Business Tip
Saved Replies
Whether you use helpdesk software or just your email client to handle customer support, saved replies are worth investing time into.
I’m using saved replies for everything. They are a real superpower to quickly help your customers without spending the entire day on them.
- Sending a code snippet?
- Asking for a staging environment?
- Need to handle a refund?
Write a reply and save it.
I have hundreds of pre-written replies in my helpdesk with different variations, tones, and languages (English and German). I’m using Helpscout as my helpdesk software which isn’t well suited to structure these replies, so I had to build my own categorization logic.
Here is what works for me: product – topic – specifics
Here are a couple of examples:
- Passster – General – Ask for System Status
- Simply Static – License – Disable Basic Auth
- Agy – Sofort Ident – Verification Request
Quick Links:
Business Story
You may (or may not) have heard from my little static hosting service called SimplyCDN. Initially, this project was developed for a big enterprise client in Germany (also one of the biggest hosting companies).
I spent 250 hours on that project to make everything work for their websites, team, and processes. By the end of December 2022, we had a stable version supporting almost everything they needed.
Still, instead of finally bringing everything to life, they became silent – not unusual for enterprise clients. I decided to wait for two months before getting in touch again. Guess what happened? Nothing. I contacted them over and over again and never got a response.
Later, I met the former CTO of the company in Berlin and asked him what the problem was, and he told me that the entire team had been replaced (including the CTO and CEO).
The new CEO had no interest in pursuing the collaboration. Now I had a pretty complex solution and zero customers, great.
Instead of throwing it away, I spent another month removing everything too specific and making it publicly available for everyone to use. It’s not huge at the moment, but it’s growing, and I’m happy to provide the missing piece (hosting) to my little Simply Static ecosystem.
Oh, by the way. The enterprise customer has a bug bounty program and already had to pay $7500 in 2023 as security researchers found some vulnerabilities because of missing updates in their WordPress installation.
Business Idea
Migration as a Service (MaaS?😅)
WordPress powers 43% of the web, and we all know that. There are hundreds of more or less specialized WordPress hosting companies.
We often forget all the other hosts that can run WordPress more or less but lack many features like staging, SSH access, WP-CLI support, and backups.
I don’t have specific statistics about that, but you can imagine thousands of WordPress websites needing to be migrated from one hosting provider to another almost every day.
Some hosting providers offer migration services, but even these are pretty limited, and a freelancer/agency is often involved in handling that to ensure everything works in the end. Offer a migration as a service for freelancers and agencies and build yourself step-by-step guides for all kinds of different combinations.
How To:
If I did that, I would use Transmit (or any other FTP client) that supports server-to-server uploads and get the pro version of WPMigrate to migrate the database.
Why? It’s reliable even for larger websites on less powerful hosts because of the plugin’s background processing and retry mechanisms.
Pricing:
Make it a one-off pricing model without a subscription. You want to make it appealing for freelancers and agencies and benefit from ongoing requests and word-of-mouth effects here.
I leave the details up to you, but to give you some numbers:
- Standard Website (max 500MB storage + 100MB Database)- $50
- Media-heavy Website (max 2GB storage, 250 MB database) – $150
Marketing:
Content Marketing and cold outreach should work best here.
Write tutorials about migrating from one specific hoster to another to grab all kinds of long-tail combinations.
- Migrate WordPress from GoDaddy to Pantheon
- Migrate WordPress from Bluehost to Kinsta
- Migrate WordPress from wordpress.com to self-hosted
Use a newsletter tool and manually find agencies and freelancers in your area (and expand later) and write a snappy e-mail about what you can offer them.
This will involve some iteration to get the pitch right, but getting feedback and improving as you go shouldn’t be too hard.
Quick Links:
That’s it for the first newsletter.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Have a wonderful day, and feel free to discuss everything mentioned with me and others on Twitter, by e-mail, or anywhere you like!