Why I Don't Regret Wasting $96

I hate scheduling appointments. Email ping-pong is not my idea of fun. When I started coaching creative business owners, I knew that I had better figure out a better way.

Therefore, one of the first things I signed up for was Calendly. Calendly is an online scheduling platform that allowed me to schedule meetings without the endless back and forth.

Why did I choose Calendly?

Mainly because I have used it on the client end and really liked the user experience. The design is clean, modern, and super easy to use. And the basic version is free!

Before signing up, I did take some time to compare Calendly to other options on the market. To me it seemed that Acuity Scheduling was quite a big competitor, but I liked Calendly. And like I said, it was free :)

And then came the day that I outgrew the free plan of Calendly. It was becoming a pain to work around all the limits. I finally realized that it’s time for an upgrade. I needed to upgrade fast if I didn’t want to miss out an important business opportunity. So I made the decision to sign up for a year of Calendly on the Premium plan.

As a self-proclaimed learning addict, one night I was watching a webinar presented by a branding expert that I had just discovered. Nothing she spoke about was new to me and I wasn’t paying close attention, until she said one thing that had me stop short. She was reading aloud a comment from one of the live viewers.

“As a Squarespace subscriber you have access to the $15/month plan of Acuity Scheduling for free.”

To me it seemed that the presenter was every bit as surprised as I was. After all, this amazing bonus is not front and center on any of the Squarespace marketing material that I have ever seen.

With this valuable nugget, I felt that I had got my time’s worth and quickly shut the webinar. Could this even be true? I’ve had a Squarespace website for almost two years. How could it be that I had never known?

Well, I did some googling and found out that this well kept secret was actually true!
 

(UPDATE as of 2022: This information is no longer up to date. While this plan of Acuity is no longer free, the lesson of this blog post is remain… and thank G-d, my free plan remains grandfathered in, as well :)

The plan of Acuity Scheduling that came free with Squarespace included basically everything that I was paying for in Calendly. If only I would have known about this just a month ago...

Yet, when I think about the $96 I spent to sign up for Calendly for a year, I don’t feel a tinge of regret.

I’m proud of myself for jumping in and investing in my business. I’m proud of myself for making a quick decision and not waiting until I gathered every last crumb of information on the topic.

I still believe that Calendly is an amazing service for amazing value. However, even Calendly can’t compete with free. In the face of this discovery I choose to be grateful.

I’m grateful that I will be able to save $96 next year and many years to come.

I’m grateful that I can now to save my clients $96 and hours of research.

I’m grateful that I can share this well-kept secret with you.

And the lesson?

Oh yeh.

We all make mistakes in business. You may have lost money. You may have wasted time. You may have invested too much energy into a project that went down the drain.

Today, try to reframe that story.

 

How can you appreciate the decisions you made with the information that you had then?

How can take what you learned and use it to grow?

How can you share your newfound discoveries to help others?

If you can answer the above questions, you will never know a day of failure in your life.
 

P.S. If you have a Squarespace account, go grab your free Acuity plan today. Click here to learn how to get set up.