Why eezySchedule Says Scheduling Tool Buyers Often Don't Need the Top Tier

For me, it was the accumulation over time of frustration with the software tool I was using to handle the scheduling of team meetings and diary bookings. The UX / design aspects of that tool kept tripping me up and I couldn't do all the things I wanted to do. With experience developing my own software tools for use in managing the business I worked in, I kept thinking along the lines of doing my own tool but never quite took the plunge. It all then came out of my brain at the top of a long dirt-road climb on my mountain bike one Saturday morning towards the end of summer, when I suddenly knew that if I wanted better functionality and UX, then I needed to go ahead and develop it myself. Somewhere in the next forty miles of trail, the decision was made and I never looked back!

eezySchedule is just being launched and so what I can say is how I intend approaching growth. In the past couple of years, since I started the development work, we have seen the world of SEO change dramatically around us as, each month, the % of software users who look to AI tools for guidance on their next software purchase only ever increases. And so the conventional non-advert approach of a new founder, where SEO was a major component of that drive, is slowly being eroded and, if you aren't being understood and suggested by the AI tools, you are essentially invisible to your market. I have therefore put significant effort into that aspect and follow the outcomes of that work closely in order to monitor the feedback loop. Another key tactic in a business such as appointment scheduling is the viral aspect and that is something that was a major tick in favor of selecting eezySchedule as being worthy of my attention. I look forward to updating this section down the line!

At this stage I am handling feedback from different beta-testers and I must say that these have been incredibly rich experiences throughout. Seeing beta-testers suggest other beta-testers was also exciting as it brought people into the loop that I otherwise would not have been able to engage with. The key feedback to date has been around simplifying some of the workflows, issues that have now mostly been addressed. One example was the user's own management of their communication preferences, where I used a split model, some controlled via the site and some via the third-party email service provider. But I quickly saw people get tangled up between these two systems and so immediately implemented a single, on-site approach that provides a simple interface and allows for rich functionality for me as founder. It also allows me more flexibility to switch service providers and avoid platform lock-in issues down the line.

In looking for software to support their scheduling needs, people often assume that they have to go with the top-end package to get a genuinely useful set of features, when a lot of what they actually need is covered by lower level, more focused tiers that can get dismissed too quickly. I think we've all been there, you start off excited to use the new tool and, initially at least, you have a positive experience. But at the first sign of a slightly non-standard use-case, you find that the features you want are locked away in a different tier and the user experience starts to go downhill fast. It's actually part of the design of pretty much all SaaS products and something that users usually understand going in. But it can quickly become frustrating as a new user if your dream of what the tool was going to do for you doesn't match the experience when the rubber hits the road. It also contributes to significant levels of churn that the business must cope with.

The priority for the next 6-12 months is working with the first cohort of eezySchedule customers in their day-to-day use of the tool, looking at how they use the product, gathering feedback and then adjusting / expanding the usefulness of the tool in line with that feedback. Knowing what to choose to work on and what to park for now is obviously a key skill that any founder needs so that their product decisions make sense and are cohesive, not fragmented.

Scheduling meetings and taking appointments was a daily, major part of my working life, so I knew the pain points first-hand. I managed a team of some 30 R&D engineers and had responsibilities across all aspects of administration and management. Meetings in a typical year ranged across topics as diverse as company strategy, marketing, finance, office admin, job interviews, performance evaluations, proposal pitching, client milestone reporting, conference talks, exhibition stand manning etc. To handle many of these roles, I had developed in-house business software tools for myself and the teams that I worked with and so eezySchedule was a natural next step rather than a leap into an unfamiliar industry. I sat on both sides of the scheduling experience. eezySchedule is the result of all that experience rolled into one!

I have learned many lessons over the years in carrying out various tasks and I very much subscribe to the view that we shouldn't see things that didn't go well or to plan as 'mistakes' rather than 'opportunities for learning'. It completely reframes the entire experience of having something not turn out the way you'd hoped for and puts you in a much more positive frame of mind when it comes to coming up with solutions. One example from eezySchedule has been that I'd over-engineered the workflow in a couple of places, and the friction it created was quickly picked up by the beta testers. It was a useful reminder of the importance of getting people hands-on with the product as early as possible. I now bounce workflows off others before locking them in.