BookMyCity in the news and blogs

Going from startup to business success is a rocky road filled with land mines. Here are 9 startup mistakes you should avoid if you want to survive past the initial stages.

Entrepreneurs are pretty optimistic people. After all, who else would put heart, soul, hard-earned cash and boundless energy into something that has a 50 percent chance of tanking within five years?
But the hearty ones who succeed know you need more then optimism and passion to make your business work: You need a road map that not only helps you identify the metrics for success but also warns you about the dangers that can surely derail you.

I’ve put off more than one (very important, very necessary) doctor’s appointment because I hate calling to make an appointment that much. Whenever I can’t scheduled something online I wonder, “It is the year 2014, right? Why the @#%@ do I need to make a PHONE CALL?”

That’s why I’m excited when I hear about sites like BookMyCity, which lets you make appointments for a huge range of services, right from your computer. No more back and forths with receptionists, no more “Press zero to speak to an operator,” no more waiting on hold for what is actually five minutes but feels like fifty.

Contractors, often pulled into several different directions, started using online scheduling to build a better business management system. Maintaining a schedule between field service demands and project site duties, returning phone calls to prospective builders, customers, and existing clients simply isn’t effective. With administrative help being an expensive avenue to field inbound calls, contractors sought an alternative method via BookMyCity’s online booking services.

BookMyCity offers a web based management platform to help facilitate both scheduling and marketing needs. Home repair software systems are often very expensive and require a lot of technical assistance. However, with BookMyCity’s contractor software, it is all done on their end thus making it a simple solution for business owners. Busy contractors often report a sense of ”freedom” to concentrate more on the aspects of their business that they love.

You wouldn’t normally think of business consultants as a traditional appointment driven industry. However, as early adopters and staying ahead of the curve, consultants of all types are finding that online scheduling poses too many advantages to ignore. A few consultants that were hesitant to lay down their own methods of managing appointments, schedules, and marketing just simply felt that this was a way to better manage their overhead. Receptionists are very costly to employ and don’t offer the same benefits that online booking does.

Clients are so busy, that they really welcome the idea of scheduling online at their leisure at any time of day or night. Phone services may answer the phone but they don’t have access to scheduling, as they just simply take a message. This type of service is a real win as it just takes out the “stress” component of managing clients.

The first step in starting up is recognizing the right opportunity. Most opportunities are easy to spot: just look at the problems you are already facing. For instance, my first startup (founded in ’08) was a banner network for social media networks called AdParlor, which a work colleague and I started in order to solve a problem we were facing ourselves: the need to invest in advertising to gain users on Facebook apps.

The idea for my second, BookMyCity, was hatched in 2012, when my girlfriend and I went for a mini-getaway to South Beach during “spa month.” We quickly discovered that there was no central location to book appointments for a service like spa treatments online (as you could for a restaurant table). A year later, BookMyCity was born to easily connect businesses and local customers online, managing availability and offering one-stop booking.