When I first set up the booking site I thought 30-minute slots would be enough time to give a car a good clean. But now that I’ve done a few cleans I’ve realised it’s not.

On average it’s taking me about 45 minutes to get set up, clean the car properly and take payment. I don’t want to feel rushed, I want to do a good job every time. So I’ve decided to change the booking slots to 45 minutes and see how that goes.

Here’s the techy bit 🤓:
This update was actually pretty simple to make. It’s just one line of Python code that tells the system to create a new slot every 45 minutes instead of every 30:

                current += timedelta(minutes=45)
                  

I'm still relying on AI to help me write the code, but I’m starting to understand more of how it works as I go.

Three mornings a week I go for a jog with my dad and lately all we talk about is the business.

This morning he asked me what I knew about my customers? All I could really say was: I know where they live and what car they have.

I actually don’t know very much about the people I'm posting flyers to or what they really want.

I set up the booking site to make things easier for me (so I didn’t have to knock on doors anymore) and I thought it would also be easier for customers.

The main idea is to make car washing more convenient — so people don’t have to drive somewhere and can get it done at home.

But I’m starting to realise there are a few things I don’t know yet:

• Is booking in advance convenient for them?
• Do the days and times I offer work for people?
• Is £8 a fair price for a car wash?

The only way to find out is to ask. So I’m planning to speak to people when I wash their cars, and I’m going to try and set up a short survey on the site.

Getting answers to these questions will help me make improvements that work for customers, not just for me.

I did my first flyer drop 2 days ago, and now the first car wash bookings have been made — so it's actually happening 😅

It was amazing to see the first booking emails pop up on my phone. That felt like a really big step for the business.

I've already learned a few important things from the site analytics (I'll write a separate post about that), but here's one thing I now have that I didn’t before: baseline metrics for my conversion rate 🤓

Why does that matter? Because I’ve got loads of ideas for improvements but until now I had no way to tell if any changes made things better or worse. Now I do:

• I posted 100 flyers and got 5 bookings — that’s a 5% conversion rate.

I’ve read that 5% is actually pretty good but it was lower than I expected. My next step is to figure out why and how to improve it. But before I do to that my main focus over the next few days is to do a really good job on the bookings I already have.

I’m working in a small area, so getting repeat customers is going to be really important. If I don’t clean well and build a good reputation that could be the end of it.

Time to go to work!

Flyers printed, cut, and packed—ready to deliver!

I’ve decided to drop 100 flyers to start with. That covers the houses closest to where I live and keeps the maths simple! One thing I’m slightly worried about is that there aren’t loads of booking slots available because I only have time for car washing on weekends. Plus, we’ve got holidays coming up in July.

To help with that we added a new feature to the site: if someone can’t find a slot, they can leave their email address. That way if I get more friends to help or have more time in the school holidays, I can email people to let them know.

My guess is that about 10–15% of flyers will turn into bookings (so 100 flyers = 10–15 bookings), but we’ll have to wait and see if I’m right.

I just really hope the site doesn’t break — that would be the worst result 😭

One last thing! The confirmation emails sometimes go to Junk, so if you book and don’t see the email check your Junk folder. You can add me to your safe senders list to fix that 🙏

This project is all about learning, so I think it’s important to show my workings — including the mistakes (and there have already been plenty!)

That’s why on this page I’ve decided to be completely open about how the business is doing. I’m sharing my revenue, costs, profit and how much I (and any friends helping me) make from it.

The first thing you’ll probably notice is the costs are quite high. That’s because they include everything I’ve invested to get started: the domain name, hosting, business cards, a custom t-shirt and most expensive of all is the proper car washing kit and supplies. It added up faster than I expected!

The Costs bit also includes the money me and friends who help me take as earnings. I plan to pay the start-up costs back over time by only taking part of the revenue from each wash as earnings at first. So even though the total costs will keep growing the profit should slowly start to improve.

I’m also trying to track all the stats I can, like what you can see on this page in the Funnel Metrics part. I want to know how many people who get a flyer actually visit the site and make a booking. This is called a Sales Funnel 🤓 and the percentage that moves through each step is called the conversion rate 📉. I’ll be sharing those numbers and how I try to improve them. 💡

I had the idea to set up my own car washing business about 2.5 months ago. I’d been going door-to-door with my friends cleaning local cars and I knew it was something I enjoyed and could make money from. But I kept thinking: there must be a better way to do it.

The idea was simple: let people book a car wash online. But getting it set up has taken way more time, money and effort than I expected (even with loads of help from my dad and AI for coding!).

The main aim of the whole thing is to learn more about coding and business. I planned to write everything I’m learning on this site so I don’t forget it all—but I’ve really fallen behind! I could probably write 100 pages about the past few months, but I don’t have the time right now.

Hopefully I can catch up… if I’m not too busy washing cars 🤷‍♂️😂