Diana Goodwin is the Founder & CEO of Toronto-based software company, MarketBox, a B2B SaaS product built for in-home service-based businesses. She is also the Founder of AquaMobile, an on-demand swim lesson provider, now the largest of its kind in North America and Australia. Developing a custom tech platform for AquaMobile gave Diana the opportunity to spin out a new company, MarketBox. The configurable software enables businesses to automate manual processes and scale using technology designed to better manage their diverse scheduling, online sales, and payment needs.
Diana is considered a tech innovator and thought leader in marketplace businesses, the gig economy, and scaling businesses internationally. With a background in consulting with Bain & Co., she regularly speaks at events, sharing her knowledge with corporate and entrepreneurial audiences.
Diana has been profiled in Forbes, Inc., Huffington Post, Techvibes, and Dragons’ Den, to name a few.
What is MarketBox all about?
MarketBox is a software platform built for service businesses with mobile and virtual workforces. Designed to automate manual operating processes, it’s a one-stop shop for companies of all sizes looking to simplify their scheduling, booking, and payment processes.
Our most unique feature is our logistics management toolkit. This enables in-home service businesses to manage the schedules of their mobile and virtual workers, instantly match customers with providers in their area, and optimize their booking calendars.
By offering service businesses a modern configurable automation solution, MarketBox helps to modernize workflows and free up time, money, and resources across organizations.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company.
My career started in management consulting at Bain & Company, and after three years, I went on to gain my MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. While there, I started growing my swim school business, AquaMobile, which I’d launched while pursuing my undergrad at the University of Toronto. This is when I found myself entering the world of SaaS.
I always joke I never set out to start a software company, I just needed software for AquaMobile, and when I couldn’t find it, I built it! It wasn’t until other service businesses started reaching out to me for help building their systems that I realized AquaMobile wasn’t the only business constrained by the lack of software options capable of handling multi-location scheduling.
No one had attempted to develop software designed for businesses operating without fixed locations because the scheduling was too complex. But I’d developed a solution for AquaMobile, and I knew that it could be made universal with a few tweaks. So while it might not have been the most conventional entry into SaaS, my route has given me a deep understanding of what the MarketBox customer wants. That understanding has been invaluable as we continue to improve and scale the software’s capabilities, and I wouldn’t have it any other way!
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
The top three skills I would say are essential to be successful as an entrepreneur are
- Resilience
- The ability to listen to (and act on) feedback
- Flexibility and adaptability
As an entrepreneur, you hear “no” a lot, so having the resilience to keep picking yourself up and trying again is imperative.
You’ll also receive a lot of feedback — not always asked for, and certainly not always positive, but valuable nonetheless, and you need to be open to hearing it. The key is knowing when to act on it.
The best advice I can give is to start piecing together themes rather than acting on every piece of feedback you receive. Consider what comes up most frequently and who’s giving it, and then decide what you will do with it. Stay flexible, and be open to your idea changing based on what you learn along the way.
What are your plans for the future, how do you plan to grow this company?
MarketBox is still relatively new compared to other software companies out there that have been around for a decade or so, so we’ve got an exciting path of growth ahead of us. We have a number of investors and are currently using the funds to expand our team in key areas like sales and marketing and put money towards continual R&D.
We’ve built a solid foundation of features on the platform, and now the big drive is on refining and improving them. What’s exciting for us is that our users are playing a big part in this. As we build out our product roadmap, we’re able to get feedback from them about changes they’d like to see. It’s also been interesting to see how our customers are using MarketBox; they see potential use cases where we didn’t, which is another big driver of innovation for the team.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
Our biggest selling point is the platform’s logistic management capabilities. MarketBox is built for businesses with mobile and virtual workforces, and our unique features reflect that. Businesses can easily establish service areas and link provider schedules to locations to minimize travel time between jobs, match customers to providers in seconds, and give employees control over when and where they work.
We’re building something for an industry that spans so many different operating models that a one-size-fits-all model was never going to work — despite what existing software options would have you believe! MarketBox can be completely configured to suit the individual needs of a business, and that really sets us apart.
What were the top three mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from them?
The biggest mistakes I made when starting my business were
- Trying to do many things at once
- Not making time for the bigger picture/strategic thinking
- Not leveraging my network sooner
I think it’s common for entrepreneurs to be protective over their business idea. It’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to do everything yourself and all at once before someone else beats you to it. I learned the hard way that this is a recipe for burnout, and because I was juggling so much, things slipped through the cracks, which meant I had to go back and re-do it anyway.
The best thing you can do when starting your business is to draw up a list of everything you need to do to get that idea ready for the market. Then it’s time to prioritize and organize those tasks into what absolutely needs to be done now, what has a 6-12 month timeline, and what would be a nice-to-have but in reality, can be added once you’ve got the idea out there.
In an ideal world, you would finish one to-do before starting another. Realistically multiple projects need to run in tandem if you want to make progress. However, what you can (and should) do is give all your attention to one task as you’re doing it — and that includes things in your personal life too. Don’t get so caught up trying to multi-task and do a thousand things at once that you forget to make time to shut off your brain. It sounds cliché, but sometimes the best ideas come when you least expect them!
Tell us a little bit about your marketing process, what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
When MarketBox first started, we didn’t have the budget for big expensive marketing campaigns, but still needed to drive traffic to our website. We focused on content marketing early on as a way to generate organic traffic, which was a low-cost, highly effective solution for us. In fact, it’s still the biggest part of our marketing strategy today!
The best tip I can give when it comes to content marketing is to write for the reader, not for search engines. Too often, you’ll see content so focused on SEO that it forgets a person, and not an algorithm will be reading it! To avoid that, ask yourself
- Who is this content for?
- What value does it add for the reader?
- What can I do to make it easier to extract that value? (images, charts, videos, etc)
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
The biggest challenge so far has been getting our product messaging right. We’ve seen people use our product in ways we’ve never even imagined, and it’s been a challenge to know what message we should be putting out there.
To overcome this challenge, we’ve really listened to our customers and taken the time to deep-dive into their needs, how they use the software, and listen to the language they used when discussing the issues they had before implementing the software. We make a point of continually revisiting our product messaging and adapting it as our product evolves to ensure the two are always aligned. It’s certainly a challenge that keeps us on our toes!
What was your first business idea and what did you do with it?
My first business idea was probably the same as a lot of kids looking to boost their allowance, a lemonade stand! But my first serious business idea came when I worked in community pools as a swim instructor.
I became frustrated at the lack of attention I was able to give kids during the lesson because I was trying to teach up to ten kids at once. There were always a couple of kids who would struggle in the big group format, and I could see their confidence taking a hit when I knew all they needed was more 1:1 attention to thrive. That’s when I decided to start offering private lessons in people’s homes so that they could build their swimming skills and confidence in a comfortable, familiar environment. This eventually led to the creation of AquaMobile.
Initially, I went on Dragon’s Den (Canada’s version of Shark Tank) to get funding to expand the business and received several offers. But ultimately, I decided to bootstrap to maintain complete ownership of the company. It’s now the largest provider of private at-home swim lessons in North America, and in 2019 we expanded in Australia.
What’s a productivity tip you swear by?
I don’t know where I’d be without time-blocking! Running a start-up, there are lots of demands on your time, so it can be hard to carve out time to do deep, focused work.
Time blocking my calendar helps me make time for diving into projects that require extended periods of attention and stops me from feeling like I’m running a mile a minute without getting anything done!
What helps you stay driven and motivated to keep going in your business?
The biggest motivator for me is knowing that I’m helping other business owners avoid the pains I faced when building AquaMobile. Service businesses with mobile workforces have been let down by the software industry as there aren’t custom options out there for them.
The goal with MarketBox is to make it easier for service businesses of all sizes to operate in such a competitive market by providing intuitive software built specifically for them. As an all-in-one platform, we make it possible for businesses to adopt technology that’s going to free up time, money, and resources without needing a huge budget or six different platforms to get the job done!
What valuable advice would you give new entrepreneurs starting out?
Get started, stay focused, and don’t worry about making things perfect!
In my experience, getting started is the hardest part of launching an idea. The fear of failure can be powerful, and too often, we think the only way to avoid it is by releasing ideas that are 100% perfect. But if you wait for perfection, you’ll never get anything done!
The most important thing you can do is continue to make progress bit by bit; otherwise, you’ll get stuck thinking about the big task ahead of you and never even cross the starting line. Even just saying your idea out loud can be powerful.
How can readers get in touch with you?
The best way to get in touch with me personally would be to connect through Linkedin. For anyone interested in learning more about MarketBox, or trying it out for themselves, they can visit our website gomarketbox.com to learn more or book a discovery call with the team.
