It’s not sexy but it sure is popular: Group scheduling tool Doodle hits 10m monthly users

Doodle doesn’t have the most glamorous or sexy of products, and it rarely gets much press coverage, but the Swiss startup is clearly doing something right as it’s announced this week that it has hit the 10 million monthly user mark.

In case Doodle’s passed you by, it’s a tool that makes it easy for groups to arrange a mutually convenient time to meet. The meeting organiser proposes timeslots and everyone else votes for the slots that suit them. Earlier this year the company launched profile pages that make it easy to arrange one-to-one meetings too.

What’s interesting about Doodle is that I’ve never seen a tech-savvy early-adopting person use it. Instead, from personal experience it’s a product that ‘normal people’ use just to get a simple but important job done. It’s grown a huge audience without much of the Internet tech industry taking much notice.

The five year old startup says it has seen rapid growth in the past two years. Its total number of users is more than three times larger than it was in 2009, and in the US it now has 2 million users – almost four times more than it had two years ago. The company puts its growth down to the viral nature of the product – use it to arrange a meeting with ten other people and that’s ten more people who are introduced to it without having to sign up. In fact, Doodle says that 98% of all users discovered it from a personal invitation or recommendation.