or ‘that’s probably not a great idea.’”

Allen is a married mom of three. It was at her daughter’s baby shower, she said, that the seed was really planted for Artful Agenda. During the festivities, a friend mentioned that she had been wishing there was a calendar app with the same look as the trendy, decorative paper planners on the market.

“I just could never get the idea out of my head,” Allen said. “I wrote it down in my little list of business ideas, and it was the one idea that never got deleted.”

Later that year, she reached out to a friend with experience in web design and started the process of creating the app.

The learning curve was steep, Allen said.

“I would say that I was a pretty early adopter of social media,” she said. “I felt like I was somebody who was pretty good at quickly adopting a piece of technology and figuring out how to make the most of it. I felt really comfortable with technology, but that wasn’t my background.”

One of the first things she had to do — with the help of an experienced web developer — was scope the app, a process in which a developer lists everything the program can do, line by line.

“You list out every single thing a user can do in the app, like, 'as a user, I see a screen with an option to login. As a user, I can click on forgot password,’” Allen said. “You are literally listing out every single thing that the app does. It’s a very long process, especially for a very complicated, complex calendar app.”

What the app offers

Part of what makes Artful Agenda so complex is that it syncs with multiple major calendar apps, including those from Outlook, Google and Apple.

“If you have somebody who, maybe, has their work Outlook Calendar and then their significant other is using iCalendar on their phone but then, in their personal life, they’re using Gmail, it seamlessly pulls all of it in one display which is, in my opinion, a really cool helpful feature,” Allen said.

This function was a big part of the reason she wanted to develop the program in the first place.

“I had tried out so many different paper planners, paper agendas, and I loved them, but they never worked for me,” she said. “My husband is a touring musician — how very Nashville of us — and most of his schedule was in Google Calendar. I needed to be able to see his stuff, he needed to be able to see mine and a paper planner just didn’t really work. I was having to do double entry. I’d write it all down in mine, and then I’d have to go put all of my stuff into his and vice versa.”

Artful Agenda also provides an aesthetic experience.  

“We’ve incorporated a lot of really cool functionalities that you can only have with a digital calendar, but put that kind of paper planner feel into it,” she said.

Included in the $35 per year subscription fee are a number of cover designs, sticker packs and handwriting fonts. There are premium packs of covers and stickers available for purchase as well.

“The layouts are very reminiscent of a paper planner. So, for example, on the computer when you’re looking at your day view, it looks like an open book,” Allen said. “The idea is that you can’t wait to look at your calendar every day. You can customize it and it becomes this really fun, happy thing you get to use.”

The Artful Agenda team

When she started developing Artful Agenda, Allen was its sole team member. Now, she has two full-time employees as well as a couple of part-time workers and a handful of contracted workers. One company she contracts with is Twin Sun Solutions, a Nashville-based digital development company. She’s worked with people at Twin Sun since the very early days of development, including its Chief Technology Officer Jami Couch.

“We’ve had a lot of people here work with Artful Agenda at some point, but I’ve been here pretty much the whole time along the way,” Couch said. “It’s been kind of a cool process — I think Artful Agenda was our second or third client after we got started, and so it’s been kind of neat that both of our companies have been able to grow together.”

Aside from a few members of the team, everyone who works on Artful Agenda is based in Nashville.

“By and large, we really are kind of a homegrown Tennessee tech company, which is cool because I think that the amount of tech in the Nashville area is growing, and I think it’s cool that we’ve gotten to be one of those companies,” Allen said. “It’s been very cool to be a part of this part of the country having more of a tech presence.”