Rate my new startup, Appointment Reminder | Hacker News Reader

Rate my new startup, Appointment Reminder

kalzumeus.com

195 pointspatio11162 comments

Clickable link: http://www.appointmentreminder.org

A funny HN story here: back in my last month or so at the company, when the seeds of this idea were germinating, I was going to call this NotiPhone, but had some minor worries about Apple going after be for selling something that was not iPhones. I had mentally gotten over that and was going to register the domains as soon as I got back a three day stint at the office... and on the last day, Notifo (YC10) launched. Going with NotiPhone struck me as professionally discourteous so I went back to my old trusty generic.

(I did end up buying the domains eventually because, hey, you never know.)

Good for you man. I liked your bingo card deal and this looks like it has even more potential. Nice job of identifying a market need that can be made easier through your app.

I wish you the best of luck.

"Prior to the appointment, we’ll automatically remind your customer of the date and time of their appointment."

"we"? Aren't you alone in this venture?... Or it's just a "professionalness" thing? I'm kind of torn between "I" and "we" for projects completely made by just one guy...

Saying "I'll remind your customer" sounds like it's one guy in a basement calling out manually. Whenever you're talking about an automatic service I think it's fine to say "we", because if you think about the system as a person you're always at least two people :-)

I've always done business communications in the plural, because it sounds better to my ear and I think three seconds worrying about this issue is two seconds too many. (It was a frequent, frequent bone of contention on the Business of Software forums a few years ago.)

Note that I already had three freelancers working on this, so it is literally accurate, if you're feeling dissatisfied by that explanation.

Where did you get those freelancers from, if you care to divulge?

Pre-existing relationships plus http://www.fiverr.com . I think almost everybody could get an idea for something business-related they could do with $5 on that site. Sure, why not have your own rap jingle.

Do you really expect businesses to buy software from "just one guy"? I's would make it feel a little too personal in my opinion. And to some extent, there is more than just Patrick involved in this: Twilio makes the calls, not Patrick.

Patrick, ever A/B tested the I/we thing?

Well, if you are indeed 100% alone in providing a service, I feel it's a bit of a misrepresentation to say "we" just because you want businesses as customers. But that's just a feeling.

He responded to you to explain this. He certainly isn't alone and even if he were, there's nothing wrong with this. People expect "we" from businesses. This is a business.

I don't like this Patrick, sorry. No "congrats" and "pat on the back" here.

You know, I do get a personal call from my dentist, carpet cleaner, and my kids' doctor before an appointment. I call my customers before meeting with them too.

But what a waste of time for all of us right? Why not send out this automated voice mail message instead:

"Don't be late! I don't have time to call you, but you better have time to meet and PAY me."

Nice.

I think you'll be able to sell it, but it seems like a DIS-service to me.

Also, NOTHING pisses my wife off more than a voice mail from an automated system.

Just yesterday she got one from a local service we donate clothes to (pretty sure it was them again), and she let out a throaty roar in the kitchen because she hates them so much, she wants a different service now.

I upmodded you from zero, because negative feedback is even more valuable than positive feedback, and it probably does Patrick a disservice to try to filter out the negative stuff.

That said: we get automated calls from a couple of different things in our life, and while I can't say that I love the calls, they are effective --- they actually change behavior.

I agree actually. Sears automatically called us about a service call. And it wasn't a big deal.

That being said, when we bought a stove at Home Depot, we received a personal call from the truck driver delivering the product to see if we were ready and where would be the most convenient place for him to carry it into the house.

So, automation probably does work sometimes, but if it's not all the time, then it's just an administration problem (as noted in the thread above)

Ya.. I wonder if you could crowdsource something like this? Pay folks a smallish commission to place the calls for you through a Twilio interface. I know of some answering services that work more or less that way, and they seem to do well. I'd imagine you can get a $2-$4 (somewhere in that range) per call, so pay a $1 commission per call. Use Twilio to record the calls to audit quality.

"Crowdsourcing" works well when workers can vote on a best solution. But you only get one crack at a customer contact.

How many customers are we talking?

If you get 10 customers a day, you treat each one like they're a duke; if 100 a day, each one is made to feel like a person. 1000 customers per day are a vague blur, an avalanche of humanity of whom only occasional glimpses are clear, 10,000 customers a day is statistics, and 10 Million per day is an abstraction.

Different businesses deal with different customers and different customer volumes change the shape and functionality of the organizations that serve them.

The question for you is, at what scale does a business built on somewhat random customer service experiences work?

You're welcome to your opinion. The market is big enough to accommodate folks of your persuasion as well as folks of mine. (If some day you are getting customers because of an outspoken dogged resistance to using Appointment Reminder, trust me, we'll both be thrilled.)

How did you estimate the market for this product by the way?

I didn't bother, since estimating market size is witchcraft.

The American Massage Therapy association has 57,000 members. Massage therapists are a small portion of the overall personal/professional services industry. 57k / small number = big number. Does it matter if it is 400k or 4 million or 40 million? Not to me. (If I was going for VC, yeah, there are 40 million -- you can see it right here on this chart in the up and to the right portion.)

This is a good attitude. It's worthwhile to be aware of the sensitivities involved in this, but the key is to execute and iterate.

There needs to be a nice balance between the needs of the business, and the needs of the customer. As a customer, you need to recognize that businesses aren't doing this to annoy you, and that missed appointments are something that they cannot afford. As a business, they need to recognize that services like this can be off-putting to their customers.

That said, perhaps a good balance would be for the business to integrate their policies with a system like this: allow customers to exempt themselves from the reminder system either in part or in whole, and then make sure those customers get charged extra if they miss an appointment.

If someone had this service of Patrick's, and then they had "some" customers on it, and other not, then it becomes an administration nightmare. Your staff would still have to take the time to look-up everyone and see who's getting called and who's not, and it's one more thing to keep track of. This burns a hole right through the benefits of automation.

Or just ask the people when they make the appointment if they would like a reminder SMS.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but, as a customer, I don't "need to recognize" anything.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's exactly the attitude that keeps companies and customers pissed off at each-other.

If you don't realize that not showing up for an appointment is extremely discourteous and more importantly costing someone money, then yes you do have something you need to recognize.

Does someone seriously disagree that not showing up for an appointment is discourteous and costs someone money?

Yes

Why?

Because thats what appointment means. How would a customer feel if the service provider books say 5 customers at the same time and provide services to only one.

When you book an appointment with a service provider, service provider cannot book anyone else, EVEN if some other customer is interested to obtain their services at the same time.

You lost me there. You said that it is not discourteous and doesn’t cost someone money when the customer doesn’t show up to the appointment, right? What does this answer have to do with that?

I like reminders. I forget stuff.

But I hate interruptions. Make the interruption as quick as possible. To me the advantage of getting a recording is the minimal interaction. I don't have to exchange greetings with a robot. So make it fast.

I may not be representative.

I think the SMS notifications could be better received. I was extremely happy myself when the company installing my ADSL sent two SMSes prior to that day -- I probably would have forgotten otherwise.

Perhaps the service could build in some kind of opt-out option? It could either be at the point of making the appointment, or after receiving the first reminder.

Actually, overall I love the idea! I think there is tremendous value in this service.

I would just want one additional feature: allowing people to opt-out. A lot of appointments are recurring, take hair-cut for an example. This will work effectively for the first time, however some customers (who actually remember appointment) may started fearing that they would get a useless call even though they perfectly remember where and when they need to go.

So, a simple Press 7 if you don't wish to have automated reminders next time will be a great addition.

Just to share a related experience:

We recently set up a free diet program that also involved behavioral change. The conversion rate on the site in terms of signups were great (about 70% actually). We were also tracking a couple of products that were integral with the diet that we referred our customers to and the sales weren't quite close to matching the numbers we were seeing.

Long story short, we tried asking for phone numbers, and those who provided were given calls a couple of days after signing up, and the response rate has shot up exponentially, including sales of the products. The people didn't mind the calls either, even after we asked if we could call them once a week to follow up on progress.

Of course, these were personal calls, not automated ones.

Email reminders are also automated, yet you are more likely to miss it because we're not glued to our monitors 24/7. A phonecall however is more likely to get your attention. There's been many times I've missed or forgotten something that could have been prevented with a short call or text message.

There certainly are some people that are put off by automated voice systems. Its hard to say if that will have a large negative impact on Patrick as he's an extra step upstream from the annoyed person.

An idea to counter this would be soothing and pleasant voice templates that may disarm those easily set off by automated voice systems.

”You know, I do get a personal call from my dentist, carpet cleaner, and my kids' doctor before an appointment. I call my customers before meeting with them too.”

You do? Must be a American thing. I never ever heard of that.

There is an existing company that does exactly this - my dentist just started using them. Some time before each dental appointment I now receive an email and an sms reminding me and asking me if I'm still going. I can either click "yes" or "no" links in the email, or respond to the sms with "yes" or "no".

Everything is white-labeled, but if you like I can ask my dentist who they're using.

I receive sms messages from both a taxi service(on way/arrived) I use and a physiotherapy clinic(reminder that you have an appointment tomorrow at ...) that I use. I find these useful and am grateful to receive them. On the other hand if they were automated voice calls I would hate them with a passion, I just can't describe how much I hate being called by an automatic service. SMS seems like the right way to go. Given that you do that I think you have a valuable service that I would be happy to use.

It is possibly a company local to me (SLC, UT) called Smile Reminder, or at least one of their competitors (http://www.smilereminder.com/)

I built the same thing 8 years ago but it did the opposite of what patio is doing... it called/texted/emailed the dentist (or dentist's secretary) and told them to call their customer.

As someone else mentioned, his monthly enterprise account seems priced too high. You can buy full practice management software for this much.

His blog post points out that the price is on purpose to dissuade healthcare customers. Not sure if that's the best idea, but it explains his pricing.

My parish does the same thing with something called "Callpost", but it's outbound-only; there's no schedule component.

so I went back to my old trusty generic

I'd love to hear more about your struggles with this, Patrick. I suspect this is an undertreated topic.

bingocardcreator. appointmentreminder. These names leave little doubt about what it's about. I've also noticed a lot of TV shows do this very well too: Undercover Boss, Pawn Stars, Desperate Housewives.

So what should the rest of us do? Go with a "trusty generic" so we don't have to lose attention trying to explain what it is? Or come up with something short and slick, with far fewer SEO synonyms?

The one movie that tried this tactic (Snakes on a Plane) didn't do that well.

Counterexample: classic kung fu movies. You rent "Snake and Crane Styles of Shaolin" because you want to see people beating each other up using the snake and crane styles of Shaolin. (insert "Snakes on a Crane" joke)

You're obviously going for maximal SEO with a name like that. Good luck getting ranked highly. I know you're a whiz at that, but that keyword looks pretty darn competitive: http://www.google.com/search?q=appointment+reminder

I'm guessing you'll have to rely a lot on your AdWords kung-fu that you talk about so much, because I think customer acquisition is going to be your toughest challenge.

Edit: Actually, I partially take that back. The ads look competitive, but the results look penetrable. Your blog post announcing the site is already #21 for that term, so you appear to be in good shape.

Edit 2: Although you may do well for SEO, I can't help but wonder if you're taking a hit on word of mouth sales with such a generic name that doesn't use a .com. "Have you tried Appointment Reminder Dot Org? My sales increased 10%!" It make work, but I think you're putting all your eggs in the SEO /SEM basket.

One last thought on this: In DropBox's lessons learned slides they said they had a lot of trouble getting customers via search because that was just a way to harvest demand, not create it. This product feels like it may fall in the same trap. DropBox at least had a 2-syllable name to fall back on for word of mouth marketing, but this has an 8 syllable name and could have more trouble.

I will second the parent comment. I feel that there's a large number of people who have needs for this kind of product, but haven't recognized it: the need is latent. Unlike active needs (the bingo card creator program, for example), people don't just go searching the internet for latent needs. The number of people who are actively searching for "appointment reminders" are probably less than 1% of the total number of people who have the need. That's why latent needs are very hard to harvest in online marketing. How are you going to tackle this problem?

[bingo cards] is also surprisingly competitive. The trick is, he's not going to go for [appointment reminder]. He's going to go for hundreds of variants of the term.

I'm really interested in hearing what the content marketing angle is for appointments though. Bingo cards had a natural content fit.

I'm really interested in hearing what the content marketing angle is for appointments though.

If I figure one out, I'll tell you. This is one of the things I'm less than sanguine about.

I assume you've noticed this already but just in case it is a quirk of my browser or something, the two panes of your main marquee are of different heights, leading to a little bit of a bounce when you scroll between them.

Also, for what it is worth, in this user's opinion:

1) I'd prefer you disable or hide (probably disable) the green scroll arrows when you are already at the edge of the ribbon. (Ie., when you are on "Apppoinment Reminders" the arrow on the left is gray and disabled while the one on the right is green; when you are on "Who is it for?" the arrow on the left is green while the one the right is gray.) The infinite loop aspect confuses and annoys my reptile brain. I expect to see new content when I click "next". (The fact that your image is a placeholder may be making this worse for me. If I saw the same image crop up again it may be more obvious that this is cycling.)

2) I'd make more of each column on the pricing page clickable. Maybe it just that I'm using a short screen, but scrolling down to the "Sign Up" link seems a pain, especially when it looks as is if "Small Business" is already selected due to the highlight.

3) Personally, I really dislike the green of the Small Business column heading on the pricing page.

Since you're keen on testing, have you user tested the pricing page yet, or is this just a first cut?

Don't let the naysayer get to you. I think the idea definitely has merit for lot of small businesses like hair salons, etc. that are often one-man (or one-woman) bands. IMHO that seems like a very long tail.

Otherfolks have pointed out that there are competing services. I think the secret here might be to be friendly, non-technical, and drop dead simple.

Patrick, first of all, congrats!

One thought - this is something that's very valuable, but I do hope that you've considered selling this (at full price) as an addition to existing reservation systems. Asking service professionals to switch reservation systems is a very large ask; perhaps your $669/mo plan overlaps with that segment enough that it's not an issue. Even outside healthcare, my barbershop has a pretty tricked out system installed already. So I think you're going to have more $9/mo in your mix than you do, but I'm excited to see the data.

Also, I think there are many, many people who would love to fete you at a meetup. Please do consider publishing your American travel plans to us HNers so that we may ply you with beer and learn the dark arts of keyword research and other internet marketing ephemera.

I think a .org is a bad idea. I know you are getting it for the exact match bonus, but noone clicks .org expecting to pay. Most people will probably just think you are an organization of appointment reminders

Here are a few available .net/.com domains that you can get now, w/ # of exact match searches per month:

appointmentletter.net - 9,900

appointmentcard.net - 1,000

salonappointmentbook.com/.net - 1,000

appointmentremindersoftware.net - 1,000

appointmentletters.net - 880

appointmentpower.net - 880

salonappointmentsoftware.com/.net - 880

appointmentreminderservice.net - 880

onlineappointmentscheduler.net - 880

appointmentsystem.net - 720

appointmentbooksoftware.net - 590

automatedappointmentreminder.com/.net - 390

no one clicks .org expecting to pay

The next time you get a haircut, can you do me a favor? Ask your stylist "What is a domain name?" and "What is the difference between dot com and dot O R G?"

I deal with this level of computer literacy every day, and you're right. However -- as I'm sure you know already -- a lot of people "go to" websites by typing something similar to the website's name into Google or, these days, Bing (curse them).

But you've written some pretty great stuff on SEO, so this is just for the benefit of anyone else reading this. :-)

Try naming 10-20 commercial websites(sites actually selling things) that are successful on a .org domain name. Can't? There is probably a reason for that.

It's not hairdressers you need to worry about, it's Google...who simply won't rank you in top positions.

It's not hairdressers you need to worry about, it's Google...who simply won't rank you in top positions.

Like saying there is carbon in a water molecule, this is simply not correct. com, net, and org domains all get the exact match bonus in the US, and orgs are not noticeably weaker than coms given equivalent link equity.

how many .net and .org websites have you launched? A .com gets a HUGE bonus over those.

A .com with 0 link building will almost always start off on page 1 or 2. Even for a competitive keyword, at worst you are looking at page 3.

A .net or .org will usually start off on page 40.

After 2-3 weeks of link building, with a .com you are looking at a top 3 position. With a .org, after 2-3 weeks of link building you'll be lucky to climb up to page 2.

A .com will always be king, it's the most valuable domain name for a reason.

Here's a quick disproof of your hypothesis. Find travelblog.com (singular) on the first page of this query:

http://www.google.com/search?q=travel+blog

Now find travelblog.org on that page.

bad example, the travelblog.com is a british site.

Go search for travelblog on google.co.uk, and it's in the top 3 position.

And sure travelblog.org is #1 there too, but the .org is a PR6 website, while the .com is a PR4 website. That's orders of magnitude higher.

No, it's a good example, for all the reasons you state.

The fact that a .com often ranks higher than its .org equivalent has nothing to do with it being a .com, but rather that its owners have done a better job of building it into a relevant site. You're seeing correlation, but not causation. As you correctly observe, PageRank and other SEO factors are the important thing.

Here are a few more examples of the same principle in action:

http://www.google.com/search?q=wikipedia http://www.google.com/search?q=slashdot http://www.google.com/search?q=php

it has everything to do with a .com.

Same SEO methods on a .com and .net, will always have .com beating out the .net.

All those examples you give, there is no competition, those are BRANDS that choose to reside on a .net/.org domains, there is no wikipedia.com trying to outrank the .org.

We are not talking about brands here. We are talking about keyword centric domains that are targeting keywords people actually search for. So to give you an example, you should be trying to find a bluewidgets.org that outranks a bluewidgets.com, where bluewidgets.org has the same or lower page rank.

You are right, do not mind the downmods.

Simple experiment, buy these three domains:

hgjhsushrdksjhfkshfkshf.com hgjhsushrdksjhfkshfkshf.org hgjhsushrdksjhfkshfkshf.net

Link them on a single page somewhere, wait Google to index it, and search for "hgjhsushrdksjhfkshfkshf". What tld will Google show first?

But if the .org or .net have a couple good links from somewhere else, they will rank higher. So, you're right on your pure domain keyword ranking, but I am from the opinion that it doesn't matter if you're going to use additional SEO techniques.

To whoever is downmodding this guy: Please stop. His post is neither inflammatory or offensive. If you disagree with what he's said, say so in a comment (with explanation as to why). Don't downvote just because you disagree.

I used to buy celebrity domain names and create "fan" pages. And this is not true.

.com .net .org worked equally well in getting ranked for the keywords in that domain.

A lot more people buy .com domains. So we see a lot more .com rankings higher up in the search engines.

But as far as my personal tests and experiences show, keyword.org will work as well as keyword.com in getting ranked if the same amount of link building is done for both of them.

The only downside of a .org is - if you plan to sell the site or the domain, a .org gets a lower price than a .com. But from search engine point of view, both work equally well.

No offense, but you just don't know what you're talking about mate.

Or, for a shorter, more "brandable" approach:

- Remindery.com (available) - Appointmently.com (available) - Appointmentize.com (available)

Ah yes, the modern, standard way of constructing a .com that's still available:

<name-you-actually-want>ly.com or get<name-you-actually-want>.com

I kind of like Remindery though :)

The Remindery.

Wine from a winery, reminders from the remindery.

diction from the dictionary

... which informs me that medieval Europeans did not expect chicken from a chicanery. Drats.

How 'bout plain old remindr.org? That's available. :p

I dont think .org will be so bad here. I think seeing the words appointment+reminder will be enough for them. Plus they are going to see the description which will likely have good copy.

how did you get these with the exact searches per month?

IMO the page is too busy. The value proposition is lost in a sea of text. Maybe try something simple and straightforward:

http://www.apple.com/macbookair/

Using your value prop: "Stop losing money on missed appointments"

Agree with that. Something like: "(value:) Stop losing money on missed appointments (large font). (how it works:) Send automatic phonecall reminders to your clients."

My brother has exactly this problem with a small suburban music school he runs, so much so that I almost wrote something like this for him.

The biggest problem he seemed to have wasn't reminding people to show up; it was having a streamlined process for handling people rescheduling. Scheduling changes create drama for him by forcing him to renegotiate lesson times, and of course it creates bubbles in the schedule.

If rescheduling is the biggest problem, this site I used to work on might help: http://hourville.com/online-scheduling/

How does it handle the rescheduling problem? It's not the "writing down the new appointment" part of rescheduling that is the problem.

People can pick their own new spot in the schedule without having to go back and forth to find available times that work for both parties. The empty bubbles can still be a problem.

I might not completely understand the problems he runs into, but I think it could help.

When someone books an appointment for Monday and then later reschedules it for Friday, a Monday booking is lost. Every time that happens you give up a booking for free.

Ah, so it's not the process, just the fact that a rescheduling happens at all. That sounds like a problem that technology can't fix.

Sure it can. Here's a simple response: you have can book an appointment for any available time slot, but you can reschedule only within a limited number of slots.

That's pretty good, but how do you distinguish a rescheduling from a new appointment? Are most customers scheduled at the same time every week for long periods of time? If so, that makes lots of sense.

That's also just one idea.

It's very easy to track which customers are rescheduling. It may be the case that a timely reminder prevents them from doing so. So that's another technological response to the problem.

Here's another: it is probably the case that rescheduling well in advance is better than rescheduling late. The earlier you reschedule the more economic value your original time slot has. So, it may be that a nudge like this gets you to free up your original spot while it's still saleable.

Those are just random thoughts off the top of my head. I just don't agree that this basic business problem admits to no technical solutions.

Looks great, Patrick. I just showed this to my boss, who was immediately interested.

One small nit: http://www.appointmentreminder.org/pricing says 'HIPPA compliance guaranteed'. It's 'HIPAA'.

"HIPAA Compliance Guaranteed" seems like a strong statement to make. Just out of curiosity, can you explain what you mean by that? I mean, if you're allowing "custom reminders" how do you know they aren't recording "Mr. Smith, we have the results of your HIV test and it's positive." or "This a reminder for you to come in for your colonoscopy" or something like that? Are your custom reminders more templated than that?

Just out of curiosity, can you explain what you mean by that?

It means that, if you don't see a check in that column, you're on notice that HIPAA compliance is not guaranteed. (Looking at my competitors shows that some invest a lot of effort into HIPAA compliance and some insist that it is out of scope for simple appointment reminders. My approach is a little different: I'll deal with the lawyers and regulatory angle, but not right now.)

If in spite of the plain language of the table and eventual language in the TOS folks insist on putting sensitive information on a service which is not rated for sensitive information, I'll say the same thing Gmail or Facebook would: I had no idea they were doing that, did not encourage it, and if you want to sue someone please sue them.

I think you misunderstood my question. I'm asking: what are you doing to guarantee HIPAA compliance? I.e., what's different about how you treat those accounts than the others and/or what steps are you taking to ensure compliance?

Patrick,

Reading over your response again it seems like you're saying that you're not doing anything to ensure HIPAA compliance and possibly that the HIPAA compliant premium option is only there to contrast with the other account types.

Is that right? If that's the case, why not just cover this in the TOS or with an on-page note like "NB: AppointmentReminder is not currently appropriate for HIPAA sensitive information." (Or some rephrasing of that that makes more sense.)

I'm confused why you're listing an account type you're not really willing to sell, or if you're intending to sell it, I'm curious what you intend to do to ensure compliance.

Of course, if you're not comfortable disclosing your plans here, or if you haven't yet figured them out, by all means disregard this question. I don't have any skin in this, I'm just curious.

"I’m coming to the market several years behind most of my competitors and will be playing catchup for quite some time"

Unless your competitors have significant secret sauce, playing catchup is a lot more efficient than leading. The unfair advantage that you have is the ability to ask your competitors' customers what they like and don't like about their products. Unlike the competition, you can add/remove features without pissing off existing users.

> I went to a small massage parlor

You may want to change your terminology there: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=massage+parlo...

maybe thats the kind of place he was referring to? :)

Oldest industry known to man, it could clearly benefit from being slapped on the butt with the modernity stick.

He did say "massage therapist" further down the page. I know a licensed massage therapist (LMT) and she is pretty clear on the differenc.

The terminology difference is important to people in the industry but not always obvious to outsiders with less experience in the area.

Warning ahead of time: this review will be critical. I understand this might all be explained away by MVP, but I will give you the notes anyways.

I clicked first to your product site. It looks terrible. I almost thought it was a Web 2.0 parody site because of how poor the assets look. The green color of the background doesn't appeal to me at all. Try using a site like http://www.colourlovers.com/ to pick a proper color scheme. The gradients all have visual banding. The rounded corners are too much. The header bar is clearly influenced by Apple's website, but it looks worse - like a crappy knockoff of a genuine article. There is no catchy wording that explains (concisely) what is going to happen or what this site is. The typography is bad (no headlines? why?).

I clicked Try Demo. First thing I noticed was the calendar. I clicked around a bit on it and liked it, but I ditched the site right after that.

I went to read your blog post next. It all made sense, and I think you have a good plan. I just didn't get close to entering my phone number or experiencing the magic of having it ring. I know that would have impressed me a lot, and I think its not front and center enough. I went back to your site afterwards and I noticed that you have a big paragraph explaining the phone call demo on your calendar page. I had never read the text, I just skipped it and my eyes focused first on the pretty AJAXy calendar.

Try to emphasize the coolness of the phone call demo. Use nice typography and a catchy headline to call my attention to it. Go look at 37signals landing page again. "A better way to work". OK now I am intrigued. Definitely show off your cool AJAX calendar, but don't let it steal the show. The phone call is the magic. Emphasize that.

Hope this helps.

> It looks terrible.

I was actually impressed by the appearance, and I don't see many other commenters italicizing their disgust, so this is probably an overstatement.

The pastel green gradient doesn't work at all as the background color.

Very cool. What you do best: providing actual value to real people from customer #1, not fancy high-tech services. I do wonder about your marketing plans, though. Are enough small business owners actively looking for this kind of service that AdWords is going to be a viable option?

And one tech question: what are you using for the calendar? It looks beautiful, like a simple iCal.

And lastly: international phone numbers don't seem to work. I'm sure that's intentional, I just hope I didn't freak out some random person in Iowa reminding them about a fake appointment.

The calendar seems to be this one:

http://github.com/robmonie/jquery-week-calendar

I would bump up the appointments on the $79 plan or add another plan well below the Enterprise plan with many more appointments.

If I were a potential customer that were near that many (and that's only not even 40/day even with weekends factored in), I'd look at that and say "if we expand a little and cross 300/month, we're going to be forced into a plan that costs 7x as much and doesn't exist right now. That's really bad."

That or do some kind of "overage" deal where they can pay n cents per extra.

I'm also not sure how I feel about you not having the .com

My biggest concern:

Small businesses already have appointment scheduling systems. Do you plan on integrating with them? Or is Appointment Reminder meant to replace them completely? Or do you expect your users to manually input their appointments into two separate systems?

Some small businesses certainly have appointment scheduling systems. One thing I have heard a few times from folks is that they're using Pencil and Paper v1.0. I plan on listening to my customers and iterating appropriately. If it is obvious that their needs include interop or importing, then there will be interop or importing.

In my wildest of fever dreams, solving a revenue-draining pain point is enough to establish a beachhead in the B2smallB mini-enterprise environment, and then I get to eat the elephant from within. ("Since you're already using me for scheduling..." Basically, a 37Signals style approach where each additional product adds synergistic effects from existing customers plus marginal revenue.)

It says under pricing only 10 appointments per month.

Who only has 10 appointments per month. And does a person with only ten appointments per month need a service to remind them of their ten appointments. Better yet does a person with only ten appointments have enough money to spend ten bucks on your service.

I can see charging extra for additional users, but the second user should be a discount not 20 dollars on top of the price for the first user. Your argument would be well they get more appointments.

Your appointment reminders give them unlimited appointments that are very low cost to your company. Then limit the amount expensive features per account like sms messages.

Who only has 10 appointments per month.

A teacher who does tutoring twice a week for extra cash. Typical rates at suburban schools last time I was in them were about $40 an hour. You can do the math from here.

Alternatively, a young professional who wants to put in reminders for himself.

the second user should be a discount

Why do you believe this? I get the sense that you're thinking there is some moral significance to a pricing table. I do not believe there is moral significance to a pricing table -- this is simply a pricing discrimination question, and if you have two people who need access to the same account you have just graduated to Definitely A Business and by implication have things like revenue, payroll, accountants, and money to spend on solving business problems which I am happy to take.

unlimited appointments that are very low cost to your company

I charge based on value, not based on cost. My customers perceive value from making appointments and having them kept. This is similar to bingo cards: the marginal cost of a bingo card is zero, but the difference in 15 cards versus 30 cards segments the market, ergo I charge to go from 15 to 30.

This particular product is very big in the orthodontic community and has been for quite a while. Televox (http://www.televox.com) is one company to check out. Back in the day they sold orthodontists an expensive telephony board and their software used the doctor's own phone system to call all the patients. They now offer reminder calls as an online service.

There are many other companies offering the same services to orthodontists, Televox is just one that I'm familiar with as my customers use them.

So - whether you hate getting these sorts of calls or not there's definitely an existing market for them.

Patrick, how did you hire the voice for the premade recordings?

I was hoping someone would ask that. Remember fiverr.com, the Mechanical Turk for people with talent, where every task is priced at $5? Somebody was offering to record a phone tree. I paid her $5 for half the job, liked what I got, paid her $5 for the other half, then got her email for ongoing work at a more appropriate wage.

God, I love the Internet.

Incidentally, the total cost of getting this project this far has been about $450, including $250 put on deposit for Twilio. (Better to have too much than too little, right?)

A full list of all the tools/services you used for this project would be most welcome. I've got: Twilio, PayPal WPP, Spreedly, Fiverr, and whoever your host is.

[Edit: This got overly long. I'll blog it later.]

Looking forward to it!

If possible, I'd love to read up on how exactly you moved from concept to product.

Wow, I thought this was a really good text-to-speech software, but it turns out it was a real voice :)

I'm not sure what was used here, but I've used Voices.com before to source voice overs and have been really happy with it. Worth a look if you need something like that.

If I were you, I'd drop the Wordpress and WooThemes link - it brings nothing to your business and negatively affects those who care about such things.

Do you have experience in B2B? Cold calling and searching for your customer instead of them searching for you? It's a very time-consuming task, much worse in support than B2C.

Cold calling and searching for your customer instead of them searching for you?

I don't know if this came across in my blog post: cold calling is not in the cards here. I think there is a market niche which exists where it is not profitable to do the cold calling, and believe that I can reach it with scalable approaches like AdWords and AdSense, in much the same way that I reached individual teachers because doing enterprise sales to their school districts would not have been possible.

You know, what I think is that this business is not going to work. There just seem so many things unusual about it. If you cross $1500 a month, you're going to have to give a detailed break-down of what made it work, because I bet I would learn a lot.

Just looking at it, my instinct is saying "nah", so if I can retrain and learn some new stuff that would be very useful.

If you cross $39,999/month with your biz you'll have to give a detailed breakdown for us here too. ;)

Is this a problem people search for?

I think direct marketing (postcards, ads in trade journals, banner ads on trade portal websites) will work better than Adwords for this.

Because I think that your solution is something that a lot of businesses need and can get a benefit from. But its not a solution that all of these businesses search for.

So you will do better with a more pro-active marketing tactic. Take the educational approach - get case studies written about your first few clients - in their trade journals. Such a PR / case study approach will work better for you than Adwords.

My haircutter absolutely calls me the day before each appointment to make sure I'm going to show. Assuming its cheap yet professional, this seems like a no-brainer for her.

If you could add a way for them to take appointments online that would be killer.

[Edit: I just realized the Pricing page says that only on the Enterprise version is HIPAA compliance guaranteed. How can you get away with that? When you deal with personally-identifiable health information (using a person's cell phone number is personally identifiable), HIPAA compliance is not a suggestion, it's a regulation enforced by the Office for Civil Rights. How are the non-Enterprise level subscriptions even legal? ]

I actually built an application like this (but it was as a sub-contractor, so I feel no obligation to promote it here).

The application I built allowed users to set their appointment reminder settings to text and/or call their phone with an automated reminder message. I also made it so that if you hit 3 on the message (there were a few options, but 3 was my favorite), it would give you voice directions to your appointment.

Also, is your appointment reminder application HIPAA compliant? It definitely should be (http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/) since it deals with potentially sensitive health information.

I'll just add that I think I was letting my experience in creating this application for medical and dental markets cloud my perception. I guess you are targeting non-medical markets with this application and medical markets only with the Enterprise plan.

Thoughts:

The sales pitch is too long IMO. If you end up keeping something like it post-demo you should test alternatives.

The voice talkent is good. A bit too slow for my tastes but you need to do research here to see what people can handle for speed. Maybe faster with an easy "repeat" function. It always frustrates me when I miss something on a recording and can't replay it.

The synthesized voice is really bad. Recording a real voice for every five minute interval (or heck, everything) is not that bad.

I realize the recipient of the call is not your customer, but the faster you can get off the phone the happier they'll be and the cheaper it is for you. If I'm a business owner I'm thinking that people are going to hang up on this. Even though the actual reminder is short you're reminding people of a long call.

Minor "ad copy" bit: I think the people you areselling to are more likely to recognize something like "text message to your mobile phone" than "SMS".

You need some sort of easier way for this to spread. Perhaps that will naturally happen as customers hear about the product.

This whole article could be a case study on finding an idea and starting a business.

"I want to be able to say something similar to 'Appointment Reminder will pay for itself the first time it prevents a no-show.'" - despite patio11's humility about sales, this sentence shows he has the right instinct.

It's an interesting idea, but I'm not so sure about your price structure. I guess that you don't want to bill for every notification, but have you thought about billing for prevented no-shows (maybe on top of a base-price that includes x appointments)? You could still make the case that your Reminder pays for itself after the first no-show and make more money off of users that benefit more from your product.

Also: I don't know who the target audience for the base-price is. If you know you have 10 and only 10 appointments per month, this plan may be fine, but otherwise? Why not change it to a "1$ for every appointment"-Plan?

What do you perceive as the benefit to my business from going from an easy to understand option to a complicated one which requires forecasting, math, complexity, and anxiety about marginal costs nagging at my users every time they sign in?

target audience for the [personal plan]

Productivity bloggers. It exists to give my business something to offer them, because they have something I want, and it is not really their money. shh

I completely see your point about the fixed rate. However, the benefit of a flexible plan is that you can lower the price of the initial payment and make a little money every time you are really helping your customers (detecting a no-show). You potentially save your customer money and take a fee for this service. I get now that that's not what you want - just wanted to offer a different perspective.

My first thought is how I could subvert this. Will there always be a free demo?

If so, can a religious zealot / abusive ex-spouse / stalker / demagogue / etc use this system to contact their victim(s)?

Ahh, a man after my own cynical heart.

While I trust you folks to not be abusive to verify this, if you were to attempt to put in the same number twice, you would get an error message telling you that to prevent spam that is not possible, but if you want to hear the demo again you can call a 877 number from the phone you want to unblock and then follow the instructions to unblock it.

That number is also the outbound caller ID for the demo calls, and explains that the demo call was scheduled by someone on the website, and if you received it in error we're sorry, etc, and you won't receive another one.

You'll note that the free demo doesn't allow folks to actually specify any of the contents of the call. (Well, technically speaking, you can manipulate the time, but that is it.)

Should some person use the paid version of the service in a malicious fashion, I'll do what the phone company would do: block their account and cooperate with the authorities.

Great market you are in. I am currently working on a identical application for my day job, although we are focusing on a niche industry we have been serving for a few years. Great design. I know companies that spend $1,000+ a month on reminders and related messages.

Edit: looking at the HIPAA compliant feature I can tell you have done your research very well :). Glad to see you in this space. Looking forward to some "cooperative competition".

If you send a message asking if the customer is coming, I'd bet they'd be more likely to cancel. "Not showing up is an acceptable option? In that case..."

Isn't not showing up always an acceptable option? For most of the cases I see this being used in, the customer is the one who wants the appointment in the first place. No one is forcing people to get massages.

I see Appointment Reminder as a way to eliminate no-shows from people who forget their appointment (which I tend to do more than I'd like). Personally, I wish every business I made appointments with used this.

It's frowned upon to cancel appointments even though it's an acceptable option. If the person I made an appointment with asks me if I want to cancel, that disincentive goes away.

The idea is still good, but tweaking the messaging might make it better.

I agree. A read-through of Cialdini's "Influence" should give us a better idea on how to phrase this. Something like "looking forward to seeing you" is less suggestive of a no-show.

That reminds me, I need to finish that book. I believe it's on the Personal MBA list if that interests you.

http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert...

Is this the personal mba list you are referring to: http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/

Or is there another one you find valuable?

I glanced at an associate's blog last week and he had his own list of PMBA books reprinted from an original source. That looks like about the same list, yes.

Cool, thanks. It does seem like a good list... looking over it, I've read/listened to 4 so far... so only 95 to go! Ya right, but I will try to read one from each category this year.

Three observations:

1) Redundant Scheduling

As an AR.org client, I would not revel in the idea of entering an appointment more than once; it also needs to show up in my normal "scheduling" calendar. Possible/partial solution: Google Calendar http://code.google.com/apis/calendar/

2) Zipcar - example #1

They have a very effective implementation of an app that schedules/extends your car appointment via SMS. It has saved me a $50 penalty on more than one occasion.

3) Time Warner Cable - example #2

TWC has an automated call reminding customers when they have an appointment; may be worth investigating. Anecdotally, as a reminder, it has been most handy when an appointment was made a week or more in the future. Of c. 7 appointments over 6 years, I think it effectively reminded me to reschedule 1 of the two appointments I had to reschedule.

One last thought; two factors seem to be driving your choice of business: (1) a focus on under-served niches, parlaying your marketing savvy and (2) unsexy businesses, reducing the potential for competition from technically skilled entrepreneurs... a very practical approach! Anyway, best of luck.

.org Yeesh. I assume you're planning to buy .com when its proven itself.

Getting tiny businesses like a Salon to use a web app for scheduling may be very difficult. Many of them probably don't even really have a computer in reception. Maybe you could let them route calls to a phone-based scheduler (then email/SMS in the appointment to the staff).

The domainer who owns the .com is known for a resistance to selling and would want 5 figures or more, and the .net is owned by a market leader in the space. I can think of better things to spend my money on.

Many of them probably don't even really have a computer in reception.

You're certainly correct, but the market is so much bigger than me that I expect it will not matter either way. We'll see if my prospective customers routinely bring this up as an issue over the coming months.

There is definitely a demand for this product.

Idea #1: add a recurring feature. Where I can schedule a phone call or an SMS to be sent every week / month / year on a specific date.

Idea #2: This may complicate your pricing plans a bit. But you want to offer: $79 for first 300 appointments per month. 50 cents for every additional appointment.

Or maybe implement the credit system. Like how istockphoto.com does. $1 for every 2 credits (with a minimum $10 purchase). $79 a/c comes with 300 free credits that last for a month.

Such a pricing strategy helps you retain folks who don't want to or can't get stuck (because of policy) to a recurring payment plan.

Patio writes: "So here’s a trick I’ve learned in Japan: there are a million ways to tell people 'no'."

Man, is that ever true, and something we Americans could learn from.

I really like the idea, but I would make it even more general. Granted one could use it right now for absolutely everything, but the title says appointment reminder, I would personally use it to remind people interested in e-sports related streams. Here's another idea, having the ability for this to send me IM messages or URL callbacks would be even better.

I actually thought "Hey, this would work for WoW guilds" and immediately saw myself getting emails from a bunch of people arguing about how expensive $9 was when they could get email to their iPhones for free. If that market interests anybody here, feel free to go for it! I'll be talking to the 30 ~ 50 year old ladies who pay money for things.

Your new venture seems very thoroughly thought-out, and I wish you good luck with it! I bet you've grown tired of hearing "you're an inspiration to us all".

But $770 for a 45-minute dentist's appointment?! Is that normal in Japan?

No, it is rather substantially cheaper here. Until recently I had not been wowed by Japanese dentistry, so I got some long-delayed work done last time I was in America on a cash basis. (Happily, when one of the fillings that cost $~X00 popped out and I had to visit the first dentist I found on Google Maps by my office, I had a wonderful experience but for the searing pain of losing a filling, and will be going to him from now on.)

None of the above is intended as a commentary on the relative merits of national health insurance.

Alright, I can imagine dental care being expensive in America. I suppose that side is run by the insurance companies too?

This is great. I have no idea whether this idea will work or not, but I really enjoyed reading about your process. It sounds like you have really embraced the lean startup, customer development philosophy. I have to admit that I had never heard of you until I saw you interview on Gabriel's website, but have been intrigued ever since. Thanks for sharing.

Good idea, if it were mine I would make text message to cellular the standard notification feature with a fallback to e-mail only if the text message did not go through, or if the customer opted in for it instead of text.

I would also try offering a 15 day free trial for the businesses and sell packages on a quarterly, 6 month and yearly basis vs monthly.

Texts are still pricey for some folks, particularly with US cellular carriers. I only just upgraded from $0.20/msg a la carte to a $5/month 200 messages plan.

Slightly off-topic. But I am always looking for good web app themes. Is this the theme you have used for calendar app? http://themeforest.net/item/sharp-admin-template/83085

Reminds me of QLess that just got funded yesterday http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/13/qless-saves-you-the-annoyan...

It looks like you're targeting medical offices with that enterprise plan, but it just seems far too expensive for them. At that price your service is starting to cost as much as EMRs or practice management software.

I'd be one of the cheapest solutions on the market at that price point. Enterprise sales, hooooo. It isn't irrational, either: like I said, if the dentist rescues a single appointment with me, he gets $750 in cash the same day.

That said, as I alluded to, I did not primarily include that plan out of a desire to sell it. It won't be available at launch: it just gives folks fair warning that the other plans are not guaranteed to be HIPAA friendly, and additionally makes everything else I sell look cheap by comparison to what the Big Boys use. As I mentioned, that appears to be essentially all of the space at the moment.

Right, I think there are many software niches that are still dominated by over-priced enterprise solutions, and the web is eventually going to destroy them.

If you eventually want to compete with those guys though, wouldn't you rather have a significantly lower price to make people consider switching? Or do you think having too low of a price will make people dismiss your business as shady, unreliable, etc.?

It's funny how you beat me to it :) I am working on pretty much the same product, about to launch in two weeks. It's good to know that you saw an opportunity in this as well. Best of luck.

My Blackberry and iPhone let me know when I have appointments.

That solves your appointment problem, but it does not solve your salon's appointment problem, because your salon cannot buy their entire clientele an iPhone. They can, however, rely on their entire clientele already having voice service.

This is why Twilio (and related technologies) are so awesome: it turns the humblest cell phone in Africa into something which, for all practical purposes, speaks HTTP.

I was wondering why you were not on HN much recently!

A Bug?

The "Appointment Reminders" link below the slider should de-highlight when the user mouses over the link beside it, right?

Why do these businesses not charge for missed appointments?

well, if you look your www.bingocardcreator.com design, this one is much much better ;)

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