Barber Shop Booking
A booking platform, for barber shops.
I hadn't touched my side project for over a year. To be honest, I'd become disheartened at how hard it was to do sales and I'd lost enthusiasm for my project and was focusing on other things (freelancing!).
My platform, Barber Shop Booking, processes card transactions on behalf of barbers; Stripe started emailing me at the beginning of 2019 telling me that I needed to prepare for 'Secure Customer Authentication' (a new EU banking regulation) by September 2019.
I scoped out the work and knew that it was going to be a big job. The code that handles the monthly payments barbers make to me (i.e. their subscription) would need major changes, as would the code handling the payments made by clients to their barbers, for their haircuts.
I always try to be unbiased and unemotional when making decisions. The facts were that the SCA integration was going to take about three week's of work, and my platform makes less than $100/month. So was this really worth spending ~90 hours on? I wouldn't even have a new feature to show for it at the end of the day. I was conflicted...
The logical side of my brain said it wasn't worth the effort. Choosing not to implement SCA would mean that card payments would start failing and this would most likely be the end of my business.
The emotional side of my brain told me not to let down my customers (although there are only a handful so far), and to do the work anyway. It also seemed such a shame to let the project die (sunk cost fallacy?) - my overheads are minimal and I rarely have to spend time maintaining the code.
I was in conflict and struggling with the decision.
My wife gave me some really good advice - just get away from your laptop and go somewhere else to think about the problem. I sat in Costa Coffee for an hour with my trusty Moleskine and a pen ☕, weighing up the two options. Then it hit me, there was a third option! Rather than just rewriting my code, like-for-like, I could actually just ditch the monthly subscription totally - this would half the amount of work required for the code migration. This would of course mean that I'd no longer receive subscription revenue from my clients, but I could instead charge a 'platform fee', i.e. a small fee for every transaction that I process. This was a pricing model that I'd been curious about for a while and now I'd been presented with the perfect opportunity to implement it. The real kicker was that it would align me with my customers - I would only make money if they were making money. And, if I could help them make more money (by, say, implementing new features), then I'd also make more money.
My original pricing model had never quite felt right to me, the motivation was inevitably to gain more monthly subscriptions rather than to make my customers more successful. This new pricing model felt just perfect though!
Fast-forward a couple of months and here we are. I've implemented SCA compliant payments and, in the process, implemented a totally new pricing model which, hopefully, reduces the barrier of entry for new clients signing-up with me 🤞
This is undoubtedly my biggest milestone since Barber Shop Booking went live in 2018. The time I spent on this migration has reinvigorated my passion for my side project and I'm psyched to push on with new features.
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 💸
14 Comments
I was so worried that you'd just shelve it, but I'm glad you finally found a great compromise. You should thank your wife for the idea of stepping away from the problem and viewing the situation with fresh lens.
Thanks! Yeah I’m really pleased that I’ve kept it going. And yes, my wife deserves a big thank you!
Great read Matt, best of luck for the new pricing!
Thanks, Ghyslain!
Great read! Glad to hear you found a way forward in the end, good luck!
Thanks very much!
I love a good plot twist ;)
It was good to hear your thought process though. Good to see that you found a way forward; best of luck!
I thought you were going to pull the plug! Nice turn at the end!
Very nice. Aligning incentives is always a smart move!
Keep us updated about progress and revenue! Keen to hear more about this one. Pricing models is always interesting, to me. 👍
Thanks, Shaun!
Wish you all the best dude with the new pricing model and burst of enthusiasm ! 😊
Thanks very much!
No problem! Will follow your updates!
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
It was a bit of a ball-ache to be honest. My checkout code was custom (rather than Stripe’s Checkout) so that meant that I’d need to handle the 2FA myself. Also, I would have needed to handle failed payments when they happened as part of a monthly subscription charge (and hence the user wouldn’t even be on my site at that time). Another layer of complexity is that my customers connect to my account via Stripe connect, and a further layer of complexity is that I’ve ‘white-labelled’ my platform - meaning that it can be setup as a different domain (e.g. dentists, rather than barbers) with different Stripe credentials. So, a lot of code to change and test!
This comment was deleted 4 years ago