Effortless scheduling for everyone to grow and manage their business

Omnify is a small business software to manage your scheduling, automate your work-flow and sell online. Whether you are fitness studio, a yoga trainer, a language school or an online coach, Omnify provides you with beautiful website templates to go online; powerful scheduling tools to manage your classes, appointments, events, rentals and more with real-time availability. Omnify also helps you automate your work-flow with auto-invoices, custom emails, sales reports, CRM, discount coupons, customer profiles etc.

Kevin William David interviewed kabandi saikia, Co-Founder at Omnify to learn more.

Hi Kabandi, So tell us about Omnify?

Omnify is an All-in-One Cloud-based Scheduling & Business Management Software. Omnify is designed to address the growing challenges faced by SMBs, with the aim of making transacting with their customers simpler & automating the day to day operations. Omnify is a complete DIY platform, where a Business owner can set-up their online service store, take bookings & collect payments while automating the operational processes at every step. Omnify is designed for simplicity and ease-of-use enabling the Business owners to set up everything in less than 10 minutes. We thrive to help these businesses give their consumers the most effortless booking & scheduling experience which is at par with big retailers. Omnify includes all the tools needed to run a services business: online scheduling, payment processing, staff and client management, reporting and more.

Tell me more about the problem you are trying to solve?

Technology is transforming the way businesses function. Consumers, now more than ever, are accustomed to the experience provided by big merchants. And, they expect the similar ease of doing business with SMBs as well.

Globally, there are about 10 million Small Businesses selling services. Less than 10% of these are online.

Traditionally, they follow three types of operational paradigms -

1. Businesses who aren’t tech savvy. They depend on registers, calendars or some offline tools to manage their business. It gets challenging at scale and also businesses tend to lose the competitive advantage.

2. Businesses who are aware of the competition and the current consumer needs. They have some kind of online presence. They use Softwares built for the large businesses not designed for SMBs. These are expensive and complex, requires significant technical knowledge and training to install and maintain. It’s time consuming, complicated and costly.

3. The more sophisticated businesses end up buying different tools to manage their business. They spend anywhere between few hundreds to a couple of thousand dollars on a monthly basis. The end result is an operational system lacking integration between the applications and is time-consuming to manage.

How is Omnify different from what already exists in the market?

While the products that are on the market currently help schedule and some help sell. What we are trying to do is help achieve both-

1.Focus on driving more revenue: We continuously improve the user experience of the product making it easier for Businesses to convert more customers (~5X). We also focus on adding features and integrations that help these businesses generate more leads and prospects online.

2. Focus on Automating tasks to save time: We help these Businesses save 40% of their time by Automating tasks, so that they can focus on doing what they love.

3. Much Simpler Platform built purely for SMBs: Omnify is a complete DIY platform, built for SMBs. Anyone with the knowledge of computers should be able to set-up and use it seamlessly.

4. Superior UX: We have a much better and modern interface which makes us popular with new-age businesses starting up.

5. Stellar Customer Support: We offer 24/7 customer support helping them with set-up when needed, understanding their pain-point and implementing the solution for the same.

Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Omnify?

Local and Online Businesses selling services like Group Classes, Appointments, Events etc. We are more like Shopify for services. We have a horizontal market segment. Anyone running schedule based services are able to use Omnify. Having said that Fitness, Wellness and Sports Businesses are still our biggest segment. We have a substantial section of Self-help groups, Co-working Spaces and Kid’s Activities Businesses using our platform as well. Most of the people who sign-up for the platform are owners. And later they add on their team members. Hence, it is imperative for us to make the UX of the platform simpler so that everyone can use it without minimum training and effort.

How are your customers using Omnify? Could you share a few different use cases?

We have two segments- one is the professionals using our platform and other is a business with 2 to 25 team members.

For professionals using Omnify is totally amazing. They create all their appointments, classes or any other services just once and they can then sell them from their Omnify Service Store or via Widgets. The best part is what happens next. They do not have to log in to the Dashboard everyday. They can check all their schedules, attendees from the Omnify Go Mobile App. It’s a simple app but very handy. They can even call, text, email, schedule from the App itself.

Have there been unique use cases for Omnify that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

Oh, yes! We were unaware of a lot of use cases when we started. We were really excited to see Dog Walking Professionals, Art Cafes, Coding Schools and Professional Services like Photographers, Electricians etc using Omnify. There is so much entrepreneurial innovation happening across the world and we are excited to play our part!

We are also running a pilot with a few Freelancers, Consultants to help them in scheduling and taking payments. We’ll be rolling that out by Nov 2017. That will be something really interesting for us to try.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

We totally rely on Inbound Marketing. We play around with our messaging and pricing a lot. One of the hacks or strategies we have adopted is to try 1–2 new channels every month to get more traction. It helps when you have a small team and you can put all your efforts into the new channel. The usual suspects like Outbound Emails, Content Marketing still work.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

Wow! There are so many :) I would say prioritizing and decision making are the two things that can make or break things. It’s the kind of customers that you get on board and how you deal with them will define how fast or slow is your growth. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of complicating your product as you keep building for your early customers. With the feedback it definitely helps but decision making plays a very important part there. Saying No to things that won’t scale. We had a challenge there but I think we passed that test :)

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added?

We have a lot of integrations that our customers love. We have integrations with Stripe, Paypal for payments. Additionally, we offer integrations with Email Marketing tools via Zapier which makes the life of these Businesses a lot easier.

Before we end, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?

• Intercom: We manage our Customer Interactions with Intercom- Chat, Email Automation. Also, Intercom’s Analytics gives us a deeper insight into how our customers are transacting with the App.
• Slack: Slack is imperative for our Internal Team Communication. Also, we have integrated Slack with Crashlytics, Sentry, Google Calendar etc so that we have real-time updates on issues and events.
• Trello: We use trello for our Project Management. We have 4 Teams under Trello- Tech, Product, Growth and Business. We create Weekly Sprint board, Bug Tracking boards etc and track progress there.
• SendX & Mailshake: SendX and Mailshake are two great tools for Outbound Marketing. For our users, we have automated drip campaigns via Intercom.
• Loom : We use Loom for recording. Loom is by far the simplest screen recording tool.
• The Help Scout: We use HelpScout for Knowledge base. But soon moving to Intercom Educate so as to reduce our Support time
• Webflow: Webflow is a very powerful CMS tool. You can check out our all new website www.getomnify.com built and hosted on Webflow.
• Stripe: We use Stripe to take our recurring subscription payments.
• ChartMogul: Chartmogul helps us keep track of our performance metrics. It’s really simple to use them.
• Skype/Hangouts: Nothing fancy here. We use good old Skype and Google Hangouts for our Demos.

Originally published at siftery.com.