There are a lot of questions we are fielding as we prepare to go-live with PassPass and stick it to inflation...In the spirit of transparency, here is our plan.
- We are launching this week in Nashville. Right now we have been approved by Google, but not Apple. We are trying to get this done so we can start doing activations this weekend. We have a couple items we need to fix for apple. So far, they have been difficult to deal with. We are not surprised, we knew the initial approval was going to be a challenge. We are working through it but can't control it and if we don't get live by Friday we will have to push the initial activations to Google only which sucks, but it is what it is.
- Our plan is to continue to do activations in Nashville over the next few weeks.
- We plan to launch the Twin Cities and Atlanta markets at the end of July (26-28) followed by San Diego the 9th-11th of August.
- Our initial App is really an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). We've developed 4 production level applications including the Mobile app in 6 months and have done over 1,600 hours of development work in this time. We're super happy with the progress we've made, but this is really a MVP. We fully expect there will be bugs and user experience issues that we'll have to work through after go-live.
- Here are some stats on where we're at thus far - 1,815 businesses signed, 1,035 affiliates. We are in the process of onboarding all of these businesses, we're averaging about 30 a day, so the app will likely have around 850 or so at go live with another 1,000+ to onboard.
- Regarding our Branding - we have decided to go with a bit of an edgy, fun, non serious brand. We are in the business of saving people money and helping businesses succeed. We are not wanting to be a stuffy, serious brand, we want to be fun and stand out. We went with a brand position of "Save a little. A lot. and our initial campaign is "No Big Deal" this is intentional as we feel like most savings sites or apps are focused on big deals on crappy stuff. We want people to save money every day at places they actually use and to make it easy by putting it in one convenient app. Thus, our theory is if you can save money everywhere, even if it is a little bit at a time, you will ultimately save a lot, and that adds up. Thus, we're no big deal (just a sh*t ton of great deals everywhere that adds up to big savings at the end of each month).
- If you like what we're doing and you just want to support us, you can signup for the app through one of our business partners. We share 50% of the monthly $5 back to the businesses that are in the marketplace referring members, this way our membership program helps businesses stay in business by developing a subscription membership revenue from our network. Our goal is to have over 1 million businesses with deals in our app over the next handful of years, so we hope we can provide you value as a member, even if you don't have a bunch of deals in your area currently.
As we launch the new Affiliate portal, we will be migrating our affiliates over and it will be a different experience then the current one. The signup process for businesses will be different as well. We are in the process of building the training materials and videos for how to onboard businesses in the new process. All affiliates will need to register and pay their $5 a month to activate their payment system, this will cover the portal, the membership to the app as well as allow affiliates to get paid from PassPass as businesses start selling memberships. As a reminder, an affiliate can also earn $1.75 per month for every member they directly refer for the life of the member. We expect this to be a lucrative opportunity for many.
We will be migrating all historical data into the new portal, but you will not see your list of affiliates right away - this will take a few weeks as we have to get the data propagated and displayed which was a feature we couldn't get done in time for the launch. But it will still be live in the old Affiliate Portal which we will not be sunsetting for some period of time to be determined.
We have also released updated Terms of Service, Master Service agreement and privacy policy. These will need to be agreed to as part of the migration to the new affiliate portal.
Businesses are already in the process of getting their marketing materials live in store. Here is a fun video of one of our partners putting up the PassPass heart sticker!
Once we go live in the next few days, businesses will be able to signup members to the App!
- We are working on deploying Intercom as a central inbox for all customer service issues and questions. We are also deploying the Help Center which will be located at help.passpass.com
- We are still adding new businesses and encourage all affiliates to continue to onboard new businesses to the platform.
- We have open sourced our Recommendation algorithm to help businesses better understand how they can maximize their exposure in our Discovery Feed.
- Please stay patient with us as this is the initial launch we fully expect there will be some bumps in the road.
- If you have ideas for the product that can make it better, email me directly at mrenner@passpass.com. Please don't spam me, but I'm open to direct feedback and would love to hear good ideas for how to improve the application.
Thanks everyone for the support and we hope to see you in Nashville or a city near you soon!
I help hospitality brands and leaders tell better stories online. Be the show, not the commercial.
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