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Comment by robfitz | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the simplification of a lot of lingo from lean/custdev down to something closer to "you make fewer mistakes when you talk to customers." Much less intimidating and great to see some tangible results already.

Will be interested to see how you keep utilizing the virtual assistant. I have a terrible habit of hiring them with a particular task in mind, getting all excited, and then letting them idle for months.

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The single best thing I've gotten from Lean Startup is the concept of doing an MVP. I released AR's (a functional demo of the core interaction -- it rings your phone and talks to you, then echoes your input onto your browser, that is it) about six months ago, after about two weeks or so of hacking on Twilio. That is close to my best spent two weeks ever from a learning perspective, since people have spent six months telling me "Yes, THIS, I want THIS." I thought AR was a good idea, and the people I talked to certainly had a raft of appointment/scheduling problems, but even a one-screen crystallization of my vision for the solution helped me move it from "something people might theoretically be interested in" to "something I have a high degree of confidence will sell."

If I had spent the last six months getting no emails about it, no signups in the post-demo form, and whatnot, I would probably have reevaluated whether AR was really what I wanted to be doing next, prior to spending a month writing real code for it.

Talk to customers, though -- if you need to call it Lean or not call it Lean to talk to customers, whatever, just do it.

Having a similar product (well somewhat) in the market it is great to see that there is quite a bit of interest in the market. I particularly liked the use of outsourcing part of your post. It is very obvious that the dream of one-man-shop is over.

One suggestion though, I think focusing on a single type of customer (mobile services that travel to the customer) might be more effective for the obvious financial loss they face for a customer who is not home at that time.

I'm building a product now that focuses on "services that travel to the customer" (house cleaning), but for some services it might not be as big an issue as for others. For example, a house cleaning service might actually expect them to not be home regularly. Kind of depends on whether interaction with the client is required.

In our client conversations so far, missed appointments (not home) hasn't been brought up, so it will be interesting to see if that continues to hold true.

Patrick, thanks for sharing your process!

This is actually very interesting. Because you can just turn this around make sure that the person at home leaves their house at that time because someone is coming :) Out of curiosity are you also working on an appointment specific service?

Yes, appointments are part of it, but also simple timekeeping for hourly employees, managing schedules, etc. So, a cleaning might be scheduled for 3 hours, but it may take 5 hours--this needs to be accounted for. We may also integrate scheduling based on spatial analysis of available employees.

We're still early in the process (much earlier than Patrick is w/ AR), but we've also explored the idea of integrating Twilio. It's nice to see how it's being used.

Edit: it's not a general purpose appointment manager and reminders are not central to my product. More of a basecamp-like app for cleaning services, of which appointments are a part. What are you working on?

I cannot stress enough how much value customers will perceive from a few days of work with Twilio. You can have remote crews punch in and punch out on their cell phones. This reduces paperwork and saves labor costs.

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