We first met Anna Munro of Little Annie photography during Malcolm’s wedding photography meeting. Through that initial catchup (that didn’t relate to Optimi at all!) we ended up working for Anna. When we first got in to exploring the Little Annie setup, we saw an innovative, fast-growing, studio photography startup. They had an urgent need to automate their manual email processes that were not handling their rapid growth.

We jumped on the opportunity to eliminate hours of manual data entry. We converted a lengthy, manual admin process into a simple, automated one. All the steps they were doing manually were converted to automatic, behind the scenes. And while we were making the process more efficient, we also built a reliable customer database in a web app called Airtable. This gave Little Annie the time they needed to develop their own in house app without having to worry about how to keep the admin running in the meantime.

Client Painpoints

• Huge admin workload, including large amounts of personalized customer emails being sent

• Poor data integrity, with multiple sources of data across many systems all going out of date

• Manual processes led to a higher risk of data entry errors

• Hard to email the right customers at the right time, due to a lack of data integrity

• Business growth blocked by admin overload

Opportunities Found

• Automate the manual admin work sending emails, while retaining the personalisation that customers need

• Create a single source of truth for customer information giving peace of mind and the ability to reach the right people at the right time

• Create a scalable system that can grow with the business, where more customers doesn't mean more admin time

• Create simpler systems and processes so that the internal administrator is able to manage it themselves.

Web app database

Email automation

Workflow automation

File storage

Customer calendar booking