SalesVote Blog

A Personal Thanks & Share To Win Game

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:10:24 -0500

Good morning;

I wanted to send a big “thanks” to everyone who has purchased the Againn deal on SalesVote.com. This has been our biggest week ever for our start-up and we are really really excited about all the interest in our Againn deal.

I’m not sure if you know this, but you can also WIN money on SalesVote by being the last person to share the deal. We call it “Share to Win.” So when you are at your computers (we don’t have a mobile app yet :-) ), click the red share button and either share the deal on Twitter or Facebook. You’ll see a countdown timer there too. The last person to share wins the cash. But every time you share the counter increases by several seconds—hence the game!

We think you will love this game. It’s a great way to stay engaged, have some fun, and win some free money :-)

If you have any questions or suggestions please feel free to e-mail us, tweet us, or call.

Every company big or small, has started somewhere. We feel like this week was a big step towards our goal of building a great company. Thank you for helping us write our story.

Take care,

Zak Kidd

CEO & Founder of SalesVote

Recent E-mail To All Our Users

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:46:02 -0500

Good morning;

Thank you for being apart of the SalesVote community. I wanted to let you know about our new platform where we give out money every day. Yes, real cash sent to you. The contest to win money is easy — be the last person who shares the deal through our website before the timer expires. Now every time you share the deal, the timer increases by several seconds, but if no one else shares afterwards, then you win. It’s really that simple. You might ask, how does all of this relate to Great Deals in DC? Well the more deals that are purchased, the larger the cash bounty grows.

We are all really excited about the program, and so far are receiving a lot of positive feedback.

A couple of stats about our sharing game:
• Last week we paid out about $240 to users.
• $66.25 is the highest payout so far to Viviane M.
• On average 4 people are winning per day

We think that this patent-pending approach is one of the most innovative and fun ways to get people to talk about the merchants and the deals on SalesVote. We hope that you agree.

Please feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions or suggestions about SalesVote. You can reach me on Twitter @zkidd, e-mail (zak@salesvote.com) or at the office at 202-642-9251.

Thank you again for your support and please head on over to www.SalesVote.com is start sharing the deal to win money!

Zak Kidd

Apologizing = Give More Than Expected

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 17:56:00 -0500

As we roll along and build SalesVote, we hit lots of bumps—some self-inflicted and others not. But when we do, I try to turn them into an experiences where customers come away saying, “That SalesVote team really cares.”

A customer e-mailed early this morning letting me know that one of her vouchers was rejected. I replied back with a straight answer and also a gift for her inconveience. I personally detest when I am wronged by a company and all they do is offer words saying that they are sorry. My basic rule of thumb is that an apology should be an excuse to do more than is expected.

Here is the e-mail exchange below… would be interested to hear if you think we should have handled this differently.

Another Comet PingPong Deal Will Be Coming Soon

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 16:46:00 -0500

Today we had the chance to run an amazing deal at Comet PingPong. We really love the place; they have great food, drinks and atmosphere, so we were thrilled when we had the chance to work with them.

We generally run our deals at 50% off. But today we wanted to do something different and even better. We ran our deal for Comet PingPong for 70% off. So not only did we offer the deal at a far greater savings than others were offering, but we also give our customers the chance to win real money by being the last to share before the time expires.

We were asked to pull our deal down though because it was running at the same time that LivingSocial ran theirs. Because we will always put our merchant partners first, we are pulling the deal from our site. We are really sorry that we can not continue to offer this deal right now. But Comet PingPong has promised us that we will be offering up another great deal in the coming months. So please stay tuned!

Sincerely,

Zak Kidd

Founder & CEO of SalesVote

P.S If you did buy the deal today, it’s still 100 percent valid.

Looking for feedback on Our New Sharing Platform

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:49:00 -0500

Yesterday we launched our new platform. In a nutshell, every day we are putting up a cash bounty that is matched to a timer. The last person to share the page before the time runs out wins the cash bounty. But every time the page is shared the timer increases by several seconds. And when you do share, share wisely, because the more people who actually buy the deal the greater the bounty grows.

You do not need to buy a deal to share the deal and win the money. So please check it the feature and let us know what you think. Thanks!

-Zak

Here’s Will, ready to go with his scooter! Thanks for...

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 11:51:00 -0400

Here’s Will, ready to go with his scooter! Thanks for sharing and hope see you on SalesVote again soon!

-The SalesVote Team

Our first payments made to Ambassadors!

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 11:49:39 -0400

It’s an exciting week here at the SalesVote office. We have come so far in just a few months and yet it feels like time is flying by as we make new friends with businesses and buyers, expand our team and enthusiastically post deals each week. With so much success, the day has come for us to take off the training wheels and officially pay the winning Ambassadors! There was a landslide in the competition with Rugby Café coming in first and we were thrilled to see so many tweets and posts about the deal to get the word out! I talked to that week’s winning Ambassadors to get a feel for what they thought about SalesVote and to see how hard they worked on getting their friends and networks to buy with them.

Jon was an awesome Ambassador for the Rugby deal and he gets a lot of credit for sharing the news early on in the game and winning many votes from his friends. He is a neighbor to our Georgetown office and had great things to say about his SalesVote experience. “I went on because I got an email…and I work at the waterfront…I thought ‘I probably won’t get it’ but I looked at the site and then I saw the ambassadors thing and the gamification layer and that’s what tipped me.” We talked more about different aspects of SalesVote and he seemed genuinely impressed with the concept and aesthetic execution of the site. He explained that after fully understanding what it meant to be an Ambassador, he immediately began to notify his friends about the deal. It was a really exciting conversation to have with someone who is completely unbiased and able to contribute constructive suggestions from a consumer perspective. He showed us some holes to fill in and we are eager to make the improvements.

Hearing that people like SalesVote and are eager to come back for more deals and to be Ambassadors again really gets our energy moving here. We’re excited to be giving back the support we’ve received from our customers, followers, businesses and friends. Cutting the checks to send out to the Ambassadors is a big deal for us and we are so happy to see our business model working – deals go up, ambassadors become passionate and then spread the news and we send them cash for winning the most sales. It’s all coming together here and I don’t think it will ever get old or boring!

Rebecca

P.S. I’m going to post a picture of our awesome Scooter Ambassador Will with his blue buddy scooter in the next post!

The Value of Soft Launching

Sun, 08 May 2011 13:26:00 -0400

We launched SalesVote three weeks ago and have set expectations low by purposefully doing a soft launch. What’s a soft launch? I define it as running your site without the express purpose of marketing your site—launching softly is figuring out where all the controls are before you start to push on the gas. We have not published press releases, we have purchased nearly zero ads (maybe $75 from Facebook, just to figure it out), and we have sent very few e-mails out to people.

When I thought of a soft launch, the goal was to limit the information about SalesVote and just make sure that the site worked and also figure out how we’ll go about running the business. The later question, of how to go about running the business, sort of seems absurd given that I had this idea in December. But one thing I realized is that the “starting up phase” is vastly different than the “having launched phase.”

The starting up phase is your walk through the candy shop. You have budgeted time and resources and you pick and choose what you want to put in your plastic bag. You are working with your developer(s) and designer(s) to build something that works and is clear. You are initiating phone calls and meetings with potential customers to get their feedback on what you are doing. And you hope you can convert them to early customers.

The “having launched phase” is when you ask yourself, “now what?” The site is working and you can accept customers—the rubber has hit the road. For us, expressly stating we are in a soft launch has had several advantages during this period:

•Soft Launching keeps expectations with customers low
When you’re talking to potential customers and they have options to use a competitor who has launched, and is doing well, you are measured against that. From the customer’s perspective, they are asking what will you offer me relative to what I can currently get.

I’ve found one way to tackle this issue is to ratchet down expectations so that during the conversation you can move a bit away from what the current choices are (between your week-old start up and the multimillion dollar funded competitor a phone call away), to the point where you our telling your customer that this is a testing stage for something bigger down the road. When we have talked to customers about SalesVote and LivingSocial and Groupon are bringing in 1,000’s of customers in a single day, we tell the customer that our model is inherently different (because it is), but that ALSO we are testing to improve our model and they can be a part of this. Having the customer believe that you will be better in the near future and making her part of that process is schadenfreude in reverse, and I believe has been one of the strongest motivating factors for clients to try us.

• With Soft Launching, when something breaks, it’s not the end of the world
Our second week, Amazon’s AWS service went down affecting our Heroku account, which ultimately forced down our site. No one could go to SalesVote.com and do anything. Thankfully the ten days before, we did nothing really to promote our site expect for some e-mails to friends. It would have sucked if the day before we were lucky enough to have TechCrunch write about us.

Of course this type of breakage is different than all the other stuff that either might break or is not quite optimal. Our Ambassador listings were not working properly the second week—no matter—less than 20 people visited our site. The shopping cart UI seemed a bit off to me with padding—again, no matter … only a couple of my friends and I bought something.

So having these issues that needed to be improved cost us little in terms of stress and in terms of opportunity lost. Initially limit the opportunity in order manage your inevitable losses.

• Soft Launching shows you how much you don’t know
It’s hard to predict my thoughts in the morning or late at night after work…starting a business has forced me to go through a stage of hypersensitivity to all the choices around me. It can be debilitating, to think about what to do first, next and what not to do. I take Barry Schwartz’ point on how the more choices you have the harder it is to make a decision.

Doing the soft launch has allowed us to collect all the choices we will need to make without making them right away. The third week after going live, I wondered what sort of street marketing could possibly work. Could fliers distributed at various points in DC help spread the word? I spent an evening sneaking into high rise apartment buildings to put flyers on doors—Chartbeat showed me not a single change. So now it’s good to know that this little test will limit options for future marketing choices. And that‘s what you want, I think. Everyone talks about “thinking out of the box,” but first you need to build a box that works. Build the box to think “inside of” and then worry about being a “thinker” outside of it.

• Soft Launching forces the build-listen-iterate mode instead of staying in the dream-build mode
By doing a soft launch, all of a sudden you get feedback from strangers and acquaintances. You start to listen and think hard about what is working and what is not. During the start-up phase looking at your business is a lot like looking at a food recipe. You know what you need to do to get it done, but you really have no idea what it will taste like. Doing a soft launch is making a small batch of cookies and then giving you the time to modify before making a month-long supply of cookies. In effect, you immediately put yourself into a build-listen-iterate mode.

SalesVote has two core features that make us different than any other site: our ambassadors for deals and the gaming dynamic between deals and users. But how these core features manifest is something that we realized needed to be adjusted very shortly after the first couple days of putting SalesVote up.

With a small audience, it’s easier to make these changes without falling into a trap of risk aversion because what you have is somewhat working for a large number of people. We can make substantial changes without screwing up first-impressions.

• Soft launching allows some little wins that are meaningful
When we did nearly nothing to promote SalesVote a couple people bought from our profiled merchants; it really felt good. It would have felt pretty bad if we had spent a lot of effort and money to announce SalesVote and the same thing happened. But by whispering to folks that we were up and going and for some of those folks to actually use our site, created some joy. You start thinking that wow, maybe we have something here.

At day’s end, doing a soft launch adds up to being less emotionally taxing and less materially wasteful, than doing everything you can to implement a fully planned and highly funded marketing plan.

Why We Started SalesVote

Sun, 08 May 2011 01:22:26 -0400

When I was 10 years old my mom opened up a cookie store on Sunset Blvd in Hollywood, California. She struggled for two and a half years to sell enough 50 cent cookies to pay the high rents and feed us something more than just cookies. The store ended up closing. We had great cookies, but not enough people knew about them. To this day, whenever I go to a local business, my thoughts linger…they must have to sell a lot just to pay their rent.

Every business needs to grow by way of people talking about its services and products. Advertising is never enough.

SalesVote was started to help businesses thrive by attracting customers with a system that cultivates loyalty. By placing discounted deals within a game, businesses can easily attract a large number of customers—not only to purchase their goods or services, but also to promote their brand. Through such engagement, local merchants can cultivate loyal customers.

For customers, we hope that SalesVote offers a refreshing take on discovering great local businesses and promoting the places you know and love.

For businesses, we hope that SalesVote helps you find customers who come to carry your flag.

Truly,

Zak Kidd

Founder

50 second video describing the role of SalesVote Ambassadors.

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:24:04 -0500

50 second video describing the role of SalesVote Ambassadors.

SalesVote Video Repost Today we started talking to Washington DC...

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 15:24:17 -0500

SalesVote Video Repost

Today we started talking to Washington DC establishments. Here again is our 2 minute video describing SalesVote. Next up we are working on a video profiling SalesVote Ambassadors.

Another design preview… We are designing badges for...

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 17:50:03 -0500

Another design preview…

We are designing badges for SalesVote where people will earn different badges for various activities. Here are some initial concepts that we were looking at a couple weeks ago.

Friend us at: fb.com/salesvote

So it looks like our $100 Giveaway is not gaining too much attention… and we thought it would...

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 22:34:52 -0500

So it looks like our $100 Giveaway is not gaining too much attention… and we thought it would be game over with that one ;-)

Upcoming design preview of SalesVote

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 10:52:38 -0500

Upcoming design preview of SalesVote

Win $100 cash + Become 1st SalesVote Ambassador

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 08:25:17 -0500

For the FaceBook user who gets the most number of their friends to like our Facebook page (facebook.com/salesvote), we are giving them $100 cash and will feature them in one of our videos as our First Honorary SalesVote Ambassador.

And because we believe that 2nd, 3rd, and 4th count too, those folks will get something cool like a SalesVote hat or t-shirt.

The competition runs for seven days, ending Jan 26^th.

How to submit: Take a screenshot of our SalesVote FB page showing your friends that have liked it too and e-mail it to team@salesvote.com or just post it on the SalesVote FB page.

Video

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 01:13:00 -0500

Starting Up SalesVote

Sat, 15 Jan 2011 12:58:00 -0500

~~Next month~~ Fairly soon, we are launching SalesVote, a game-based platform for deeply discounted deals. SalesVote, like no other company, has created a system whereby competitive deals are promoted by a user community that is rewarded by reputation points, additional discounts and cash back earnings.

Above you can watch a short video of SalesVote.