How on-demand businesses will get more customers in 2015
If you’re an on-demand startup in 2015, the truth is that you have hundreds of competitors that have received billions in funding over the past 24 months. While these “competitors” might not offer exactly what you offer, the point is that they are all trying to move consumers to the world of on-demand. Think about all of the on-demand services any one of us can choose from today right on our phones:
On-demand: Food delivery, Alcohol delivery, Haircuts, Car washes, Massage,Storage, Transportation, Photography, IT services, Pet care, Parking, Errands…etc. the list goes on and on.
While you’re messaging out to consumers about why they should use your on-demand company for X, all of these other companies are pushing their product offerings for people to use their company for Y. So how do you standout? What is going to make people say that your on-demand start-up provides real value and is something that they’ll use consistently?
Build a better customer experience. That’s why your customers are choosing your app instead of doing things the way they always were. When your customer makes a request, they don’t care what genius processes your business has developed to power this?—?they just want to know that their expectations will be met or exceeded.
But as a start-up, how do you get your app from where it is now, to where it needs to be fast and without spending hundreds of thousands (if not more) of dollars? You could build your own tech stack, but unless you have internal resources already hired and working (which is expensive), it will take too long. If you hire an agency, be prepared to spend the majority of your funding if you have any.
I think about marketing automation as a good metaphor here. If you’re an SMB looking to scale up your marketing efforts, you could go build everything yourself, which includes: blogging, SEO, social media, site building, lead management, landing pages, calls-to-action, marketing automation, email and analytics… or you could just go use a tool like HubSpot.
The pros here severely outweigh the cons/risks and is one of the reasons that they’ve amassed over 10,000 customers. Within the on-demand economy, you have a similar choice. You could absolutely go out and build your own tech stack which would include: job management, scheduling, billing & payments, customer relationships, location reporting, user management, dashboards, integrations, field apps and web tracking… or you could build on top of what already exists.
Focus on your customer experience and let Dispatch manage everything else.
This blog post didn’t start off in my mind as a straight-forward Dispatch pitch, but once I started writing my conclusion sort of evolved there. Whatever. Maybe I’m biased. ?