Had a good day today but we are having to make decisions on money which is never that fun. Had a couple meetings today which is still kind of weird but Im getting more used to them. I feel like we got some things accomplished.
Meeting with the developers went well. Lots of things to think about, mostly how we are going to handle some of the services. So a local locksmith wants to join which I fully support but it lead us down the path of trying to setup Fix it Today in the best way. Car keys are so variable by brand, fob or no fob, year, etc. While the locksmith just suggested a “starting at” we felt like this is a little lacking. The best solution at this point is to offer a quoting system for special ones that truly need it. The idea is to have the user find an appointment time, click the custom quote button which will allow a text input box. For the car key example, they would put the year make and model of the car. This would send a message through our system (probably use Ably for messaging) to the provider who can then do a quick custom quote. Send it back in a message and then the customer can decide if its for them or not. If yes, continue to book the appointment. If no, they can just decline. My project manager wanted to commit to an appointment, then get the quote. I’m afraid of the number of cancellations and refunds. The downside of doing the quote up front is some provider trying to go around our system and not pay the whopping $20 for the appointment. Time to get chatgpt integration to monitor messages.
Meeting with Scott from my SEO group. I feel like Scott is a good guy and will do a great job for SEO for Fix it Today. SEO, if you don’t know much about it, is a long term strategy. The goal is to show up on page 1 of the search results. This takes time and patience to achieve. The quote from Scott I felt was affordable and we are going to move ahead. His firm has to build out 400-500 pages on our website, create backlinks, HARO reach out, etc. My job is to round up professional photos of everyone and write bios. We have to look legit.
Spoke to my business partners with all of the updates. They are good with it. We also decided we are going to hire someone as a full time employee to manage Facebook ads. Scott also agreed that most agencies won’t take the time or effort to really test ads and work hard on ad creatives to maximize ROAS. They have several clients so everyone gets mediocre service. The other thing we discussed was the patent.
So we started with a lawyer a few months ago with registering our trademark and discussing a patent. Paid the money for the patent research and they feel like we have a possibility to get a patent based on our idea. They do recommend filing a non-provisional patent. In the pdf they sent us, they showed what they felt were the closest patents to us, how they are similar and how they are different. Going up against some big companies like Sears, Groupon and Uber. We have one main feature that really puts us out on our own though which is real-time availability. This patent thing really feels like a 50/50 chance and that was basically noted by an image at the end of the pdf showing our chances in their professional opinion. $10k gamble. Probably not a lot of money for most people out there but as we are self funding this project, we have spent a LOT of money already. Looking at it though, it has both offensive and defensive positioning. We can go after companies that are copying our idea as well as stopping people from patenting our idea then accusing us of patent infringement. Thinking about it, I feel like we don’t really have a choice at this point.
