Well, another day of up and a major down. Marketing meeting, seo mastermind meeting, someone scheduled a meeting for tomorrow then a swift kick to the nuts. What a day.
So today started off with setting up Uptime Kuma. After a long time of dicking around with trying to smtp to work, I finally gave up and used SMPT2GO as a relay service. Good news is, its up and running and works. The cheat code is being able to send an email to my phone number and get a text message for alerts for free. I was originally going to have my developers install it on an AWS instance but they were taking too long and Linode had a one click install. Jackpot
Marketing meeting with a couple of great gals. Two hustlers starting a new social media management company while both working full time jobs. There is something I find awesome about people willing to work hard to achieve goals. They are still in a test or beta phase and just getting started. I really like them though, so we will see what their proposal is. This is feeling better (and cheaper) than the company from Monday. I feel like this aligns a little more with our style and goals.
Our guy started cold calling today which is great. He is trying to get the groove but Im glad hes having at it. I’m confident in him.
SEO meeting to see if these guys had any input on not being screwed on our referral program. They didnt see anything glaring other than if people just have a bunch of phones (like they do for CTR manipulation). I finally had to really explain why I want to do this and the company and I loved the response once they heard the pitch. “You’re going to piss off a lot of people”. Yep….we are bringing that change. Dare we call ourselves a “disruptor”…nah, kinda cringe. We are just going to try to make a difference for people.
Kick to the nuts. So we missed our Monday meeting with the developers so there was a discussion for a make up tomorrow if needed. We use a google sheets that we share to log our discussion points. I sat down to look them over to determine if we need to meet…we sure as hell do. My project manager wants to delay the launch by 1.5 months. Kick to the nuts. Super frustrated. How can you tell me a week before that we need 1.5 months? I have spent thousands on advertising, have an employee working, providers signing up and BAM…need to push it back 1.5 months. Aint happening.
So, we have to really prioritize and pull a rabbit out of the development companies hat. Step number 1 was to message the owner. I need his help and expect (strong word) some help to knock out this work. We have used this company for hears and spent several hundred thousand dollars with them. I expect them to pull some developers out of their hat for the next week and get the bare minimum done to launch our software.
So what are the things that they want to develop over the next 1.5 months? Referral program – screw it, provider app – screw it, credit card charging – screw it, google analytics – screw it, provider approval flow – screw it. What can we not pass on? Calendar has to be done, we have to be able to separate out employee types (if a company does hvac and plumbing, only some employees do plumbing and some hvac). Thats it. Im willing to continue to lose money, spend more money on advertising vs referrals, make providers use the web interface, now understand our analytics (which they should be logging searches…thats all I need and it was discussed months ago..I dont understand why we are needing google analytics). Boy I sure hope they have competent Node.JS developers growing on a tree.
