I am working on a long-term project (an app for collaborative voice translation). Since I will be running out of funding for this project by the end of the month I tried spinning up an "easier" side business: selling websites to veterinary clinics.<p>The idea is that I know well about webdev, and my gf is a vet, so together we could provide a good quality service to vets.<p>Turned out, there was nothing "easy" about that!<p>We discovered about the danger of trying to sell what you are able to build instead of what people wants. We discovered the pains of cold calling.<p>It was a quite formative experience so I did a quick write up yesterday.<p>Feedback is very welcome since we still intend to keep pushing a bit in that direction before we give up!
<i>We have to use pen and paper for everything.</i><p>The doctor probably is saving himself a lot of headaches. I work with programming for many years, but computers are not made for regular people. This is a myth. Many times I have to save my wife about something strange happening in her computer, a WiFi printer not connecting, some virus suck in and showing popups, screen freezing, internet is not connecting, and this goes on and on, almost every day. Man I hate Windows. At least when I solve the problem I can come back to my solid Ubuntu. Wait, one update arrived. Oh god now my keyboard is not working anymore. I hate computing.
Yeah but there's lots of cat owners who want to read about cats and (speculating) cat health diet and behavior and maybe show cat photos and talk cat.<p>Build a website for them and do the cold calls to cat food suppliers to sell ads.<p>Or sell websites to cat owners for their cat - every cat needs a website.<p>Or make "hot or not" for cats.<p>Or combine all these into one site.<p>The internet was mostly made for porn and cats so you should be able to get the cat thing to work.
There are a good number of specialized SEO and marketing firms that just focus on vets, dentists, or other broad medical specialties like dermatologists.<p>One thing you may not realize is that many small businesses -- vets included -- get spam (charitably called 'outreach') emails from agencies from all over the world on a nearly daily basis. Because of this, most cold calls and cold emails will be met with an even colder reception.<p>100 people is also a tiny list to cold call. I am not really sure that this was the right strategy for you to get clients. Selling marketing services to medical professionals is also harder than it is for many other kinds of businesses because getting more customers is not their biggest problem: it's often something else that a digital marketing company cannot fix for them as you noted in your article.<p>For a portfolio, you should just have a mockup website that you can use to swap out their information quickly to show them what you can do. It's also not clear to me that most vets really need a custom website. They would probably be better served by a Wix/Wordpress/Squarespace setup that has cheap customer service and would just need help for content, design, and some customization.<p>To sum up, you will get more projects much faster if:<p>* You respond to RFPs or job postings instead of cold calling
* You build a portfolio or mock portfolio that you can show to vets
* You focus your sales pitch on the anticipated results that the vets are going to have rather than just giving them a new website which they might not need all that much
* You look at cheaper off the shelf solutions to provide to buyers who aren't ready to get into custom web development project<p>Finally, it's much easier to sell to people who already want what you are selling.
I think you should have driven out to them, rather than trying todo everything "efficiently": waiting for emails, calling on the phone. If there were 100 veterinarians in a 200km radius, you could have visited them all.<p>Yes, it would have been hard work. But that's kind of the reason why nobody else has done it. Easy money is a lottery game. You want success on your schedule you have to pound pavement and do the hard work that other people are too lazy to do.<p>The value of talking to people in person is that you learn significantly more about their problems and what they want. You can see whether or not they are lying about their interest in the product. You can see their environment and infer new information. It's also a lot harder for people to say no to your face, or to stop a conversation in person. So you're likely to just plain have a longer conversation, which <i>usually</i> means you're getting more information.<p>Case in point: my wife writes sci-fi novels. We sell them on Amazon, and they do okay there. But we do significantly better at book fairs. At a book fair, if you see a nerdy girl wearing a Dr. Who t-shirt carrying a tote bag that is already half-full of books, you've got a pretty good idea that she'd probably be interested in your time-travel book about a strong female character <i>and</i> you can be pretty sure she's willing to buy. All without any tracking cookies. All without any alignment analysis algorithms. No freely handing over monetizable data to Facebook, et al.<p>Being in the Amazon bookstore, you have to compete against literally millions of books. At the book fair, it's probably less than 100. You can't catch people's attention as they go by online, but you can call out to people at the fair. And you can't be sure the people you're contacting online are even in the market--they likely are not. But people go to book fairs because they specifically want to browse and buy something new and unique.<p>Physically put yourself in the places where people are willing to take chances on new products.
A bog-standard strategy for bootstrapping a new business is to take on your FIRST client for FREE (or nearly so). Pick a business nearby that you like - perhaps your OWN local vet? - and talk to them <i>in person</i> to see if they'd be willing to allow you to make them a website. Make it clear that you're doing this for two reasons:<p>(1) to better learn the business - you expect the experience of building <i>their</i> site will help you learn how to meet market needs.<p>(2) To build a portfolio - you want to have some real sites done and in-use to help sell to other customers later.<p>Do both of those things. Focus on making ONE key customer happy, learn whatever you can about their needs, and only THEN do you try to sell the same service to other customers.
Consider a simple online booking system, backed with google calendar or speaks ical. Importantly, something that lets their customers pick a time slot, send reminders, etc.<p>A number of healthcare providers locally do something similar; benefit to the vet is lower admin costs (answering phone etc), potential of online payment to secure the consult, and easy ways to reach their customers for follow up (vaccination reminders for example could be triggered by adding people into a mailing list package, email details gained at time of original booking).<p>Those are harder to build, but offer clear value and ongoing revenue ($1/booking fee x 5 vets x a year starts to make it look attractive!)
Classic example of starting with a solution and looking for a problem.<p>Consider going to another set of potential customers with no product at all and just interview them. It's much easier to get their time if you're not selling them something.<p>Ask what their business problems are. These could range from annoyances to serious revenue issues. Ask them how much it would be worth to make the problem go away.<p>Once you've gathered this information from several potential customers, find commonality and figure out a solution.<p>Then, without building the solution, pitch it back to them and ask for them to sign up. If enough say yes, then you have something worth building.<p>Consider getting the book Four Steps to the Epiphany.
Interesting article. I have a similar business (websites for physicians). I was very lucky to get some introductions and leads through my personal network (being a med student myself, my parents having a lot of physician friends).<p>A thing a was quite successful with, was redesigning existing old websites. More building a new website than just redesigning. But most of the clients I worked with had already a website that was just ugly or outdated or both. That made sure that they at least see some value in being found on google
> They want to see a portfolio. It’s tough to get off the ground because of the chicken and egg problem. Vets who were showing some interest always wanted us to “provide some references”: the problem is that no one wants to be your first client.<p>So why not give one away for free ? In exchange for a good reference (if they are happy).
Okay it is quite unlucky that you chose that particular segment. Becoming a vet is very expensive, the setups are very, very expensive and the margins are very tight. Most vets accumulate into vet practices and would be better off financially stacking shelves at Walmart so if I were looking for rich clients these aren't the clients you were looking for - you may well have lots of pictures of cats but maybe some other segment might be more open to you. Even a charity for cats might pay better than a vets. How about pivoting into pet boarding? Plenty of scope for fun there and quite lucrative?
It's good to see that he analyzed the problems to see why his client base wasn't interested. The reasons had nothing to do with him, which is good data to have.<p>The veterinarians I've seen are booked from dawn to dusk, so "too many clients" is their issue. Why advertise when you are already booked solid.<p>Those retiring and those who want no tech are also valid complaints and little can be done about either.<p>He focuses on the fourth reason he can do something about, they want to see a portfolio of their sites done for other vets. That is a reasonable move.
I am in a weird situation with a few friends that we made an appointment scheduling application for a client who tried several others and found nothing they liked and kept reverting to using google calendar. Now we built them this perfect app that they love, but we can't seem to sell it to anyone else. It's looking more and more like we spent six months developing an app for essentially one client (technically we have three, one client has two shops, and one employee that left started his own and uses it).
The problem here is that you're trying to sell a website that vet clients will generally only look up when their pets are sick, and probably not in the right frame of mind to appreciate your web design skills. The idea has inherently unpleasant connotations right from the start.<p>You'd get a lot farther if you found a novel set of pet toys, or premium food, or something that the average pet owner would enjoy spending money on. Vets stock those things, people buy them, I'm sure you get the gist of the idea.
The key to success is to follow-up on cold calls. The first call is to establish the relationship and let them know who you are as well as you learning more about them. Figure out how you can help them (potentially for free) to build that trust. It's our human nature to be skeptical about being approached and we immediately go into self-defense mode.
One option instead of making them a website (which they probably don't care about) is selling them leads (which they probably do).<p>Instead of them saying they don't like technology, you just say that you'll send them leads for $x per go.<p>You then build the sites and bill them for each contact that goes through (or phone call - bit more work).
Cold calling might not work for the first few customers. Instead, you should find friends or friends of friends to sell to at first, because even if you have the best pitch, and they would use the product, it might be that they're very overworked and they don't have time to speak to you.
hello Master,<p>one issue with pitch is that, for doctors who are not versed with web technology, your offer is more of a paid liability, than a solution.<p>who would maintain the website, when you have sold them?<p>the vets, probably neither have the time nor the inclination to maintain it, and so far they have been doing without it.<p>Why dont you offer them, website and with just a marginal yearly cost, free maintenance also, with which they can always keep their website updated, by just sending you text and photographs by email?<p>this is like a complete peace of mind offer.<p>in fact, you can make it one offer, website with free maintenance (hosting, domain, updating content etc) at a flat yearly free.<p>You have a SAAS product in offering now...
If you're making vet appointment software, please considering pivoting to the petcare appointment business. Our dog walking company uses an absolutely craptacular app called Leashtime, and any replacement would be welcomed.
I agree with TFA on the "making yourself sound bigger than life" thing. I always think I sound ridiculous when I do that so I prefer to focus on what I know.<p>Not that I've had much succeed either, though.
Vets are like doctors that don't make any money. Most vets in the US just don't have the marketing budget for this kind of thing. There are better niches out there.