This is our very first beta client, Rhonda Hawkins, co-owner of Byers Gymnastics in Roseville, CA. Rhonda and her partners Vickie and Kim are using Fanminder to send instant updates and reminders to staff, parents and students. If they need a class sub at the last minute, they can now send a text is less than 10 seconds to their staff to find out who’s available instead of calling one-by-one until they find someone to say yes. They are also sending reminders to their students and parents regarding parent meetings, classes, gear, events and refer-a-friend specials.

Let me share a few things that happened when I sat down with Rhonda to start using Fanminder. This is an excerpt from the actual email I sent to Paul in the middle of the experience. By the way, this is Tracy and this is my first official Fanminder blog. <smile>

“I am here with Rhonda and we breezed through the beta tasks. When we got to adding a fan, she couldn’t contain herself to wait for my survey on the task. She automatically created a staff group and with a huge smile on her face started quickly entering all her staff. She keeps saying ‘this is so cool’, ‘this is so easy’, ‘this is fun Tracy’, ‘Kim is going to love this’. She’s already had a text conversation with her business partner Kim right from Fanminder. They are replying back and forth to each other totally excited. Kim’s been asking for our service for 6 weeks now because she’s been sending texts to her staff one by one from her own cell phone. Yuk!

I also have some great feedback and found some interesting bugs. No show stoppers though. Just annoying stuff we can fix. We need to come up with a better way to explain the short code because it doesn’t look like a phone number which is normally what you enter into the phone number field when creating a text.

Her last message to Kim said ‘Almost have the staff completely entered. Fun fun fun, new techy stuff.’ She just sent a text to her entire staff (32 people) and keeps checking the mailbox in anticipation. She said ‘it’s fun, like a little game’.”

These Byers’ ladies are a beta dream come true. They have been actively blowing through our beta tasks and calling and writing to share feedback. We’re about to release a couple of fixes to bugs they found and based on their direct feedback, we’re already adding a feature that will help them manage their text replies faster.

More beta news to come so stay tuned.

We’ve all heard the maxim that “Keeping a customer is five times less expensive than finding a new one.”

The Wall Street Journal reinforced this point of view with an article today In Tough Times, Companies Coddle Their Regulars

So why does it seem like there’s so many more start-ups focusing on helping local businesses find new customers, rather than make the most of the ones they have?

It’s grossly lopsided: new yellow page competitors spring up daily. Vertical directories for restaurants and clothing stores and malls and so forth; sites to help a consumer find new shoes or the new pair of jeans in the mall ; coupon sites by the dozens; ratings and reviews; every conceivable type of online marketing tool promising to aggregate every last empty spot on the web just for your business.

Don’t get me wrong. We know that local and all types of small businesses spend in order tens of billions in advertising to attract new customers. The average small business spends $2,500 on marketing per year. Undoubtedly, this a big chunk of money and money that could be spent more efficiently with higher impact.

Yet I don’t think that’s the only answer. I think another, overlooked piece of the puzzle is that marketers looking to help small businesses, just don’t get them. It’s a lot easier to want to build some sexy consumer directory than it is to understand how the cash register is “z’ed” out at the end of the day. Or how a small business owner procrastinates entering the emails from the guestbook into excel every day (or more likely, week or month.)

At Fanminder, we recognized the untapped value in driving more repeat business – focusing on your customers and not chasing the next new one. When we visited local businesses and sat and listened to their problems, we heard how they all kept lits of their customers, but they didn’t do anything with them. Instead, they told us of how they chased prospects through all types of marketing – and how those programs don’t deliver the goods, cost too much, and as a result, they move on to the next fad.

The customer list is usually many lists, scattered around. It goes unutilized because it’s just too hard for the owner to create marketing. Outsourcing it is too expensive. So the owner defaults to conducting marketing based on which advertiser walks in the door today.

Naturally, Fanminder changes this. When an owner can sit down and in 10 seconds or less be instantly communicating with their customer, that’s a pretty big revolution vs. the same ‘ol way of marketing. And when those text messages can be tracked the program’s success measured, now you’re talking the language of the owner.

It’s official. We launched our beta at 7pm tonight. After eight months of relentless problem solving, networking, working to build a top-notch team of missionaries, and countless debates of misplaced pixels, lost text messages and other sundry product-related issues, Fanminder is live.

The last 2 weeks were weeks I prefer not to repeat but will likely remain par for the course in a start-ups’ life. We would release to QA, test, find some bugs, and go through the whole cycle again. Once in a while we even released to production and said ‘ooops!’ After 2 weeks I almost threw my iPhone through my glass doors in my home office.

Alas, this too shall pass.

For tonight, everything smells sweeter. The air is crisp, and gently breezing into my office. I have a shit-eating grin on and I think I’m going to go outside and smoke a big ol fat stogy. It really does feel like it’s supposed to – a fantastic, seminal event. Our baby came home.

Looking back on the past eight months, for me, the overwhelming emotion is one of relentlessness against numerous obstacles. Mostly, it’s a story of working at the hip with two relentless co-founders, assembling the right team “on the bus” and getting to know a whole new group of people in my life, from co-founders, to team members, investors and a slew of other CEOs.

Speaking about what it personally feels like, leaving the corporate world and co-founding a business is only what you make of it. At AccountNow and Intuit before that, one’s network and daily rythym is built-in. Your whole world revolves around your company, employees, and processes. However, venturing on your own, your world is only what YOU make of it. If you personally want a fulfilling career, It’s up to you to populate it with meaningful work, a product that you can proud of, customers who want what you have to offer, partners who are interested in working with you, and a team who cares about what you do.

I think the easiest way to make it meaningful is to not do it alone. So a big part of the new life is being wedded at the hip to Fanminder’s co-founder, Tracy. Working with a co-founder is so different than working with ‘colleagues’ at a bigger company. Mostly, it’s about a huge amount of passion and energy, attempting to split up a crush of work, and alot of more involvement in every aspect of well, everything. We never say “goodnight” and go home, we say “speak with you later online.” So it’s alot deeper.

And it’s rapid-learning for me. Tracy has been through this before – multiple times. She easily counter-acts any lingering ‘big-company-itis’ I may have. Each day she role models how to rapidly prioritize and get things done with few resources. And since she’s a woman she brings this other side of relating to issues and discussing things that, well, let’s just say, the male gene isn’t so great at

I’m often reminded of that TV show “The Starter Wife” (I might have watched a couple of episodes, Debra Messing is super!) After her divorce she needs to go out and make a new life for herself, not as the wife of Mr Rich Bigshot, but as a no-namer. And she does. And she’s happy.

Well me too. A big leap into the unknown and eight months later there’s no revenue yet, few customers, and humungous unknowns in front of us. But there’s a new and very fulfilling life filled with so many great new people, friends, and a co-founder. I’m making this new life for myself all on my own, from scratch. No other CEO, boss or corporate environment made it for me. I did.

Time to smoke that stogy.