Meetme

I feel like it took my five years to be able to explain the USP and the killer feature of Meetme in a few words.

Those are the following:

Meetme is yet another scheduling tool, but it has the following USP: it's mobile first, so it uses phone number for auth to ensure better engagement on bookings. And it uses the phone calendar to suggest meeting matching both user's calendar ✨

Have you experienced something similar? I find this crazy. Maybe it's my weakness to be able to articulate and communicate clearly what I have been working on for so long.

How did you get clarity on your USP?

I am reading this book, One Million Followers, by Brendan Kane. It has a whole chapter on the importance of testing, or experimenting. The idea is to experiment as fast as possible, analyze, learn. This resonates with the famous build, measure, learn loop, but at very high speed. Apparently, this was the single one reason Mark Zuck said Facebook succeeded: the ability to run 10K version of FB in parallel to experiment and iterate at hypersonic speed.

I find this fascinating and very inspiring.

What will you do with this?

I have been working on the new landing page for Meetme. The previous versions seemed amazing when I released it 1 year ago. But the more I am refining my USP and highlighting my killer feature, the more I realized my landing page or web page sucked.

So I took a few days to built it again, inspired from the methodology I used with AirCal.

I used ChatGPT to help me structure the content and data that I want to highlight. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to let chatGPT generate everything for me like a dumb little robot. But using it wisely, like a sparring partner, to iterate on the structure and on the copy of the web site feels really amazing.

I'd love to have your feedback on how it looks and what u understand from it.

It has been written for French people first. And I still have SSR to enhance with my Next.js setup.

Go - ROAST IT please! 🔥

https://www.meetme.io

This is the leap of faith. I have waited for this day since I got the initial idea of Meetme back in 2017.

First I have changed my work to work part-time. I switched to 80% to be able to do 80% on my job, and another 80% on my startup.

Since then, it has been a rollercoaster. So much hard work. Finding balance, with 2 kids and an amazing wife (kids born in 2018 and 2021) is hard. But possible.

I did a lot of SCRUM sprints alone to push myself on doing the dev. Estimating the time I could work, try to work in 2 weeks sprints. Do the retrospective on my own.

1st key to succeed here was to work from 4-5 AM to 8 AM before my day job. This was a massive helper. It was truly amazing to see how much these little chunk of time ad up and become HUGE amount down the line.

I tracked all the development time on wakatimer to add some gamification and goals like code 2h per day minimum. It helped as well!

Just before covid hit, I had a good MVP and could test it with my first paying user. Rewrote a new version during covid.

Released v2 at the end of 2021. In summer 2022 I took a few months off to grow the business and learn to do sales. Doing sales door to door is hard. The first time it was so hard to enter shops without meeting and pitch my product. Getting so much rejection is really hard. But during the first dozen cold outreach in person, I could not even enter the shops. Many time I motivated myself like: "This time I enter, let's go". Walk toward the shop like a hairdresser, and at the last second sawing so many people in it and scared of rejection and just passing in front of the shop without entering. Oh that happened to me so many times.

Now, almost 2 years since my first cold outreach meeting, I can enter any crowded area and pitch my product at any given time.

I entered some pitch contest (and love it!) as I started to realize that I might need to raise some money to grow faster.

Now, since early June, I am full time working on Meetme. I am so proud after so much struggle.

When I gave my notice to leave my job, another big company approached me for a CEO role for Switzerland. I was really teased and happy that such a big and great company offered me this opportunity. I thought "hey why not?". I did all the process, travelled to meet the worldwide CEO and had great contact and chat with them. But after giving it really some deep thoughts, I refused the job. I did all the hard work and hard choices since 5 years to be able to focus on my own business. So I turned down that 500k / year job to focus on Meetme.

What's Meetme? Meetme is yet another scheduling tool, but it has the following USP: it's mobile first, so it uses phone number for auth to ensure better engagement on bookings. And it uses the phone calendar to suggest meeting matching both user's calendar ✨

What's next? The goal is to sell my first subscription online to be able to shift away from door to door sales to online sales.

We are growing slowly but very steadily.

Last week I started doing cold calling ☎️ after visiting more than 500 prospects door to door. I always thought in person sales would be much more efficient. But after 3 months doings sales full time, it seems that cold calling is working well too!

First day, after 24 phone calls, I booked 6 meeting for in person demo 💥. This made me change my opinion on cold calling. I am now shifting to more cold calling and then cold visiting.

We have 20 paid customers in the pipe. Some are in trial, other are waiting for their config and some are waiting for the web version 💰.
In the last weeks, we had our first customer literally writing resignation letter to our competitors to start a new contract with us. Hard to show more love to our product 🧡.

All these conversations allow to grow and fine tune the product like crazy. We have a lot to do, and today I took some times to cleanup our backlog and prepare the next sprints. It's very hard to prioritize. Talking to customer helps a lot. I can create EPICS for the upcoming features and rough estim the Business Value and the Cost or Story Point of each. Then, sort based on my feeling based on the customer conversation I had and the ROI of these tasks.

Let's get back to work! Have a lovely week-end all and let me know if you have any similar experience or what you think about my journey.