I realize we might have actually gone about it the wrong way. From a consumer perspective, that’s where we were struggling to find a niche to start off with.
Our long term goal is to enable people to buy services from anyone in the world, no matter how small or large (i.e. reservations, travel), and it’s on us to make it actionable by as broad an workforce as possible.
We felt we had to prove out the concept of farming out discrete tasks in a straightforward niche like the concierge-space, as opposed to perhaps a white labeled platform. That probably wasn’t the right approach, and we’d appreciate your thoughts on this.
We picked a reservation concierge service first, as it is a vertical that is immediately testable in SF with easy to understand mechanics for consumers. With the increasing mass-media fueled foodie culture, our hypothesis being that people don’t want the trouble of deciding where to eat and making the reservation - they just wanted a curated experience. And that made it a good candidate for our platform.
The other 2 verticals we considered were 1) a marketplace for on-the-ground, region specific collection of data and 2) travel planning in countries with low internet penetration, namely bookings and suggestions by locals.
With Loft, we have 20 customers paying us $10 ~ $20 a month, but we haven’t grown beyond that due to limited marketing, as we focus on nailing the operations side of platform. The agents are currently just the both of us, and we can afford $10 - $15 an hour per agent if our economics hold.
All in all, we have our vision of what the future of jobs can be. Loft is an experiment towards that which has seen mild traction, and that’s why we really want your advice!
We are building a platform that allows anyone with a mobile phone to earn a living by performing discrete tasks.
Our platform aims to break down complex jobs into easily actionable items, that can be performed easily by anyone, anywhere.
The first vertical we are applying this to is reservations. The Loft Club (https://useloft.com) is a service that makes reservations for you at amazing restaurants every month on your preferred day, saving you the decisions and the hassle. Through our platform, we centralize restaurant recommendations and assignments, before farming out the logistics of making and manging them to our agents.
Our question is: Should we work on building out the generic platform and expand quickly into other verticals, or focus on building out The Loft Club and owning this space first? We've customers paying us for The Loft Club with the mild publicity it has received thus far.
While I applaud the effort, this just shows how disconnected Mozilla has become from the web in general. I wish they'd concentrate on making a great browser, an area they were leading until Chrome and the mobile web happened.
The landing page doesn't tell me what this does at all. I get that it does alerts that somehow get onto the apple watch, but nothing else.
"Discover our channels" --> what are channels?
Ah ok after watching the video I get a much better idea of how to use the app. I'm curious to know how many people actually click on the video to watch it. IMHO good direct copy on the landing page is worth more than a video hidden behind a click.
I love how Apple takes common sense (in retrospect) to extreme levels. Not only do they do that well, they excel in thinking out of the box, for the simplest of things. Color me impressed.
adding a testimonial from the paralyzed man and any other satisfied customers on your front page might go a long way to show how your app can be useful to certain niche markets.
I don't see why this should be controversial, it's so easy to switch to Haml, Sass or jQuery when you need/want to. The defaults are there to get the uninitiated off the ground as quickly as possible, and is in keeping with the 'rails way'.
I, on the other hand, have my 'own way', and rails doesn't in any way prevent me from implementing that when I start a new rails project.
Forrst has been a source of inspiration for my work ever since I started using it. Honestly some of the designs I see there are so polished and refined that it makes me (a developer trying to improve on my design skills) feel downright design-dumb sometimes.
Seems like we have quite a bit of thinking to do. Any further advice for us? Thanks!