Orderofservice.me
Printable funeral order of service maker
Search console has just told me that I’m ranking for ‘order of service template’. Position 74, which is roughly halfway down page 3. Which is the wilderness where no one goes. But! This small achievement has made it feel infinitely more achievable to get onto that first page.
Inspired by Cory Zue's journey with placecard.me, I ran a google ads test to see how viable this idea is. I launched it, got around 200 clicks, and what seemed like no conversions. Not a single person going through the flow to download a completed .pdf. I was feeling pretty gutted, until I thought to check the database - and saw that in fact a handful of people had created real life orders of service! And downloaded them! I'd just not configured google analytics properly...
Honestly, I'm still pretty baffled about how to configure google analytics. But feeling elated that a bunch of people were able to make an order of service using the product.
I've also launched a very scrappy v1 of orderofservice.me/guide, which will hopefully be the backbone of my attempts at ranking for 'order of service template'.
Having started work on this a few months ago, I hit a development roadblock that made me drop this idea. It would be pretty trivial (how to save images that users upload to a database) for an experienced developer - but it made me stumble. And then freelance work came in, etc...
I'm in-between freelance work now, uni has wrapped up, and I'm in Japan on the tail end of my student visa. This idea kept coming back to mind. I think also just that itch to build something.
I decided to start from scratch, and think I've made a few sensible design and technical decisions compared to last time.
Instead of a pure WYSIWYG editor for an order of service, I've gone for a more structured form. This is much simpler to code, and also works far better on mobile. My hunch is that people just want something simple to fill in, rather than the complex editors that the few competitors out there have.
I previously also tried to make my own .pdf generator. Honestly, last time I think this is what wore me down before I got to that image upload issue and meant I didn't have the energy to solve it. Now I'm handing that all off to a third party - for the price of 3p a .pdf it feels worth it.
I'm writing this now having spent the last few weeks, on and off, getting together and launching a working prototype.
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