Four weeks away from Outpost is not the story I wanted to tell. But it is where things stand. This week I was thinking about how often small businesses underestimate the hidden work behind new capabilities. A shop adds embroidery. An office hires a new employee. Sherpa adds Quick Quote. In each case, the visible change is just the beginning. The real work is everything the change touches.
Recently a friend in the industry added embroidery to their shop. On the surface, this might seem as simple as ordering up the equipment, waiting for it to land and then turning it into a money-making machine. The idea is simple. The operational reality usually is not. There's of course the big question of who's going to run the machine. What's the plan to get artwork digitized to a format the machines can use? Who's going to take the time to order and keep supplies in stock? What’s the plan for when the unexpected happens, it’s 1 AM, and you just broke your last needle? For a small business, this can easily be a new operational load that can disrupt a shop's daily rhythm.
Office teams run into the same thing when they hire someone new. There are résumé reviews, interviews, negotiations, and of course, training and onboarding. Day-to-day business can be impacted for weeks. Hiring looks like adding help. In reality, it temporarily creates more work before it creates more capacity.
The new Quick Quote feature in Sherpa is turning out to be a similar endeavor. The real insight is that it's not just a screen. It touches the pricing engine, customer discounts, PDF quote generation, and now quote delivery. Each intersection is an opportunity to see what the next weak link might be. For Quick Quote, it's email. This brings us to the new feature I've alluded to, a Ministry of Bits Mail Gateway.
For those of you who have been following Sherpa from the beginning, you'll recall that it originally landed with a one-time license. Email was solely through your primary email client due to the ongoing costs associated with hosted email sending without ongoing revenue. Many shops were looking for a lower cost of entry to Sherpa, so last fall the model changed to a monthly subscription. With this change, it opened up the possibility for hosted email sending. When the business model changes, the product possibilities change with it.
Outpost is planned to use this hosted email system upon launch for shop and customer emails. Building it for Sherpa first was not planned, but Quick Quote made the gap hard to ignore. Sherpa will be the proving ground with Outpost being the beneficiary.
A quote is only useful if it reaches a customer clearly and quickly. Email deliverability in Sherpa is something that has always been ripe for improvement. Quick Quote forced the issue with Outpost on its heels. Sometimes a detour is just a detour. Other times, it reveals work that needed to happen anyway.
Have you ever delayed one project because another project exposed work they both needed?
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