The Yottled Journal – January

The Yottled Journal – January

If you’ve landed on this page and you’re a host, we can’t thank you enough for helping us achieve this.  It’s because of you that we will be successful.  If we can help you in anyway, if this is confusing, you have questions, or want us to learn something from you, Trevor’s email is trevor@yottled.com and Will’s email is (you guessed it) will@yottled.com. 

What is this?

Will and I thought we would take the time to share what we’re doing from the business perspective.  What we’re learning each week, trying to do with our customers, and how we’re trying to make Yottled successful.

Who is likely to read this?

We would expect anyone in the tech industry to benefit from this blog.  It’s an update of what we’re trying.

Some context before reading further

Will and I are two people that want others to succeed. Our goal is to enable others to make money…and we want to make money too. We’re investing our own money and time to make this as delightful as possible. We have a small about of pre-seed money and we’re laser focused on retention, delighting our users, and making sure we’re simple and easy to use.

What has been done so far?

Check out our previous posts:

• The Yottled Journal
• July
• August
• September
• October
• November
• December

The high level things we want you to know right now:

• Broaden our market: We are testing a move away from fitness and wellness and towards the micro-entrepreneur. It is being run with an A/B test against our baseline page.  Language has also been redefined to be focused on hosts (from coach), events (from class), and appointments (from sessions).
• Better UX: We are releasing a major user experience update that focuses on driving “meetings booked” for the host.

• New pricing: A significant percent of our sign ups opt for our higher priced plan.  Subsequently, after talking with several advisors, we are going to be raising our prices.  We expect this pricing to take effect at the end of February.
• Integrations: We are going to be focusing on integrations with Shopify, Zoom, Squarespace, and more.  Our goal is to provide simple events and appointments for any business.  We believe this will lead into us needing to integrate into their backend CRM, accounting software, and possibly more.  We want to be at the center point of everything for in person appointments.  Integrations are going to be a priority in March. 

What we did in January

The first thing we did was redefine our personas and total addressable market.  We’ve been slowly broadening to anyone – away from fitness and wellness.  Second, we redefined terms.  Classes are now called events.  Sessions are now called appointments.  Coaches are now called hosts.  Our goal is to delight anyone in need of an online or in person experience, not just fitness and wellness.

January had 3 primary objectives:

1. Improve scale and usability: We spent almost the entire month delivering a brand new user experience/interface.  Why?  Because we had been blasting out features without any cohesive experience.  We needed to pause, reset, and understand how hosts wanted to navigate their events and appointments.   Hosts now have clear, concise workflows and actions to complete.  They are never left without an action to take.  It’s addictive.  We drive them to always be doing something and check on their progress.
2. Focus on delight and ease of use: We hired a Host Success Manager that is an avid user of Yottled.  He hosts events almost every day.  Cris has become our canary in the coal mine, pointing out challenges for hosts and his clients.  In addition, he spends his days connecting with other hosts, understanding their needs and pain points.  We immediately fix and deliver usability updates to ensure hosts and clients can use the product.  This has become an obsession for Yottled.
3. Reduce CAC: We’re a long way from our goal of a $0 CAC, but trending in the right direction.  We’re now offering $100 per referral as part of a drip campaign.  In addition, it’s also part of our in-app experience.  We’re also seeing continued evidence of social proof.  Hosts note they found us from friends or interactions with our product.

Metrics and Baselines

We have 1 metric that matters.  Meetings booked.  We know that our VC’s care about MRR…yes it’s important.  We’re starting to see our MRR go up.  All we care about is meetings booked.  What we’re seeing:

• MRR: Our payback is now under 1 year.  We’re just focused on retention which is why all we care about is meetings booked.
• Meetings booked: Everything we do is centered around increasing the meetings booked for our hosts.  We have 3 host personas and we’re indexing on two of them.  Every decision we make is around driving bookings.  If our hosts are not booked, they are not using Yottled.  Every feature request we get…we ask ourselves…will this increase meetings booked?  If you’re asking why not money made…we’ve effectively replaced Calendly for several of our hosts.  Many of them host free classes and intro appointments at no cost.
• CAC, LTV, and any other financial metric: *shakes 8 ball* – outlook good.  Everything is positive right now.  We won’t know the full retention curve for several more months…but as we drive towards our 1 metric that matters, meetings booked, things continue to look great.

What are we going to do in February?

• Recurring events: This will increase meetings booked for our hosts and also drive usage.  It’s one of the first features a host asks for.  Right now, they’re able to copy past events, but we’re going to make it even better for them to retain their clients.
• Integrations: We are going to be focused on higher retained customers via integrations with Zoom, website builders, and more.  Our goal is to target customers that have a proven business and help them with their events and scheduling.
• Better pricing: We’ve learned that our pricing is confusing for our hosts.  We’re going to be providing clearer, more articulate pricing to our hosts.
• Feature delight: Appointments currently do not have 24 hour and 60 minute reminders.  In addition, we’ve found several other points of friction throughout onboarding and overall ease of use.  We’re going to be ensuring that new and existing customers can have the simplest and most delightful experience possible.

As always, if you have advice for us, send us a note to hello@yottled.com and we’d love to hear from you.

Come hang out with us during one of our weekly demos or product jams!

Best,

Trevor and Will