Earlier this week, I went to a small massage parlor which is located at the mall next to my house. There are three attendants on duty at any given time. I was a “walk-in” (no appointment) and ordinarily would not have been able to see someone quickly, but luckily for me two clients had failed to make their appointments. That was rather unlucky for the firm, though: two clients not at their appointments means two massage therapists not seeing anyone, and that costs them $2 a minute in direct economic losses.
What that business needs is some way to reduce the number of no-shows and get earlier warning when no-shows happen, so that they can rearrange the schedul, actively solicit walk-in customers, or invite one of their regular customers to have her weekly massage early. That would minimize the lost revenue from missed appointments. For example, they could call every client the day before their appointment.
But calling customers is an expensive proposition, when you think of it: three staff members times an average of 10 clients each per day means they’d need to make 30 phone calls a day. That is thirty opportunities to hit the answering machine, thirty voicemails to leave, thirty “We’re sorry, our customer is not in the service area” messages to hear. And, since there is no dedicated receptionist at the store, that is time that has to come from an expensive therapist — and when their hands are on a receiver, they aren’t working the knots out of someone’s shoulders for $1 a minute.
There are many, many businesses like my local massage parlor: massage therapists, hair salons, auto mechanics, private tutors, and large segments of the healthcare industry. They all have an appointment problem… and it is about to get a bit better.
Introducing Appointment Reminder
For the last several weeks, since quitting my day job, I’ve been hard at work on Appointment Reminder. (You can tell that I haven’t lost the same panache for inspiring, creative names that bought you Bingo Card Creator.) It is a web application that handles scheduling and automated appointment reminders via phone, SMS, email, and post cards. The phone and SMS reminders are through the magic of Twilio, which lets you make and receive phone calls and SMSes using simple web technology.
My value proposition to my customers is simple:
- Schedule your appointments in the easy-to-use web interface. That’s all you have to do.
- Prior to the appointment, we’ll automatically remind your customer of the date and time of their appointment.
- The customer will be asked whether they’re coming or not. If not, we’ll notify you of that immediately, so that you can reschedule them and rescue the emptied slot.
- This makes you money. Plus, it is another opportunity to touch your customers, hopefully improving your commercial relationship.
How This Is A Lot Like Bingo Cards
My assumption, which has been borne out a bit in talking to potential customers, is that the market for this sort of thing is overwhelmingly female. The personal services industry is mostly female, and dedicated receptionists (who I am replacing making more efficient in one facet of their jobs) are almost universally female. That is one point in common with the market for Bingo Card Creator.
In addition, the competition is similar to the competition for educational bingo cards in 2006: they’re structurally incapable of addressing huge segments of the market and I am going to go after those segments with a vengeance. For example, if you look for appointment reminder services online, you’ll find that most of them go after the healthcare market — that is, after all, where the money is. (My dentist got $770 for 15 minutes of his time and 30 minutes from the dental hygienist — he’s losing a car payment every hour he doesn’t have his hands in a mouth.)
This is mostly sold as enterprise software, with the long sales cycle, non-transparent pricing, and general cruftiness to match. It almost has to be, because the software has to plug into patient records systems (the typical enterprise morass of dead languages, horrible interfaces, and software which would have fallen to pieces years ago if it hadn’t sold its soul to the devil). Additionally, healthcare is a very regulated industry, and compliance with HIPPA and other regulatory requirements inevitably drives costs up.
From my research, the cheapest options available cost about $300 a month as a service (often involving a contract with an actual call center) or ~$1,000 as installable software and hardware. Those do not strike me as viable options for a hair salon, piano teacher, or small massage parlor. However, thanks to Twilio incurring the capital expenditures on my behalf, I can afford to offer a superior service for a fraction of that price.
And because my cost structure is absurdly better than my competitors, I don’t need to have a sales force to close the deals. Instead, I can use the skills I’ve built up over the last several years of selling B2C software, and consummate transactions online on the strength of passive sales techniques like a demo, free trial, and website. My guess is that the low-friction nature of this is going to help me with the less enterprise-y segment of the market, as they’re least in the mood for “Give us your phone number, address, and financial particulars so we can have a salesman set up a meeting to talk to your office manager about how much this is going to cost you.”
Demo / Minimum Viable Product
Appointment Reminder is not actually ready yet. Having been on something of a Lean Startup kick recently, I thought that getting the software ready prior to showing it around to customers would put the cart in front of the horse: why spend 2-3 months getting v1.0 of the software ready if it turns out that users are cool on the entire concept. Instead, I took a bit of inspiration from Dropbox’s minimum viable product, which was just a video showing how awesome your routine tasks would be if the product actually worked. (They had a working prototype at the time but not one which would 100% reliably keep people’s data, which is sort of a key consideration if you’re making a backup product.)
The way I figure it, since the demo of my software is what ultimately makes the sale, everything that happens after the demo is essentially irrelevant to getting someone’s credit card number. So everything that happens after the demo is out of scope for the MVP: I can demonstrate the sizzle without actually cooking the steak. The sizzle for Bingo Card Creator was cards coming off your printer. The sizzle for Appointment Reminder is demonstrating that I can make a phone ring on command if you type a number into your computer.
I’ve been programming for more than a decade now and very, very rarely get the “kid in a candy store” feel these days from it, but the first time I made my phone ring with an API call, I got all kinds of giddy. I’m figuring that my customers will likely be the same: this is new and magical territory for them. And unlike a certain technology company which specializes in new and magical telephone equipment, this will credibly promise to make people money.
You can try the demo of Appointment Reminder yourself. Get your cellphone out, you’ll need it. The flow goes something like:
- Open the demo page. (I may eventually capture email addresses here, but folks visiting in the first few weeks are mostly going to be my tech buddies, so I’ll hold off for now rather than collecting a lot of mailinator.com addresses.)
- Take a look at the simple calendar interface.
- Type in your phone number and hit Schedule Fake Appointment.
- Your phone rings and you get a combination sales pitch and product demo in the guise of informing you of your fake appointment. At the end of the call, you’ll be given an option to confirm or cancel the appointment.
- As soon as you confirm or cancel the appointment, that is reflected on your computer screen.
- You’ll be asked for a conversion here. At the moment, it just asks for your email address. Once the site is live, I’ll be pushing for the sale right there.
In real life I’d be using a more immediate way to contact the customer than updating their web interface, since they won’t be on Appointment Reminder when their customer gets the phone call, but that didn’t make sense for the demo — I’ve already credibly demonstrated my ability to make the phone ring. Now I just need to credibly demonstrate that I can get information from the phone calls to the computer.
Pricing
I have some tentative thoughts on pricing for the service. This was mostly a marketing decision — I want to be able to say something similar to “Appointment Reminder will pay for itself the first time it prevents a no-show.” There is also quite a bit of daylight between the value of an appointment among my various customer groups — for a low-end salon that might only be $10, for a massage therapist $50, and for a lawyer or dentist “quite a bit indeed.”
My plan breakdown is mostly to do price discrimination among those user groups:
- Personal ($9 / month): This is for folks who either want to send reminders to themselves/family or folks who have a part-time business like piano tutoring on the side. Candidly, I think the value of these customers is going to be minimal, but I wanted to have this plan available for marketing reasons. (It gives me a shot at appealing to the web worker/productivity/etc blogging folks, for example.)
- Professional ($29 / month): The bread and butter plan. This is intentionally sized to be decent for a low-intensity full-time business, such as a hair salon or single massage therapist. Of note, putting the ability to record custom reminders here rather than in the personal plan provides a strong incentive for folks to upgrade.
- Small business ($79 / month): This is where I expect to get the majority of my revenues and profits from (notice how I recommend it?). It should be sufficient to cover most businesses smaller than a busy dentistry practice. Speaking of dentistry practices…
- Enterprise ($669 / month): So here’s a trick I’ve learned in Japan: there are a million ways to tell people “no”. One way to tell people “No, I don’t want your business if you’re in health care” is to make them check a box certifying they are not in healthcare at signup. That increases friction and demonstrates contempt for potential customers. Instead, I’ll say yes, I do want their business eventually (after I get the kinks out of my system and have hardened the security and legal representation enough to feel comfortable with soliciting their business), but it won’t be today and it won’t be cheap.
Common among all plans: the first month will be free (capture credit card on day 1, bill on day 30 for month #2, etc etc), and I’ll have my usual 30 day money-back guarantee. I’d like to offer discounts for multi-month signups, but I think that Paypal may not be too keen about that until I have some history with this business, so I’ll be avoiding it. (Oh, trivia note: Paypal Website Payments Pro + Spreedly for subscription billing.)
At these price points, the cost of providing the service (Twilio calls) would cap out at about 30% if customers routinely rode their plans to the limit. On experience and knowledge of the industry, I think that is highly unlikely, and expect to pay something much closer to 5 ~ 10%. Obviously, I’m never going to characterize this as a 20x markup on Twilio services to my customers, as my customers don’t care beans about Twilio: they care about making sure their expensive professionals don’t idle for lack of work.
Early Reception From Potential Customers
Sadly, I’m not in a position to get this localized into Japanese at the moment (Twilio doesn’t quite have first-class Japanese support, and I have severe doubts about my ability to market effectively domestically). This means that I can’t exactly walk over to the massage parlors around town and ask them to try it out. However, I’ve been talking to friends from high school who work in service industries to verify that my assumption of what their problems are is indeed accurate, lurking on message boards (the number of posts deleted for excessive vituperation about missed appointments suggests to me that there may indeed be a market need for this service), and have been doing keyword research. There appear to be healthy volumes in the core keywords, although I wish it had a built-in longtail search strategy like bingo cards did.
This summer I’m going back to America for about a month to visit family, do a bit of consulting, and have something of a vacation. Over that time, I’m going to be taking the demo (or the product) on my laptop and showing it to as many service providers as I can stomach seeing. Thankfully, I expect that they’ll indulge my request for an interview — I intend to pay them their normal hourly, so coffee and a discussion of their industry and opinions about the software will work out just as well as offering a haircut/massage/etc would.
Business Plan
I didn’t write a formal business plan last time and I have no intention to devolve. That said, I do intend on documenting and revisiting assumptions. As usual, I’ll be doing most of that on my blog, so you guys are welcome along for the ride. I’ll also continue my general transparency policy with regards to what works, what doesn’t, and what my statistics are looking like. That probably won’t rate automatic reporting for a few months yet — no sense building things to track the sales I don’t have.
I’ve essentially got two notes for marketing and intend to be hitting both of them: SEO and AdWords. AdWords is likely going to be a tough nut to crack in this market due to high spending by companies with very, very high average ticket prices, but most of my competitors do not strike me as extraordinarily web savvy, and I think I can out-think their outsourced SEO/SEM teams.
In terms of reasonably achievable goals, I’d like to have v1.0 of the service open and accepting money by the end of June. I think that two hundred paying customers is a very achievable target for a year from now, although I’m still not sure yet how being full time affects my skill at marketing, so that might be understating things by a bit. The last time I made a sales prediction for a new product was when I expressed the wild desire that Bingo Card Creator eventually sell a whole $200 per month. I hope to be every bit as mistaken.
A Quick Request
I value your opinions tremendously. If you have suggestions related to the business or forthcoming feature set, I’d love to hear them. If you have any particular areas you’d like to hear about in my upcoming blog posts, I’d love to hear that, too.
I’m coming to the market several years behind most of my competitors and will be playing catchup for quite some time. I would be indebted if you took a few minutes to blog about Appointment Reminder.
Interesting idea Patrick. But as an indirect user of Twilio (we use PagerDuty.com for ops, which uses Twilio), I find the voices to be very inhuman, and their voicemail detection is WAY off. If I miss a page, and it goes to VM, it usually starts about 15 seconds into the PagerDuty schpiel (and I miss the important bits). Twilio is great and all, as a web service, but in proposing to replace the human touch with an automated system, do you think it’s up to snuff?
Solid idea Patrick. Something to think about – is there a way to get into the “Appointment Reminder” business without needing to enter the “Appointment Scheduling” market?
For whatever reason, Appointment Scheduling startups seem to be plentiful and struggle to get adoption from small businesses. Your potential customers probably already have a thousand reasons in their heads why they don’t want to use / change scheduling software, so how can you avoid that discussion entirely?
I note that you’ve got a .org domain for the site. Do you own the .com as well? If not, do you think that’s going to be a problem?
Hey Patrick,
Very nice idea; I actually toyed around with that idea awhile ago. It’s much potential; and I think you will do very well in it if you put all the same focus you did with bingocreator. The SEO is probably the best marketing strategy, and your domain is very good start.
Patrick, I am much in the very, very same boat with you, my web startup is not doing the same as yours, but kind of complimenting and shares the same customer base. I, too, want to get it launched by end of June.
Also, kudos to having balls to post what you are wanting to do in such great detail and so early without a finished product. Especially posting to other web app “startup” likely people that can steal your idea!
Anyways, I’d love to talk with you. We would learn alot from each other, I think, and definitely keep each other motivated as I am a single bootstrap founder as well. Look up my email I put in for this comment, and hit me up!
Thanks,
James
@boofus I think he can worry about that later, it’s just a squated page. Unless someone wants to directly copy him, I don’t think it’s much of a worry now. Once he’s up and knows it’s a viable business bringing income, he can just buy that domain. Plus if he does bring in money, he can setup some legals to protect his name.
The .org exact keyword he has now is going to give him leaps and bounds of advantage in both short and long term.
– James
Congrats!
Prediction: 200 customers in six months. Don’t underestimate yourself.
Hi Patrick,
I think you have recognized a terrific opportunity, and you could be really successful with a bit of polish on your method for solving the problem.
One potential issue with the current proposed solution is that it may tend to alienate regular customers. My sense is that they may not like having a computer remind them of appointments that they fully intend to keep–especially if the appointments are recurring. (Of course I could be wrong!)
Perhaps the cause of the problem also needs some further analysis. You are assuming that people miss appointments mostly because they forget. This is probably correct; however, there could be a sizeable number who miss them because they find something better to do at the last minute. “Oh Shirley, I have a massage appointment in 20 minutes! But we’re having so much fun, I’m going to skip it. My masseuse Tina will understand. I’ll tell her when I see her next week.”
So, what do you think about this? You create a service that charges customers in advance on your clients’ behalf. Your service would also provide the appointment reminder as an option to the customer. As an incentive to use this service, the customer would probably get a discount. The caveat is that if she ends up missing the appointment, she forfeits most of the money that was paid in advance.
The idea needs a lot more development, of course. Please keep us posted as the project evolves. One last thing: You’ll probably want to casually chat with potential clients for a few months to get a better idea as to whether this is truly a problem worth solving.
Best,
Kevin
Two quick notes about the demo page:
1) The text box where the phone number is entered didn’t really stand out to me when I first checked out the page
2) It looks like you made it to where the users can only place one call. I tried a refresh and restarting the browser, and just see the “Your call was processed” dialogue. I think your target demographic could very well just have one computer in the office and may need to make multiple calls to demonstrate the product to their co-workers/bosses. So you may want to let the users make a few calls in the demo.
– Andrew
Looks like a solid idea. I’m not in the target market but I’ve definitely received phone calls for appointment reminders recently and thought to myself “man, I wish these people didn’t have to waste their time calling me to remind about the appointment but I do see how it’s important to their business and needs to be done.”
I’d be curious to tell my dentist or someone about this to see how they react. I think you got a good market/product fit and now it’s about making sure it’s super intuitive for the people that really use it.
no phone ringing in the uk.
Patrick,
Your article reads like a textbook lesson. Your approach to MVP and pricing demonstrates practice of the lean startup theory.
Thanks a lot and good luck with your idea!
Alex
Great job Patrick and good luck with it.
In a future blog post I would be very interested to hear about the UI design of your app. This is the area I have most difficult with and least knowledge of. Hearing how you went about your design and lessons learned would be extremely useful to me. I’m very interested to find out more about using themes. I seem to remember you mentioning somewhere (maybe twitter) you were going to be using ThemeForest, but now seem to be using WooThemes – would love to hear more about all this in a blog post.
Thanks
Phil
Good Luck with this. I’m sure there’s a market for this if you can find an efficient way to reach them.
Hi Patrick,
I think Rohin is right, appointment scheduling is a weak link. There are all sorts of reasons to say ‘no’ up front when hearing the words “appointment scheduling.” If the customer thinks they need to stop using their current system, it is likely a missed sale. Switching systems has a high psychological impedance.
Being able to schedule reminders has great appeal. Some businesses would prefer to remind customers 24 hours in advance, and others 30 minutes in advance. If data input is easy then it should be an easy sale.
I think that asking for appointment confirmation is less important than sending a simple reminder. It would be interesting to see the data on appointments kept, there have been studies done in this field.
If the service is going to interact with the customer though, please enable them to cancel via the service. The business doesn’t know what is going on if the customer simply fails to respond. Plus the customer feels good that they were able to communicate that they can’t make it, and the salon is happy in being able to reschedule.
Depending on the customer, an email or IM may be preferred, they are simple add-ons to the service. I had that same giddy feeling the first time I used an API to send an IM reminder about the status of some software.
Best of luck!
p.s. I know there are lots of strategies on pricing, but as a customer I would strongly prefer a simple pricing model of $x per reminder. Possibly broken down by reminder type like:
Phone Call .75 cents
SMS .50 cents
Email .05 cents
IM .10 cents
It’s easy to make a decision on value if it’s broken down that way. And I avoid the unsettling feelings that come with signing up for a subscription. It’s also easy to communicate the pricing plan to others: “Have you heard about appointment reminders? It’s only 50 cents for an SMS”
Patrick:
I just watched a presentation on customer acquisition given by Drew Houston of DropBox and it seems like their mutually beneficial referral program would be a perfect way to encourage WOM for your new endeavor. Here’s the link (thanks to Bob Walsh):
http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262672510#
Can’t wait to see what you do with this idea!
Steve Moyer
The enterprise market may be easier if you can give their engineers an API. Later this year we will be building something like this, I’ll recommend your service to our team if it is up and running.
A related idea: something I keep meaning to go hunting for is a system for scheduling reminders for myself. I have all these routine things that I have to do every month or every quarter, and then a load of irregular appointments like meetings and haircuts… And I’m rubbish at remembering it all.
I want a system that will organize me so that I *know* I can’t forget my appointments, and that will make it easy for me to remember to do my routine tasks. For meetings I want a reminder the day before, by text and by email. For routine things I want a reminder that starts on a certain date and keeps coming once a day until I say that I’ve done the task. Because I’m a lazy bum, and I like to procrastinate on boring routine things. I’m unlikely to drop everything and do my tax return straight away if I can put it off for a few days, but I do want to know that the deadline is looming.
It’s a pretty different idea to your idea for an appointment reminder, but it’s also an appointment reminder of sorts. Maybe some day you might want to expand your product in that direction.
Suggest that the box gets cleared of the phone text here when someone starts typing. I got confused put my number to the right of the phone text: and then puzzled a minute over the error.
Also when looking at the interface I was thinking about the whole Walgreens meds reminder for pick-up. Your workflow is directed at scheduling only for a particular time and place instead of just a reminder to pick up like your laundry tomorrow at any time. So all I enter is this task is done and ready for follow-up call and a time that the call should occur for follow-up.
For example the lady that tells her friend to call her during the blind date so she has the potential to bug out early well now she doesn’t need to ask her firend to make that call.
How about I can my email and a call will be made, might be useful for grandma .
Also how to handle voice mail? You have confirm press a button or not but that script may not make sense for that scenario. I suspect you may want to write out a few different type of scenario’s so you get a feel for the variance in settings the customer will want to set. (Probably after all those sales start coming in first).
Sorry about being all over the palce good concept app and great work on the tool; the possibilities of this type of application really seem exciting. Hope you generate a lot of business. Good Luck!!
Say how do I populate the image of me on my comment?
I like the idea a lot! Nice work; this should be a great one. I totally agree about the impact of that phone call. The only suggestion I would make at this point is to make it easier for them to be wowed by it like I was :)
Patrick,
Congrads on the new product.
I wrote a similar system (automated appointment reminders) targeted to medical practices. I found sales very difficult for this type of product. I found business owner’s very reluctant to sign up even after showing them how it saves them money. I found Microsoft’s Speech Server to be a very nice development platform.
Again good luck!
Patrick,
Kudos for laying it all out there and sharing without holding back. I just returned from a professional service provide myself, and having read this entry before my appointment, I brought up the business to her. She’s a 1 year old business (formerly working for a big spa and struck out on her own) and schedules largely out of her “day planner” by email and phone. She was all ears when I told her about your site, the interface and the functionality it could bring her–and with that higher revenue.
I say ignore the market that appointment schedulers may have their hooks in. My guess is there are at least 200 other pros just like mine that are early in their startup, need to manage a budget tightly and would dig your service. At least 200.
And Rich has my money. 200 customers in 6 months. Best of the market to ya.
@bromley: your alternative idea sounds like RememberTheMilk.com to me.
@patrick: thanks for posting on this, and TIA for future reveals on how it all unfolds! This is excellent vicarious experience for the rest of us.
A few thoughts:
* Have you looked into ways to use real voices for some/all of the reminder messages? A reminder message contains a pretty limited set of things to say; if you had voice talent record the building blocks (times, etc.) then be available to record company names, that could be a neat one-time setup type thing, and/or a different subscription level.
* About the (deadly boring but errors-cause-havoc) work for the receptionist of copying over appointment data from the scheduling system to the reminder system — this is definitely a psychological hump to get over, and it seems worth some work to make this as simple as possible. I don’t know about popular scheduling software, and what options there are for exports, integration, etc. (if any!), but you *can* at least give them a big text area to paste in data, and then do your best to parse it. I implemented this on my music theory site for teachers pasting in student lists from Excel (or elsewhere) and it has worked out quite well.
* You may also hit a snag with internet access — do small business owners generally pay for in-store internet access (…just so their employees can waste time, since in most massage parlors/beauty salons/etc. there’s not much need otherwise…)? Auto mechanics are possibly a bit better off, as more of their suppliers try to move to the web, but I’m not sure. I am still fairly frequently surprised at the arcane-looking data-entry apps I running in these types of small businesses.
* I worry a bit about the .org name, though it’s also often a losing game to try to buy the .com from the squatter. What about .us or other TLDs? appointmentremind.us for example. (I suppose I’m mostly just concerned because it feels wrong to put a commercial site on a .org… but no, that’s not a business reason).
HTH, and best of luck/courage!
Rob W
@Professor Opinion
I’m not wowed about the Twilio voices at present, but I’m told they have new ones in development. Additionally, I expect that most customers will be using custom reminders or my pre-canned reminders. I have some fun ideas for how I can use the pre-canned ones in my marketing. More on that later.
@Robin:
Excellent question. I’m not sure about the answer yet, but I’ll be iterating in response to customer feedback. My initial hope is that Appointment Reminder demonstrates value from the very first appointment you put into it, whereas scheduling only adds value if *all* your appointments are in it. This plus the stupidly low barrier to doing your first appointment reminder might push folks into trying it out.
@Boofus:
The .com is owned by a professional domainer. No, I do not anticipate this is going to be a major problem. Domains are dead, long live Google.
@Rich:
Thanks for the vote of confidence!
@Kevin:
We’ll see if customers appreciate this or not. My impression is that it is a minute out of their day — if it is a nuisance, it is very easy to hang up on a computer (easier than if the secretary was calling with the same message). I suspect many folks will appreciate it.
I’ll be chatting with customers throughout development and post-launch. Interest from folks I have already spoken to has run pretty high — I’m fairly confident this is an actual pain point. Now I just have to solve it.
@Andrew:
Thanks for reporting that. It is a bug — you have received a message telling you how to unblock your phone for a second bite at the demo apple. I’ll try fixing it today.
@Michael:
Thanks. I have likewise felt that “There has got to be something more important for you to be doing this morning than reading me information from off your computer screen. Technology should have freed you from this drudgery already.” It strikes me as a largely pointless exercise like washing clothes by hand.
@nickj:
I apologize, it is US/Canada only at the moment, as it isn’t economically viable for me to offer it overseas yet. I’ll work on that as time goes on, if warranted.
@Phil:
Don’t use me for UI lessons! I’m terrible at it!
@Aaron:
Thanks for the detailed thoughts. I don’t want to do metered billing because I think that introduces complications in sales and support which I do not need. Also, all you can eat pricing is very attractive to people — look how many folks go for all you can eat SMS on their own phones, for example. It stops you from having to worry about the cost of every click of the send button.
@Bromley:
You are *exactly* who the Personal edition is for.
@John:
The computer can detect whether it has gone to voice mail. If yes, it plays a different message and lets the customer call back to confirm/cancel the appointment. You can get an image for yourself by going to gravatar.com and registering your email address, then uploading an image — this is a WordPress thing, not a “this blog” thing.
@Ruben:
Thanks! Glad you liked it.
@Chad:
Thanks. I’m likewise worried about my ability to get folks to sign up for it, but I’ll be using every passive sales trick I know and then some. We’ll see if it works.
@Brian:
Thanks for doing that. I love hearing from “real people”, and in addition to talking to them myself any secondhand opinions are always welcome. I also think that the number of service professionals who need something like this is ginormous. If I could sell it in small town Japan, there would be well in excess of 200 businesses to try selling to here. I’m fishing over the entire US and Canada at the moment, and only have to convert the barest fraction while I work on the product, marketing, and sales.
@Everybody:
I really appreciate it, guys.
Neat idea, definitely an unexploited niche there. Personally, I would hate to receive an automated call – in fact I would probably have hung up before it finishes reading the first word, thinking that it is some telemarketing nonsense. But receiving notification by SMS would definitely be good (I know Specsavers opticians in the UK already do this, but they are a big chain so probably have some expensive system to do it).
What happens if I don’t reply to the reminder? I assume that the default response is that my appointment is not cancelled. I would be quite irrirated to turn up and find my appointment cancelled because I didn’t reply to a text message!
This is a great idea. I’m another one of those ‘I always thought about doing this’. I primarily need it to remind me to change the oil in the car, renew the licenses, etc (ie, things that happen only once per 3-4 months, or once per year).
One question: It seems like you’re staking your business on Twilio and that subscription processor (can’t remember the name). If they shut their doors suddenly (I know, I know, that could NEVER happen), is that the end of your service? Seems like all the customer billing/subscription info would be gone. That’s the one downside to the whole web services/cloud thing — companies do go out of business.
Patrick,
I find your post interesting because I’ve mulled over this idea myself. One major problem that I couldn’t think through- how do you get service companies to do dual data entry? Any business with the slightlest acumen already uses a computer to manage appointments. In most cases, those computers are running proprietary scheduling software. So you’d either need to automatically read that program’s data file, or convince businesses to enter schedules first in their existing software and then through your new service. The second path is going to be a very, very hard sell. (You can’t simply replace the existing software, becuase it often handles other tasks such as billing.)
You should absoltely follow the Lean Startup route and talk to your target customers before writing any more code. To follow your example, how many salons would be willing to use your service? I haven’t been to a salon in a long, long time that didn’t use a computer to schedule my next appointment. And beleive me, you don’t want to waste your time trying to sell to businesses that haven’t yet realized the value of installing a computer to the office. You’d lose your sanity in no time.
The idea that’s much more compelling to me- as other commenters have mentioned- is the reminder tool for individuals. Something more specialized than the general task management websites that are around today.
Good luck!
The chances of this website working are close to zero. You have no experience selling to businesses, your site is really ugly and the customers of the businesses don’t want to hear some mechanical voice talking.
Additionally, your prices are horrendous for businesses that make $3000 or $4000 a month.
You’ve had one product that is sold to the most naive group of people that exist. People have been stroking your ego and declaring you a genius – and you’re bought into their bullshit. What you’re done here is selected a terrible market that has very little overlap with what you are already doing (meaning bad knowledge transfer), you’ve selected a model that is totally unlike what you were doing before and addresses different people (your email database is now useless) and you’ve gone from high volume to low volume.
Your product is poorly designed and looks bad. It solves a problem that people have – but badly.
You’ve drank your own cool-aid, my friend. You should have evolved out of your current business into something close by where you could apply the success of one to the other, but instead you switched and went somewhere else where you have no experience. The feedback you have been getting is mostly negative, but you are defending the business and replying all questions with “I am right” instead of trying to understand what people are saying and fixing pre-launch.
Don’t let people convince you that you are a genius and can do no wrong. You can do a lot of wrong, and what you have here is wrong. Let me predict exactly what will happen:
You will have 100 to 150 visitors to the site within a few months. You will have two or three paying customers on the cheapest plan. These customers will bother the heck out of you in support. You will keep the site running to save face, but will go back to talking about your bingo stuff.
I just found in comments you answer to my question on BOS about .org domain name. It is really better to get .org .net or with hyphen with exact keywords then to get .com with some not so good keywords.
Holy cow Jane – bad day at the office? Did Patrick wrong you in a former life? I think I’ve got a bit of your anger-dribble sprayed on my screen. You have some (potentially) valid points, but they’re lost in your projected-rage spittle-fest. If you can’t be good mannered and engage in a constructive manner, please do the internet a favour and don’t bother.
Patrick – OMG you can like *totally* do no wrong man, can I touch your genius? Please? ;)
*Ahem*.. One thought that came to me that might be worth investigating: Anecdotally it sounds like some in the target audience are aware of the problem, but, do they have enough insight into the problem to be actively searching for a solution (which you touch on with your comment on the lack of long-tail keywords). My spider-sense tells me that this might be one of those things that people bitch about, but, are at such a loss that they never attempt to do anything about it, because they can’t conceive of a possible solution (unlike Bingo cards where teachers can conceive of the fact that someone on the internet might have already produced what they are looking for).
If correct, this would make the sales process more education heavy (ie educating prospects that the solutions exists, so heavier touch at least). Couple of potential solutions to this:
1. Affiliate scheme – get others to find/do the educating for you into their niche/vertical in return for a slice of the pie. Sounds like a patio11-style ‘automated’ style solution!
2. Create a tangential resource that attracts those who would be prospects which leads them to discovering that a solution exists, e.g. a site offering marketing-tips for freelance hair-stylists – these could be the equivalents to your freelancer produced micro-sites for Bingo Card Creator.
Best of luck with it. Looking forward to reading about your progress.
PS You are an inspiration to me and others – not because I enshrine you on some genius-pedestal, but, because you get off your ass and *do things*, humbly, modestly, warts-and-all, which is what I aspire to do better. Thanks for that.
Actually, “Jane” is voicing (albeit crudely) what a lot of us have been thinking.
But personally I feel that Patrick isn’t stupid – he’s just not telling us the whole story. Nobody in their right mind would quit their day job for BCC and this project, especially if they live in Japan.
Patrick is embellishing his story to tell us what we want to hear, to give us hope, to inspire us. That’s not such a bad thing. But it is still, technically, a crock.
Embellishing? Did I miss the part where he described the drug-fuelled hooker orgies?
What possible motive does Patrick have for making out that he’s a MicroISV selling low-earning products if in reality he’s not? Fame? Glory? Even if he were, what would he gain from fame amongst the BoS/Hacker News fraternity? Hot-chicks throwing themselves at his feet? From the evidence presented here: nerd-rage.
Jane put a lot of effort into her rant. I don’t get where all that energy comes from? If Patrick were being obnoxious, or, deliberately opinionated, or obtuse, maybe. But, he’s not.. He’s said: ‘Here’s my hypothesis of how this little part of the world is, I’m going to test it, and let you know if I’m right or wrong’.
How do you go from that to: ‘BAAAAAAAAAAAAAASTARD!! YOU ARE WRONG! DIE! DIE!’
It just doesn’t……………….. compute.
Patrick. Dude. Did you toilet-paper Spolsky’s house or something?
As usual, you are both amazing and great. I have no idea whether this product will work, but if anyone will iterate it to success, it’ll be you. I’m holding back on the temptation to run off with your idea and steal a jump on the European market. Best of luck pal.
Give Patrick a pass – he takes his time to share a lot of information and insight. If you don’t like it then don’t follow.
The fact that he’s actually built a successful business also gives him more of a mandate to talk about this stuff than 99% of the people posting on these forums.
Patrick I will say I think you bounced back some valid criticisms, particularly on the Hacker News thread. Nearly all of the points raised there and here have different degrees of merit.
A few initial points of feedback:
As an end customer of the service business:
– A robotic voice would really put me off – can you play an MP3 of a human voice?
– I might want to opt in to this – i.e. be asked whether I would like to receive the reminder? Would feel less intrusive.
– I would prefer to receive an SMS any day of the week. The automated Twilo call would please the hacker in me, but SMS is would be preferred practically.
– The chance to confirm I am not coming would make me more likely to not show up.
As one of your customers:
– The .org would put me off – rightly or wrongly – Google ranking or otherwise.
– You know about the pros and cons of this than me, but I would really be looking to brand something like this – ‘Appointment Reminder’ as a name is even dryer than ‘Bingo Card Creator.’ The name is nice and clear, but branding, image, naming etc create loyalty and empathy – the big guys do it for a reason.
– If I was looking for this it would imply I had some degree of tech savvy – probably more than your ESL teachers. In that case, I might be looking for things such as a simple HTTP API to hook up my own system into it.
– Considering the double keying, I would want it to be really fast to enter new appointment reminders – maybe even a desktop widget or a screen that just accepted the reminder.
Similar to James above – I am also operating in the same market and am learning a lot. Feel free to open an email thread with James and I and maybe we can learn something from each other!
@Jane:
I guess we’ll see, won’t we.
@CheeseMuffler:
I actually wouldn’t describe bingo cards as a market where people are aware my solution exists. Less than 1% of my sales come from people searching for “~ software” or “~ download”. They only know how to describe their immediate desire, “~ bingo cards”, which is what I optimize for on the long tail. I don’t have any fantastic ideas for long tail content creation in appointment reminders at the moment, but will work on it.
@BOS Regular:
I’m confused: you think I have created an elaborate fictitious Internet personality over the last four years, and it has spiraled out of control, such that I have to embellish it with details like “lives in Japan” and “quit the day job” to keep delivering on the legend? If I were going to spend four years on creating a fictitious Internet persona, he’d darn well be making more than I do! And he’d have a hot supermodel girlfriend who moonlighted as an astrophysicist.
@Benjamin:
I’d love to do a human voice for 100% of it, but it strikes me as impractical unless my customer wants to do it. I have an idea for how I can offer that to them in an easy fashion, though.
As for SMSes: I think SMSes make for an excellent product, and I intend to offer it, but they make for a poor demo. It doesn’t have nearly the impact that a voice speaking into your ear does. (Which is, ironically, why everyone who has suggested it would prefer to receive SMSes.)
HTTP API: I am open to listening to actual customers on this issue, but just between you and me, I think I’m more likely to win the lottery than to find a massage therapist who knows what “So can I integrate this via a webhook callback?” means.
I’ll definitely be optimizing for quick entry. I have some ideas for how to do this from my old days as an order entry operator — keyboard based navigation with a bit of intelligence in defaults, for example. This will be a fun opportunity to test how far I can push a Javascript-based interface.
Patrick – take your point on the massage therapist.
I guess my more general point was, expect this market to have a higher degree of tech savyness than you are used to with ESL teachers.
I’ve been surprised in both directions in my early interactions with small businesses. Some are obviously not tech savvy at all, but at least half have surprised me with talk of stuff like APIs, Reporting, Mobile, Social Media yadda yadda.
“you think I have created an elaborate fictitious Internet personality over the last four years, and it has spiraled out of control, such that I have to embellish it with details like “lives in Japan” and “quit the day job” to keep delivering on the legend?”
I don’t know if you are deliberately misreading my post to create a straw man argument or not, but that’s not what I meant by embellishment. My point about living in Japan was not that it was fictitious, but that it is not cheap to live in Japan (I know, I’ve lived in Tokyo), and I don’t think you can live there on BCC earnings alone without dipping into savings or doing consultancy – both options you have mentioned but downplayed.
But by calling everything an experiment, you will be able to spin every failure into an interesting anecdote, and those who want to believe in you will be happy, and those of us who read between the lines will just say “meh”.
Oh, and this is not your second product, this is your third. The second one you abandoned quietly. This is an example of the spin you employ that makes some of us question your posts. (Pre-emptive snarky comment: But this is the second product that got to the demo stage)
Congrats Patrick, I’m following along with your progress along with the Twilio team and we’re always here to help. Regarding the voices, we do have some new ones for you to try out – drop me a note at danielle@twilio.com and I can get you set up (if you aren’t already).
Cheers!
Danielle @ Twilio
Love it. Any plans to provide this service as an add-on to existing scheduling programs?
I wish you luck, hope it works, but I am (mostly) sceptical. I hope you prove me wrong.
But here are the reasons for my scepticism.
1. My experience is that doctors, dentists, and lawyers generally have receptionists whose job is to manage and schedule appointments.
– They can’t get rid of the receptionist, because their job also includes answering the phone to book appointments, reschedule appointments if a customer calls to request a time change, etc.
– And when the receptionist is talking to a customer, they usually need to field queries about things like billing, the progress of their case, or whether their test results are back yet, or can I get a receptionist with the hygenist as well as the dentist, etc.
– To the extent that they want to remind customers of appointments (I don’t ever remember being reminded, but I know my doctor and dentists keep records of all previous appointments), they probably prefer a person doing the calling, rather than a computer – see previous paragraph for some reasons. Particularly if you consider that most doctor’s and dentist’s most frequently visiting patients are probably on average less keen on being dialed by a computer than even the average person (e.g. elderly).
– If they want a computer to manage the diary, they probably already have one, and they one they have, probably integrates to their billing or client/patient records system.
– Another problem: Client confidentality. Even the fact that you are having an appointment with a doctor or lawyer may be considered confidential information. Putting the client’s name and phone number into an internet web site is the opposite of that.
– Other problem: Syncing. The receptionist books an appointment using their diary or computer system. Then they put the reminder into your web site (double data-entry). Then the customer calls to cancel or reschedule the appointment, which of course happens all the time. The receptionist updates their diary or computer system. Then they need to remember to update your reminder web site (double double data-entry). And so on. Especially for doctors, people are rescheduling appoints all the time, sometimes again and again. When you consider the make-work aspect and potential for error seems enormous.
2. Hair-dressers, beauty salons, etc.
– No hair dresser that I’ve been to has ever had an appointments computer.
– I’ve only been to a couple of beauty salons to pick my wife up. Never seen a computer there either.
– What I do see: A big diary on the reception desk, that any random hairdresser who works in the salon and who answers the phone can scrawl appointments into.
– So the problems:
(i) They probably don’t have a computer
(ii) It takes five seconds and no-skills to scrawl an entry into the diary, or cross out a cancelled appointment. BUT it takes lots of time, and training to update both the appointment diary and to remember to update an appointment reminder web site.
– Also, I am sure these folks moan about missed appointments, but are you sure the reason is that customers forget and need reminding? Without wanting to sound sexist, trust me, most women don’t forget about their hair or beauty. They might choose not to go to a beauty appointment if they’re having more fun doing something else, or are just too busy, and if they’re inconsiderate they might not call to cancel, but they didn’t forget.
3. Guitar teachers, piano teachers, private tutors, beauty therapists, etc., working from home
These are people usually working at home alone right?
So they have a computer: Good
Single worker: Easier for them to keep up a diary and appointment reminder web site updated
But
– Price sensitive (may only be working part time)
– May not be tech savvy or interested (this is often the attraction of teaching piano etc., get away from pressure, computers, etc.)
– May not have many appointments
– Appointments may be pre-booked on a schedule weeks in advance (every Tuesday at 8pm) so considered easy for students to remember.
– Still need to do double data-entry (in their diary and your website) of appointments. They may figure it’s easier just to manually remind those students who are unreliable, or just lose those students.
– If the student/customer doesn’t turn up (and forgetting again may not be the reason), they might be annoyed that they stayed in specially, but it’s not usually lost money in the sense that they could have fitted in another appointment – because they are far from fully booked anyway. Instead they’re annoyed at the lost payment from that customer, and then they go back to watching TV or watching kids, etc.
4. Other points:
– My personal gut feeling is that the double-entry requirement will be a killer in the long-run. Even if you get customers initially, I think you’re retention will be low when they realise how much work it is to maintain 2 sets of records.
– Double data-entry is never going to work in more informal working environments where their is no dedicated person handling the scheduling. And if there is a dedicated person, they don’t really need you app.
– You may be thrilled by the fact that typing a phone number into a computer can cause a phone to ring. I would probably be too, if I wrote an app to do that. In fact in 1998, when I wrote a fax app to do something similar (enter a number and a message to fax), I was too. Customers are not. They have used things like skype and are not amazed by a computer dialing a phone (if anything, I think that they are more likely to see an analogy between the phone messages and those annoying automatd voice mail and customer service systems). You may be able to find a sizzle in your app, but I don’t think this is it.
– Group 3 is I think your best target. I think there are only a low percentage who might take it up, but amoung all the piano teachers, maybe you can find a few tech-savvy piano teachers who need to remind their pupils of lesson times, and don’t mind double data-entry, etc.
Seems that the tone is a bit different from the first day (when I initially read your post, but did not get a chance to comment).
Patrick, don’t listen to the nay-sayers. I love your idea, and it may not be slam dunk, and could require a lot of work, it seems to me that what you’ve been working on so far prepared you well for it.
One key think you seem to be minimizing, though, is that the price point difference may be bringing more challenges than you anticipate, plus the subscription model vs. one time sale (as it is the case with BCC).
In any case, good luck, and I’ll be eagerly awaiting to hear more about the rest of the story!
Hi Patrick,
You (probably) don’t know me, but I know you via HN. (Hi! I’m zaatar) Just some suggestions:
1) For your pricing page:
http://www.appointmentreminder.org/pricing
While I think I can make an educated guess at what “Users” and “Schedules” refer to, I think it would help much if you were to have ALT-text on hovering those with some explanation of what they are.
2) For your 404 page
I assume you’ll be fixing this, but if not, I don’t think “Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.” is a very useful 404 page message :)
Cool, good luck!
–ravi.
I’ll think I’ll add something to my previous comments, as I thought of something else.
It seems to me that there are two groups scheduling appointment.
1. Those don’t currently use computers/technology for scheduling appointments..
2. Those who do
I don’t think you can target group 1, because they’ll probably never find you through Google anyway, may not have any money, and you have to sell them on the idea of using a computer.
Among the people who do, there are 2 sub-groups
2(a) People who don’t want to automatically remind people of appointments
2(b) People who are not prepared to do extra data-entry and data-maintenance to automatically remind people of appointments
2(c) People who are
Group 2(a) is irrelevant to you. So it’s 2(b) versus to 2(c), and I expect group 2(b) is much bigger than 2(c)
So the answer is to build the reminder function into (or tightly integrate with) the software that they already use to manage their appointments and diary. Especially since when you call up a lot of places to book they already know who you are (if you’ve called previously) because their phone caller-id is connected to their computer.
Alternatively if you want to target self-employed guitar teachers and the like, why not integrate with the diary/scheduling apps in mobile phones. If they use tech to manage appointments it’s a pretty good chance they use an iphone or blackberry or whatever, and they already have their appointment schedule and customer details including phone numbers all in there.
I just think the core of managing a schedule is managing appointments and a diary (even if this is not integrated to a billing system or whatever), and thus making appointment reminders a separate task involving data-entry, is like the tail-wagging the dog.
Anyway good luck, and I hope you prove me wrong.
Nice launch. I don’t think you need to wait till summer to talk to potential clients. Can you call or email them? You have a lot of supporters in the US. Maybe one of them can make some market research calls for you. All they’d need to ask are basic questions like “If we built this, will you pay? What would make you pay?”
I like the name, but I think it boxes you in. And, as some have said, the .org is confusing to many users.
I think the process of creating a first event can be clearer. I didn’t read any of the text on the demo page the first time I used it and I wasn’t sure what the calendar was for.
Maybe you can have a simple form that says, “who should we remind? When? How?” With the right form, you can explain the whole product without much text.
Thanks for the feedback Andrew (and others). I’m going to be tweaking the demo as I go along.
The receptionist at our dentist phones to remind people to keep their appointments, and does this when she is not doing anything else. So it is difficult to see how in this situation there would be a benefit to the practice in changing to your system on time saving alone. The receptionist is using time that she would otherwise be wasting, she can re-schedule the appointment immediately if there is going to be a no-show and there is no need to enter data twice.
The reminder call is also a way of remaining in contact with the client even if they are not going to keep the appointment this time. Obviously, it is vital in this day and age of cutbacks, job insecurity and less disposable income to encourage client loyalty.
So, how about adding saving money on phone bills to your USP? I can only speak for the UK where we don’t all have free day-time phone calls, and small home based business users will not necessarily have dedicated work phone lines with decent tariffs etc etc.
Good luck.
It’s nice to hear you’ve started another one. Congrats and Good Luck!!!
My dentist recently signed up with a third party service that sends me SMS reminders. I love it, because I don’t have an appointment book and have regularly blown off doctors/dentists because the receptionist has the wrong number when they give me the two day “reminder call”.
Fantastic idea, and good analysis in the blog post. Also, I can’t believe anyone would think it’s a mistake for you to lay out your idea publicly and freely like this. Haven’t people realized by now that good ideas are cheap, and there’s no value in stealing an idea — it’s all in the execution! Plus you get so much valuable feedback.
Using a text color of #666666 while seeming artsy, is really hard to read for me (and I think lots of other people based on comments I get when I bring it up).
Why not just go with a higher contrast? Black on white works, and is readable by everyone.
Ok, Patrick, as I mentioned offline recently, I’m also at the minimum viable product stage with a product development project of my own. (http://sheridanprogrammersguild.com/2010/05/22/my-minimum-viable-passwordrn-product/) So your thought process here is really important to me. And that means I gotta ask about the elephant in the room.
Why in the world is your second product NOT a follow-on product for teachers? I mean, I can understand that you a) want to tackle something more technically challenging now that you are full time or b) want to prove to yourself that your niche marketing tactics work outside the one small niche you have conquered to date. But, frankly, one of the things that has always stood out about your product/business choices, as you describe them, is the extent to which they haven’t been about you; they’ve been about what is pragmatic to do. And I just can’t see why you would not go back to your teacher customers and offer them follow on products. Crossword Creator, anyone? Word Search Creator?
I guess you could be thinking that there is a lot more money to be made with a product that hits a business’ bottom line than by any set of products that ‘just’ save teachers’ time or improve on what the free-product market is providing them. But even so, wouldn’t it make sense to solidify Bingo Creator with an xxxCreator ‘line’ of products — which probably wouldn’t take a long time for you to produce — and THEN branch out after a new market?
I guess the reason this matters to me is that I believe that, if I succeed in bringing out a couple of products for nurses, then I’m pretty much committed to that marketplace for a substantial period of time. Yeah, sure, I may come up with a parallel set of products for another niche, but in order to maintain momentum for my xxxRN brand, I’ll HAVE to bring out additional products. Don’t you feel that way about Bingo Card Creator?
People ask me that every once in a while Anne. Let’s see:
I want to try some new challenges. Marketing to small business is different than marketing to teachers. I’ll be thinking of new angles, new problems, new people — similar and different at the same time. I love novel problems and, well, after four years of speaking to teachers *every single day* about classroom activities I am ready for something novel.
I’d like to go after slightly bigger game this time. Word searches or vocabulary puzzles are sort of like BCC plus epsilon. I’ll be able to sell to some of the same customers, but the new sale will be worth $30? $50? I really, really want to do something with lifetime customer values in the hundreds range. That will give me more options in marketing, more month-to-month stability, and (highly probably) more money on the bottom line.
Sounds like an interesting idea and I wish you all the best. I had a little dabble in the appointment scheduling market but unfortunately it didn’t really take off.
It is still running but I’ve moved on to other things:
http://appointmentmemo.com
Looking forward to hearing more about your new venture
Cheers
Hi Patrick,
This sounds like a very good idea and I think the website and demo look good!
I’m curious to know why you’re using wordpress for the appointmentreminder.org website instead of static pages. (I’m not criticizing, I’m genuinely curious ;-)
Patrick – knock ‘em dead man. It seems like a great opportunity.
It’s so much easier to spout negativity and “this is why it won’t work” instead of encouraging you to pursue a new challenge.