It’s a nice sunny morning here in Wilmington NC today and a typical Monday morning for me. Wake up and have coffee with my wife and watch the news, while our 3yr old son performs surgery on his stuffed animals. You know – the kiddie doctor kit with the shot, stethoscope and blood pressure monitor.
Anyway, I just hopped on the laptop to knock out a few small changes to our little website and as usual I got sucked into watching the really cool map of live restaurant customer activity on our homepage. It’s a google map that pans to the location of a customer when they do something like check their schedule, trade a shift or approve a schedule change. It was bouncing around venues on the east coast since it’s way too early for most people to be up on the west coast…and then the map zipped across the Atlantic Ocean and across Africa and Saudi Arabia to Dubai – because our new customer there was logged in doing some work. For a second I thought there was a bug making the map flip out…but no…the owner of a restaurant there was approving a schedule change online.
As I sat there, still in my pajamas, and watched that map zip across the globe to show a customer on the other side of the earth logging in…a feeling of amazement came over me. Seriously, Schedulefly is a simple system, with a simple team and a simple business model. We’ve not taken any investment, we are not working on a global marketing campaign – yet a really great restaurant in Dubai heard about us, tried us for 30 days and is now a happy customer. Amazing.
I felt an urge to blog this and let people how we are reaching the other side of the planet with our service. Wait – I really have no idea! We are 3 guys with a laser focus on keeping our software simple and serving restaurants. 10 years ago, a software company run by 3 guys in North Carolina would have had a hard time serving customers in places they did not actually visit. Heck – finding new customers in South Carolina would probably have cost us some money – someone on the other side of Africa? Forget it.
Today is a different story…the internet has changed everything for small businesses. What an incredibly fun ride it is…
Keepin’ It Simple and Fun,
The Schedulefly Crew