What people don’t know is that prior to building our software, I spent close to 16 years working in teams using a plethora of different platforms and solutions that were knitted together and overcomplicated for getting shit done.
The common thread, was they ALWAYS involved crossing between them to run project updates, client updates, working with the developers, then tracking my time, running reports, etc.
When I wasn’t paying the bill, I was like okay.. this is over-complicated (and expensive), but I will do as I am told.
When I started my own agency, I opted for a combination of options, as I set out to do things differently and frankly more streamlined as I hated being asked “What are you working on”, “How much time did you spend on…” etc.
After a year of running my own business, ( and racking up $17k in software subscriptions for 8 staff) I looked at what we were doing and I stopped. They were good platforms BUT* they were all developed for big corporates, with missing key features and elements, and didn’t even consider small marketing agencies as users.
In a nutshell, this is how I approached building CanTicket over 3 years.
1️⃣ 2020 I built a time-tracking app to see exactly how much time was spent on projects to work out what was / and wasn’t viable. Then unsubscribed to a platform which was about $2.5USD per person, per month*
2️⃣ 2021 I then worked on the ability to request a task, work and assign it to a person and department with the ability to run a report of the time spent on the project.
Then I unsubscribed to a project management platform for about $12 USD per person per month*
3️⃣ 2022 I realised I was already adding in my client information to be able to make the ticket/ job so I then turned my client info area into a simple CRM. Rather than running another platform with all my client info on it. Then I unsubscribed to my sales CRM $69USD per month
4️⃣ As I started to scale, I needed to recruit but I didn’t want to give access to all my clients and projects to an outsider for a project, so I created a contractor’s access. Where they had a restricted view of inside the business and could only see and work on the task they were assigned to.
This is * 💰 Priceless 🕰 * I saved hours of back-and-forth headaches communicating.
5️⃣ As the business started to grow, I found clients were texting, calling after hours, and asking for work to be done. I am not sure about you, but if I was asked for something at 11 pm on a Saturday night, guaranteed I would forget come Monday. So I built in the ability for clients to make requests direct into the ticketing system, allowing them to follow the work, as it was accepted (or denied) 😝, and move from pending to active and then done.
Since then, there have been invoicing, and other elements in the platform built in to streamline workflow.
