The calendar gap nobody talks about
I wrote about why I’m building Retempo and how it thinks about events. This week I want to talk about a gap that’s been hiding in plain sight.
Your calendar runs your life
Google Calendar. Apple Calendar. Outlook. Whatever you use — it’s probably the most important app on your phone after messaging. Meetings, flights, dentist appointments, birthdays. Your life runs through it.
And it’s great at that. It handles your stuff.
But then there’s all the other stuff.
The stuff that doesn’t fit
Barcelona plays Wednesday night. The new season of that show you’ve been waiting for drops Friday. Tickets for Tame Impala go on sale next Monday at 10am. There’s a free game on Epic this week you might want. The Australian Grand Prix is at a weird time because of the timezone.
Where does all of that live?
Not in your Google Calendar. You could add it manually — I’ve done it, plenty of times. But then the match gets postponed and your calendar entry is wrong. The concert date shifts and you don’t find out. The game release gets delayed by two weeks. You’d need to maintain all of it yourself, constantly checking sources to make sure nothing changed.
That’s not a calendar. That’s a part-time job.
Niche apps don’t solve it either
The other option is what most of us actually do: niche apps. A football app for fixtures. A music app for tours. A gaming site for release dates. Each one covers its slice pretty well.
But they’re not really calendars. They’re feeds, dashboards, news hubs. They bury the “when” under scores, stats, reviews, social features, and ads. The date is there somewhere — it’s just not the point of the app.
And if you’re like me and you care about more than one category, you’re back to the same mess I talked about in my first post: five apps, five places to check, five notification settings. My girlfriend and I probably check a dozen different things between us just to piece together what’s happening this week.
The gap
So there’s your personal calendar on one side — great for your life, useless for the world. And niche apps on the other — each covering one slice, none of them treating “when” as the main thing.
In between, there’s a gap. A whole layer of time-based stuff — when things happen in the world, for the things you care about — that has no proper home.
That’s where Retempo sits.
Not replacing your Google Calendar. Not competing with FotMob or Songkick. Just filling the space between your personal schedule and everything happening out there. You subscribe to the things you care about — your team, your artist, whatever — and Retempo keeps that layer current. Automatically, quietly, without you having to think about it. When something actually needs your attention — presale opens tomorrow, match got moved to Sunday — you get a notification at the right time. Not five different apps buzzing at you with their own logic.
Your calendar tells you when your dentist appointment is. Retempo tells you when everything else is.
Why this gap still exists
This sounds obvious once you see it, so why hasn’t anyone done it? Honestly — it’s a hard problem. Every domain has its own data mess. Sports means leagues, fixtures, postponements, time zones, different competitions. Music means artist tours, presale windows, venue logistics. Gaming means tracking releases across platforms, free deals, early access dates. Getting all of that into one clean feed that stays up to date is a real engineering challenge.
Most teams pick one domain and go deep. Smart move if you’re building a football app. But it means nobody ends up building the layer that connects all of it.
That’s the gap. And that’s what I’m building.
More soon. Follow along on X/Twitter or check out retempo.app.
— Quim