WaysGo Blog

Sep 14, 2011

Report from WaysGo's Happy Hour

Last Thursday, Sep 8th we've finally found some free time to take our heads away from monitors and throw a party in our new shared office - RocketSpace.

And we had an occasion to celebrate a little bit - as you know, we've launched new version of WaysGo.com lately. As most of parties like this, it has been a great opportunity to meet peeps we work with in the same building. So, here're some photos, thankfully made by Yuriy Dybskiy:







As a resume, I want to admit that there is an absolute benefit in working in a co-working space like RS. You work in the same place with other young companies, with people, who "run". Each in his or her own directions, but eventually, you start to run even faster in your's, too. You can easily compare it to studying process, where competition and friendship come along. And RS turns out to be not a bad university to be in.

Cheers!

Aug 23, 2011

About Customers and Vendors

While reading analytic reports on the topic of relationships between customer and vendors, it becomes obvious that future of commerce lies in customized approach to customers' needs and expectations. Global Corp. approach just doesn't work. While there might be a whole list of reasons for that, there is one obvious enough - people like to stay unique, express their individuality. It is the key to make ideas we carry and things we create more valuable.

This trend is actually good for small and middle businesses, as following this demand they can compete with the big guys on their local markets. Guess why? They just know people they sell to, they speak the "same language" on the "same topics". These kind of relationships can keep customers loyal whatever happens, as they are based on giving personal approach the highest value.

This is true for both the moment of purchase and the moment of rewards. So can local businesses keep their personalized approach not only selling, but rewarding people as well? At WaysGo we believe they can! That is why we give business owners an ability to measure the loyalty and importance of each specific client and create reward campaigns based on this information. Different types of rewards can be given to first-time visitors, loyal customers and specific groups of clients, like friends of existing clients or auditories of local experts.

This type of personalized approach to reward clients for every visit, every purchase and every recommendation is the key to keep your old clients loyal and make your place interesting for the new-commers.

May 10, 2011

Activating your experience

Sometimes even the smallest decisions can present us with having to reach out to our friends or associations to help us be more informed and comfortable with what we choose. How many times have you been with a group of friends on a Friday night, and the million dollar question of “Where do you want to eat?” gets put on the table. More times than not, it's usually the experience and recommendation of someone in the group that ultimately convinces everyone else to decide on where to go. This is just one example of the dependence we have on our friends, networks, and community for credible recommendations and it touches the vast landscape of the purchases we make throughout our lives. From where to eat to buying an automobile, we have the propensity to seek validation and qualify our purchasing decisions, and we find that within our pool of resources, there is usually someone particular with the valuable knowledge on the array of products, services, and consumables we buy.

Today, we process information and make consumer decisions at rates never experienced before. We leverage networks and communities of people both on and off-line and there is a vast reference library of expert and consumer reviews at our disposal. You see it everyday. There might be an expert at a major newspaper who's sole role is to put their stamp of approval or list of cons on a new product. This has considerable impact on the way we react to the product and has major influence on the overall buying decision. We have come to know and respect these experts. They usually have a long track record of making clear and objective recommendations and usually have history with their specific line of expertise. At the same time, we have come to know and respect the expertise of those that hit a little closer to home. As well, we ourselves fall into that category of having expertise in some facet of our lives.

We at Waysgo.com understand the importance of our unique qualities as human beings. It's a huge part of what defines us, and the very fabric of our lives is often guided by our unique qualities, preferences, tastes, and aptitudes. With Waysgo we can all harness our uniqueness, join a community of qualified experts, and in effect enhance and improve the way we make buying decisions. One of the great qualities of our product is the ease of use and validation system behind the technology. Unlike other systems that enable us to see the list of opinions, thumbs up, and negative reviews; which ultimately leaves us in a cloudy realm of still having to decide if we might make the right choice or not, Waysgo.com provides a way to tap into a growing community of friends, experts, and other consumers who are constantly verifying and validating the things we are looking for. For example, if I'm looking for a good filet mignon, I can go to Waysgo.com and easily find what restaurants have been visited that have this recommended feature. What I will see are recommendations from people on the system, see where others have followed them and further recommended the product, giving me a tangible validation of my sought after filet. Or, I'm going to see that recommendations for this feature aren't getting a steady flow of further benchmarks, thus helping me easily validate whether or not the steak is worth my pursuit. No reviews to comb through, no strict requirement for high level expertise to rely on, just an effective and easy to understand system of validation by people who are just like you.

So why all this fuss about being an expert at Waysgo or uncurling your uniqueness. You don't have to be an expert at Waysgo, but why not bring your qualities to the community and help others make more comfortable buying decisions. As well, you can grow your expertise, establish relationships with businesses, help others harness their unique qualities, get a little return on your time and tastes, meet new friends, expand your pool of places to turn for help in making decisions, and join a reference networking system that will not only enhance your life, but make it a little less stressful and easy.

Apr 4, 2011

We Have Been Busy!

We here at WaysGo have been extremely busy for the last couple of months. We
have been adding a lot of changes to make things easier for both the business
owners and the experts.

Many ask what they have to be an expert in to qualify as an expert on WaysGo. Every
single individual is an expert at something. Do you love Italian food and know what
to expect from an Italian dish? If so, then you qualify. The team at WaysGo has made
things easier for our Experts, improving Expert’s dashboard. The new dashboard
makes it simple to keep track of every thing that you accomplish. Broken into three
categories which consist of:

Places - where you can find entertainment places around and prepare reviews.

Activity - that displays statistics of your deals with selected places, current and past
deals with and reviews.

Subscribers - where you will find statistics about subscribers as well.

For business owners we have added brand new features as well. You are able to
track which experts and consumers are reviewing your business. You are able to
offer experts’ incentives and deals, as well as rewards to your most loyal clients.

As we’ve said before, at WaysGo we believe that everyone is unique. And we believe
that every business is unique. We all have something to offer and why not have fun
doing it? A community of people getting together to help each other is nothing less
than a winning situation. Uniqueness is what makes everyone different and what
WaysGo is made of.

Thanks for reading and Stay Unique!

Dec 24, 2010

Christmas, Overviews and Plans!

2010 is slowly coming to the logical end, leaving it's last week for final cuts on things that were inspiring us through out the year. And while one big coding-designing-copywriting process goes on, there is a small snippet of time that should be devoted to sum-ups, plans and congrats.

First of all, the whole team would like to say "Thank you!" to everyone, who were with us this year. To all people we've met on events and meetings, people that gave us advises before we had launched, our temporary partners and, of course, EVERYONE, who visited waysgo.com after the launch!

This year was full of events, breakthroughs and step backs. But if I was to keep it really short to describe it in one sentence, I would say: "WaysGo is finally alive". I believe, this November event easily throws everything else (in WaysGo sense of mind) that happen in 2010 into the cold winter shadow. And like good old Santa, we have are packing a whole bag of "presents" for our users that will be revealed early next year!

As I wrote in previous post, after we've received first feedback from our early heroic Experts, we rushed to our laptops and monitors with one idea - to make the product better. We started first with some surface changes, but than it got deeper and deeper. I believe, this feedback gave us a clear understanding of "how" our users want to see and use the product.

Not to reveal everything before hand and spoil the first impression of real clicks, I'll just say, that we totally re-worked tools for Experts, making them more natural and profound in use, updated logic of cooperation between Experts and Businesses, designed new useful tools for Businesses and Consumers and worked really hard on the UI.


Still, I could not leave you with naked words, so I've stolen this mock up from our designers' office. Hope they stay busy all the time and won't see this post before we all leave for holidays!

This is it for now.

Hope you all have really happy and joyful Christmas and a New Year! Stop by here from time to time, 'cos we'll keep uncovering more and more details about future release closer to event itself.

Stay unique, guys!

Nov 17, 2010

Resume from Startups Demo Night 2010

Yesterday me (Oleg) and Dmitry (our Art Director) performed at Startups Demo Night 2010, in Sunnyvale, CA.

To see everything on your own eyes you can watch this video:



It is the first pitch we've done for WaysGo and we are very excited about this! 8 start ups were presenting their ideas, and we were one of them. The point of our pitch was to share our vision with the present audience about future local search and Experts role in it. Although we've received a very good feedback from people and other participants, we think there is a lot of things we should work on. And first of them will be to perform not only in front of the IT crowd.

We want to take part in several events, where we can reach out to our Experts and share our vision and ideas with you, guys! We would rather be answering questions about how WaysGo can improve the internet experience and earning possibility for Experts, than questions like "how do we balance the server loadings".

By the way, if anyone knows about such kind of events that will happen in CA in the nearest time - let us know!

Nov 10, 2010

First Experts Are On Board!

This Monday we've initiated the email campaign, reaching out to our early adopters all over the country. We've selected about 10 000 people, who, as we think, could be interested in becoming Experts in WaysGo.

Right after the campaign was initiated, we started to receive first traffic, sign ups and, of course, lots of questions on our email. That was absolutely fantastic to read about impression of the first actual visitors. First Experts. At the moment, we have already more than 100 Expert profiles around the country and still counting.

As you've noticed, WaysGo is still on it's early stage. And we are working hard to make user experience better than it is. After receiving first feedback, we decided to upgrade the processes of creating and editing the Expert profile, writing reviews about businesses and more.

We have also worked a lot on the naming and grammatical errors, which happened in different places. We understand that the product has a totally new approach on Experts-to-Business relationships and needs to be explained more detailed. That is why we will create as much tutorials and explanations as possible in the future.

Once again, we would like to thank everyone, who responded on our invitation emails and payed interest to the service. We value your suggestions and proposals. All errors will be fixed and questions will be answered in this blog as FAQ.

If you would like to receive the latest information about updates and new functions - stop by to read this blog or follow as on Twitter or Facebook.

Stay unique!

Nov 5, 2010

Launch, press release and server downs

Last couple of days were really filled up with events for our team and system itself.

First of all, on Thursday we have finally launched the full working version of WaysGo. As never before, this version embodies all the necessary functions for all user groups to work right. Users can share recommendations, Experts can write reviews and Businesses can activate feature approvals. Of course, there are still a lot of bugs and corrections we should work on further to make the product be "tasty". But appearance of this live, "full" version finally revealed the weak spots. And that is a huge step forward.

Also, our first official press release was published! It is dedicated to the launch and uncovers WaysGo's vision on the role of Experts in todays online world. We have received some feedbacks and even were picked up by several news resources such as Yahoo!News and SF Gate!

Of course, it would not be a "start up", if we didn't face some troubles. For example, our server has been down twice for the last two days. All database was erased and a back up version contained data of ten days ago... You know this situations when everyone's happy, but nobody's smiling?

Nevertheless, we all are very happy and proud because of these facts. It means that we have finally launched the product, and it's working. Next Monday we expect first visitors to start populating WaysGo. We are in a hurry of bringing in the furniture, supplying electricity, water and gas. Making final changes to exterior and decorate the interior. Arranging lamps, tables and chairs. And then, take a final look and smilingly say - "Welcome to WaysGo!"

Sep 15, 2010

Features update #2

This week we will be working on a list of key updates for each user-role in the system.

For instance, Company profile owners will have updates in Dashboard, Profile and Connections. These features will give them opportunity to order printed materials, manage most of their features, like complains, events, reviews and contact groups.

All users will also have updates in their Dashboards, Profiles and Connections. Now they will be able to view the gifts, received from companies, manage confirmed Tags and invite other people to join WaysGo.

Experts will be given updates of Dashboard and Connections, that will enable features of Review management and invitation of subscribers and company representatives.

All this will bring us even more closer to the full product release and it's primary population.

Stay Unique!

Aug 2, 2010

Features update #1

Hi!

With this post are starting a series of posts about new features we are working on right now. Most of them would be available pretty soon in our beta version on www.waysgo.com. In next few weeks we'll be working on:

  • Customers feedback to Experts - now users will be able to submit comments about Expert's reviews about companies and products. They will be able to view comments of other clients and discuss them;
  • Tag's categories - users will be able to sort tags during search by category of company's activity, they are looking for (bars, clubs, shops, etc.);
  • Company profile verification - now that's cool! We will integrate logic and functions of approving company after submitting it's profile. We will send out a letter on selected post address with a code. After receiving, this code should be entered in company's profile to submit verification. We hope this will elevate the usefulness of the system, filtering "empty" or "fake" company profiles;
  • Experts on company profile page - users will be able to view a list of all Experts, that collaborate with this business, sorted by Expert Rating;
  • Review Rating - users will be able to rate Expert's reviews with stars (1-5), expressing their opinion about it's quality and relevancy.
Right now, we also are re-designing most part of the system according to some ideas we had. We hope new design to be more natural, easy-to-use and sexy! You'll be able to check it out soon on our Facebook profile!

Stay tuned!