Helios
Best in class business text messaging
Just launched the brand new marketing site for Helios. We've been shipping tons of new features and growing into new industries. We wanted our website to communicate our product's features and value in the way it deserves.
The marketing site now lives in the same NextJS project as the web app. I used the /app directory for all the new stuff and most of the app code still lives in the /pages directory. Really happy that I was able to share components that were already built in the app.
Check it out and let me know what you think!
After a long selection process Barre3 has chosen Helios as their preferred SMS marketing software vendor for their franchisees. We're very excited to partner with the brand as they are a premier boutique fitness studio. We've already onboarded 2 studios and hope to partner with many more of their locations.
We've launched our first 3rd party integration. Mindbody is a scheduling and CRM software for gyms and fitness centers, which is the niche we are focusing on in our early stages of growth.
We now sync contacts and their profile properties to allow fitness centers to segment and message their leads and clients.
After onboarding 10 clients at our base subscription plan we were noticing almost all of them were exceeding their monthly message quota (which is a great; they are using the platform a ton). We've introduced 5 tiers with different price points and overage rates to accommodate businesses with different SMS volume.
We officially ended the beta period and moved a beta user to a paid plan making them our first paying customer. We're now setting up a sales funnel and looking to aggressively close more leads. We continue to work on new features, including a dashboard home screen to show the user KPIs and metrics for their account.
Since the MVP completion we shipped a bunch of new features.
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Automations: Allow a user to set keyword triggers. When a contact responds to a message with one of the keywords a response set in the automation is automatically sent.
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Scheduling a message: Users can schedule a message to be sent to a list at a specific date and time.
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Filters: From the messages page users can filter to see only unread conversations and search by name or phone number.
We launched our marketing site to highlight the platform and these new features - https://sendhelios.com
After a few months of planning we had a working MVP that allowed users to import contacts, build lists, send bulk SMS blasts and then respond 1:1 to clients and close sales.
We offered 4 fitness centers the opportunity to use the platform for free in the beta period so we could uncover bugs and get honest feedback about what works well, what doesn't, and hear from the customer what features we should focus on next.
After speaking with a friend about his fitness center consulting business we uncovered a need for software that would make him more efficient and save his clients money.
His main point of contact with prospective gym members was SMS and he had been using exiting platforms but running into issues with certain aspects of his workflow. He was also funneling new business to a platform that he didn't a stake in.
Other options offered some features we needed but none offered them all. We decided to build Helios from the ground up to combine the best SMS messaging tools a small business needs to succeed with text messaging.
2 Comments
Congrats Joseph, the new website looks great!
Pretty cool idea to use the same components/style for both the website and the app.
One thing that was confusing to me was the hero text: it keeps changing, but it's so slow I didn't really notice it. So I read "Text message marketing software built for fitness", and thought the app is specifically designed for fitness/gyms.
Thanks, that's good feedback. I wanted a way to convey the industries we specialize in right now but yeah probably can't expect people to stick around in the hero long enough to notice.