Looking for a new digital agency to help grow your business? Schedule a free marketing evaluation with our team to meet the right agencies fast. It’s fast, free, and we get it right.

Today I have an exciting announcement both for pros and businesses looking for marketing help – availability!

Now when you go to a pro’s profile (here’s mine) on desktop or laptop (anything bigger than a phone, really) you’ll see the pro’s availability for taking on work:

availability-live

If they have nothing specified, then they are deemed to be available NOW and ready to chat with you about their business:

availability-simpletiger

So where did this idea come from, and why is it a win for both sides?

Idea Inspiration

I love following other entrepreneurs who are on a similar path as me. One such business is CushionApp, which is run by a guy named Jonnie based out of my beloved Brooklyn. It’s a simple tool for freelancers to use to forecast their income and business expenses so that they can avoid down months (which anyone running a services business will tell you is a constant concern).

A few months ago I read this post that he wrote about Cushion’s Availability badge, which you can see on his personal site. Because Jonnie allows freelancers to input their projects and number of hours they’re working, he can have availability pull automatically for them.

jonnie-availability

I don’t have available data on Credo pros (yet), so I’ve implemented it as a Custom Field for pros to fill out on their profile.

Also just in case you were wondering, I proposed partnering on this with Jonnie but he said he’s slammed getting Cushion caught up with features. He did tell me:

In your case, I’d try to keep your availability feature as simple as possible—and being based on WP, a simple custom field would do the trick just fine.

Thanks Jonnie, that’s what I’ve done!

Transparency

Credo is built on transparency. From Reviews to public hourly rates and project minimums, Credo exists to bring transparency to the consulting world. This new feature continues that vision by allowing businesses looking for help to set their own expectations around if the pro can take their business immediately or not.

Transparency is hard and scary. Some people have asked me if I think this might hurt inquiry volume on Credo. The answer is that I don’t believe it will, though I am definitely keeping an eye on that and will be testing different wording to make sure that nothing adverse happens.

Onward!

Availability is a feature I have been wanting to ship live for a long time. I’m glad to finally have it out (and thanks to my friend Glenn at FaithStreet for the PHP help!).

Onward!