091 – Gavin Zuchlinski: How to Run an Efficient and Productive Business
Managing appointments can be very stressful. As a business owner, you would rather spend most of your time working on your business, instead of going back and forth between clients, trying to figure out schedules and time zones.
Enter Acuity Scheduling.
Acuity Scheduling is an online tool that helps small businesses offer and manage appointments online. If you haven’t heard of it yet, I invite you to check it out.
Today on the podcast I chat with Gavin Zuchlinski, Founder of Acuity Scheduling. He shares with us the inspiration and intention behind the product, how he developed and improved it, his insights on sales and working with a virtual team, and a lot more.
It’s a short and fun episode, so click on that play button now to tune in.
“I originally created it for my mom.”
Gavin’s mom was a massage therapist, and he noticed how she kept on going back and forth with clients, struggling to listen to all their crazy excuses as to why they had to cancel their appointments. He felt like there had to be a better way to simplify that, and that’s how Acuity was born.
“I didn’t really know about the lean startup idea at the time, but once I did, it completely resonated with me.”
“When you’re working on something part-time, by necessity, you have to be very lean, you have to listen to your customers and be very efficient in what you work on and not go off on giant projects with wild guesses because you’ll be dead by the time you actually get around to that.”
Selling your idea
According to Gavin, “there was a real disconnect between the quality of the product itself and the absolutely amateurish and ugly, marketing side of the site.”
So when he decided to take it full time, the biggest thing he did was amp up marketing and sales.
He believes that Acuity is the best thing available out there, so he wanted more people to realize that and not get turned away just because the marketing side of the site wasn’t that great.
When they first started out, they pretty much grew organically through referrals. But by 2013, they really focused on improving the storefront side, which is basically just design changes and tightening up the copy.
Now they’re trying to increase traffic to their website and just get the word out about their product. In the last year, he’s been doing interviews so people understand Acuity more, as well as the personality behind it. They’re also doing more online marketing like Facebook ads, but still trying to keep it as self-serviced as possible and let the product just speak for itself.
Mentions
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