Well, its technically the 15th already but Im going back and wee will start the daily updates from Monday the 12th.
I thought I’d add a fun bit of info. We have been developing for 8 months now and its down to the wire. We have a firm date of Sept 1 to launch. Today, we needed to move all of the code over to our colo servers. The code isnt done. We are not ready, BUT, my amazing crew has enough to get the provider side of software up and running on its final home. The consumer side of the app doesnt work, we cant charge the providers for work we bring them, and the calendar is not finished. Oh, and while the front end for uploading insurance documents and license info looks good, it doesnt work either. Its ok, we have 3 weeks :/
So Monday, the big day to start getting service providers on. 3 weeks till launch and we are starting today. Why 3 weeks? Well, to be honest, Im not really sure. I figure we need a minimum of two weeks to get people onboarded before launch but our first city probably needs a little more time. I was nervous to see if our cold email strategy was going to work. We got 4500 providers from Google maps through the API. We had a couple of virtual assistants go through the list to see how many we could simply get contact emails from their website of Facebook. Well, that came out to about 1400. Time to send 1400 emails.
Well, sending 1400 emails manually would be horrible. We could use a service like Mail Chimp but its expensive. After a little reading on Twitter, I found a lot of people were happy using Sendy (email client) in conjunction with Amazon SES. This was perfect because we already have a SES account setup and out of the sandbox ready to go for Fix it Today. I just had to setup a server.
About that server. I spun up an Ubuntu instance on our servers, got the server itself setup, installed Sendy…no dice. Reading multiple different install articles, following them…nothing. Talked to Jesse and he asked if I had Apache or Nginx setup. Nope…sure didnt. I dont know anything about setting them up correctly. Hell, I dont really know much Linux and the command line is not my friend. So, I did what everyone else does, I shut down the server, deleted it and setup Sendy on a Plesk install 😀 After a little troubleshooting, Sendy was working and I had my first test email
Sendy is great but it is not setup for what we really want to do. Its designed for people who run marketing campaigns to set groups or newsletter subscribers. It will be great when we want to send out some info for every homeowner on Fix it Today, but this is definitely not the best setup for how we will actually use it. Our use case is emailing only the homeowners or only the providers in certain areas. New lists for every single email. Very unlikely we will send to the same list over and over. Will Sendy work… we will make it work.
So, 1400 emails sent…now we wait to see what the real response is
