Ecommerce seems like old hat these days.
There are so many online platforms for creating a storefront to sell products, you almost lose track.
But what if you’re not selling a product?
What if you are a coach, consultant, therapist, attorney, yoga instructor or other professional who is instead selling access to your time and expertise?
How can you create a professional web presence that integrates your calendar, services offered, FAQs, policies, testimonials and a payment gateway, all in one place?
With an amazingly powerful online platform called Book Like A Boss.
My guest this week is Nachum Kligman, author, podcaster, CEO and creator of Book Like A Boss, who will be joining us from his office in Beit Shemesh, Israel.
I very seldom do product endorsements but I am a long-time Book Like A Boss user and, because I believe in in it so strongly, also an affiliate partner.
If you’d like a two-week free trial and would like to help support Radio Free Enterprise, please click this link: https://partners.booklikeaboss.com/429.html
Otherwise, please feel free to visit the Book Like A Boss homepage to start your free trial.
What follows is a computer-generated transcription of our entire conversation. Please excuse any typos!
Frank Felker 00:22
Thank you, Dude Walker. Yes, indeed I am Frank Felker. Welcome back to Radio Free Enterprise. My guest today is Nachum Kligman. Nachum is an author, podcaster, and CEO of Book Like A Boss, joining us today from Beit Shemesh Israel. Nachum welcome to the program.
Nachum Kligman 00:42
Thank you, Frank, thanks so much for having me.
Frank Felker 00:44
I am excited you are here not come because I am a longtime Book Like A Boss, customer and user. And I think that the platform is amazing. But rather than me trying to explain to our guests and our audience exactly what it is, I wanted to start out with asking you to give us your elevator speech, what is Book Like A Boss?
Nachum Kligman 01:09
Sure. Well, so Book Like A Boss is basically a booking pages builder, that will allow you to build landing pages that are customized for your use. Basically, whether it’s for booking appointments, booking group events, booking multiple day events, booking a webinar, booking classes, we have different templates that allow you to manage all your bookings for all your business needs in one space. And of course, we have several integrations that make that you know, all the better.
Frank Felker 01:40
And I do want to talk about the integrations because I think that’s one of the most amazing features, although it’s kind of hard to narrow down to the most amazing features. So I want to make one thing clear, I don’t do a lot of product endorsements or affiliate offers or that kind of thing. But I want to make it clear that I am a user and fan of Book Like A Boss, and I am an affiliate partner a Book Like A Boss. And you may see a link somewhere near this video or audio that offers you a free two-week trial. And if so, it’s an affiliate link for me, you don’t have to click on that one, you can go right to Book Like A Boss dot com. But if you do and you choose to move forward, you’ll be helping support the podcast and I appreciate it. Now, with that having been said, I’m not sure I’ve even scratched the surface of all the things that Book Like A Boss can do. And I want to make clear, as you just said, when you say book, you mean like booking a meeting, booking an appointment, scheduling, you know, even so much I’ve seen therapists that use Book Like A Boss. So one thing that I’ve noticed that it’s almost as if for a consultant or a therapist, or someone who sells their services by the hour Book Like A Boss could almost replace their website. Is that a fair statement?
Nachum Kligman 02:59
Absolutely. In fact, we actually have had many customers that once they saw the power of what Book Like A Boss is able to do is that they got rid of their other websites, because everything they wanted to do was able to do a Book Like A Boss. And truth is, you know, when you have a business, you’re focused on one thing, and that is sales. And if you’re selling a service book, like a boss is optimized to help you get that sale. So if you’re, you know, so you don’t need the extra fluff, you have all the important stuff, right on one page, tells your customers who you are, what you do, you could show a video, your frequently asked questions, and of course, all the products and services that you offer. So they could go through your catalogue of things that you offer and choose the one that fits their model, find a calendar time that that they’re open for and click and pay for it all in one place.
Frank Felker 03:50
And one of the things, so many things, but one of them is it integrates directly with PayPal and stripe. And so clients who want to book an appointment can pay right there. And the system can make it that they don’t they’re not allowed to book unless they pay that, you know, you make it so easy. Was that a difficult integration to put together?
Nachum Kligman 04:16
Well, it was one of the basic foundation integrations is to do stripe and square and PayPal. Because you know, when it comes to being a coach or becoming a service provider, we want to help you run your business and not have to waste time, whether it’s you know, in this particular case, chasing money, right? If somebody wants your business, someone wants to work for you, with you, you know, let them pay you upfront that way you get it out of the way, and you don’t have to worry about trying to collect fees that you may be owed.
Frank Felker 04:46
Well, and you know, that’s an important point that there’s another sort of gateway aspect, that Book Like A Boss offers, which is that you can prevent someone from booking something on your account. Islander, until after they’ve completed a questionnaire, or checked a box that says you understand they understand your terms and conditions, or what have you. What this brings me to is, what was your original vision? What was the impetus? What problem were you trying to solve when you first came up with this idea?
Nachum Kligman 05:22
So that’s a great question, Frank. So I’ll tell you, like we mentioned when you introduced me, is that I wrote a book, I’m an author, and I had a podcast. And what happened was, when I my book was released, my podcast is released, I started getting people, you know, left, right and center contacted me, Hey, can I pick your brain to have a cup of coffee? Can I take you out for lunch? And it just became it? I said, Well, I charged my time. Oh, how much you charge? I charge $300 an hour. Oh, wow. What does that include? That was just a lot of wasted time. And I said, I wish there was a solution, where when the first point of contact, I can just send somebody one link. And they can go to that link. And they can learn more about me see what my services are, and book it and pay for it all in one page. And you know, there are hundreds of calendar type apps. But there was nothing that did everything in one place. And so I tried building an app on WordPress. And it was a nightmare when one thing tried to one thing was updated or throw off something else. And so I was going to hire a professional web developer to build it for me, and he wanted like $3,000 to do it. And I just said, There’s got to be, you know, a better way. But, you know, a couple weeks later, a friend of mines sister, who was a misuse, she reached out to her brother and said, Hey, is there any type of software out there, I’m not technically inclined, I’m just looking for a simple way that could say, hey, these are the massages I offer. Here’s my calendar, that people booked me and pay for it all in one place. And my friend knew that it wasn’t the technology. And he asked me if I knew of such software. And that’s when the light bulb went off. I said, you know, what, if I as a business coach has this need, and here’s some as soon as this need, right, the gig economy continues to take off, I bet there are 1000s of people out there 10s to hundreds of 1000s millions of people out there, they’re looking for an easy solution to be able to sell their services online. And once I had the idea, I approached a good friend of mine, who is a developer, my co-founder and partner, David, and he loved the idea. And we decided to start building it.
Frank Felker 07:32
Well, you know it, there’s, you have so many videos online, and I encourage people to search for Book Like A Boss on YouTube, you’ll be amazed at the number of videos that are there. And I don’t normally on Radio Free Enterprise, do like a screen share and do a walkthrough of a website. But I feel as though at a certain level, we’re doing our viewers a disservice. Because they’re probably like, Well, what does this thing look like? You know, how does it work? So maybe a good way would be if you could share one or more case studies or success stories, you talked about your need as a business coach. And that makes sense. And I love that, you know, sure, I’ll be happy to talk to you. But first, you know, you got to pay me. And the same thing could be true, with a, with a therapist with a hairstylist with a, you know, everything that could be imagined. But can you give us an example of one of your clients whose business was transformed by using Book Like A Boss?
Nachum Kligman 08:33
Absolutely. I mean, there’s one fantastic, I mean, as many fantastic stories. And you know, you talk about the different use cases that we have. And we’ve grown to over 35,000 users in over 100 countries. So it really runs the gamut of all different types of enterprises and use cases. But we recently had a story that was just mind blowing to me. And, you know, the whole team was cheering for him. Basically, you know, before the holiday season, you could do the COVID, a lot of things have changed. And this entrepreneur, he said, You know what, you know, people are not able to go to the malls, and bring their kids to sit on Santa’s lap. What if I created a virtual Santa experience where you can book time with Santa, and you can have a 10-minute call, you know, with Santa one on one. And he used our platform he was already familiar with using our platform for some other businesses. His wife took ballet classes, so she had her own account. And he had his own account, but he created another account to use specifically for this project. And he did more than $30,000 in business in three weeks. Wow. totally sold. The time slots for this, you know, book a time a Santa.
Frank Felker 09:45
You know, and, Boy, that’s a great story and I had not heard about that. So many things occurred to me as a result of that one is must have been easy for the customer to integrate with to figure out how to use or otherwise, he wouldn’t have booked all those. The other thing is It shows that it really ramps up how much volume you can process. Because it takes away so many of the administrative and transactional costs associated with doing this type of thing. That’s, that’s time oriented. I want to give a quick example, just, I want to talk about the integrations next. But for example, for me personally, when somebody books time, I offer too many people, a 20 minute Ask me anything at no charge. And so when they click on that, not only does it integrate with my Google Calendar, and make sure that it’s only going to book people in spots that are available, and that I have made available, but it also integrates with my zoom account. And so when they go through the process, and I do ask them to complete a short questionnaire of two or three questions, because make sure they’re at least have some level of being serious about this before they move forward. It automatic, and then it sends me the thing that says someone has requested an appointment, I approve the appointment. And automatically it shows up on my Google Calendar, it sends them the book, like a boss invitation that includes all of the YouTube, excuse me, zoom integration, with a link, etc. And it and everything is so smoothly integrated with no bugs. It’s just amazing. Can you speak to some of the other things that Book Like A Boss is integrated with and the cool things that they do?
Nachum Kligman 11:32
Sure. I mean, just because you mentioned that we are one of the top scheduling apps in their marketplace. Oh, no. Kid, and so yeah, and so we weren’t expecting it. But we, you know, due to COVID. And the use of zoom and zoom exploded, it also exploded our sales and our use cases, and, and just made easier for people to use to use us because there were so familiar with zoom already. And so we you know, we had a very tight integration with them almost from the beginning. But we also have recently integrated with Google meat since Google meat is 100% free. And so you can use Book Like A Boss of Google meat, and it works seamlessly, which is fantastic. We mentioned the different payment integrations that we do. And we actually there’s we have a slew of other ones that are coming out over the next 369 months. But one of the more important ones is a I would say is Zapier and I don’t know if your audience is familiar with Zapier, but basically Zapier with a Zapier account, it makes it simple to connect with 1000s of other software’s out there. And so you know, that was also a very important integration that we did early. Because until we could build individual one on one integrations, and integrate with Zapier, you can already give access to 1000s of other software’s for users. And so, you know, it’s been a great success. And, you know, people have been used again, people love it.
Frank Felker 12:57
Yes, I am. I’m familiar with Zapier. And as you mentioned, once that integration is in place, it’s almost like you can integrate with anything. And at that point, the challenge is for the user to creatively find ways to combine Book Like A Boss with these other platforms. Now I’m going to, I’m going to stick the stick the needle in a little bit here, you had mentioned to me that I said to you in our pre-interview meeting, man knock them, I can’t understand how you keep coming up with all of these great new features. And, you know, I know the platform’s doing well, why do you keep coming? You know, I mean, I’m, I’m so old man, I’m not going anywhere. You don’t need to keep coming with this, and this, and this, and this. And I asked you, you know, why do you do that? And, and, you know, as a creative person, myself, I could see where we, you know, an idea comes to knock him, he wants to, you know, throw it out to his team and make it to happen. But you said to me something like, this thing still isn’t what I had in mind way back when five years ago. Can you give us a little peek into what you had in mind five years ago?
Nachum Kligman 14:09
Sure. Basically, yeah. And it’s correct that there’s two different ways to want to start a company one is to be bootstrapped, where basically, you’re using your blood sweat and tears and your own money to build it out. Or another way is to take investments. And, you know, we decided that we did not want to go the venture capital route, we did not want to take large investments, because we really wanted to be the bosses of our own company and our software. And when you take investments, large investments from VCs, then all of a sudden you now have your own boss on top of you, and what was painful experience.
Nachum Kligman 14:44
Yeah, me too. So but the challenge is, is that if without cash, things go a lot slower. You can’t hire the amount of developers you want. But that being said, the original vision of Book Like A Boss over the next couple months, we’re going to be releasing four or five major new features that will finally bring up the first version of what I envisioned, you know, more than five years ago. Wow. And so it’s taken a long time. And, you know, till we got to where we are. But you know, once we finished that first version, about three, four months, that’ll say, Okay, now we’re up now we can start focusing on version two. And, you know, but yeah, I mean, thankfully, we have, you know, our users, we call our users bosses, and, you know, we have over 5000 of them in our Facebook group. And, you know, we listen very closely to our users, and we’re very focused on hearing what they have to say what their needs are. And so we sort of give our attention to what will make the most will make the majority of our bosses happy, when it comes to new features. But there are some things that I’ve been waiting to do for a couple of years. And we still haven’t gotten the chance to do it. But we can see,
Frank Felker 15:56
I’m not going to be able to squeeze those things out of you. But I mean, we’re going to be okay, please.
Nachum Kligman 16:04
Memberships is coming out in the next couple of weeks.
Frank Felker 16:07
Oh, like a membership site type thing?
Nachum Kligman 16:10
Correct. So if you have you run a gym, or you run some sort of group with them that you want to get paid monthly for, wow, that’s coming out. We have Round Robin, for our company plans, we haven’t made our company plans. They’re not live on our site yet. But they are we have about three to 400 companies, businesses that have multiple users that are currently using us. And so we’ll be adding features to our company plans, like round robin bookings, and some and being able to manage and set the branding, so that any new person that you bring onto your team, you could, they’ll be already like off and running with their pages with just minimal customization. So we have some really great things in the works. Shopping Cart is another one, you’ll be able to add products to, to a booking, different pricing for the same product. So if you have, like we have an events feature. So if you run an events, you can charge tickets, you know, right now you have one price, you can charge a ticket to but in the future, if you want to have add multiple people and offered and have different prices for different level seats available to do that from the platform as well. We also Frankie probably seen that we have different skins and different themes. Yes, I was planning on adding multiple skins and themes for for book like a boss that are geared towards specific industries that we have a real estate skin that will be coming out soon, then we’re going to have an Airbnb type of skin and an Uber type of skin. So that it will be easy to, you know, run and create these type of pages, no matter what it is that you’re trying to get booked for.
Frank Felker 17:50
Unbelievable. And you know, I’m glad that you mentioned the Facebook community because I did want to touch on that. I mean, that’s a real value to users like me. You may well have seen this before you and I got to know each other. But I was in there frequently asking questions about what I’m trying to do this. And I’m trying to do that. And it turns out virtually everything I asked, in fact, I think everything I asked was already available. I just didn’t know how to do it. And but so I got immediate feedback from the community and from your guys’ internal support. And I didn’t remember that there were over 5,000 members. That’s a big deal. Is that something that you focused on as far as the value proposition as you were growing the company? Nachum?
Nachum Kligman 18:35
That’s a great question. And I think when we started it and started the group, we weren’t focused on on it being a such a solution for us. But I’d say when you know, when we first had our first few 100 users, and someone will go and ask a question, we weren’t expecting our users to do the customer support. And when they started doing that, and they started answering the questions themselves. That is when we knew we had something here, that’s when we knew we had very special users. And that people really, you know, resonated with the brand and resonated with the product, because someone’s going to take out of their busy schedule to help other people. And you know, you’re creating something great. And that was one of those aha moments for us. And we’re like, Wow, that is pretty awesome. And so we love our users, we love our bosses, you don’t have that that much with so many software companies. You know, I’m not going to mention any competitors, but they don’t usually have a Facebook group where people are out there trying to help each other.
Frank Felker 19:32
That’s right, and that’s one of the biggest problems. All right, I won’t mention any names either. But there’s one name that is probably the best known and the most widely used and I’ve used it myself in the past. And if you’re looking for support or you got a question or you’re like Mom, you’re in luck. And so this is one of the biggest values I see with Book Like A Boss. I want to back step for one question when you said companies with round robin does that mean if a client if a prospect shows goes up and says, I want somebody to call me that whoever’s next in the in the rotation gets that lead. Is that what you mean by that?
Nachum Kligman 20:07
Absolutely. So if you’re, if you’re on our company plan, you get a company page, and on your company page, you’ll be able to have a company calendar, where people can book the company, and then internally, the owner can assign the bookings to specific people, or it can be set out to automatically go to the next available person in line. So if you’re a hair salon, and you have five slots, just to be able to book the company, it’ll just, you know, find who’s next available, and assign that booking to that person.
Frank Felker 20:40
That’s great. And, you know, here’s a, just an off the wall feature that I think is fantastic, is the ability for someone to come to my book, like a boss page. And let’s say I did photo retouching at that was what I do, they could upload a photo through the system to me, or any type of file that I could then work on. I mean, that’s a very unusual feature of where did that feature request come from?
Nachum Kligman 21:10
I think it’s just from that, I mean, one of our core base of users are podcasters. And so when you’re a podcaster, you create a page for people, you know, asking for people to to book time with you. So you want to get that headshot photo, you want to get maybe a bio, etc. And so we saw that people were asking, Hey, can they upload, you know, files for us? And we thought it was a great idea, we added it pretty quickly, you know, the ability to have a forum to have these, as you mentioned a couple times already, that you can ask questions and multiple-choice answers or, you know, it helps define your customer and helps that run them through what type of services that you offer. And just makes it a, you know, a seamless experience for, you know, for both parties. And so, you know, our custom fields is, you know, one of our brightest features that we offer,
Frank Felker 22:03
you know, one feature you offered, and because I’ve been with you, what did we figure it was 2017 or something like that. I don’t remember when this feature came on, to me, it seems fairly recently, but it had to do with the ability to embed videos in my pages. And because now there’s like, unlimited number of pages I can create and unlimited different types of pages that I can create thank you page privacy policy, you name it. In addition to booking page, the ability to have a custom video on each page is a tremendous value. Like on a tutorial I watched recently, where you create a thank you page, and there’s a thank you video. I mean, that’s great. That’s really something. How long ago has the was the video feature added? And do you have any, like, success stories of people using that.
Nachum Kligman 22:59
So I mean, the video feature is one of the earliest features that we gave, I mean, back and we definitely had it back in 2017. with YouTube video, because to me, the whole idea of like a boss was to get you the booking. And so if someone comes to your page, we want them to see a video, we want them to hear your voice, see you and start building that relationship with you. Even if it’s still you know, by watching a video, so that when you get so the idea was to get everything in one place. So you start feeling comfortable the person you say, hey, yeah, that’s somebody I want to work with. You know, the large majority of our users put videos in their pages. One of the, I think one of the things you touched on, which is fairly new, is about a year and a half ago, we released this unlimited pages that you could build, and customize. So you could customize each page with a different look and feel. So let’s say you’re I mean, you’re a podcaster let’s say you’re also an author, you could have one page for your podcasting business, and they could have another page for selling your books. And they can have different colors and different fonts and different themes. And different pictures or and, you know, frequently asked questions or testimonials that are geared specifically towards that specific project. So if you’re creating a webinar, right, so you could have frequently asked questions about that webinar, you could have its own branding for that webinar. Right. So it’s basically you know, giving you unlimited customization, unlimited pages you can create using the software.
Frank Felker 24:27
Yeah, it’s, as you say, it’s unlimited. But at the same time, it’s not overwhelming. Because it’s simple to use. It’s point and click, it’s you can duplicate a page that you’ve already created and then make multiple changes to it. We’re just about out of time, but I wanted to ask you, let’s say somebody decided to move forward, they click my affiliate link or they go to Book Like A Boss and they decide to try the two week trial. What’s like in your experience, what’s the smartest first few steps they should to kind of get their feet wet.
Nachum Kligman 25:02
Yeah, great question. Obviously, you filling out their profile, you know their name, putting up their headshot photo. So that starts to really feel like their own, you know, social booking page. And again, we, you tell them, you just touched on it, we created this to be simple for anyone to use. It’s not like Wix or other website builders or page builders, you have to drag and drop, and you still have to spend hours building it, we created this in a way that you can be up and running and start taking bookings with as little as 10 minutes. So simplicity and keeping things simple was very important part of the core to what we built here. Another thing I would do is definitely set your schedule, set the hours of your availability, and then connect to your Google Calendar, or Apple calendar, or outlook 365, I’m sorry, office 365 or outlook.com. That way, you can make sure you’re not getting double booked. And you have you know, all your bookings, you know, showing up in one place.
Frank Felker 26:00
Great. Now, you guys also do a great job with tutorial videos, which you produce yourself. I don’t know how many you have there. But you have a lot of them. And then I noticed last November, I think it was you did an entire soup to nuts, almost hour-long overview of each of the features and so forth. I just the reason I bring that up is I want people to be aware that again, this is something much different from other quote competing platforms, you might look at any question you have, you can search through the YouTube side the YouTube page channel and find almost certainly a specific video that addresses exactly that question. Is that something that you foresaw a knock? Um, I’m sort of asking you as an entrepreneur. Now, I know that must take a lot of your time, and you have to block out in your schedule to make it happen. How important is that to this to the success of your platform?
Nachum Kligman 27:04
So again, is great question, it’s extremely important at any business. You’re only a business if you have customers. And so taking care of your customers and making their lives easier, is super important. Now, that’s why we have all these custom videos that we created, you know, walking you through every step. So even though we keep it simple, we want to make it even simpler. And so we create videos, we have over 50 of them, showing you how to set up your page. And we also have a knowledge base. And we have Facebook, the Facebook group we mentioned before, we also have chat and email ticketing, so that there’s always a live person that can you know, we try to get back to you within 24 hours, usually it’s a lot quicker. So that way we cover all the bases and really give you what you need to get started. So we keep it simple. And then we help you throughout the way, I will tell you it has been challenging, being able to keep up, you know, because as we add new features, and start changing the style, a little bit old videos, walkthrough videos become a little bit outdated. And then like right now, I have to I’m in the process of recreating every video, though me through the system. So it’s a, you know, I can’t do that very often. That’s why I did an hour-long demo video, which is I tell people, hey, I put everything in this one hour video. It is demo video walks you through everything that’s live and updated and sorted. That’ll keep us going until I’m able to redo all these 50 videos.
Frank Felker 28:33
That’s great. Well, I know after you and I sign off here, I’m going to say daggone it, I wish I had asked Nachum about this. And but that doesn’t come to mind right now. With that in mind, I always want to close with each of my guests by asking if there’s a question that I have not asked you, or something that’s come to mind, as we’ve been talking today that you’d like to share before we go.
Nachum Kligman 29:00
I don’t think we definitely covered a lot I would say that, you know, if you’re just being entrepreneurial is that, you know, take the shot, you know, within two weeks, you can use our platform and start selling a service and everybody has a skill or talent that they can use that they can monetize. Right? So we give a two-week free trial that has all the different features every feature that we offer. And so you could really get started right away in a little you know, it’s 15 minutes and start getting bookings. And so, you know, that was one of our goals. We want more and more people to be able to create their side hustle to create their side gig to be able to get out there and and take their chances without even costing a penny. You know, and you know, some of the success stories that we have now from our 1000s of users are you know, people started just like you or just like other people that they had an idea, but they didn’t want to do it. They didn’t know where to get started. Well now you know how to get started. That doesn’t cost you anything And you could, you know, I’m sure you can get your first paid booking before you even pay us a dime.
Frank Felker 30:06
Well, that would be sweet. Nachum Kligman, thank you so much for joining me today.
Nachum Kligman 30:12
Thank you, Frank, thank you so much for having me.
Frank Felker 30:14
Thanks again to Nachum. And thank you for joining us. Until next time, I’m Frank Felker saying I’ll see you on the radio.
Dude Walker 30:23
Making your day a little more tax-deductible, Radio Free Enterprise with Frank Felker.
