Yesterday I was handling our incoming phone calls at Schedulefly. We received fewer than 10 calls the entire day, and here’s how they broke down….

Approx 5 calls: Customers who needed to change their credit card number with us and don’t know about our new online billing system.

2 calls: Calls from people considering using Schedulefly and wanting to learn more.

1 call: A customer who asked about the best way to use Schedulefly based on their unique situation.

We have around 150,000 users, so imagine how many calls we could potentially get flooded with on any given day. But yesterday was par for the course, and we’re very proud of that. We’re proud because we have focused intensely on making sure our software is very simple. Intuitive. Easy to figure out without feeling the need to throw your arms up and call somebody.

Trust me, it’s no small task to do that. The natural inclination with software is to keep adding stuff. More features. More bells. More whistles. More of everything! It’s much, much harder to take away than to add. Or, frankly, it’s much harder to be happy with what you have than it is to add. But we try to never forget that while each link or button or tab or setting we add may not complicate Schedulefly by itself, complexity is nonlinear. In other words, one new feature might increase the complexity by one notch. But 10 new features might increase the complexity by 50 notches. I’m not saying we will never add anything, but I am saying that at this point we’re much more interested in finding things to eliminate vs. things to add.

Also, I mentioned above that we received two calls from people wanting to know more about Schedulefly. Given than we have hundreds of restaurants in trial at any time, that means at least one person at those restaurants visited our web site before starting a trial with the intention of learning more about what we offer and how it might help them. Our web site has to do a great job of giving them the information they need while not overwhelming them, or making them think Schedulefly seems like more trouble than it’s worth.

So it’s a careful balance, figuring out just the right amount of features in our application and the right amount of information on our web site. And once you think you’ve figured it out, it takes some restraint at times to keep from wanting to add more stuff to both of them. But the more you practice that restraint, the easier it comes. And the better off your business will be, if it’s anything like ours.

Therefore we keep our software simple. And our customers rarely need to call us. And we are able to support nearly 150,000 end users with a team of five people. We’re stoked about that!

Wil

P.s. I’m taking calls again today. I’ve spoken to four of five people – billing and “more info” related. None of them has needed help with using Schedulefly. My hope is that we can get to a point where we routinely go entire days without calls. Hey, I’m always, always happy to speak to people about Schedulefly. But if a day came where nobody had any questions because our we site and our app were so clear…well, that would be pretty special.