TextJoy

For the past few months, I've been working on finding a customer for the TextJoy MVP without a lot of success. In retrospect, I've been doing it backward by trying to find a customer for my product. I should have been building the product to solve a problem for a very specific customer instead.

While interviewing potential customers in different industries, I discovered a couple of problems. First was that my vision of the customer wasn't specific enough. For instance, I thought that TextJoy might work for apartment leasing agents, doctor's offices and restaurants. Too broad and disparate an audience to understand. The second problem was that I didn't know enough about those customers and their pain points. So I started over.

The big pivot was to focus my attention on independent coffee shop and popup restaurant owners. I know for a fact that making enough sales is a grind for a lot of these entrepreneurs, and that's how I landed on the idea of SMS mobile ordering.

To sum it up, the new TextJoy lets customers order from cafes and restaurants by text. It's great for customers because it makes it super easy to order, no app downloads required and you can save the shop's number right to your phone. It's great for businesses because with the reduced friction, you get more sales.

You can test it out now by texting "hi" to (404) 948-6147.

We're live and in beta right now, and working toward our first sign up. Let me know what you think!

So I thought I finished the TextJoy MVP at the beginning of January 2022, but after some very basic testing I discovered a bunch of issues that sent me back to the drawing board.

I'm a big fan of releasing early, but the first versions were too buggy to provide a good experience for even the most basic features.

With the latest release, TextJoy allows you to:

• Set up your business phone number to receive text messages
• Automatically reply to common customer requests like creating appointments and requesting hours. On the backend, we use Natural Language Processing to understand what your customers are saying in their texts
• Hook up your Google calendar to automatically check your availability and create appointments

Would love to hear what you think! The site is live now at https://textjoy.us

• Steve

I was on vacation with my family around Christmas and noticed that a lot of restaurants were hard to reach by phone for reservations. It got me thinking "Why can't I just text these businesses?"

As a customer, I prefer texting over phone calls. I hate waiting on holds, don't like getting interrupted by phone calls, and I almost never check my voicemails. Texts, however, I open pretty much everytime.

I tend to get carried away with ideas, so before investing any development time, I ran the idea through my version of "The Meat Grinder" which I first learned about through Tyler Tringas (worth a Google). The idea checked all the boxes (B2B, SaaS, I could identify the customer and marketing channels), so I decided to start building ASAP!