Smooth Operator

A little more than a week ago, I asked a question on r/smallbusiness: "how are you guys writing SOPs?" Surprisingly it got a lot of engagement, and the most upvoted post talked about: "flow diagrams." The point was - no one reads documents, but people do follow basic visual cues.

That was a huge insight for me and an immediate pain point: people were manually creating drag / drop process flows. Incredibly time consuming work. So I built out a feature that takes the contents of any SOP document and creates a visual flow chart using AI, complete with accurate checks, wait times, loops, etc. I even managed to bring my generation cost to below $0.05.

Super excited to ship this feature, especially because many of the legacy SOP creators have nothing even remotely close to this. Any tips for getting the word out there?

I think we (at least, I) fall into the temptation that adding features is good for users. However, today I did something non-intuitive and I think beneficial.

Here's what the main functionality looked like on the operatesmoothly.com before. Notice the sliders at the bottom. I thought they might be useful - e.g., cleaning an espresso machine can be a simple SOP, maintaining a hydraulic press might require technical details.

But instead, it just confused users! Because all our users are new, they didn't have any reference point, so they just picked arbitrary values. I decided that it was hindering conversion and understandability of the product.

Take a look - I removed, and now there's only 3 mandatory fields to fill out instead of 5. I'm optimistic it'll improve conversion AND I'll add back the sliders as a feature in the "Pro" subscription package I'll launch later (presumably, the users that buy that will already be power users).

Finally got a legit sale! Step 1 in a 10,000 mile journey. Thank you to everyone that inspired and supported me, we're just getting started!

I recently read Clayton Christensen's book Competing Against Luck. Key takeaway: the "Jobs to Be Done" philosophy - individuals "hire" products that fulfill a particular "job" that needs to be done. Think V8 and getting your vegetables without actually eating vegetables. Or old school Volvo and car safety.

After reading that, I thought about Smooth Operator. Take a look at the old Hero copy:

It was focused on helping "scale" a business. But is that really the right audience for my SOP generator app? I talked to o3 about who I'm really targeting and we settled on a specific, clear use case for a specific person: the overworked manager who knows they need SOPs but just doesn't have the time to write them. Simple and easy.

Take a look at the new copy.

Rather than some vague copy about scaling a business, it's focused on solving one specific pain point! I'd love your thoughts? Is it good/bad? Let's see how this affects conversion / interest!

Hi friends! I've built out an MVP, gotten a few testers, and everything works well. I'm looking for a good way to market to small biz. I understand it's a hard market to crack, but I would love any insights or tips. Thanks :)