Meet “the guy”
I'm Joe,
Owner & Founder of Frederick Window Tinting, Frederick Wraps & Graphics, and Frederick Apparel. Located in... you guessed it... Frederick, Maryland. 15 years ago I started my tint shop and have been wrestling with the business-owner side of things ever since.
Over the years, I would hear about this or that software and it would seem like a glimmering ray of hope. Maybe this would be the solution. The one that actually did what I needed. Needless to say, all of them were a bust. They'd get me halfway there and then leave me wishing it did this or I could do that.
I always ended up still needing to combine softwares or tools. An ever-growing tech stack just to get the job done.
About two years ago, I had a pretty good thing going that combined Google Sheets, Google Calendar, Zapier, and my website. But I still hadn't solved one of the big ones: Online Booking.
I had a version of it that kinda worked. A complex nightmare of conditional sections and fields that showed this if that was chosen. It wasn't anything I was proud of. The problem was putting vehicles into one price bucket based on door count. It left a lot of money on the table.
That birthed my first whack at solving the problem: window-count pricing. 5-7 window cars, 9-11 window SUVs, etc. That helped close the gaps and surprisingly, between that and gift certificates, I had online booking and GC sales looking pretty good. At least enough to experience getting notifications after hours while hanging with the family. The other game changer was being able to send someone to the site for pricing and availability when I was tied up in a back seat.
I ran with that for a while. And then it hit me.
If I could somehow figure out pricing based on the Year, Make, and Model and actually control how much to charge each vehicle, then I wouldn't have customers coming in who selected the wrong option because they struggled with counting quarter windows.
The AH-HA moment hit.
I went into my “Bat Cave” (a simple office with a chair, a desk and a computer). For weeks and weeks I worked on a vehicle database. When it was released, it triggered a chain reaction for our business. Customers were booking themselves on our website, the calendar would fill up and we had more time to focus on working on the business. We combined that with a BRAND NEW approach to selling gift certificates (I might share details on this later). Our Black Friday to Christmas GC sales were DOUBLE any prior year. For shops like us that see snow in the winter, doubling GC sales can be a game changer for how many presents are under the tree on Christmas. It was crystal clear...
Online booking with YMM pricing was the solution.
No more awkward conversations when the price on-site didn't match the new price we gave them after helping them count ALL their windows. No more guessing. No more making something up on the fly. Pricing became a breeze. Booking became a breeze. And the best part? We could confidently send someone to the website and know for a fact, the price they see is specific to their year, make, and model.
Over the past two years we've been testing our YMM pricing combined with online booking. Our sales have never been higher.
In September of 2025, I looked at Google Sheets, Google Calendar, the Zapier automations, and all the other stuff I had Duct-Taped together and said “I'm Done!” . I set out on a mission to put EVERYTHING we needed to run our shop into...
ONE. SINGLE. SOFTWARE!
