Last week was a particularly good one.

Goal Progress

I’m happy to announce that, as planned, I brought a new customer onboard last Monday the 17th. This makes 6 customers, and I’m now 2 for 3 on my goal of getting one new Snip customer onboarded for each month of 2014. (January was the month I didn’t make it.)

The New Website

There is one and only one significant step in the way of getting the new website released, and that’s getting SSL to work for the new home of the Snip application, app.snipsalonsoftware.com. I put in support tickets with both Heroku and DreamHost as a last resort, and DreamHost basically told me their SSL certificates are meant to work with DreamHost-hosted sites, and if I’m applying the cert to anything outside of DH I’m basically on my own. That’s not the answer I was hoping for but I’ve burned so much time on the thing that at this point I’m willing to cut the Gordian Knot and just buy a new SSL certificate. Heroku recommends DNSimple so I figure I’ll remove as many possible failure points as I can and just do exactly what Heroku says. And if I have to pay for a DNSimple account, I might as well just transfer all my domains there from DreamHost so I’m not paying two hosts. I think I might try to do that stuff this weekend so that in the not-terribly-unlikely event that something goes wrong, the effect of customers will be minimal.

The Product

I also made a somewhat significant improvement to the product since last week. In addition to the ability for clients to click on a “Yes, I can make it” link in their appointment reminder emails, there now exists a “No, I can’t make it” link. If the client declines the appointment by clicking that link, the stylist sees that appointment show up red on the schedule. I think my next priority will be to start monitoring more closely the delivery rate on these emails because I’ve had reports of clients not getting their reminder emails, and right now I have no idea if that represents 1% or 50% of clients. That would be a good thing for me to know.

The Sales Funnel

My sales funnel still has a ton of room for improvement. I haven’t really done anything in this area since last week because I’ve had bigger fish to fry. I think what I’ll do first when I get to this point is put together an autoresponder that gets triggered when someone first signs up for an account.

See You Next Week

So between now and next week hopefully I’ll FOR REAL release my new website, and then after that I think I’ll get to work on the autoresponder and continue to chip away at the product improvements I need to make.