My startup: Tradesmen Bookings

A project I started 4 months ago is tradesmen bookings. Property management services currently manage their tradesmen through calling, which is expensive, so I decided to write a SaaS tool that would optimise this. No calling, just post a job and the tradesmen apply.

Development

It’s written in ruby on rails, which was honestly quite painful to get started on. I’m not typically involved in web development, so it was quite a giant learning curve, felt like the learning curve of Eve.

Yeah, it was hard, just not used to MVC. What also really doesn’t help is that while ruby on rails has thought of nearly everything, have fun with the UI. Server side rendering is a core part of rails, yet you get stuck with the basics and that’s it. Luckily Bootstrap isn’t hard to add, otherwise my app would look horrendous. I’m not a designer.

Selling

Marketing. Selling. It’s all hard. As a developer, I’ve been caught into the typical trap of building without customers. Therefore, I must fly blind, hoping to crash into customers with my existing solution. Naturally, my first step was emails. Fun fact, emails barely work in B2B, the response rates are incredibly low. So email’s out.

Now came letters, sent about 20 to local lettings agencies and property management services, hoping to strike gold. No responses so far, but they need time.

In terms of next steps, I’m thinking of trying calling to arrange meetings, or god forbid, walking up to them and talking to them. Cold calling is definitely not fun, but honestly I don’t feel I have other options, marketing really is not what I’m good at.

Conclusion

Startups are hard alone. Please, find a co-founder, preferably somebody in marketing.