Appointment Reminder

Wow, what a year for Appointment Reminder. We ended up the year down roughly 15% from prior years, but in the context of the global small business challenges, that's not too bad.

December 2020 was the first month to see over 10% of our customers come back online as paying users and that really gives me hope for the future as 2021 unfolds.

I don't have any major plans for AR other than to help get pandemic customers back up and running as they were before. We still have travel/hotel customers that are on the side lines waiting out this incredibly challenging time for the travel industry. Once those headwinds start to change, we could be getting back to where we were at the start of 2019.

Thankfully, 2020 was not a "lost year" like I worried about at the start of April 2020. We bottomed out around 20% down and are slowly recovering, reflecting the same market trends we're seeing in the global economy.

I look forward to welcoming back every single small business that was affected by the pandemic and had to close their doors. Let's all hope that's sooner, rather than later, and we can all learn some valuable lessons from this event that we apply to our future business plans.

July 2020 continued to demonstrate the same overall results I’ve seen in the last few months for both of the SaaS-focused companies. The most obvious take away was there was nothing abnormal about the month, it was boring, routine, and predictable. In 2020, that's a welcome sign.

Appointment Reminder had a few clients return with notable exceptions from our travel industry customers. This is a welcome trend, but we’re still likely to have many companies never to return as the start/stop nature of many state reopening plans has caused too much havoc on smaller businesses.

We've seen new customers sign up as they need more appointment scheduling software to plan for the future and we've been a welcome beneficiary of that trend. I hope that continues as it will take a lot of new customers to make up for the losses from the pandemic and its effects on small businesses.

Since the month was so boring, I had the team start working on updating the website for a new fresher, cleaner look, and I hope to have that go live in August or September.

All in all, a very routine month with mostly blocking and tackling work on a day to day basis.

After the last few months, a boring month of normalcy was a welcome change.

I'm going to condense the last three months of Appointment Reminder performance into one quick posting. If you want to read more about how things were going in the last few months, I am writing more long-form essays on my Buy Op Sell website.

AR did - at least, what I believe to be - an acceptable amount of business over the course of the last three months. In total, we lost about 16% of our MRR between first quarter and second quarter from customers who had to either close their establishment or pause their subscriptions because their industry was hit hard by the pandemic (travel, in particular).

Even taking into account the loss of 16% of quarterly revenue, AR was in a great position to help new customers set up appointment reminder services for all sorts of businesses that never had to do appointments in the past. It felt good to be part of that new mission, even if we can help one business keep its doors open or re-open, it's a bright spot in an otherwise really hard economy for so many of our subscribers.

Fortunately, the good news is we're starting to see customers come back and un-pause their accounts. Some that paused for a complimentary 3 months are back in business again, even those that work primarily in the travel space. It is the most rewarding thing to see and gives me hope that many businesses might be able to squeeze through this recession and make it out the other side.

The biggest lesson I learned is how flexible and responsive we needed to be to our customers' circumstances. Obviously, it's a push-pull relationship because our business also has bills to pay, and the more leniency we allow, the more we increase our own chances of problems. But we were able to find creative ways to save the customer some money, save on our own expenses, and muddle through this pandemic together.

I'll continue to provide updates as the economy continues to come back online both here at IH (quick snippets) and on BuyOpSell (longer essays).

Just a quick update on how Appointment Reminder is doing after three weeks of an economic shutdown.

One thing that is important to point out is that AR only runs for businesses in the USA and Canada, so any economic changes in those two countries will have a full impact on AR.

For the end of March 2020, we saw about a 10%+ pullback in customer billings almost exclusively coming from customers that had to cancel due to the shuttering of their businesses.

Almost all of them said they would be back as soon as this was all over, but that's only if they are all still in business.

Many of AR's customers are small businesses, nail salons, barbershops, yoga studios, exercise class locations, etc. Obviously, these are the types of businesses that everyone worries about failing before the economy can get back to a respectable level of traction, as they likely to have a high fixed cost and little flexibility to survive a sudden cessation of income.

I imagine April will see the same level of contraction - if not an accelerated amount of closed or postponed accounts. Obviously, that hits our viability as a going concern as well, as fixed costs are tough to get out of quickly.

One note, of course, that we all know, is that software does have a higher margin and much more of a variable cost structure (I'm generalizing a lot there, bear with me, but I realize some online businesses aren't this fortunate) and with less usage, our costs will go down a bit. I'd guess maybe 2-3% for every 10% in lost revenue.

Like many small businesses, if AR can survive to the point where the economy is allowed to function again, and most of the customers come back, it will survive quite nicely through the pandemic. If a loss of 40-50% of customers is permanent, then AR would still be profitable, fun to operate, and can even help SMB’s recover in the future as businesses get back to normal.

Only time will tell!

Like I said in my QuotaGuard IH update, "I'm pretty sure a lot of people learned a lot about how stable, necessary, and vulnerable their business's were in the past 2+ weeks in the USA and Europe."

Appointment Reminder is the type of business that, at this time of the year, is in higher demand due to tax return time and an increase in CPA company usage.

What we obviously didn't expect was a pandemic at the same time.

With the extension of filing dates, I can see the CPA revenue stream continuing a few more months out than usual, which is obviously good for business. But that will be dwarfed by the pandemic and the public/government reaction to it in the short term.

AR is predominately a business that customers still need to keep setup and running during a short term loss in business velocity. At this point, we haven't seen a wave of cancellations, nor have we seen a diminishing number of signups vs. a typical March. Therefore, for now, things are doing ok...

Time will tell if this continues, or if a national shutdown causes businesses to reach out to us and ask for a "pause" in their service, or just fold and quit entirely. Many of our customers are SMB's and a prolonged (by which I mean 4 weeks plus) shutdown of their business will likely cause bankruptcies for some of our customers.

This is, and will continue to be, a tough time for non-governmental employees, gig contractors and small business owners in particular. I am afraid that governmental steps to curb real and perceived threats to public health and safety will come at the expense of those three groups almost exclusively when the dust settles (hopefully settles) in a few weeks or months.

Until then, I will continue to report what I'm seeing on the back-end of my businesses to help everyone see behind the curtain of a few SaaS small businesses and how we react to these types of Black Swan events.

6% revenue increase over 2018, which is a much smaller revenue increase for 2019 for a variety of reasons.

First, the changes to Google's search results - promoting ads to above the fold - basically meant our #1 SEO search result no longer delivered the same volume of new customers as it had in the past. The cost for advertising to reach the top of the page is significant and we apply that marketing budget selectively to only a few niche areas (medical, dental, HIPAA-required, etc) now.

Second, the need for Appointment Reminders has changed as the market has changed. Medium to Large businesses are utilizing built in functionality in other planning and CRM systems they own, so we continue to focus on the smaller businesses (which is my favorite type of customer, regardless), but that has a naturally resulting lower MRR and LTV component, but higher CAC.

I'm constantly working on other ways - outside of SEO and Ads - to promote AR across different platforms. The more we learn, I'll share it here so others in our position can benefit from what we learn, as well.

11% Revenue increase for the year, with the additional savings from better expense management allowed AR to become more profitable, yet continue to be stable for our customer base.

The biggest challenge this year was our payment processor opted to pivot into another type of credit business and we had to migrate all of our customers from an Australian credit card payment processing company to Stripe.

Additionally, we began to investigate the option of investing a significant amount of money to completely redesign the interface and add additional functionality. After months of work, I decided that we were over complicating a nice, simple solution that hundreds of customers already loved.

It was disappointing to drop the development of the changes - especially after so much was spent on the development - but in the end we didn't want to risk alienating our long term customers by redesigning a system they have been using for years.

In our first full year of running AR, we were able to increase revenue a solid 15%, while eliminating some expenses and starting to upgrade the core functionality and infrastructure of the business.

The decision was made to move the service to AWS following the ability to execute BAA's for HIPAA-compliant companies. This move saved a considerable amount of expense and provided a much more stable environment for the future.

Following an amazing new career opportunity, patio11 entrusted me with his business to carry it forward into the future.

We spent a lot of time discussing not only the technical aspects of the transfer, but what we both wanted for the future of his successful project.

Taking care of the customers, the mission, and the people that AR helps on a daily basis was just as important as the technical hand over, to make sure we were both on the same page to ensure the future of AR was just as bright and valuable to customers.

Patio11 started working on Appointment Reminder. Obviously I don't have any insight into that phase - as I was not in the picture then - but patio11 covers it in his IH article here : https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/appointment-reminder-2b8720ca25.

My intention with posting here is to help people who are interested learn "What happens next after I sell my IH business to a new owner...? Does it fall apart? Do they care about my customers like I did? Will I ever hear what happens to my baby?"