From Thursday 16th July Smoothbook will be free without limit (fair use applies: if you plan on taking more than 5,000 appointments in a day please can you let me know).

In short: Smoothbook will be paid for by advertising on the booking calendar – advertising which can be removed by paying a $10 / month subscription.

So what happened?

Smoothbook has been charging based on a ‘freemium’ model for a week. I’m not going to lie: if 100 people were signing up for subscriptions every day then I would not be looking at alternative business models. The engagement with new users, post charging, was actually better than I thought it would be: sign ups were less than before which was to be expected but the new users were engaged and willing to pay. Things were roughly going to plan.

The big problem, to put it bluntly (and in the unlikely event that anyone is still reading this) was boredom – mine. I looked at Smoothbook and it’s pricing table and it was *exactly* the same as the blancmange of competitor’s pricing tables, albeit with tepid differences in features and pricing (except for Mindbody. Wow those guys are next level). And basically I lost the will to live. I’m joking: if I was to put on my business hat I could regale you with the numerous reasons why Smoothbook is better on features and pricing than its competitors (and then you’d lose the will to live).

The point is that when Smoothbook was free there was a great deal of goodwill around the project: people sending me emails saying how much they appreciated the product and how could they help, etc. Despite the complete lack of profitability (or indeed revenue of any kind), Smoothbook was fun and rewarding and Smoothbook was different: noone else is doing this in this way. In startup speak: it had a big USP (technically speaking, most business schools will tell you that refusing to take payment for your product is not strictly a Unique Selling Point seeing as you do not have any actual sales).

So all these thoughts are swirling around my head, I’m trying to square having a free product with actually bringing in some money and, not altogether unexpectedly, I came back to the solution of putting advertising on the booking calendar and charging a nominal fee to have it removed.

So this ticks many boxes: brings in some money, allows me to continue working on this product that I really enjoy; keeps it free for the users (and advertisement free if they like) and hopefully perpetuates the goodwill and enthusiasm around the project. I hope that this sounds fair.

Wishing you all the best, James

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I know that many businesses in the yoga / fitness sector (and many others) have not survived Covid. Not to put too fine a point on it but I’ve experienced severe business and financial stress myself as an entrepreneur (I was at the sharp end of that other ‘once in a lifetime’ financial crisis: the 2008 financial crash). I really feel for the many people who are in trouble at the moment.

But, as a result of those experiences, I also learned that things always move on; the world keeps on turning and so I hope that people will take it as an optimistic sign that, certainly in terms of Smoothbook bookings, things are approaching where they were pre-Covid and climbing every day. Gyms, yoga and pilates studios are re-opening – in whatever shape or form; summer is here; people are desperate to get fit and healthy and to re-connect after months cooped up indoors. There is opportunity and reason for optimism here! (One thing I’ve noticed: if there’s any way you can get your class outdoors – to a park / garden or whatever, these are *really* popular).

Smoothbook will no longer be completely free

Smoothbook is a business and (like most of you) I’m an entrepreneur: it was always on the cards that Smoothbook was going to be charged for, and that’s as it should be. It has been very rewarding to receive such goodwill over the years and watch people grow their businesses using Smoothbook (some very successfully indeed – I watched one fitness instructor in Ireland go from himself to three large, separate gym locations with many different classes).

But there’s a lack of accountability and being held to a higher standard when things are free: people really give you the benefit of the doubt and expect less. And I want Smoothbook to grow and succeed: to improve as a service and increase the ways it’s useful to it’s users. To have better support. All of which takes resources – which are expensive where software is concerned. Over the last three years or so I’ve managed this by doing the work myself and living very cheaply (and, it must be said, very happily) as a ‘digital nomad’ in South-East Asia.

So this is the next stage of the project for Smoothbook. It’s challenging and it’s out of my comfort zone; the territory is quite unknown. The competition is big and well funded; success is far from assured. I’m sure many of you have experienced this feeling: it’s what being an entrepreneur is all about.

Best wishes to everyone – wherever you are in your journey at this crazy time.

James

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I’m delighted to announce that Smoothbook has been approved for addition to the Zoom app marketplace: https://marketplace.zoom.us/apps/Dy6umQk-T6-Z9iv3M-7ZbA

Zoom is now integrated into Smoothbook meaning that your classes (‘meetings’ in Zoom speak) are automatically created in your Zoom account the first time a student books. You no longer need to manually send joining links to your students: these are sent in the confirmation email (and are available to your students in their booking calendar). Starting your meeting is easier than ever: the ‘start meeting’ link is included in the confirmation email to you and you can also start your meeting directly from the dashboard, simply click on the ‘start zoom meeting’ button for the class.

Use Smoothbook as your online gym booking software or yoga booking software – now completely online and integrated with Zoom.

You can read about how to integrate Zoom with your Smoothbook class management system here: https://help.smoothbook.co/knowledgebase/zoom-online-meeting-and-webinar-integration/

Zoom are rigorous in their approval process, it is rewarding to get to this point. I’m very happy to be able to offer this improvement to help you manage your online classes.

All the best, James

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From the feedback that I’ve received from Smoothbook users, the process of managing your online classes is much the same as before: your students view availability, book and pay, etc. through Smoothbook. The biggest difference is the requirement to send students an invitation to the online class (i.e. the online meeting with Zoom, etc.), maybe an hour or so before the class so that they can logon to the meeting and attend.

To enable this the dashboard of Smoothbook has been updated to better display, manage and interact with classes. From an online class point of view, the most useful new feature is the ability to message everyone in a given class (so now you can send them a link to the meeting with Zoom, Google hangouts, etc.)

If you prefer the original dashboard interface, you can easily change back by clicking the ‘view upcoming appointments’ button at the top.

In addition to better enabling online class management and scheduling, the changes to the dashboard make it easier and smarter to view and export your appointments, along with (optionally) the student registration information, student / appointment comments and payment information.

If you click the ‘view / message class’ button you’ll see a modal with the details of the class.

To create, schedule and manage your online class with Smoothbook:

1. You want to create an online event for which you’ll need a web conferencing service. Zoom web conferencing seems to be the most popular option but there are alternatives: goto meeting, webex, etc.
2. You should be able to retrieve a meeting ID and a link that you can send to people so that they can join your class.
3. Open up the class by clicking the ‘view / message class’ button on the dashboard

You want to email the students in your class with the meeting ID so that they can login and attend. To do this. click on the ’email students’ button at the bottom of the modal:

This will launch your own email client: gmail / hotmail if you use those services, or Outlook, etc. if you use a desktop application for your email. This will allow you to use your own email client for the ‘reply to’ address, etc.

Exporting classes

You can print the list of attendees in your class at any time by clicking the ‘print’ button at the bottom of the modal (or you can press ctrl + p in your browser). You can choose the information you’d like to show for each student using the checkboxes. If you’d like to download and / or send the student (and / or waitlist) list: click the ‘print’ button to bring the up the print dialogue for your browser. You should be able to see an option ‘save as PDF’ where you select the printer. Select this and select ‘print’ to generate a PDF of your class list which you can save and email to anyone that you like.

I hope that this can help people at this very difficult time, best wishes to everyone.

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It’s hard to believe that Christmas is almost upon us again ?!

A couple of users have asked if Smoothbook supports gift certificates: the idea being that someone could purchase a given number of yoga classes (for example) from you as a gift for someone else. The answer is yes!

Simply:

1. You create a package of appointments that you would like your customers to be able to gift to someone else.
2. The package would probably be free / have no cost: that way the person who receives the gift is not paying for the classes or appointments.
3. You create ‘coupon codes’ for the package: codes (e.g. ‘HTYUPG’) that the customer must enter in order to receive the free package.
4. You sell the code to the person who wishes to send the gift and send it to them by email / other method.
5. Christmas day: the person you sold the code to presents it as a gift to someone else.
6. The person who receives the code can use it to book classes with you.

Hopefully that makes sense!

There is more documentation concerning coupon codes here: https://help.smoothbook.co/knowledgebase/using-coupon-codes-gift-certificates-promotions-trial-classes-and-restricting-access-to-services/ 

As ever I hope that Smoothbook is helping you with your business and users; there are a number of new features arriving soon including, notably, the ability to offer memberships / subscriptions.

Wishing you patience, calm and happiness in the next month!

James

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Waitlists

tldr; Waitlists are disabled by default but configurable on an organisational or service level. To enable / disable waitlists on all services select ‘settings’ from the main menu and click on the ‘calendar settings’ icon. Under ‘general settings’ you will see a checkbox (‘enable waitlists for all services’). To toggle waitlists for individual services, select ‘settings’ from the main menu, click on the ‘resources and services’ icon and select ‘edit’ for the service in question.

Smoothbook now supports waitlists for all services, meaning that if a timeslot or event has been fully booked, customers can optionally add themselves to a waitlist. The process is simple: if a slot opens up for the event then everyone on the waitlist will be emailed and the slot is awarded on a first come, first serve basis – whoever arrives and books first receives the place.

You can read the help article on waitlists by clicking here.

Secure Customer Authentication (SCA) for Stripe payments

tldr; You don’t need to do anything. Smoothbook now supports Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) meaning early compliance with European regulations and greater protection against fraud for you and your customers. Your customers may report that they are having to complete a second step to complete their payments – this is by design.

Per upcoming European PSD2 regulation, all online merchants were required to enable Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) for online payments by September 14, 2019. (I say ‘were’ because the British financial authorities realised belatedly that – somewhat predictably – few businesses were prepared for this hard deadline and mayhem was about to ensue. The deadline has now been pushed back by 18 months). For some light reading that will really help with any insomnia issues you might be having you can read up on PSD2 by clicking here.

Strong Customer Authentication means that certain payment cards require two factor authentication (2fa) in order for a payment to be processed. Two factor authentication generally means that the customer submits their card for payment but will then be prompted to confirm their payment from their phone – either by push notification or a code sent by SMS.

You need to do nothing – all of this has been handled by updates from Stripe and changes to the Smoothbook code. If a payment card requires two factor authentication your customer will submit their card and then be presented with a small screen to take them through the confirmation process.

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I hope you’re enjoying the summer and business is going well for you, this is just a quick update on the latest developments at Smoothbook after another busy month.

Booking Calendar General Updates

Your booking calendar is an extension of your organisation and brand to your customers – it’s essential that the experience of your customers with the booking calendar is a good one and represents you well.

There have been significant updates to the booking calendar. Mainly these revolve around a general tidy up and update. The changes should not significantly noticeable to you and your users – generally the styling and user experience have been updated but purposely kept the same. We did not want to arbitrarily implement large scale change to your booking calendar but some changes you might notice:

• The general feel of the calendar should be cleaner than before
• Service and resource descriptions are in a modal / popup as opposed to a tooltip.
• The character limit on service and resource descriptions has been raised to 400 characters from 200 characters.

Booking Calendar Customisation

It’s now possible to customise all of the colours on your calendar and add your company logo if that is what you would like to do. So the booking calendar will be a seamless extension of your website and brand.

You can choose colours for the major components of the calendar based on a selection of themes or you can customise the colours as you like.

The settings for this can be found if you select ‘settings’ -> ‘calendar settings’ from the main menu and scroll towards the bottom of the page.

There is a help article explaining these new features at: https://help.smoothbook.co/knowledgebase/customising-your-smoothbook-booking-calendar/

As always, I hope you have great success with the system and your business, please let me know if you have any issues or comments at all.

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Thanks so much for reading this blog post, I just wanted to quickly share some of the updates that are in the pipeline for Smoothbook.

You may know me via email and phone: my name is James and I’m the founder of Smoothbook.

The short message is that this is a busy time for Smoothbook: there are many fixes, updates and a few new major features coming to the system in the next few months. These things should greatly enhance the user experience for both you and your users – which is the primary goal of the project. Smoothbook has been built from the start on your feedback, thoughts and ideas – it’s always great to hear what you think.

Here are some of the more major updates in the pipeline for Smoothbook:

Events and workshops

The big immediate update is that workshops and events are now natively supported in Smoothbook. You can create a workshop schedule: that is, timeslots that occur only on specific dates. The scheduling interface to do this is much the same as the interface to create weekly schedules except for a couple of features unique to workshops:

• You can specify that someone who books one date of a workshop is automatically booked into all of or the remainder of them.
• In the charging section you can use the existing charging options (single appointments + packages) or you can set one charge for the whole workshop.

So you could create a ‘semester’ for example and book your customer into all dates of the semester in one go.

If you’d like to know more about how to implement workshops, you can read the help section for workshops here: https://help.smoothbook.co/knowledgebase/scheduling-events-and-workshops-with-smoothbook/  

Updates to the booking calendar

Since the booking calendar is how you, as a Smoothbook user, present yourself to your customers, the appearance, functionality and usability of the booking calendar is of primary importance.

We will shortly be releasing an updated version of the booking calendar. The layout and functionality will be almost exactly the same as before but cosmetically the calendar will be updated and improved; there will also be the option to customise the calendar.

Memberships

Another new feature which has been quite a long time in the making is the ability to offer your customers subscription based memberships: your customers will have access to the services that you specify for a monthly subscription. I aim to make memberships available within the next two months.

Quality Assurance

To supplement the quite significant amount of testing that goes into Smoothbook before it’s released, I’ve hired some experienced, professional Quality Assurance personnel to ensure that the reliability of Smoothbook is as high as humanly possible. I take great pride in Smoothbook as a product: it’s critical to me that errors are as few as possible. But web development being what it is, and with the large number of updates coming down the pipeline, it’s impossible to guarantee there will be no problems on a product the size of Smoothbook. If anything is wrong at all please let me know straight away!

…and many others!

There are numerous small updates coming soon to Smoothbook: waitlists, attendance, concurrent appointments, user notifications, payment statuses, etc. I’ll update you as these are released.

Thanks, as always, for your support and feedback – all of your ideas, suggestions, bug reports and feedback are much appreciated. I hope that these new updates will help everyone with their businesses and organisations. If you have any comments or suggestions at all, please let me know.

James

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