So you are looking at getting your bathroom renovated and check out Google for businesses that offer this service in your area. You come across several of them with good reviews – but here is the thing – [su_highlight background=”#fffff00″]none of these businesses give you an actual quote on their website[/su_highlight].
In each case, you have to submit your contact details and wait for someone to call you. Or, you need to call the number provided on the website and reach someone from the business. Not really a smooth way to do things, right?
Wouldn’t it be better if you could give a few details about your requirement and get a quote right then and there? Of course, businesses are not going to do this because this robs them of the ability to capture the lead’s information.
However, [su_highlight background=”#fffff00″]what if you could allow the visitor to enter their requirements and capture their contact details before offering a tentative quote?[/su_highlight] Again, this is not going to work for all businesses since there are [su_highlight background=”#fffff00″]too many variables in the costing process[/su_highlight]. And that’s exactly why many such service businesses don’t have a pricing page like SaaS businesses do.
But it is a no brainer that having an ‘instant quote’ page can significantly increase your conversions. A visitor to a business website already has several competitors open on other browser tabs. When every other website has a phone number of a lead capture form for the visitor to take action on, the one website with an instant quote feature garners the maximum engagement.
There is another upside to having an instant quote section on a business website. It allows the business owner to anchor the price. You can now call the buyer and offer an attractive discount to bring them onboard.
How do you build something like this?
Building a tool like this is kind of similar to the ‘MakeMyCalculator’ business idea that I had discussed earlier. Essentially, you define the variables and calculate the cost based on user inputs.
Let’s go back to the example of bathroom renovation. A user offering this as a service will base their quote on several factors. Something like this:
- Square foot area of the bathroom
- What kind of tile to be used for the bathroom
- Do you need a new bath tub
- What bath tub brand/model to use
This is not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea. According to this link, bathroom tiles cost between $14 to $55 per square feet with installation. If the user has a 75 square feet bathroom and is looking for a budget renovation, the quote for installing tiles could be around $1050.
The work flow for creating a widget could look something like this.
Once the user has entered all the questions, they may proceed to formula. A formula for this calculation could be something like
(Tiles you need)x(Square-foot-area) + (Bathroom tub model).
[su_highlight background=”#fffff00″]Once the formula has been input, the system will provide the user with an embedding script that can then be placed on the user’s website.[/su_highlight]
You may add more features to the script like conditional questions (in the example here, you only ask for the model of the bathroom tub if the visitor does need one installed), changing the text of the submit button, adding A/B testing features on the CTA, and so on. But a basic version like above should be good to get you started.
But hold on, the objective of the widget is to capture lead details from the business user’s website. Since the target market for this business is local service businesses (mostly), it makes sense to capture the visitor’s phone number rather than email address.
This is how the widget will look like on the website.
When the user enters the details and clicks on ‘Get Quote’, you ask them to verify their contact details
Upon entering the OTP and clicking Submit, the user will now see the quote
You may pass on these details instantly over an SMS to your customer. You may also choose to have a leads section on the website where all the leads generated (with their service requirement) are displayed.
The business can now choose to get back to their leads with attractive discounts if they do not hear back in more than an hour or two.
What does it cost to build this website
The first version of this site does not need to have frills like sign up forms and payment gateway. If you know enough to access the hosting backend (Cpanel, PHPMyAdmin, etc.), you can create new user accounts directly every time you sign up a user. Payment can be set up with Paypal checkout buttons. If you plan on outsourcing this project,you can avoid all of this for now.
I work with some really low cost developers to build MVP versions of my business ideas and in my experience, it should not cost you more than $200 to build a basic version of this script?
(Need help building this project? Write to me and I can help you out)
In addition to this, here are some costs you will incur.
Hosting – Shared hosting works well for an app like this at least in the early stages of your business. But here’s the thing – your embed script gets fired every time one of your many customer websites get a visitor. More importantly, a lot of your customers might place your script prominently on the top fold of their website homepage. It is very important for your site to not have a downtime. It is better to make use of a dedicated server; or atleast a VPS for this purpose.
Here is a quick comparison of the many popular VPS services in the market today
Generally speaking, the cost of a VPS is somewhere between $11 to $120 a month.
Phone Verification – Your script sends an OTP to the visitor’s mobile phone and then passes the verified lead as an SMS to the customer. There are a number of different transactional SMS providers that you can choose from. With services like TXT180, it is free to send up to 100 messages – that is enough to get your first customers on board. TXT180 also lets you set up ‘drip marketing’ campaigns – so if you want to automatically follow up after a day or two, you can do it with little effort. The smallest plans cost about $14.95 per month for 500 messages.
Here is a summary of the costs:
Hosting on Namecheap : $11.88 per month
SMS setup on TXT180 : $14.95 per month
Development costs : Approximately $200
[su_highlight background=”#fffff00″]That is a one-time cost of $200 and a recurring cost of $26.93 per month.[/su_highlight]
How do you market this service
The target market for this project are local service businesses that are not too tech savvy. Neither are they going to be looking up relevant search terms on Google, nor are you going to see high response rate for your cold emails. Cold calls can work, but then it is not easy to get your customers to sign up or set up their widgets.
There are two ways to do this:
One way is to [su_highlight background=”#fffff00″]reach out to the design agencies[/su_highlight] who handle the development and marketing of your client websites. You can find it on the footer of many websites, like this one.
You can reach out to these agencies and could possibly sign up several clients with just one outreach (since these agencies work with multiple such businesses).
Alternately, you can offer to set the widget up on the client’s website for one flat fee. Setting one site up does not take more than a few minutes and you can charge as much as $50 to $100 per installation.
How much money can you make with this business idea?
This business idea has very little ongoing dev work (other than client set up that you charge money for anyway). All your efforts can thus be directed completely on marketing your service.
How much money you make depends completely on how much you charge. You could charge a monthly subscription fee or a per lead fee. Charging per lead should have higher conversion rates, but then it is not commensurate to your monthly expenses.So it is something I would avoid.
Subscription fee could be based on the user’s traffic numbers (since pageviews determine your server load). But given that most local service businesses have low traffic numbers (you will hardly see a website with more than a few thousand pageviews a month), it is good to go with a flat monthly fee.
This could be anywhere between $25 to $50 per month. You may of course go higher than this later on when you have inbound customers. But when you are reaching out for customers, it is good to keep your fee lower.
For this service, you could reach the top five ranking websites for various business keywords (since these businesses have substantial organic traffic and these businesses are thus likely to consider investing in conversion optimization).
Targeting businesses that advertise on Google for local business keywords is also likely to fetch a high conversion. In fact, this is a better target market since these businesses already spend hundreds of dollars to acquire leads and would be happy to spend a few more dollars to improve conversion rates.
Assuming a modest conversion of 10 customers in the first month, you could make
(10 customers * $25/month) + (10 customers * $50 per setup) = $750.
Let’s assume a dropout rate of 2 customers per month. Your monthly income is likely to be thus:
Month 1 : $750 (10 customers overall)
Month 2 : $950 (18 customers overall)
Month 3 : $1150 (26 customers overall)
Month 4 : $1350 (34 customers overall)
Month 5 : $1550 (42 customers overall)
Month 6 : $1750 (50 customers overall)
Month 7 : $1950 (58 customers overall)
Month 8 : $2150 (66 customers overall)
Month 9 : $2350 (74 customers overall)
Month 10 : $2550 (82 customers overall)
Month 11 : $2750 (90 customers overall)
[su_highlight background=”#fffff00″]Month 12 : $2950 (98 customers overall)[/su_highlight]
The numbers provided here are highly conservative considering I have not accounted for the exponential growth of such businesses (word of mouth tends to be higher. Also, signing up agencies can get you more than 10 customers a month).
With a little more investment into marketing your product, this can easily be a five digit monthly revenue business in a year’s time.
