Upcoming KeepMeBooked features

Here is a summary of the upcoming features in KeepMeBooked, in approximate order of likely release:

• Automated guest emails (to acknowledge payments, chase for balances, etc.)  DONE 2 Feb
• Colour-coded bookings (to distinguish between paid / unpaid, online / manual, etc.) DONE 4 Feb
• Allow part-payment for online bookings DONE 5 Feb
• Apply rules to online bookings (e.g. minimum stay) DONE 5 Feb
• Export your data to a spreadsheet DONE 9 Feb
• More sophisticated pricing (by day of week DONE 10 Mar, single/double occupancy, etc.)
• Automated discounting rules (e.g. "with x days to go, discount prices by y%")

We expect to have most of this completed within the next 4-6 weeks. (Update 5th Feb - looks like we might be done a little quicker than that. Update 9th Mar - well, maybe our original estimate about right, turned out more sophisticated pricing a little more sophisticated than we first thought) 

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New features: Online booking widget, choice of currency, improved calendar scroll

We released some new features this morning:

Online booking widget

You can now take online bookings on your own website and have the details go directly into your KeepMeBooked calendar.

To start taking online bookings, paste the snippet of code that you'll find under Settings -> Online bookings into your existing website.

This will display a small calendar on your website and allow your website visitors to check availability and make online bookings.

You can choose whether or not to require your guest to pay online. If you'd like your guest to pay online, enter your payment gateway details in Settings -> Online Bookings. We currently support PayPal's gateway (which, if you don't already have an internet payment gateway / merchant account, is the easiest and quickest to set up), and will add support for other gateways on request.

There is a quick demo here of the booking widget.

The booking widget is available during your free trial, and thereafter available to Plus subscribers (but not to Regular subscribers).

Choice of currency

You can now set your currency symbol to either Dollars, Pounds or Euros. You'll see this option under Settings -> Your details. If anyone would prefer a different symbol (and, if you don't use any of those symbols in your country, then you probably will want a different symbol), just let us know at getsatisfaction and we'll add it in a jiffy.

Improved calendar scroll

The calendar now scrolls one week at a time, not two, fixing the annoying situation where a booking would always spill over one edge or the other of the view, so you could never see the start and end of it at the same time.

Feedback welcome, as ever.

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KeepMeBooked: Out of beta, now accepting paying users

KeepMeBooked is now accepting paying customers. Yay! That makes us, like, a proper business and everything.

All existing beta customers are now on a thirty-day free trial, starting today, so everyone has a further 30 days to use KeepMeBooked before deciding whether or not to purchase a paid subscription. And of course new users signing up from now on will have the same thirty-day trial.

There are two pricing levels: Regular ($5 per room per month) and Plus ($12 per room per month). The Plus plan includes the online booking widget which you can embed on your own website to take online bookings. There'll be more about how that works posted here shortly.

Get your free KeepMeBooked trial here.

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Back on-line - details to follow shortly

Maintenance over-ran slightly, but we are back on-line now. Thanks for your patience. More details to follow shortly.

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KeepMeBooked will be offline Thurs 28 Jan 0100 EST / 0600 GMT

We are going to be releasing a significant upgrade (including the online booking widget) to KeepMeBooked on Thursday.

KeepMeBooked will be offline for approximately 3 hours starting at 06:00 Greenwich Mean Time on Thursday 28th Jan, please bear with us during that time. (We'll probably have everything done in much less than 3 hours, but we'll allow that much time to be on the safe side.)

We are releasing the online booking widget and a number of other minor improvements. We are also connecting our user database to our subscription gateway (Spreedly), ready to move out of beta and into real-live-paying-customers-mode. And it's that bit that means we have to come offline for a while, so we don't have new users signing up while we are in middle of linking up with Spreedly.

Questions? Please ask any questions on our support forum.

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Online booking widget - sneak preview

Sneak preview of KeepMeBooked's online booking widget. This will allow you to paste a few lines of HTML into your existing site to display a mini-calendar of availability, and allow you to take online bookings:

Publish Post

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KeepMeBooked: "The Zendesk of Hotel Management Software"?

KeepMeBooked is very much inspired by Zendesk, the web-based helpdesk tool. Zendesk helps companies track and respond to support requests from customers: recording what happened, who responded, how quickly, what they said, etc. We used it when I was at ViaPost and I love it.

Like Zendesk, KeepMeBooked operates in a very crowded marketplace, but where the existing offerings are over-complicated and hard to use, and mostly involve a complex, no-turning-back installation on a local PC / network. Like Zendesk, KeepMeBooked isn't doing anything radically different from its competitors, other than focussing almost entirely on making a product which is easy to use. And remember, 'easy-to-use' as in 'quick to use', not as in 'dumbed-down'.

Two years after being launched by three Danes in Copenhagen, Zendesk now has over 1,000 paying customers, fancy offices in San Francisco and funding from Benchmark Capital. I'd happily skip the fancy offices and VC funding, but still find their story inspiring.

I spent a pleasant couple of hours recently re-reading some of their early blog posts, here are a few highlights:

Sep 07: Judge for TechCrunch awards unimpressed. Their interview was

'a mildly awkward affair. It was over in four minutes and basically ended with Jason [the judge] saying "So you've built a help desk with a blog and a some RSS?". Ouch!'

I can relate to that! It is very hard to explain that your software is game-changing because, er, it is easier to use. Everyone says their software is easy to use. One of our differentiators at 0800handyman was that we offered great service. But of course any plumber will tell you that they offer great service. Just saying that doesn't differentiate you at all. Only when people start using you, and start telling other people that you offer great service (or that your software is easy to use) does it start making any difference.

Feb 08: They've clocked up 1,000 customers in first 100 days. New customers (by which I think they mean signups, including those that don't convert free trial to paying accounts) cost $60 in acquisition costs. Reassuringly close to my complete guess of £50 per customer.

In the same month, we see a few of the reasons why Zendesk moved to Boston, USA. e.g. having to bill all Amex customers in Danish Crowns (and users of other credit cards in US Dollars). Resonates with me trying to find a UK commercial insurer who has heard of web-based software.

June 08: Zendesk proudly highlights a commentator comparing Zendesk to 37signals. Looking forward to when someone compares KeepMeBooked with ZenDesk: "The Zendesk of hotel management software".

They enjoy rapid customer growth through the summer of 2008: June - 2,100 customers; July: 3,000; August: "almost 4,000".

Sep 08: Great quote from Mikkel Svane (CEO):

“We’ve worked very hard to keep Zendesk beautifully simple, so support staff and their customers can start using it right away as easily as they might buy a book at Amazon.com.”

Just saying your software is 'easy to use' is bland and quickly forgotten. Saying it is as 'easy as buying a book at Amazon' is somehow much more powerful.

By now Zendesk has got a Facebook group going, and is having regular real-life meetups around the globe: NYC, Sydney, Melbourne, Hong Kong, San Francisco. Kind of extraordinary that people are already enthusiastic enough about some helpdesk software to meet up in a bar to chat about it.

Nov 08: Again, Mikkel comments how hard it is to

'explain why "beautifully simple" is a differentiating concept for both our business model and our product'

and cites a study showing that user adoption is the most critical factor for enterprise software success, and argues that a beautifully simple user interface is the easiest path to effective user adoption.

Feb 09: Zendesk goes multi-lingual.

May 09: Close funding from Charles River Ventures and move to Boston.

And from then on its just a long stream of new feature announcements and even more meet-ups in bars around the globe.

If you are in the early stages of running a web-based software business I'd highly recommend a browse through Zendesk's early blog posts to keep you fired up and inspired.

(cross-posted at my Bruce Greig blog)

(updated at 14:20 to correct capitalization of Zendesk (not ZenDesk))

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Why you should use the NOINDEX tag

Why use the NOINDEX tag to stop Google indexing a page? Surely the more content Google indexes the better?

Here's why:

Above is a screenshot of what Google currently thinks the four most relevant keywords are for KeepMeBooked, a site offering web-based hotel reservation software.

1. Software

OK, fair enough

2. Islands.

Eh? "Islands"? Where does the word "Islands" appear on this site? Answer: the signup page. Thirty times. Because the signup page has a country list for the user to select from, and there are thirty countries in the world with the word "Islands" in their name. And with not much other content on that page, it appears to Google that this page is, er, about islands.

3. Tortoise

My company is called Tortoise Software (as in "Hare and Tortoise" if you are wondering), and that appears in the footer. But hardly very prominent, why is Google thinking this is the third-most relevant keyword? Because it appears 12 times in the Terms and Conditions page, making it a very prominent word on that page

4. Republic

See 2. above.

If Google hadn't indexed the Terms and Signup pages, it would probably have put more prominence on words like "guesthouse", "availability", and "bookings", which would have been a little more helpful.

Easily fixed, though.

(cross-posted at my Bruce Greig blog)

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