The newsletter: only when there is something to say
I have one rule for the newsletter: if I wouldn't tell it to a friend, it doesn't go out. That's why some months nothing goes out.
Leer más →Foxnice Booking and Foxnice Restaurant: the same idea, twice
Foxnice Restaurant started with a mass email, a discount and a date that doesn't exist. Foxnice Booking, with years of broken bookings. Both ended up as the same idea.
In November 2022 we sent a mass email to restaurants.
A new website, an online menu, online orders and table bookings. For €680 instead of €1,250. "Only until 31/11/2022".
There is no 31st of November.
That was, more or less, how Foxnice Restaurant was born.
The replies
The ones I still have in the inbox are a small lesson in humility.
Auto-replies confirming a booking nobody had asked for. A hotel letting us know it was closed for works until next season. And a business that wrote to us, very politely, asking to be unsubscribed: they had nothing to do with restaurants.
Generic email. Generic list. A discount with an impossible deadline. If a client showed it to me, I'd tell them not to send it.
But the idea behind it wasn't bad. It was just told badly.
Meanwhile, in bookings
Foxnice Booking went the other way. No campaigns. Years of rural tourism clients asking us for the same things over and over.
That guests are only charged when they check in. That the calendar works before the payments. That the engine doesn't charge for children who don't exist, which also happened to us.
Every client wanted their own version. And for years we built it for them. By hand. One at a time.
Until we realised we were building the same house with a different colour front door. The problems were the same. Only the logo changed.
When you build the same thing for the third time, it isn't a project anymore. It's a product you refuse to see.
So we took what kept repeating and turned it into something a business can use without commissioning it from scratch. And at some point we stopped customising the engine, with one exception.
The same idea, twice
A rural guesthouse and a restaurant look like different businesses. Inside, they have the same problem.
Someone wants to book. Someone has to get paid. And in the middle there's a person who already works too many hours and doesn't want to learn another tool.
Foxnice Booking and Foxnice Restaurant are that: what we learned by building, breaking and fixing, turned into something you can use the next day.
We don't guess what a restaurant or a guesthouse needs. We've spent years hearing them ask for it.
That's the advantage. Not the discount. And definitely not the deadline.
P.S. If anyone finds a 31st of November on the calendar, let me know. I have an offer that's still pending.