During COVID I was in Mexico. At some point I wanted to go horseback riding. I was researching places to go horseback riding and I was not at all surprised to see I would have to make some calls to book.
Fast-forward a few weeks, I become pretty good friends with the owner at the ranch I went to. We grab tacos one night and he shares his concerns: They're not doing so well financially and are worried about whether or not they'll be able to afford feed in a month.
I got involved and we solved that problem and a few more: revamped the website (it looked and felt like it was from 2006), I whipped up a booking/reservation system to get more customers through the door, and exit surveys to make sure everything was perfect (and figure out what went wrong if it wasn't).
Bookings this month are up 490% from 2018 (according to the paper waivers they had) and that's without a single dollar spent in paid marketing. I answer a few emails every day from prospective riders and make sure everyone's happy. I get a percentage of each reservation which is cool, but the coolest part is that I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranch.
Mexicos overall internet presence is literally stuck in the early 2000s.
Most business' official website are a Facebook page.
In a country of 150M people and growing expat presence, there is a TON of opportunities for software businesses to enter the market.
For example: Riviera Maya has no MLS style real estate tracker/listing platform. The entire real estate industry operates on word of mouth, WhatsApp and Facebook messages.
I keep running into this in the US in large cities. Really well regarded restaurants or music venues do everything through FB and insta. I don't have either of those apps, and I don't remember my passwords from a decade ago. Isn't there a service somewhere, where you give someone some pictures of your food, and restaurant, and you get a container and credentials for a webpage that handles reservations, takes pickup or delivery orders, and lets you update the menu? Why do people do this?
Because Facebook is simple. Any one can update it, and it doesn't go down, and it doesn't cost anything.
I've many times seen web presences fail for small organizations, when the only person that understands the web set up leaves. With Facebook, that doesn't happen.
I'm sure there are services such as you describe, and probably many restaurants use them, and it's not obvious. But Facebook is the default.
No, because facebook is free and they are cozy with the mexican government and this allows them to operate in a country without net neutrality. Therefore facebook, whatsapp and instagram are included for free in most if not all cellphone plans and pay per month options.
I've seen that too. Or when the framework chosen goes away. If the person at a small restaurant or non profit who understood the page goes away you can at least find someone to come up to speed. But sometimes it relies on stuff that just isn't there anymore and you have to start over. I'm not in web dev, or whatever its called, but is there some technology in the space that is the equivalent ofba T-shirt and blue jeans, or a charcoal suit, that will be fine for a couple decades with only informational updates?
You have to constantly install updates for it to stay secure, then every second update your theme breaks, you find out it's not updated for the new version and have to redesign the whole page.
I’ve wondered this too. I don’t know any young people (at least nobody my kids’ ages between 17 and 26) who use Facebook. It seems like they might be missing a large part of their target audience.
Others have pointed out the simplicity of it. Just use an existing platform, doesn't take much IT skill at all.
The other answer is that this is where the people are. Why waste time building your own website when only those searching you will visit it? Interacting with the various social media platforms instead gives you far more options on discoverability.
If you must maintain a presence on those platforms anyways, it becomes even less compelling for a small non-tech company to maintain their own infrastructure.
As a Mexican who travels plenty to the US and works for an American company and has worked for another top-tier software company from the US, I believe this statement is false.
E-commerce platforms, “sharing economy” apps, neo-banks, dating apps, real estate platforms, etc. are all used every single day by millions of people.
Mexican living in México, ~95% of the population use Facebook, word of mouth or driving around where you want to find a place to rent. Of course there are many sites that you can use to find a place to rent, but the best deals and more options are available on Facebook.
Facebook doesn't act as the central trust authority. So as an expat, most realtor is telling me to avoid FB and use them because scams. But as a user it's inefficient to talk to 20 Realtors for 20 listings.
I just want something in between that doesn't inflate the actual price by 40%
Facebook marketplace is as trustless as you can get. It's 2010 version of Kijiji/Craigslist with built-in picture upload.
Right now depending on how much effort you want to spend, you can get a place for $2000 usd a month or $600 a month, for relatively similar unit maybe 20min of walk distance apart. Simply because information does not flow freely.
Airbnb fixed the trust issue and dominated rental market in the last few years. But hefty fees + taxes are making them less and less viable for travelers.
I honestly see a big opportunity to just improve the overall experience. Especially considering Riviera Maya is the fasted growing realestate market in Mexico.
If you're serious about working on something like this, email me (check my profile), let's connect.
> I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranc
You must get business cards made and start distributing them to friends and family whenever you get the chance. Not for marketing - to brag and to be able to be mildly annoying.
It's definitely my favorite fun fact. I'm grow up in the city but I spent a few summer days on a horse growing up. One of my earliest memories was horseback riding with my mom. I must have been no older than 18 months.
Note that you can also use the ranch business cards as 'get out of jail cards' to avoid social chatter when you need to change the subject: You note that the in-law starts taking the discussion towards some uncomfortable topic during thanksgiving dinner. You immediately use the card: "Say, have I given you my business card?" - and then you move on to talk about the ranch. Even if they interrupt you and try to get back to the topic, the topic will be derailed for good. Usable every 6 months by pretending that you forgot that you already gave them your business card...
My 16-year-old remembers a pediatrician's office she hasn't seen since she was 18 months old (we moved across the country). She described it well enough that her dad and I were both convinced. I was shocked.
We must work with the same people. I work with a guy who would devote dozens/hundreds of hours to this project just for the business card opportunities.
My wife runs a riding academy and she's been resistant to any kind of online or off-farm marketing, relying instead on word of mouth. She thinks we get a better quality of customer that way and we have little trouble keeping our herd busy.
Of course our business is centered around repeat riders, it would be a very different business to organize trail rides for strangers.
Our barn is much smaller than most (7 horses at the high water) but it has been consistently profitable. A barn with more horses and a large staff could bring in more revenue but costs will be higher too. There is a barn down the road that has nice facilities but has had several managers and has only been viable with the last one. We know another troubled barn with an alcoholic owner who has a large off-farm income that has struggled economically and has a legendarily bad safety culture. (I took 10 rides there before we were in full swing and had 3 'near miss' accidents)
I swear I read the FAQ and the last question was "Are you real? Sometimes. I mean, yes.". I chuckled at that one and it was the end of the page!? Or ir wasn't? OP if you just added it please tell me :) (nah, just partly joking, I'm sincerely confused though)
This is awesome. Only one minor thing about the website. On mobile when i click on "Meet Pam", the logo in the header is white and the background beige, making it unreadable.
Thanks! We get a lot of compliments on the copy. I wanted to reflect that we are indeed a Mexican horse ranch without the site being incredibly boring. There's only so many cool things you can show/say before you realize that horses aren't really all that interesting on the internet.
Not sure if the website is broken, but attempting to book 2 people and clicking a time does nothing on iOS Safari. It might be worth looking at the analytics for device distribution but I presume iOS is the bulk of your traffic, si probably worth optimising it.
I noticed this too. I think it’s because those time slots are not available (if you choose a date a couple months away, you’ll be able to click there time slot). The solution would be to print “No availability” instead of disabled time slot buttons.
Thanks for sharing this! i feel this is a cautionary tale for us HN-minded folks since i see a rather unusual love for the look and feel of the "old internet", and what i like to call the Craigslist style of design. As someone who remembers the internet of the 90s and early 2000s before it was taken over by ads and SEO spam,
i understand the nostalgia, but as a web developer, also know that i need to do right by my clients and build things for them that make their businesses successful. An old outdated website turns away many customers.
Ironically, a badly designed modern website turns me away. (sometimes because the thing literally doesn't work)
I remember trying to book a place and there was some issue with the z-index and I couldn't click to confirm the dates on the pop-up calendar. Made me wonder how much $$$ they could be losing because the % of people willing/know how to delete the offending element must be pretty small.
I agree 100% with what you're saying though. Older websites appear more "complex" to a lot of people. There's good middle grounds though. The new netflix for iOS is really nice, imo. Leans more towards form but still functions very well.
This is one the examples where the exception proves the rule. After introducing my friends and family to a CLI-based booking tool I wrote for them, they have swore off website UI's since. Every other week I get an excited e-mail stating how great the tool is, and how they have also convinced their own friends to give up JavaScript and turn towards Rust.
I did something very similar for Surfing schools. Not yet making any money off it, but I am trying to. Reaching out to other surfing schools, improving the product adding new features.
It's mostly CRUD, and the stack is very boring: Rails/Hotwire/Bootstrap, about 10k lines (we have apps for the staff on the ground, agents and agencies that we partner with, and some other stuff in there). The tricky part of handling the bookings is that on any given day we have a limited number of horses and multiple types of rides: 3 trails at 10AM, 1 trail at 3PM. A few times a month we'll max out the horses and not have availability for a given time. We can burst horsepower if we need to and accommodate bigger groups if we're hitting capacity and suspect load will maintain its current HPH. (that was a stretch; I tried)
We also track what horses have been used and how much so that we're not riding them into the ground — the people on the ground have an app I built in Framework7 to manage everything; they love it and Framework7 is very fun once you get rolling.
We ask for a 20% deposit to "hold [your] horses" and to prevent no-shows; the rest is transacted at the ranch (though we make the option to pay in full available if you email us). Our cancellation policy extremely flexible and though we say 24 hours on the site, we've never not refunded someone.
An absolutely amazing story. I’ve wondered for a while how powerful bringing skilled software engineers (let’s be honest, people don’t give us credit for the amount of actual business skill is required to effectively do this job) into small businesses would work. Most people who don’t work in tech or advertising don’t think so much about tracking everything. It presents a pretty big opportunity for both small business owners and software people.
One of the things I wanted to do was understand who our customer was. They had really no idea. Waivers are all digitalized and ask for the basics: name, date of birth, where you're from, emergency contact. I use a "gender API" to get the gender of the rider the best we can, and from there we have learned a lot about who our typical customer is.
Some fun factoids:
* typical rider is 35-44. Less than 10% of riders are under the age of 24,
* about half of people book when they're in Mexico
* average lead time is 7 days
* about 66% of riders have riding exp; about 33% consider themselves "novice" or "expert" riders
Question is how sustainable is that. If you get bored at some point, who will be able to take it over. RoR is a reasonably safe and stable stack from the PoV of software devs, but the discussion above about facebook makes me wonder if they'll end up in 10 years with a website 'stuck in 2020'.
Fast-forward a few weeks, I become pretty good friends with the owner at the ranch I went to. We grab tacos one night and he shares his concerns: They're not doing so well financially and are worried about whether or not they'll be able to afford feed in a month.
I got involved and we solved that problem and a few more: revamped the website (it looked and felt like it was from 2006), I whipped up a booking/reservation system to get more customers through the door, and exit surveys to make sure everything was perfect (and figure out what went wrong if it wasn't).
Bookings this month are up 490% from 2018 (according to the paper waivers they had) and that's without a single dollar spent in paid marketing. I answer a few emails every day from prospective riders and make sure everyone's happy. I get a percentage of each reservation which is cool, but the coolest part is that I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranch.