Texas Startup Blog written by Alexander Muse

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ServiceGuy News and Staff Additions!

August 27, 2007

ServiceGuyWe launched ServiceGuy on August 6th after three months of development as I explained in a post titled, "ServiceGuy, better late than never!"  We have had a few bumps throughout our launch.  First, our VoIP provider flaked on us and we had to get our SIP from someone else (if you sell SIP or IAX connections by the minute please call me).  Next, our theory on how users would be able to figure out the sign-up process was wrong.  We had to redesign the process and I am happy to announce everyone seems to be getting the hang of our new system.  Just when we thought we had all of the bugs figured out it was brought to our attention that we didn’t give the service providers any instructions on how the call would be connected (we just played a beep).  Turns out it helps if you tell them what to do when they hear the beep ~ sorry about that.  Anyway, most of the bugs have been worked out and we have been watching more and more local providers sign-up each day.  Oh, and everyone loves the ServiceGuy voice (countrified Texan cartoon voice). 

Interestingly, we had planned to roll out ServiceGuy as a service with the ’secret’ goal of sell private label versions to folks like Sherwin-Williams paints.  The idea was simple: offer the referral service to professionals who use your paints and locate the referral numbers on your do-it-yourself webpage.  We would build a custom version of ServiceGuy and run it as a managed service for their brand.  Funny thing is that we never got the change to pitch the idea; instead two different groups approached us with our own idea and as a result we have been struggling to ramp up our staff to handle the projects (I am pleased to welcome Brad Merritt and Candice Mercado to the team).

In the meantime, if you are in the Dallas area and need a ‘guy’ check out ServiceGuy:

 

Written by Alexander Muse · Filed Under Blog ·