About 18 months ago, Kim (my wife) decided to start her own business. We had been looking far & wide for places where our then 1-year-old could be triggered to move, jump, run, and climb and with her background in physical education, she decided to fill the gap herself. We had been brainstorming on ideas, branding, location, and formats for months and it all started to crystalize. The next step was building a website.

User research

After convincing her to start with a simple teaser website, I started looking at our options to build the real thing. With a history in web development, it was tempting to just build the whole thing from scratch. I started dusting off my PHP skills and even considered learning React or Vue for a moment. And then we started discussing what the site needed to look like.

It didn’t take long before the feature requests started streaming in. Straightforward at first, like easy-to-edit pages, a contact form, maybe a news section. Responsive of course as most people were (and are) going to visit it on their phone. A mailing list, obviously. Great SEO. Oh, and a reservation system with a calendar where she can plan 9-week courses as well as single lessons and allows users to update or cancel reservations. And BOOM, off the charts!

I tried to convince her to lower the priority of certain things. The mailing list was more of a “could”, people use social media and would follow via Instagram or Facebook anyway. The news section could wait as there was no news yet. And for the first month or so she could just ask me to edit the pages until we had the editor in place, that wouldn’t save me a lot of effort but the impact was low as well. The reservation was non-negotiable, however. Understandingly so: the amount of work that would go into keeping track of emails, making sure everybody had paid, having an idea of how many spots were still open for a given moment…

Building an MVP on a budget

Given the limited amount of time I had (about 1 month) and the fact that I had a full-time job “on the side”, I realized that it was impossible. My rough estimations were pretty reasonable until I understood it all involved a calendar. I still wake up bathing in sweat when I dream about the calendar we had at Teamleader from time to time, so I decided to look into SaaS options. Planyo was one I knew about and offered pretty much everything we needed, but the pricing was steep for a startup that had yet to… start up. I started looking into Wix and… well… it covered at least 80% of the needs at a very reasonable price. I decided to give myself 4 hours to set up something. Being a big fan of the fail-fast approach I decided to leave the basic stuff like the contact form and web pages aside (assuming they’d be ok or manageable) and dive straight into the booking system. And surely, it had its limitations. I contacted Wix’s support multiple times and got a “no, sorry, we don’t support that use case” just as many times. But we found workarounds and when we didn’t it was not a dealbreaker. The booking functionality in Wix answered the most critical needs and setting up payments was trivial too. We had a winner. Maybe not for the long run, but at least this would buy me time to find, or build, a more permanent solution.

The proof of the pudding…

I wrapped up the website in about 2 weekends and some evenings max. We even had the mailing list in place already. Setting up bookable sessions was easy too. And then we started bumping into the first skeletons

Kim wanted to offer a discount when you booked 5 sessions at once. While this functionality existed in the Wix Shop module, it did not exist for the Booking module. I called support again and we found a way around it with a member feature that exists in Wix. It wasn’t perfect but it did the trick.

Things went fine during the summer and the time to launch for real came nearer. This meant people would book weekly sessions instead of separate ones. We knew this was possible with the booking system. What we never tested was grouping them by category. We soon found out that wasn’t supported.

We called support again and got another “no, sorry, we …”. So I started looking for a workaround and found one in the form of the Shop module. So we ended up going for a combination of both. This meant that Kim needed to update the available slots for the single sessions whenever she sold a subscription. It was far from perfect but it would work.

Just make it work

And it did. And it still does. For the past year, Kim has been running Toddle & Tumble using this setup. We tweaked a few things and launching a new course is now pretty straightforward. Our stress level surely dropped by a lot since that first launch. Sure, we bumped into some other issues, but we managed to make it work using no-code integrations like Make.com. Currently, I’m even looking into something like that to replace the manual work of updating the available slots.

Will we stay with Wix forever? Probably not. Maybe she’ll have multiple locations one day. And there still are some things that aren’t optimal. Things Planyo probably does a lot better. But for the past 15 months, Kim has managed her business, received payments, and organized classes with little to no hiccups.