

Appointment Reminder Launches - patio11
http://www.appointmentreminder.org/appointment-reminder-launches

======
patio11
Thanks in advance guys. I mean this sincerely: I probably couldn't have done
it without you.

I don't generally ask for things on HN, but just this once: y'all know that
links my website gets gives me more ability to rank for search terms of
importance to me. If I've said something which helped you or you otherwise
want to go give me a Christmas present, please take a few minutes out of your
day, go to your blog, and write up a few sentences with a link to the front
page. I'd really, really appreciate it.

~~~
prkp0
I know you probably worked hard on this, but I'm extremely disappointed that
you might have just lifted Twilio's appointment script example
(<http://www.twilio.com/docs/howto/appointmentreminder>), set up a billing
frontend, and charging $79/month for this product. I wish you would've
credited Twilio for much of the hard work.

As much as I want you to succeed, I don't know if this is the right way to do
it.

~~~
alanthonyc
If you think that all it takes to build this business is copying Twilio's
code, then you should try making money off printing bingo cards.

~~~
mikepp
Is this the new paradigm in Tech/Silicon Valley? Copying the crucial component
of others' work and just building a business off of it?

I hope this is not how we create innovation going forward.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Which part of Silicon Valley do you think patio11 lives in?

When, exactly, did he claim that "innovation" was some critical portion of his
business models?

One of Patrick's most charming features is his unwillingness to tie himself up
in emotional knots over his status as an "innovator", or fret about whether or
not his products sufficiently express the essence of his cutting-edge twenty-
first-century personality. He just makes things that people want, and markets
them systematically with a great deal of focus. And he writes about that.

My lawyer, my accountant, my dentist, my doctor, my grocer, and my pharmacist
don't have particularly innovative business models. They just provide things
that I want, and I pay for them. There is no sin in that.

~~~
mikepp
"Tech/Silicon Valley". Didn't imply he lived in the Valley.

"My lawyer, my accountant, my dentist, my doctor, my grocer, and my pharmacist
don't have particularly innovative business models."

This has nothing to do with his business model. It's about using someone
else's work and passing it off as your own. I'm sure I'll get downvoted again,
but I hate the blatant disregard for intellectual property. Twilio paid its
$90-100K+ developer to program and document the appointment reminder script,
and in the end, weren't credited for the crucial component of the work.

~~~
patio11
I yield to no one in my respect for IP, and my karma would be higher if I
didn't feel the need to pipe up so frequently on the "we should be able to
steal music" topics. But I did not actually use Twilio's sample code for my
product. It is _sample code_. Really. Go try running it, come back when you
find that it doesn't even have enough for Rails to load.

I didn't even use that code as a base for mine. Again, it is _sample code_.
Take a look at the user experience or error handling -- they're clearly
inadequate for a real product, but suffice to give a competent Rails developer
a taste of what API it takes to actually have Twilio make a phone ring. After
you can make a phone ring (in one line -- and, again, one line I don't even
use), you only need the other 3,500 lines of AR to actually make that phone
call worthwhile for business purposes.

------
MarkMc
Patrick - you may find this useful:

"One restaurant owner greatly reduced the percentage of no-shows (people who
booked a table but didn't honour the reservation and didn't call to cancel it)
by having his receptionist change what she said when taking a reservation from
'Please call if you have to cancel' to 'Will you call if you have to cancel?'
Of course, nearly all customers committed themselves to calling by saying
'yes' to that question. More importantly, they then felt the need to abide by
their commitment: the no-show rate dropped from 30 per cent to 10 per cent."
(quoted from 'Yes! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion' by Goldstein,
Martin and Cialdini)

One other suggestion: Give your would-be customers a FREE split test. Half of
the appointments get a reminder, half don't. Get the user to place a 'value'
on the outcome of each appointment, then tell them the result of the split
test. The user will be BEGGING to give you money.

~~~
patio11
Thank you -- I've had my head in the trenches so long that didn't even occur
to me, and split testing is ordinarily a passion of mine. I'll consider doing
that if I can figure a way to sell it to my customers as well as I can sell it
to Rails developers.

~~~
MarkMc
Forgot to say: Thanks for sharing all your bingo card revenue stats - it's
been very motivational! Well done.

------
balsamiq
Congrats Patrick!

A small piece of feedback. On this page:
<https://www.appointmentreminder.org/a/calendar> \- I am wary of testing it
because I'm not sure who'll see my phone number if I do. In other words, it's
not clear if this demo is just for me or if this is a "demo sandbox" for
anyone to use.

BTW, love the outrageous enterprise pricing that makes the small business plan
look better, as well as the blatantly fake "HOT" tag - you shipped today! it
gets hot fast in Japan! ;)

Not so sure about this "All questions are answered by our lead engineer. (Your
business is too important to trust to a call center..)" - smells a little bit
fake. I like Garrett's style better: <http://sifterapp.com/support> (scroll
down to the green box).

Just my quick first impressions. Congrats on a new beginning!

~~~
patio11
Thanks for the feedback Peldi. I clarified the copy on the demo page, and it
should be restarting right about now.

We'll agree to disagree on the "hot" tag: it is my personal recommendation,
and _everybody_ who committed to buy AR when I asked them wanted that plan.
(The enterprise pricing is mostly because HIPAA is insane -- it is still
cheaper than any competitor in the healthcare market. I'll talk at length
about that some other day.)

~~~
ironkeith
One small thing, on this page: <https://www.appointmentreminder.org/pricing>

The strings from the "hot" tag to the "Small business" column are wrong. One
of the strings needs to come from behing the column, otherwise it looks like
there's some weird bug sitting on the column, holding a "hot" tag.

See: <http://imgur.com/gjVbb>

------
sgdesign
I don't know if you're looking for any design critiques, but since that's what
I know here goes:

\- The logo is not very readable. The letters are squashed together and the
gradients are a little too strong. Subtle is always better.

\- The pure white background behind the tagline is very harsh. I suggest using
a light shade of beige instead.

\- Your content needs some rythm. People hate reading big blocks of text, so
you should add in some headings and lists.

\- Maybe you're planning to add more slides to the carousel later, but right
now you really don't need it. You could take out "who is it for" and put it in
the sidebar instead.

\- The two call to action buttons get lost inside the illustration. I suggest
putting them in the brown bar instead.

\- The tagline could really use some typographical love. There's a ton of
gorgeous free fonts on FontSquirrel.com, just pick one from the top 10 most
popular.

\- The sign in link should probably not be placed inside the nav, most people
expect it to the top right of the site.

That's just the things that jump out at me from looking at the homepage for 5
minutes. Hit me up on Twitter (@SachaGreif) if you have any questions or you'd
like some more advice.

PS: I almost forgot to say, congratulations on launching what looks like a
truly useful product!

PPS: I often go to Kyoto, not that far from you!

------
Hates_
I found the audio on the video really hard to hear. A good quality mic and a
little mixing makes a huge difference.

~~~
patio11
I apologize: you know us engineers, 95% of the schedule goes to the
engineering and we leave the 90% of the project that remains to the last day.
I'll eventually have that video professionally redone.

~~~
pwim
Additionally, I found there was too much talking in the video. It was at least
a minute in when the demo started.

~~~
AgentConundrum
I also found it "ended twice." Patrick wraps it up, says "thanks for
listening" and then still goes on for another 20-30 seconds. It felt a bit
long-winded.

Also, the actual phone call was really hard to hear at first. Sound
quality/volume was inconsistent throughout.

Personally, I'd probably take the five minutes and re-record it now, even if
it's going to be professionally done later.

------
scottyallen
This looks great. Nice work, Patrick, and congrats on the launch. I just sent
my mom an email about it, and suggested she try your demo. Hopefully she'll
sign up. She's a private tutor, and very frustrated by having students not
show up to appointments. This definitely solves a significant problem for her.

Any plans on integrating more tightly with Google Calendar? That's where she
currently keeps her appointments, and being able to suck appointment info out
of there would be really useful for her. That being said, I have no idea how
structured her data in there is (probably not very), so it may not be a super
easy problem in the general case.

~~~
patio11
Already on the roadmap, but I couldn't fit it into prelaunch and GC support
wasn't a blocking issue.

~~~
scottyallen
Totally understand - I wouldn't have made it a launch blocker either:) Great
to hear it's on the roadmap though.

------
MarkMc
Nice work patrick - this has big potential! When possible, get a quote on the
front page like:

"I save $320 per month with Appointment Reminder!" - Mrs Smith

------
michael_dorfman
First of all: congratulations! That was an effective November....

I assume that you are going to be aggressively A/B testing this site.

Are you planning to share the results with us? I know I, for one, would find
it very informative.

~~~
patio11
I am planning on continuing my usual practices with regards to transparency,
with the proviso that I could think of some circumstances where obligations to
customers might force that to change. (e.g. If I land one big whitelabel
client, and my gross revenues would tend to give away the size of that
relationship, then I'd start publishing very incomplete data.)

~~~
joshstaiger
Really looking forward to future discussion. Congrats!

------
mrduncan
The signup links are redirecting to the coming soon page.

Example: [https://www.appointmentreminder.org/coming-
soon?plan=small-b...](https://www.appointmentreminder.org/coming-
soon?plan=small-business)

~~~
patio11
That's what I get for not automating that deployment... fixed.

------
singer
_< meta name="description" content="Quickly and easily send phone appointment
reminders, SMS appointment reminders, and email appointment reminders to your
clients. No software, no hardware, no contacts. Start your free 30 day trial
today" />_

I think you meant "no contracts".

------
RKlophaus
Congrats! Just emailed my dentist to tell them about it. Keep up the good
work. :)

------
davidblair
Caller ID is really important for me. Unless I know who is calling I will
probably ignore my phone. Spoofing the phone number of the actual business
would be really handy and greatly increase the chance that I take the call.

I can't tell from the site whether one can do this without signing up for an
account but if it's not a feature yet I would seriously consider it.

~~~
patio11
This is already on the roadmap, but thank you for the suggestion.

------
pwim
In the video, from the time you answered the call, until the voice started, it
took 5 seconds. If that's normal for the system, I'd be worried my clients
would hang up before hearing appointment reminder.

~~~
patio11
So just between us geeks: Twilio retrieves your MP3 files when the call starts
(and caches them), but my Capistrano tasks effectively bust caches on
deployment, and since doing that video took a couple of takes with redeploys
in the middle, the shot you saw was live with a cold cache. Actual users will
almost certainly have a warm cache for that default script, and the voice will
start playing almost immediately. (That said, I agree, if I had a team to do
video for me it would have been more polished.)

~~~
roel_v
I've been doing a demo video last week, and you can get a long way with
powerpoint, windows movie maker, camstudio and audacity. I found I got
significantly better results by writing my script, doing the voice over, then
the screencast, import all into movie maker, and then edit the screencasts to
make it all fit.

('better' when compared to the 'do it all in one go' approach)

------
dgallagher
Love the idea. Great job. :) This is how I'd summarized things (I didn't watch
the video):

Appointmentreminder.org:

\- Automatic appointment reminders for your clients (phone, text message,
email).

\- No more meetings where nobody shows up!

\- Get notified automatically if someone is going to be late!

\- Client needs to cancel or reschedule? We'll let you know!

\- Record phone reminders yourself, or save time and have our professional
voice actors do it for you!

\- Always on the go? Use it on your laptop or iPad. (iPhone coming soon!)

Never show up to an empty meeting ever again. How much time and money are you
going to save?

 _:insert pricing chart here:_

Questions or comments? email@email.com 888-555-1234

------
kmfrk
Your tagline "You didn't go into business to spend the day on the phone. Let
us handle that." uses a prime, ', instead of a proper, curly apostrophe, ’.

It's also amazing to see a site free of any social network buttons. You don't
get to see that often.

~~~
patio11
I am not a fan of social buttons, with the sole exception of Delicious on
geek-friendly authoritative reference content. If Facebook wants my help
promoting their website, then they can turn some virtual cows into burgers and
use the proceeds to pay my consulting rate.

~~~
joshu
Standard disclaimer: actual users would have installed the extension or the
bookmarklets and don't generally click the on-page save button.

But the tags were nice to see.

~~~
patio11
I find that I get many, many more saves when I put one of those buttons on an
article than when I don't. Subjectively, it feels like about a factor of two
for roughly equivalent values of geek-reference-worthiness. Maybe it activates
the Delicious neurotransmitters even in bookmarklet users -- I don't know.

(This is, obviously, not something I've spent a lot of time A/B testing.)

------
novon
Welcome to the club! ;)

<http://opencal.com>

~~~
prawn
Very nicely designed site, but one thing bugged me - your brand features a
circle and a tick, yet there is no UI element in your app that I could see
which uses this. I know you'd likely need to use non-standard interface
elements to achieve that (e.g., in place of a checkbox perhaps) but it did
stand out to me. "Hey, isn't this place all about ticking circles? I've been
lied to!" ;)

Regardless, as I said, the overall design is excellent. Well done.

~~~
repack
Agreed. What's with the circle and tick? Also, I don't think the name really
works. "OpenCal" - it sounds like OpenTable but in that case the name tells me
more about what the service is. What is "Cal"? (I know calendar, but calendar
does not communicate online appointments, the same way Table does restaurant.
At least not for me). My point? You should change your name. I'm sure you love
it, but it's holding you back.

Beautifully designed site though. It looks like a very slick service.

------
HeyLaughingBoy
Congratulations Patrick!!! I hope the results blow your expectations out of
the water.

Also, because of your blog, I discovered Twilio and it's exactly what I've
needed for some ideas I've been thinking about over the last year.

------
user24
Well done! So now you've gone from building a successful startup in your spare
time, to building another one in the spare time left over from the first one!
Very impressive work, inspirational :)

------
jeromec
Congrats Patrick! Successful entrepreneurs ship, and it looks great. In the
thread where you introduced the concept of appointment reminders there was
concern voiced that computer calls went in the direction of undervaluing
customers by cutting down on human interaction. However, seeing the experience
demo'd out I think it actually adds professionalism. If I received such a call
I would be impressed, and actually view it favorably because getting a
reminder is in my interest, too. Keep going!

------
marilyn
Congratulations Patrick!

I'm wondering, how did you put together the image with the cartoon characters?
Did you have it designed? Do it yourself?

~~~
patio11
Melvin Ram (who posts around here as melvinram), the principal at Volcanic Web
Design, did it for me. He knocked it out of the park.

------
vaporstun
Congrats! It looks great!

A couple nitpick things I noticed which may be helpful:

1\. When you go to the pricing page
(<https://www.appointmentreminder.org/pricing>) the top navigation disappears.

2\. You probably want the email address in the top right corner to be a
clickable link.

Best of luck!

~~~
solutionyogi
I think navigation disappears on purpose. The idea is that when a user is on a
pricing page, you want to let him focus on 'Sign up' process and not distract
with other links. [Have you noticed that navigation disappears during Amazon's
checkout process?]

~~~
patio11
Got it in one.

~~~
vaporstun
Fair enough. I thought it was an interface bug, but that is a solid reason.
I'll keep that in mind for my next app.

~~~
arn
I'm going to disagree here. If that is the goal then removing the naivigation
makes sense when clicking sign up but not clicking pricing.

The equivalent would be amazon removing navigation when you arrived at a
single product page.

The end result IMO is that it looks like a mistake.

------
marcamillion
Congrats Patrick. The link anchor text I used is:

>easily setup automated appointment reminders for your customers

Hope this helps. You can see my post here: [http://marcgayle.com/appointment-
reminder-launches-congrats-...](http://marcgayle.com/appointment-reminder-
launches-congrats-patric)

------
scrrr
Hehe. I was considering implementing exactly the same thing, but currently I
am working on other projects. Anyway, I wish you luck and I'm curious to see
how it works out.

------
jeffiel
Congrats Patrick, looking great!

~~~
patio11
Thanks Jeff! I think I've told you guys before, but Twilio is one of the most
awesome things I've ever seen as an entrepreneur. You're going to make several
people absolute mints. (I will settle for a mintlet.)

Context for HN users: jeffiel co-founded Twilio and is their CEO.

------
freshfey
Congrats on launching! But please consider either a. a better microphone or b.
a professional speaker service. It's not that your voice is bad or so, it just
sounds more professional when representing your company.

------
theklub
This looks really cool. I'm not sure what you know about Televox but that's
what we use and I have to manage our account. Let me tell you they are very
nice people but the service leaves a lot to be desired.

------
speleding
Congrats on going live. It looks like <http://www.supersaas.com> provides much
of the same functionality at a lower price though (free for small users).

~~~
patio11
Spiffy. They're welcome to folks who think $79 is a lot of money -- I will,
seriously, recommend them by name to people who complain to me. I'll happily
take the part of the market who thinks calling phones is worth paying for. I
didn't ever compete on price with BCC and I'm for darn sure not starting now.

~~~
fido
AMEN!

You built a ton of value into your product and should not sell it for peanuts.
Real businesses pay real money for products and tend to be better customers
than those who want it for a "few bucks a month".

------
saikat
Congrats on the launch. One bit of feedback - I might link the Coming Soon!
text under "Enterprise" in the pricing page to some kind of e-mail collection
form so you can let users know when it arrives.

------
sahillavingia
The favicon's blue, while the website green. Sorry, minor nitpick!

------
cdr
Small question - why is the blog directly on the root rather than under
something like /blog/? And don't you think it'd look better to post under
something other than "ADMIN"?

~~~
patio11
You know it is a blog, and I know it is a blog, but does my business gain
anything from saying "This piece of content was written by some pajama-wearing
shmuck who doesn't know what he is talking about and what it says was obsolete
within 30 minutes of being posted"?

Blog? What blog? No blog here, Mr. Person With Decisionmaking Authority At A
Law Firm. All I see is experts talking to experts.

~~~
cdr
Not sure I 100% understand the response, but I guess I feel it should either
look like a blog or not look like a blog. Even my dad knows what a blog looks
like, and right now that post sort of looks like it's part of a half-
implemented blog.

If you don't want it to look like a blog, why not get rid of the "06. DEC,
2010 CATEGORIES: UNCATEGORIZED BY PATRICK MCKENZIE COMMENTS OFF" byline
completely? And maybe "comments off" at the end too, since if it's not a blog
what do you need comments for.

And if it's not a blog, I sort of wonder why you're using a blog engine rather
than whatever other CMS or static pages, but I can completely understand if
the blog engine is the easiest way to do what you want to do.

~~~
patio11
_And if it's not a blog, I sort of wonder why you're using a blog engine
rather than whatever other CMS or static pages, but I can completely
understand if the blog engine is the easiest way to do what you want to do._

I use Wordpress for the marketing site because I can concentrate on writing
copy and end up with something which looks good very quickly, whereas when I
write copy in Netbeans I end up concentrating mostly on balancing my tags and
end up with uninspired copy which looks cruddy.

~~~
cdr
Like I said, I completely understand doing what's fastest/easiest, and that
definitely makes sense. If Wordpress is what you know, it's completely
defensible even if it's overkill.

To be fair though, the choice isn't really "Wordpress vs handwritten HTML" -
there are plenty of CMS systems that aren't big gnarly blog engines, and
there's even just basic template systems.

------
PStamatiou
Curious - why did you opt to launch on a Monday? Everything I've read says
Monday is a bad day to launch products.

~~~
patio11
Honestly? No major reason. It wouldn't have been ready on Thursday, and if I
had launched it on Friday then I would have had to be up to the wee hours on
Saturday and I had a dinner party planned on Saturday and wanted to spend the
day cleaning.

I wasn't planning a big splash media launch -- getting it to you guys is sort
of the highlight of my day. Tomorrow, I start contacting individuals who I've
promised accounts to. After that, the _real_ work starts. My strengths in
marketing are more towards the slow-burn acquisition strategies than the
burns-bright-fizzles-quickly launch strategies, which makes me care about as
much about launch day numbers as Zynga cares about their SEO. (i.e. not much)

~~~
PStamatiou

      getting it to you guys is sort of the highlight of my day
    

Good plan! :) Thanks for the reply.

------
aik
Looks great. Though, the demo seems so locked down it's hard to actually get a
feel for how it'd be to use.

------
yters
Nice. I like how you can eat your own dog food by using it yourself to remind
and keep customers.

------
dminor
I like the white label idea - I think that's going to be pretty successful.

------
teejae
Congrats Patrick!

------
maxer
love it, had an idea for the exact same service over here in ireland, would
you be open to franchising it outside the US?

~~~
patio11
Perhaps. It would depend on the particulars. Send me an email if you're
interested in talking more about it later.

I'm really looking forward to first-class support of Japanese by Twilio,
although I won't realistically be in a great place to exploit that for at
least 6 ~ 8 months.

------
dennyferra
Congrats on going live and good luck!

------
mkramlich
congrats and looks great!

