Feature highligts
- Wedding photographers have complex workflows. templates and allows photographers to create tailored worfklows for their needs.
- ShootZilla's dashboard is one of rare examples of Dashboards that are actually useful. Horizontal position of task label combined with color gives photographer an overview of each job's status.
- Some tasks need to be performed on specific days (like cleaing lenses day before shooting) while others can be grouped for effciency (sending contracts, following up on emails). Tasks pane suggests what to do based on your context (e.g. "in front of the computer").
- Workflow tasks can have emails. When task becomes due an email is generated and added to the queue for review. Photographer can tweak emails or just send them all with one click.
- Links to forms branded with photographer logo can be added to scheduled emails. When submitted those forms fill out job, contact and lead information within ShootZilla saving photographer from copying and pasting.
- Photographers configure rules for their preferred availability, like "no more than 2 weddings a week" with manual overrides for holidays. Then they see at a glance how booked they are for a given month and what's their availability for a given date.
- When photographer has to turn down a customer they can search ShootZilla Marketplace for photographers available on this date. While searching ShootZilla considers considers their calendar (preferred availability settings, manual exceptions and booked shoots), distance from shoot location and budget.
One man development team
Thanks to amazing technologies like Ruby on Rails I was able to build and maintain ShootZilla myself, working directly with the founder. With Twitter Bootstrap I could quickly protype and ship esthetic UIs while Shelly Cloud platform took care of the servers and NewRelic monitored performance.
We collaborated around a live prototype from day 1, shipping new features on a daily basis and getting instant feedback from a group of early adopters.
Integrations
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Availability Calendar is expored to an
ical feed
allowing subscription from your favorite calendar application.
-
Gmail OAuth
used to request permission from phtographers to send automated emails on their behalf from their Gmail mailboxes.
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Entered addresses are previewed on
embedded map
(Google Maps). Geocoded information is used when searching for available photographers for a referral.
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Avatar pictures
for contacts are automatically looked up in their social network profiles.
-
Lead submissions from
Contact Form 7
Wordpress plugin are parsed and extracted information is used to fill contact and job details and automatically add workflows.
Credits
Building product this way was possible because of founder Esther de Boer who fearlessly put prototypes in front of users to gather feedback, was open to tradeoffs that allowed faster iteration and generally embraced Lean Startup ideas.
Also my rudimentary design skills could take us only so far and half a year after launching we got brilliant new visual identity from Adam Horn.
