Barber Shop Booking

I dedicated most of last week to sales. Before I launched my beta, I had reached out to barber shops using Facebook messenger and had a fairly decent response rate (even if it was a negative response). I'd also tried email, but the response rate was terrible with this channel (plus, very few barbers have email addresses on their websites). On that back of this I decided that I was going to do my initial sales using Facebook messenger; reaching out to barber shops to let them know about BSB.

Oh boy, did this flop. Of 143 messages sent, no-one created an account with BSB, and only 15 people visited my website. Sending all these direct messages took quite a lot of time and FB blocked me a few times during the process 😬 However, I did also post on 5 Facebook groups and Reddit, too. Those posts brought in far more website visitors (compared to the direct messages) and didn't require too much effort on my behalf.

Before I started this experiment, I was really confident that I'd get good engagement and I'm really gutted that it bombed. I tried lots of different copy in my messages, but nothing stuck. However, I'm quite surprised by how much better the 'content marketing' approach was, and it took much less effort too.

This week has certainly produced some data that makes me more likely to put more effort into content marketing 📊✉️✏️

I'm an engineer and I love writing code. I find sales a bit terrifying but I'm trying hard to get better (currently reading 'The Way of the Wolf', which I recommend). Over the past 6 months I've messaged some barber shops over Facebook but I have found it hard to sell my product. This got me thinking about ways that I can help myself with the sales process and move the conversations towards a dialogue that comes more naturally to me. Freemium was an idea that stuck with me because it allows me to reach out and offer something for free, without leaving me feeling like a pushy (and awkward!) sales person (Influence, by Robert Cialdini has a great chapter called 'Reciprocation'). There are lots of barber shops that don't take online bookings and I hope that the offer of a free product will get people signing-up and 'top load' my conversion funnel. Hopefully 10% of these people will eventually convert to paid customers.

My strategy is to reach out to barber shops on Facebook, ones that don't have a "Book Now" button, and see if they want to add one, for free.

There are quite a few other booking platforms out there but only one is focussed on barbers. The other platforms use really generic language like "Book a service, with a practitioner" rather than "Book a cut, with a barber". Additionally, most of them are fairly expensive and don't have a freemium product. So I'm hoping that the intersection of a barber-specific app and a freemium product will result in a decent up-take of new signups. I am weary of the extra overhead that a load of freemium accounts may create, but it's a risk I'm willing to take; if this strategy doesn't work, then I'll just have to try a different pricing model 🤷‍♂️

Since I built it last year, my marketing website has only consisted of the landing page. I want to make it look more professional and bulk it out with some articles, plus hopefully start ranking for some keywords on Google. I've created a 'Tips' section and have written a guide on how to add a Book Now button to your Facebook page. I'm aiming to create content that is genuinely useful, and not just self-promoting garbage, and on that note, this article should work with any booking platform, not just mine.

I've finished BSB's integration with Stripe marketplace and I went live with my second beta customer, today. Barber shops are now able to accept online payments and the money gets routed directly to their own Stripe account (and then onwards to their own bank account). It's really cool seeing their customers use the platform to make payments. I feel like my baby has grown up! 🤣

Today I went live with my first beta customer 🎉 I half expected something to go wrong but BSB was flawless 😅 I spent a lot of time writing unit tests and end-to-end tests and it's paying off.

Next step is to integrate Stripe marketplace payments so that the barber shops can take money for appointments 💸