Appointment Reminder Launches | Hacker News Reader

Appointment Reminder Launches

appointmentreminder.org

238 pointspatio11104 comments

Thanks in advance guys. I mean this sincerely: I probably couldn't have done it without you.

I don't generally ask for things on HN, but just this once: y'all know that links my website gets gives me more ability to rank for search terms of importance to me. If I've said something which helped you or you otherwise want to go give me a Christmas present, please take a few minutes out of your day, go to your blog, and write up a few sentences with a link to the front page. I'd really, really appreciate it.

Any anchor text you would particularly like people to use? I do quite a bit with SEO, and imagine you want to avoid too many "over here" anchors!

His title is "Appointment Reminder | Phone, Text Message / SMS, and Email Reminders", but knowing Patrick, he's probably going to start "Hair Dresser Appointment Reminders", "Massage Appointment Reminders", "Yoga Class Appointment Reminders" really soon.

You're directionally accurate. I will probably have something to show off on that front in January or February.

Hey Patrick,

Congratulations on having another 'leg' under your business, I've placed a homepage link on ww.com for you. I had to step back and check because it's a .org and not a .com, aren't you concerned you'll end up sending a bunch of people to that placeholder ? (they got at least one visitor more today than they should have....)

I've used 'never miss another appointment' as the link text, if you want another one let me know. And what was that again about there not being a scalable way to build links, it seems you may have found one ;)

Maybe structurally add the .org to the name to differentiate it from the .com ? If you call it just 'appointmentreminder' I think there will be some confusion.

I agree about reinforcing the mental branding of .org, because people are really dot com brainwashed. This could even become a distinguished part of mental recall: What was that reminder site again? Oh yeah, AppointmentReminder.ORG! The only drawback of that is if he does eventually acquire appointmentreminder.com, which appears to be held by domain name investment company domainnamesales.com.

Congrats, I hope this proves to be an excellent source of growth for your business.

I look forward to a post from you about how it went. :)

This looks great Patrick. I've been consistently impressed whenever I read your HN input; I just sent a tweet promoting Appointment Reminders.

Hey Patrick, Won't you tell us what Anchor Text will you prefer? I want to write a post about your new business on my blog and want to link with a proper anchor text.

Pick something which comes natural to you. I'm #1 for "appointment reminder" and am loathe to give particular suggestions because over concentration on it will cause me to probably hit automatic filters, since this site is still relatively low-trust by Google standards.

Here you go: http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/appointment-reminder-pa...

Hope you like it :)

If I were a dentist I would probably search for "appointment software", "appointment scheduler", or "scheduling software".

Edit: According to Google's keyword tool "scheduling software" is a great place to be. Patrick, you may want to expand your software to handle scheduling as well.

I know you probably worked hard on this, but I'm extremely disappointed that you might have just lifted Twilio's appointment script example (http://www.twilio.com/docs/howto/appointmentreminder), set up a billing frontend, and charging $79/month for this product. I wish you would've credited Twilio for much of the hard work.

As much as I want you to succeed, I don't know if this is the right way to do it.

If you think that all it takes to build this business is copying Twilio's code, then you should try making money off printing bingo cards.

Is this the new paradigm in Tech/Silicon Valley? Copying the crucial component of others' work and just building a business off of it?

I hope this is not how we create innovation going forward.

Which part of Silicon Valley do you think patio11 lives in?

When, exactly, did he claim that "innovation" was some critical portion of his business models?

One of Patrick's most charming features is his unwillingness to tie himself up in emotional knots over his status as an "innovator", or fret about whether or not his products sufficiently express the essence of his cutting-edge twenty-first-century personality. He just makes things that people want, and markets them systematically with a great deal of focus. And he writes about that.

My lawyer, my accountant, my dentist, my doctor, my grocer, and my pharmacist don't have particularly innovative business models. They just provide things that I want, and I pay for them. There is no sin in that.

"Tech/Silicon Valley". Didn't imply he lived in the Valley.

"My lawyer, my accountant, my dentist, my doctor, my grocer, and my pharmacist don't have particularly innovative business models."

This has nothing to do with his business model. It's about using someone else's work and passing it off as your own. I'm sure I'll get downvoted again, but I hate the blatant disregard for intellectual property. Twilio paid its $90-100K+ developer to program and document the appointment reminder script, and in the end, weren't credited for the crucial component of the work.

I yield to no one in my respect for IP, and my karma would be higher if I didn't feel the need to pipe up so frequently on the "we should be able to steal music" topics. But I did not actually use Twilio's sample code for my product. It is sample code. Really. Go try running it, come back when you find that it doesn't even have enough for Rails to load.

I didn't even use that code as a base for mine. Again, it is sample code. Take a look at the user experience or error handling -- they're clearly inadequate for a real product, but suffice to give a competent Rails developer a taste of what API it takes to actually have Twilio make a phone ring. After you can make a phone ring (in one line -- and, again, one line I don't even use), you only need the other 3,500 lines of AR to actually make that phone call worthwhile for business purposes.

Twilio wants him to do this. They created a fund that invests in startups like patio11's [1]. One of the Twilio people even wrote a comment on HN encouraging patio11 to apply [2].

[1] http://blog.500startups.com/2010/09/23/twilio-fund-for-500-s...

[2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721822

"Twilio wants him to do this"

That's quite misleading. One of the workers encouraged him to apply. This was 75 days before the product actually launched.

How does the timeframe affect anything? patio11 has had a landing page up describing the product's functionality for months.

You should really stop and think about what you are saying. Do you understand the business Twilio is in? The entire point of putting example code out there is to get people to use it or be inspired by it so that Twilio can make money from its use.

I recall at one point they were actively soliciting people that were interested in the service but didn't have ideas to contact them and they would provide you with ideas and/or brainstorm.

They want people to take their ideas/code so they can make money. They aren't in the appointment reminders business but would love for anyone in that business to use their service.

It certainly isn't how you're going to go much further forward. Way to go go make a first impression like this.

Really, you're clueless about Patrick and just about everything else you're commenting on how about you spend some time familiarizing yourself with all the actors here before making snap judgments that are bordering on libel?

I used nothing of that code. Did you actually look at it? It is sample code not complete enough to even run, much less actually solve a customer need.

Its almost as if you don't realize that Twilio makes money on service usage -- that you don't understand that they're probably thrilled to see their half-formed example code encourage someone to create a real business on top of their for-pay developer APIs.

(Assuming Patrick is even using Twilio and that the code is in any way relevant.)

That's a bit like calling DropBox just rsynch with a billing frontend. It's not.

Patrick - you may find this useful:

"One restaurant owner greatly reduced the percentage of no-shows (people who booked a table but didn't honour the reservation and didn't call to cancel it) by having his receptionist change what she said when taking a reservation from 'Please call if you have to cancel' to 'Will you call if you have to cancel?' Of course, nearly all customers committed themselves to calling by saying 'yes' to that question. More importantly, they then felt the need to abide by their commitment: the no-show rate dropped from 30 per cent to 10 per cent." (quoted from 'Yes! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion' by Goldstein, Martin and Cialdini)

One other suggestion: Give your would-be customers a FREE split test. Half of the appointments get a reminder, half don't. Get the user to place a 'value' on the outcome of each appointment, then tell them the result of the split test. The user will be BEGGING to give you money.

Thank you -- I've had my head in the trenches so long that didn't even occur to me, and split testing is ordinarily a passion of mine. I'll consider doing that if I can figure a way to sell it to my customers as well as I can sell it to Rails developers.

Forgot to say: Thanks for sharing all your bingo card revenue stats - it's been very motivational! Well done.

Congrats Patrick!

A small piece of feedback. On this page: https://www.appointmentreminder.org/a/calendar - I am wary of testing it because I'm not sure who'll see my phone number if I do. In other words, it's not clear if this demo is just for me or if this is a "demo sandbox" for anyone to use.

BTW, love the outrageous enterprise pricing that makes the small business plan look better, as well as the blatantly fake "HOT" tag - you shipped today! it gets hot fast in Japan! ;)

Not so sure about this "All questions are answered by our lead engineer. (Your business is too important to trust to a call center..)" - smells a little bit fake. I like Garrett's style better: http://sifterapp.com/support (scroll down to the green box).

Just my quick first impressions. Congrats on a new beginning!

Thanks for the feedback Peldi. I clarified the copy on the demo page, and it should be restarting right about now.

We'll agree to disagree on the "hot" tag: it is my personal recommendation, and everybody who committed to buy AR when I asked them wanted that plan. (The enterprise pricing is mostly because HIPAA is insane -- it is still cheaper than any competitor in the healthcare market. I'll talk at length about that some other day.)

One small thing, on this page: https://www.appointmentreminder.org/pricing

The strings from the "hot" tag to the "Small business" column are wrong. One of the strings needs to come from behing the column, otherwise it looks like there's some weird bug sitting on the column, holding a "hot" tag.

See: http://imgur.com/gjVbb

I don't know if you're looking for any design critiques, but since that's what I know here goes:

- The logo is not very readable. The letters are squashed together and the gradients are a little too strong. Subtle is always better.

- The pure white background behind the tagline is very harsh. I suggest using a light shade of beige instead.

- Your content needs some rythm. People hate reading big blocks of text, so you should add in some headings and lists.

- Maybe you're planning to add more slides to the carousel later, but right now you really don't need it. You could take out "who is it for" and put it in the sidebar instead.

- The two call to action buttons get lost inside the illustration. I suggest putting them in the brown bar instead.

- The tagline could really use some typographical love. There's a ton of gorgeous free fonts on FontSquirrel.com, just pick one from the top 10 most popular.

- The sign in link should probably not be placed inside the nav, most people expect it to the top right of the site.

That's just the things that jump out at me from looking at the homepage for 5 minutes. Hit me up on Twitter (@SachaGreif) if you have any questions or you'd like some more advice.

PS: I almost forgot to say, congratulations on launching what looks like a truly useful product!

PPS: I often go to Kyoto, not that far from you!

I found the audio on the video really hard to hear. A good quality mic and a little mixing makes a huge difference.

I apologize: you know us engineers, 95% of the schedule goes to the engineering and we leave the 90% of the project that remains to the last day. I'll eventually have that video professionally redone.

Additionally, I found there was too much talking in the video. It was at least a minute in when the demo started.

I also found it "ended twice." Patrick wraps it up, says "thanks for listening" and then still goes on for another 20-30 seconds. It felt a bit long-winded.

Also, the actual phone call was really hard to hear at first. Sound quality/volume was inconsistent throughout.

Personally, I'd probably take the five minutes and re-record it now, even if it's going to be professionally done later.

It would probably look better with you on camera for the first minute. It's hard to stay on the page when the audio has nothing to do with what's in the video.

EDIT: Now that I've seen the full video, I'd say this would work a LOT better if the whole thing is a video of you doing the demo with the phone and everything.

If you'd like someone to do the voice over with a studio quality setup, drop me a line. I have all the equipment, have done a few voice overs in my time and above all, I'd love to help. I can probably knock it out in a short amount of time.

That video also loaded incredibly slowly for me. I'm not on a terrible connection so you should consider a) where you are hosting it b) the audio/video quality to help speed up downloads. I probably wouldn't have watched it if I didn't know you.

This looks great. Nice work, Patrick, and congrats on the launch. I just sent my mom an email about it, and suggested she try your demo. Hopefully she'll sign up. She's a private tutor, and very frustrated by having students not show up to appointments. This definitely solves a significant problem for her.

Any plans on integrating more tightly with Google Calendar? That's where she currently keeps her appointments, and being able to suck appointment info out of there would be really useful for her. That being said, I have no idea how structured her data in there is (probably not very), so it may not be a super easy problem in the general case.

Already on the roadmap, but I couldn't fit it into prelaunch and GC support wasn't a blocking issue.

Totally understand - I wouldn't have made it a launch blocker either:) Great to hear it's on the roadmap though.

Nice work patrick - this has big potential! When possible, get a quote on the front page like:

"I save $320 per month with Appointment Reminder!" - Mrs Smith

First of all: congratulations! That was an effective November....

I assume that you are going to be aggressively A/B testing this site.

Are you planning to share the results with us? I know I, for one, would find it very informative.

I am planning on continuing my usual practices with regards to transparency, with the proviso that I could think of some circumstances where obligations to customers might force that to change. (e.g. If I land one big whitelabel client, and my gross revenues would tend to give away the size of that relationship, then I'd start publishing very incomplete data.)

Really looking forward to future discussion. Congrats!

The signup links are redirecting to the coming soon page.

Example: https://www.appointmentreminder.org/coming-soon?plan=small-b...

That's what I get for not automating that deployment... fixed.

I think you meant "no contracts".

Congrats! Just emailed my dentist to tell them about it. Keep up the good work. :)

Caller ID is really important for me. Unless I know who is calling I will probably ignore my phone. Spoofing the phone number of the actual business would be really handy and greatly increase the chance that I take the call.

I can't tell from the site whether one can do this without signing up for an account but if it's not a feature yet I would seriously consider it.

This is already on the roadmap, but thank you for the suggestion.

In the video, from the time you answered the call, until the voice started, it took 5 seconds. If that's normal for the system, I'd be worried my clients would hang up before hearing appointment reminder.

So just between us geeks: Twilio retrieves your MP3 files when the call starts (and caches them), but my Capistrano tasks effectively bust caches on deployment, and since doing that video took a couple of takes with redeploys in the middle, the shot you saw was live with a cold cache. Actual users will almost certainly have a warm cache for that default script, and the voice will start playing almost immediately. (That said, I agree, if I had a team to do video for me it would have been more polished.)

I've been doing a demo video last week, and you can get a long way with powerpoint, windows movie maker, camstudio and audacity. I found I got significantly better results by writing my script, doing the voice over, then the screencast, import all into movie maker, and then edit the screencasts to make it all fit.

('better' when compared to the 'do it all in one go' approach)

Love the idea. Great job. :) This is how I'd summarized things (I didn't watch the video):

Appointmentreminder.org:

- Automatic appointment reminders for your clients (phone, text message, email).

- No more meetings where nobody shows up!

- Get notified automatically if someone is going to be late!

- Client needs to cancel or reschedule? We'll let you know!

- Record phone reminders yourself, or save time and have our professional voice actors do it for you!

- Always on the go? Use it on your laptop or iPad. (iPhone coming soon!)

Never show up to an empty meeting ever again. How much time and money are you going to save?

:insert pricing chart here:

Questions or comments? email@email.com 888-555-1234

Your tagline "You didn't go into business to spend the day on the phone. Let us handle that." uses a prime, ', instead of a proper, curly apostrophe, ’.

It's also amazing to see a site free of any social network buttons. You don't get to see that often.

I am not a fan of social buttons, with the sole exception of Delicious on geek-friendly authoritative reference content. If Facebook wants my help promoting their website, then they can turn some virtual cows into burgers and use the proceeds to pay my consulting rate.

Standard disclaimer: actual users would have installed the extension or the bookmarklets and don't generally click the on-page save button.

But the tags were nice to see.

I find that I get many, many more saves when I put one of those buttons on an article than when I don't. Subjectively, it feels like about a factor of two for roughly equivalent values of geek-reference-worthiness. Maybe it activates the Delicious neurotransmitters even in bookmarklet users -- I don't know.

(This is, obviously, not something I've spent a lot of time A/B testing.)

Welcome to the club! ;)

http://opencal.com

Wow, nice design job.

I think we're in adjacent markets but aren't so much in competition (as of today, anyhow). I don't have immediate plans to go into online booking, and you might have noticed that mine has a wee bit more to do with appointment reminders than yours does.

Welcome Patrick :) I gladly welcome another good competitor in this area. Hopefully together we can drive some innovation in this stagnant field.

http://SmartPointment.com http://remindMypatients.net

Very nicely designed site, but one thing bugged me - your brand features a circle and a tick, yet there is no UI element in your app that I could see which uses this. I know you'd likely need to use non-standard interface elements to achieve that (e.g., in place of a checkbox perhaps) but it did stand out to me. "Hey, isn't this place all about ticking circles? I've been lied to!" ;)

Regardless, as I said, the overall design is excellent. Well done.

Agreed. What's with the circle and tick? Also, I don't think the name really works. "OpenCal" - it sounds like OpenTable but in that case the name tells me more about what the service is. What is "Cal"? (I know calendar, but calendar does not communicate online appointments, the same way Table does restaurant. At least not for me). My point? You should change your name. I'm sure you love it, but it's holding you back.

Beautifully designed site though. It looks like a very slick service.

Congratulations Patrick!!! I hope the results blow your expectations out of the water.

Also, because of your blog, I discovered Twilio and it's exactly what I've needed for some ideas I've been thinking about over the last year.

Well done! So now you've gone from building a successful startup in your spare time, to building another one in the spare time left over from the first one! Very impressive work, inspirational :)

Congrats Patrick! Successful entrepreneurs ship, and it looks great. In the thread where you introduced the concept of appointment reminders there was concern voiced that computer calls went in the direction of undervaluing customers by cutting down on human interaction. However, seeing the experience demo'd out I think it actually adds professionalism. If I received such a call I would be impressed, and actually view it favorably because getting a reminder is in my interest, too. Keep going!

Congratulations Patrick!

I'm wondering, how did you put together the image with the cartoon characters? Did you have it designed? Do it yourself?

Melvin Ram (who posts around here as melvinram), the principal at Volcanic Web Design, did it for me. He knocked it out of the park.

Congrats! It looks great!

A couple nitpick things I noticed which may be helpful:

1. When you go to the pricing page (https://www.appointmentreminder.org/pricing) the top navigation disappears.

2. You probably want the email address in the top right corner to be a clickable link.

Best of luck!

I think navigation disappears on purpose. The idea is that when a user is on a pricing page, you want to let him focus on 'Sign up' process and not distract with other links. [Have you noticed that navigation disappears during Amazon's checkout process?]

Got it in one.

Fair enough. I thought it was an interface bug, but that is a solid reason. I'll keep that in mind for my next app.

I'm going to disagree here. If that is the goal then removing the naivigation makes sense when clicking sign up but not clicking pricing.

The equivalent would be amazon removing navigation when you arrived at a single product page.

The end result IMO is that it looks like a mistake.

Congrats Patrick. The link anchor text I used is:

>easily setup automated appointment reminders for your customers

Hope this helps. You can see my post here: http://marcgayle.com/appointment-reminder-launches-congrats-...

Hehe. I was considering implementing exactly the same thing, but currently I am working on other projects. Anyway, I wish you luck and I'm curious to see how it works out.

Congrats Patrick, looking great!

Thanks Jeff! I think I've told you guys before, but Twilio is one of the most awesome things I've ever seen as an entrepreneur. You're going to make several people absolute mints. (I will settle for a mintlet.)

Context for HN users: jeffiel co-founded Twilio and is their CEO.

Congrats on launching! But please consider either a. a better microphone or b. a professional speaker service. It's not that your voice is bad or so, it just sounds more professional when representing your company.

This looks really cool. I'm not sure what you know about Televox but that's what we use and I have to manage our account. Let me tell you they are very nice people but the service leaves a lot to be desired.

Congrats on going live. It looks like http://www.supersaas.com provides much of the same functionality at a lower price though (free for small users).

Spiffy. They're welcome to folks who think $79 is a lot of money -- I will, seriously, recommend them by name to people who complain to me. I'll happily take the part of the market who thinks calling phones is worth paying for. I didn't ever compete on price with BCC and I'm for darn sure not starting now.

AMEN!

You built a ton of value into your product and should not sell it for peanuts. Real businesses pay real money for products and tend to be better customers than those who want it for a "few bucks a month".

Congrats on the launch. One bit of feedback - I might link the Coming Soon! text under "Enterprise" in the pricing page to some kind of e-mail collection form so you can let users know when it arrives.

The favicon's blue, while the website green. Sorry, minor nitpick!

Small question - why is the blog directly on the root rather than under something like /blog/? And don't you think it'd look better to post under something other than "ADMIN"?

You know it is a blog, and I know it is a blog, but does my business gain anything from saying "This piece of content was written by some pajama-wearing shmuck who doesn't know what he is talking about and what it says was obsolete within 30 minutes of being posted"?

Blog? What blog? No blog here, Mr. Person With Decisionmaking Authority At A Law Firm. All I see is experts talking to experts.

Not sure I 100% understand the response, but I guess I feel it should either look like a blog or not look like a blog. Even my dad knows what a blog looks like, and right now that post sort of looks like it's part of a half-implemented blog.

If you don't want it to look like a blog, why not get rid of the "06. DEC, 2010 CATEGORIES: UNCATEGORIZED BY PATRICK MCKENZIE COMMENTS OFF" byline completely? And maybe "comments off" at the end too, since if it's not a blog what do you need comments for.

And if it's not a blog, I sort of wonder why you're using a blog engine rather than whatever other CMS or static pages, but I can completely understand if the blog engine is the easiest way to do what you want to do.

I use Wordpress for the marketing site because I can concentrate on writing copy and end up with something which looks good very quickly, whereas when I write copy in Netbeans I end up concentrating mostly on balancing my tags and end up with uninspired copy which looks cruddy.

Like I said, I completely understand doing what's fastest/easiest, and that definitely makes sense. If Wordpress is what you know, it's completely defensible even if it's overkill.

To be fair though, the choice isn't really "Wordpress vs handwritten HTML" - there are plenty of CMS systems that aren't big gnarly blog engines, and there's even just basic template systems.

Well, at least you can do away with the "Comments closed" bit.

Curious - why did you opt to launch on a Monday? Everything I've read says Monday is a bad day to launch products.

Honestly? No major reason. It wouldn't have been ready on Thursday, and if I had launched it on Friday then I would have had to be up to the wee hours on Saturday and I had a dinner party planned on Saturday and wanted to spend the day cleaning.

I wasn't planning a big splash media launch -- getting it to you guys is sort of the highlight of my day. Tomorrow, I start contacting individuals who I've promised accounts to. After that, the real work starts. My strengths in marketing are more towards the slow-burn acquisition strategies than the burns-bright-fizzles-quickly launch strategies, which makes me care about as much about launch day numbers as Zynga cares about their SEO. (i.e. not much)

  getting it to you guys is sort of the highlight of my day

Good plan! :) Thanks for the reply.

Looks great. Though, the demo seems so locked down it's hard to actually get a feel for how it'd be to use.

Nice. I like how you can eat your own dog food by using it yourself to remind and keep customers.

I like the white label idea - I think that's going to be pretty successful.

Congrats Patrick!

love it, had an idea for the exact same service over here in ireland, would you be open to franchising it outside the US?

Perhaps. It would depend on the particulars. Send me an email if you're interested in talking more about it later.

I'm really looking forward to first-class support of Japanese by Twilio, although I won't realistically be in a great place to exploit that for at least 6 ~ 8 months.

Congrats on going live and good luck!

congrats and looks great!

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