- Insight: Ensure that you are serving your customers and providing value.
How She Started: Being a founder risky, how did you decide to be an entrepreneur?
Bridget Harris: The business genuinely demanded it. We were growing exponentially in the first few years, and by doing that you create enormous numbers of customers who have given you money. When you do something for free it’s a hobby, but the minute that you take the money from a customer you’re under a contractual obligation to supply the service that they've given you the money for. Otherwise, you have to give that money back.
As the business grew I needed to give up my full-time job and run the company. We've just developed that relationship with those customers and we still have some customers who have been with us for 11 years. The decision to go full-time is fundamentally built on our relationship with our customers.
HSS: How did you acquire your first customers?
BH: Customers were initially drawn to our platform because of our diverse array of scheduling tools. Our inaugural tool was an aggregate scheduling feature. We already had thousands of users, and quite a few of them were paying users. As an early mover in the market, where there weren’t that many scheduling tools, those people were appreciative of our solution. Our growth was fueled by a product-led strategy; we did not rely on a structured sales process.
HSS: How do you retain your customers?
BH: It’s all in our product. They either like using your product or they don't. Another way to look at this question is: How do you how can you lose customers? One easy way to do that is through a lack of trust. Another problem might be a lack of momentum if they stopped using the solutions. Lastly, if they don’t need the product anymore. For example, if they were a university student and that’s where they needed it the most, but they graduated there’s natural attrition. Sometimes your product needs to grow and adapt as the use cases change. Our product 12 years ago is quite different from what we have today.
HSS: How did you handle the competition?
BH: Our priority is taking care of our YouCanBook.Me users, ensuring we are laser-focused on understanding their needs and enhancing their experience. My advice to any entrepreneur would be if you're always just looking at the competition, you're only ever aiming for second best because you're only ever aiming to be whatever they are.
We were first in the scheduling space for calendar-based bookings. We have loads of ideas and things that we're rolling out now inside our product that nobody's told us to build that aren't there in the existing scheduling space. We identify these opportunities because we're focused on our customer’s long-term solutions.
Overall if you have the right mindset and deeply understand your customer you can handle competition. If you're trying to be a Unicorn, then that's slightly different. You have to find a way of commercially trying to capture the market.
What was the most pivotal moment in the business
BH: I think that would probably be when we launched YouCanBook.Me. When we had that launch we received more in our subscription revenue and our upgrade revenue in a month than we had gotten in the previous year.
What's your growth strategy?
BH: We are very focused on product-led growth. We try to spend the minimum amount of money that we can to achieve the maximum of what we want to achieve.
HSS: What are your lessons learned as you look back on the business?
BH: I have learned a huge amount about people and management. If you start a company where you employ people you need to hone your management skills. I think that we make a mistake about the difference between being exceptional at doing something yourself and then being exceptional at enabling somebody else to do that job better than you.
For example, we can all go after extremely talented people in particular areas, but a good manager is like is like gold dust. If you have an excellent people manager in your organization, it will encourage your employees to perform at an incredibly high level. Good people managers are really hard to find, and they make such a difference to a team.
Do you have any additional advice for female-founded businesses?
BH: My advice generally is to try to resist stereotypes. The way sexism is framed is always about how women should catch up. It’s important to recognize sexism, but also push past it.
- Insight: Ensure that you are serving your customers and providing value.
- Insight: A strong product will lead to a growing user base.
- Insight: When identifying customer retention strategies research what would make a customer stop using your product.
- Insight: If you are striving to be like another company you are bound to be 2nd best.
- Insight: Identify opportunities to spend a minimum amount of money to achieve maximum value.
- Insight: Strong people managers are necessary for employee satisfaction and retention.
I messaged Bridget and we set up a call over YouCanBook.Me.
I've always been passionate about women helping other women. I created this blog to tell stories of successful female-founded businesses. Hopefully, these stories will help inspire more women to found their own businesses.