Today is the last day of February and it was an eventful month.

The Two Main Highlights

On February 1st I got a new customer onboarded and they’re still using the product. So I met my goal this month of getting one new customer onboarded. I met with them a couple weeks ago and I think it’s pretty safe to say they’re sold for good.

Like I mentioned in last week’s update, I had some problems with the appointment reminder features. Since then I added the ability for clients to confirm their appointments and stylists/receptionists now see confirmed appointments show up green on the schedule. This means there’s no longer confusion as to whether the client noticed the reminder email. Even though I mostly put out the fire, I’m not out of the woods yet and I still have a lot of work to do in this area.

Direct Mail

One thing I did this month was start researching direct mail as a marketing channel. I bought a book called The Direct Mail Solution (co-authored by Dan Kennedy) and read most of it. I’m really interested in the idea of marketing via direct mail because my target market is mostly non-tech-savvy people, and to me reaching them via offline methods seems like it could make a lot of sense.

The big outstanding question in my mind is what the offer in my sales piece should be. The book had a suggestion for online businesses to use direct mail, somewhat ironically, to drive people to their website. I believe the suggestion was to get people to sign up for your email newsletter or drip campaign, and then sell to them that way. I could see that being effective. The only alternative offer that comes immediately to mind is an in-person demo or something like that. My thinking right now is that driving people to the website is the stronger idea.

New Snip Website

I’ve been working on a new Snip site for a while, one that’s built on WordPress rather than Rails. This will allow me to create content much more quickly and easily, and I can also take advantage of things like Yoast, opt-in plugins, MailChimp-integrated Gravity Forms, etc. Building my marketing site as an extension of my Rails app was a really dumb idea, but fortunately it’s a reversible mistake. So in 2013 my site was on Rails and hosted at sniphq.com. Now with my site on WordPress at snipsalonsoftware.com? Holy shit. SEO city. Watch out, competitors. I’m about to scream past your asses. (And I’m of course doing more with SEO than just having WP and a good domain name. It’s more about what WP allows me to do.)

I’m planning to release an initial version of my site at first that’s actually roughly on par with my existing site or maybe even a little bit worse, just to get SOMETHING done and out there and get the ball rolling. The simple fact that my new site is on a more content-scalable platform is SO huge. After I get the new site up I can worry about fleshing out the content, making it more visually appealing, and all that stuff.

March

In March I plan to get my new website out as well as continue to improve the appointment reminder features. I’ve been planning forever to implement a certain email marketing campaign, and releasing the new site is a prerequisite to that, but I’ll probably get started with the email marketing thing in March. Then I think once the initial email marketing system is in place it might make sense for me to turn my attention to driving traffic to my site via direct mail.

Talk to you next week!

People Are Pissed at Me

I’m starting to have my first experiences of Snip customers being genuinely pissed at me. It’s an interesting and exciting time.

Snip has what’s currently a very rudimentary email reminder system. If a stylist flags a client as wanting email reminders, that client will get two emails prior to his or her appointment. The emails are totally one-way communication; there’s not yet any way for the client to confirm the appointment, so the salon doesn’t know for sure if the client saw the email or even got the email at all.

You can probably see how these one-way reminders might cause confusion. I had an incident recently where, due to a scheduling mixup caused by Snip’s shortcomings, a customer of mine believes to have lost a client. That’s a pretty big deal, and the customer was justifiably upset.

I’ve also gotten at least one report that some clients aren’t getting their reminder emails at all.

It’s a Good Problem to Have, Though

When I originally built Snip’s email reminder system, I wasn’t sure how useful or not it would be to people. I wasn’t totally sure anybody would really care. So I built the simplest thing that would work.

It turns out the email reminder is super useful, at least for certain types of customers. I know how useful it is by how mad people are when it doesn’t work how they want. Since my product can cause big headaches, it can prevent big headaches. So even though it’s not very fun being on the receiving end of an angry phone call, I’m kind of glad in a way these problems are popping up because it shows me my product is valuable, and has the potential to become even more valuable.

Gotta Put Out the Fire

My email reminder feature can be made more dependable in two ways. First, I can provide an indicator to the stylist(s) of whether the client confirmed the appointment. In order to do this I will of course have to have a way for the client to confirm, e.g. a link in the reminder email. Second, I can start keeping a closer eye on my delivery rate (and maybe open rate) since right now I’m not actively tracking that stuff.

Given the “house-on-fire” nature of these problems, I’ve decided to throttle back on sales and marketing work for a time and focus on putting out the fire. I always hate to distract myself from growth activities, but the good news here is that when I’m done the product will be SO much more valuable, and therefore more marketable as well.

It Was Still a Pretty Good Growth Week

On the 17th I got two free trial sign-ups in one day, which is a first for me. I also met with my newest customer for the first time, and they seem to be humming along just fine. For anyone keeping track, I now have 5 customers. I went from 4 to 5, back to 4 and then back to 5 again.

I also made 12 outgoing phone calls early in the week. I found out that the Canadian lash salon that was gonna use Snip is now going to stick with their current product because their vendor gave them a break, and that another prospect also ended up going with a different product because, according to her, her partner required her to use a certain product.

And I almost forgot: my precious book, The Direct Mail Solution, arrived from Amazon yesterday. I’m reading the shit out of that right now and I expect to take the salon world by storm with a direct mail campaign in the coming months. I haven’t talked about that much yet but I’ll definitely be talking about it more.

Talk to You Next Week

Hopefully what I’ll be reporting next week is that the email reminder feature is new and improved, and that I also happened to get 923482359 new customers while I was doing that.

This past week was a fairly eventful one.

By the way, I’ve noticed that ever since I put my rule in place of making at least three phone calls per weekday, each week has become more eventful and interesting.

On Saturday, 2/8/14, I got a new trial signer-upper. I found the salon’s website and saw an interesting testimonial there: ” ‘Magic hands’ – Jennifer Aniston.” So I guess now I have the claim to fame that one of my prospects is evidently the hairstylist of Jennifer Aniston.

On Sunday, 2/9, I released a new feature: text appointment reminders. I try to work on the product (as opposed to the marketing side of the business) as little as possible these days, but a lot of prospects ask for text reminders and I know this is a valuable feature. Plus, I had (foolishly) promised this feature to existing customers. Don’t ever do that.

Monday, 2/10: I have a prospect who I’ve been doing a dance with since around October or so. I really want them to go ahead and pull the trigger, so I sent a certain special time-bound offer: get onboarded by March 1st and I’ll give you X. I also met with one of my existing customers and got her to upgrade to the higher pricing tier that includes text reminders. So my revenue went up a little this week.

By the way, I don’t make phone calls on Mondays because salons are usually closed on Mondays.

Tuesday, 2/11: I made my three phone calls, plus I talked on the phone with another existing customer. She had a bunch of feature ideas and she reminded me of one outstanding bug. I also got a positive response to that special offer I had sent out Monday.

Wednesday, 2/12: I got sick and didn’t do anything.

Thursday, 2/13: I visited a salon owner who was referred to me by a mutual acquaintance. I had actually visited this guy’s salon in, I believe, the summer of 2012, but since I sucked at following up back then I never reconnected until now. Anyway, he and I sat down and looked at Snip and he said he was in, he just had to talk with his stylists and take care of some other shit that’s in the works right now (building renovations or something). I know by now that this is far from a done deal, so I’m gonna make sure to keep on top of this guy (LITERALLY) until he either shits (again literally) or gets off the pot (this time not literally). He and I agreed to sync back up in March. Since I have a goal to get one new salon onboarded each month of 2014, I hope this salon can be March’s salon, but I’m of course going to continue pursuing other leads as well.

Friday, 2/14: I made seven phone calls, all to warm leads who I would have called on Wednesday and Thursday. I found out that the Canadian lash bar who was interested in using Snip for multiple locations is no longer interested. They were able to strike a deal with their current scheduling vendor. All the other 6 were some form of unavailable. Natch.

Also, I forget which day it was, but I learned that clients aren’t always receiving their reminder emails, and then the next day I got an upset text from a salon owner about a scheduling mishap. So before I continue to move forward with the website redesign I have in progress, I’m gonna work on making my reminder features more reliable, which I started today.

As of this moment I have 8 decent leads, 4 of which have basically said, “I’m in.” So hopefully I can get one of those 4 onboarded soon, and hopefully the leads keep flowing in the way they have been so far in 2014.

I have a victory to report!

I had set a goal in late 2013 of getting one new Snip customer per month. More specifically, the goal was to get one new Snip prospect each month fully onboarded (meaning at least 50 appointments scheduled). I did it that way because I can’t tell who’s ultimately going to become a customer until after they go through a 30-day trial. “Getting a customer” takes more than a month, so I can’t get one each month; I can only onboard a likely customer each month.

In January I did not meet my goal. I had a bazillion promising leads but all of them either flew the coop or I’m still trying to wrangle them in. I can’t believe none of them got on board.

But this month, I’m happy to report, I have met my goal. My wonderful and talented wife put in a good word at the hair salon where she works which is opening a second location, something called a lash bar. The hair salon itself is too big to use an MVP like Snip but they don’t like either of the scheduling products they’ve tried so far, so for the lash bar they decided to use Snip.

I also started a Snip journal this week, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I wrote down all my phone calls, visits, etc.

So I’m 1 for 2 on my goals for the year. I’m gonna try to get a second salon on board in February to kind of make up for January.