the playOccasion blog

In 1935 Jesse Owens broke four world records in 45 minutes....

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:30:29 -0500

In 1935 Jesse Owens broke four world records in 45 minutes. #factivity http://on.fb.me/13Jd7Em

Most NASCAR teams use nitrogen in their tires instead of air....

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:30:27 -0500

Most NASCAR teams use nitrogen in their tires instead of air. #factivity http://on.fb.me/11Szugd

A faceoff in hockey was originally called a puck-off or a face...

Fri, 17 May 2013 00:30:37 -0500

A faceoff in hockey was originally called a puck-off or a face of the puck. #factivity http://on.fb.me/107CUZq

The practice of identifying baseball players by number was...

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:30:26 -0500

The practice of identifying baseball players by number was started by the Yankees in 1929. #factivity http://on.fb.me/10TmW0s

Boxing became a legal sport in 1901. #factivity...

Sat, 11 May 2013 00:30:27 -0500

Boxing became a legal sport in 1901. #factivity http://on.fb.me/18zn0dl

The very first Olympic race, held in 776 BC, was won by Corubus,...

Mon, 06 May 2013 00:30:29 -0500

The very first Olympic race, held in 776 BC, was won by Corubus, a chef. #factivity http://on.fb.me/13aVNeQ

What’s up Prezi!! Our old (full-sized) logo is very...

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 11:36:00 -0500

What’s up Prezi!! Our old (full-sized) logo is very similar to your “Invite”. Is this your lovely way of inviting playOccasion to use “Prezi for Business”?

This is amazing. playOccasion buyers spotted in the...

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 17:01:13 -0500

This is amazing.

playOccasion buyers spotted in the wild.

Here’s the Facebook conversation between one of our co-founder’s wife and her friend.

Yea!!! Hurray!!!

Taking Chances

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 14:05:00 -0600

This is a guest blog from Danielle Di Silvestro, wife of a playOccasion co-founder:

Making changes is difficult, and can be even more difficult when you don’t know what the outcome will be.

In 2010, Eric and I moved to Washington DC so he could work for his local Illinois Congressman. I left my small business in Chicago, moved to DC with no promise of a job, and no means to make money. It was scary, but with a lot of hard work and little luck, it wasn’t long before I found a job. Together, we got a little apartment, went to work every day, and enjoyed biking to Capitol Hill on the weekends. We took a big chance and made a big change, because we believed in us.

In the summer of 2012, my husband of seven months came to me and asked how I felt about him leaving his job to focus on playOccasion. My immediate reaction was ‘no way.’ Give up a stable job with a steady income? Sacrificing paying off student loans, buying a home, and starting a family was all I could think about - it was all too intimidating to consider.

When Eric came to me he was asking me to take a chance, make a change. After we tweaked plans and finances a little, the idea of change wasn’t so scary. It ended up working out to where Eric finished the 2012 term with the Congressman, and I was comfortable to let Eric focus the rest of his time on playOccasion.

playOccasion is a great business idea and I know it will succeed. Driving that success is the people making it work - not only Eric, but the entire playOccasion team is dedicated, focused, hardworking, and passionate about their vision. Because I believe in Eric, and the playOccasion team’s work ethic and drive to succeed, I took a big chance, let go of my security blanket, and accepted that he is forgoing a salary to try and grow a business from the ground up.

It is not the safe play, but I believe in him.

Simple "Cloud" Based Technologies for Business

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 12:19:00 -0600

Last week, I had a scary moment. I lost the second most important electronic device I use after my iPhone: my iPad. As I scrambled around looking for it, I utilized a valuable tool to assist me: the cloud. Going to iCloud.com, Apple’s cloud service, I saw where my iPad was located on a map, showing me it’s location right in my apartment.

Through the cloud I could have also wrote a message on the iPad screen if it was lost in a public place with my phone number and email for people to contact me. I also could have enabled the device to sound an alarm to help me hear it if was nearby. Luckily, I found my iPad with the help of the cloud, but it helps me with so much more than that.

The Cloud is simply a tool to deliver services over the internet, in contrast to downloading software onto a computer directly. This is especially important to us because our team members are spread out around the world and we do not have normal 9-5 schedules. We are also highly mobile. I work at home, school, and even in transit, so we need access to our information through our smartphones and tablets. The cloud helps us overcome these challenges by connecting us to important online tools that are vital to running our business efficiently. The cloud is an indispensable tool to our business allowing us to row in the same direction, cheaply and quickly.

When bootstrapping a startup company, saving money is essential and utilizing cheap or free cloud programs is a Godsend. Below, is a list of the different cloud based tools we use:

Yammer is a secure, private “twitteresque” social network for a business. It allows us to collaborate easier making us more productive. Our team members post status updates on things they are currently doing. This allows the rest of the team to see that update and abstain from interrupting the person or messaging and collaborating to get it done.

Google Drive allows us to store and access our files and documents anywhere in the world. This is much easier than emailing attachments or using a flash drive. We have over 60 GB of storage where all our images, files and code is archived. It allows for real time collaboration among team members to edit documents. In addition to a computer, I access Google Drive on iPhone and iPad on the go.

Salesforce is our CRM provider. We manage our merchant contacts and sales efforts through here. Each of our team members has the Salesforce app on their phone. This comes in handy when let’s say I am walking down the street and I see a potential merchant. I can instantly create a contact record for him and schedule a call.

Asana and Basecamp is where we store all of our pending projects and can see the status of assigned work.

Sproutsocial is our social media management tool. We use it to send out twitter and facebook messages and monitor the responses.

Speek is our conference call tool. Every Sunday night we have the entire team join a conference call by simply texting to one number. This is much better than having to remember dial-in numbers and access codes.

HelloFax is our virtual fax machine. It is connected to our Google Drive so when merchants request information via fax we can send it to them at the click of the button.

DocuSign is where we sign our contracts on our smartphones. When we need to sign a contract, we add the document to our Google Drive, which is connected to DocuSign. We open the document on our phone using the DocuSign app and sign and save it. No more printing, scanning, emailing!

Twilio is our phone company. When you call 1-877-866-8558 (our corporate number), our Twilio VBX receives the call, see which one of the team members is available, and only calls them.

Quickbooks online is our accounting software. Instead of hiring an army of accountants, we take care of our accounting and bookkeeping in a couple of hours each week. It’s connected to our sales platform. Quickbooks is smart to learn how to bucket different transactions differently. On our part, there is no data entry any more and all that is required is for us to approve what Quickbooks has already done.

Chase Online is our bank which is connected to our Quickbooks. We authorize payments through Quickbooks, which communicates to Chase the information on the check amount, payee information.

Many of these tools are free but some are a modest cost to us. One thing is for sure, the cloud allows us to work on playOccasion remotely and collaborate in ways that would have been difficult just a few years ago.

A Lesson in Customer Service with Amy Cosper

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 10:00:47 -0600

If there is one obsession all of us at this organization share, it is our maniac-like commitment to customer service. Our customers are not only our sellers, who publish and sell their activities through us, but also buyers, who choose to spend their money through us instead of somewhere else.

I worked at Gap’s (yes, the retailer) customer call center in high school and learned a ton about customer service. Gap instilled in me a sense of enthusiasm for customer service and today, I patronize companies that deliver great buyer experience. It’s a sustainable competitive differentiator.

However, the following lesson in customer service goes above and beyond. I think it’s an important lesson and worth sharing with you. Hope you enjoy it.

Customer:
I am the customer. I subscribed to receive Entrepreneur magazine’s daily email with five top articles. Every morning, I diligently opened and read the email and the articles therein enclosed.

Problem:
One morning instead of an email with articles in it, I receive an advertisement. There are two problems with this.

I did not subscribe to receive advertisements.
My trust as a customer of Entrepreneur magazine was broken.

Complaint:
Like any other customer, I complained. I resorted to Twitter and sent out this tweet.

I opened every email in the morning from @entmagazineamy and the magazine, until they sent me an advert today. #unsubscribe #betrayedTrust
— Aksh Gupta (@theAkshEffect) October 12, 2012

Acknowledge Receipt:
Amy Cosper, the Editor-in-Chief of the magazine acknowledged receipt, apologized on behalf of her team, and asked for more information to be able to help.

@theaksheffect oh no. i am so sorry to hear that. can you tell me what the ad was? i will look into this.
— Amy Cosper (@EntMagazineAmy) October 12, 2012

After I shared my information with Amy, she acknowledged that the email was tacky.

@theaksheffect you’re right. that’s tacky. let me look into it.
— Amy Cosper (@EntMagazineAmy) October 12, 2012

Follow-up:
Four days later, Amy sent a follow-up via twitter.

@theaksheffect hi there. i am still trying to figure out this spam thing. sorry. thanks for patience.
— Amy Cosper (@EntMagazineAmy) October 16, 2012

Resolving Issue:
Although, I am still awaiting to hear back if the issue was resolved or not, I learned something from Amy Cosper.

Regardless of where you reach within the ranks of an organization you have to stay connected with your customers, listen to them, acknowledge them. After all customers are people. People like to be loved, not ignored. Whether the medium is email, phone, face to face, social media, it is important to keep an “ear” out.

Do you have amazing customer service stories? Please share them with me or playOccasion on twitter!

Experience on the other side: Using my own business

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 16:00:00 -0500

Since starting playOccasion last January, I have spoken with many merchants and asked them to list their activities on the website. Over that time, (over 300) 375 people have purchased activities through us, providing our merchants with tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. As great as it is to see others transacting on playOccasion without a hitch, I myself had never purchased an activity listed on our own site, until recently.

Our mission is to make it easy for people to discover, decide and buy things to do, fast - online. I am aware of the steps involved to make this happen, but I never actually went through the motions. I understand things better by doing them, so that is what I set out to do as a playOccasion customer.

My wife’s mother recently came for a visit and since it was around Halloween, I thought it might be a great opportunity to take a ghost tour of Alexandria, VA, near Washington D.C., from a merchant on playOccasion.

While the ghost stories did not give me nightmares, I would certainly have had one if the purchase process did not go flawlessly. After inputting my preferred tour date, I purchased four tickets on the website and printed out the receipt. We arrived for the scheduled tour, the guide happily accepted our playOccasion receipt, and we proceeded to learn about some Alexandria ghost stories. Whew!

One area where I noticed we needed to improve the purchase experience was on the checkout page. The buyer’s experience for changing quantities is not as seamless as I would like, so we are focused on making this aspect better.

Indeed Confucius once said, “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” As more people, like me, experience the process for the first time and see how easy we have made it to buy activities online, they will continue to look to playOccasion for things to do in the future. Simplicity breeds familiarity and this has created many repeat buyers on our site.

Sharing our cash flow research

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 09:26:10 -0500

Cash flow is very critical to every business whether the business is on the web or on Main Street. When accounts payables exceed sales receipts it can prove fatal to any business. We want to develop a payment system that streamlines the process for our merchants. We researched popular services we’ve used, purely from a cash flow point of view. Below, we share our research with you.

It’s easy to manage cash flow when the customer pays you in person. However, over the past few years e-commerce for the local market has exploded and will continue to grow faster than the economy. Online services like GrubHub, OpenTable, Groupon, LivingSocial, Square are second nature to buyers and sellers.

Grubhub.com - Well, Grubhub doesn’t really need an introduction. But to our east-coast followers, it’s like Seamless.com but Grubhub came first. :) Restaurants incur three types of costs - cost of food supplies, salaries, and fixed cost of tables and kitchen equipment, and thus, operate on the thinnest of margins. Restaurants receiving orders from Grubhub receive monthly checks for earnings. Grubhub can do more to speed up the reimbursement process to help restaurants more with accounts payables on food supplies.

Square - The latest “thing” in technology is mobile payments and Square is an innovator in this space. Square buyers and sellers can be anyone i.e. it doesn’t serve a single industry. Square sellers can sell shirts, tacos or cleaning services. When merchants swipe a customer’s credit card, Square deposits funds the next day. Square now also allows customers to buy from merchants without having their card handy. Cool huh? However, and it’s a BIG however, Sqaure does not have an online distribution platform, i.e. the buyer cannot go online and buy from the seller. They have to transact in person.

Groupon and Livingsocial: Buyers love shopping for local services on daily deal sites. As is the case with Square, sellers of Groupon and Livingsocial can be of any type. Some are service providers (like spas, nail salons), some others are restaurants. The payment terms offered by the two largest daily deal providers are different but follow a similar structure. Partial or equal payments as installments few months after the deal closes. Both companies can improve their earnings payout process and tie it to voucher redemption instead. For example, when the voucher is redeemed, the funds are deposited the next day.

The On-demand Economy

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 08:00:27 -0500

Growing up many children are taught that instant gratification is not how the world works. They must wait to have fulfillment. While true today in many cases, it has become untrue for so many others.

With the internet at work, coffee shops, homes, and pockets so many things can be had at the very moment a thought is created in the brain. The world is moving more and more into an “on-demand” economy. The following is a list of examples of this I encounter daily:

When I am in class, if the professor brings up a scholar or an organization that has interesting ideas, I immediately follow them on Twitter. For example, I recently followed the World Economic Forum when my professor was speaking about it.
Coming home from work, my wife will visit Netflix on our TV and watch her show of choice. Right now it is the Tudor’s.
Waiting at the airport, I can download an audio book or podcast on my iPhone at the gate to listen to during my flight. On my last flight, I was listening to the polemics of Frederic Bastiat, French statesman and philosopher extraordinaire.
At work, the moment hunger strikes, I can go to GrubHub and order some pizza for delivery.
The other day, I was on the train and saw a man reading National Geographic. I remembered when I used to subscribe to it and immediately wanted to subscribe again. So I pulled out my iPad and renewed my subscription on the train. Love the photos!
I live away from my parents and for my mom’s birthday coming up, I will visit Amazon.com to buy her a gift and have it delivered to her house. (I’ll do that right after writing this blog. Thanks for the reminder!)
I was at Barnes and Noble with my business partner and heard the iconic French singer Edith Piaf on the speakers. It had been awhile since I heard her voice so I, once again pulled out my iPhone and opened my Pandora app and put her in as a station on my phone. C’est magnifique!

One thing that is missing is an on-demand store for activities. Currently, there is no easy way to search for things to do. How simple would it be if there was one easy place to see all things going on around you in your area? We are tackling this problem with our startup, playOccasion. We want to make it a marketplace of activities where people can buy things to do, on-demand.

Learn about the Interest Score

Tue, 02 Oct 2012 15:58:57 -0500

Save time, enhance the experience for the consumer and align our interest with that of the merchants are the three pillars of our core principles as an organization.

In this post, we will reinforce those core beliefs with our latest effort to remain agile.

Today, we are announcing “The Interest Score” - it is a number that is uniquely calculated for each activity and referenced to show the number of people interested in that particular activity. The interest score will help the consumers save time and enhance their shopping experience. Crunching data on how over 70,000 visitors to playOccasion’s marketplace have interacted, we noticed a pattern. When making a decision on what to do, consumers prefer activities closer to their home, comparing prices across merchants and participating in activities that are popular with others as well. With the new display improvement, consumers will be able to make a quick decision.

Activities in the marketplace are more visual and anchored to key pieces of information that help make the decision faster.

Photos are more critical than ever to every listing. In addition, title, price and neighborhood are neatly arranged in the order of priority. At the bottom of each listing is the interest score represented in the picture as “343 people interested”.

This has been our biggest change since our launch in January.

The interest score objectifies our value proposition to merchants that This will create several new opportunities for us to work closely with our merchants and learn innovative ways to help them improve their interest score. This will also enable us to tackle their biggest challenge - affordably finding new customers online. A higher interest score will bring more visibility to a merchant’s activity, thereby bringing it newer first time customers.

We would love to hear from you and what you think about our recent upgrade. Does this help you save time and make a decision faster? Does this upgrade offer a consistent and enhanced user experience while shopping for activities?

Aligning Interests

Wed, 12 Sep 2012 09:57:05 -0500

Online aggregators are aplenty on the interwebs these days especially pronounced in the travel or recreational sector. Aggregators spend a lot of money on marketing to draw traffic, accept transactions, and take a high commission or listing fees from merchants. In such a design, incentives are aligned so that merchants want to remove the middleman (aggregators) from the transaction workflow. Aggregators are seen less as a value-add for providing incremental sales and more as an annoying cost for existing sales.

Instead of a commission-based model, playOccasion has a transaction-based model. We made it our mission to align our interests with that of the merchant so that they are just as happy when a customer pays online through playOccasion as when they pay directly to them. We achieve this goal by focusing on a visitor to transaction ratio for every merchant. If the ratio drops below average, we work with the merchant to implement strategies to improve it. A line from Matt Maloney (Grubhub CEO), “we don’t make a dime until you make a dollar,” has become our mantra.

We have a very strong incentive to ensure that our merchants are increasing their online presence. By exposing their activities to more online visitors and maintaining a steady visitor-transaction ratio, we offer our merchants tremendous value. For example, one of our merchants, ELD Touring, has had lots of visitors looking at his tours but not much in the way of purchases. This is a concern not only to him, but to us as well. Our incentive is aligned with the merchant’s.

At playOccasion, we are constantly striving to make the online shopping experience ever quicker and easier. At this point, we have established a checkout process that takes less than 30 seconds once a decision to purchase has been made. We aim to make it even faster. When our merchants and we all share the same goal, we can grow each other’s business and improve the user experience for the customer creating a win, win, win situation.

Ode to Small Businesses

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 07:41:32 -0500

Post by Eric Di Silvestro

I come from a family of small businessmen. My father, uncle, and cousins’ all run their own businesses. I worked with them as a boy and know firsthand the hard work and hustle required to succeed as a small business.

Most Americans intuitively know this as well. A recent poll by the Public Affairs Council shows almost nine in 10 adults (88 percent) have a favorable view of small business.This positive sentiment is well deserved.

There is much uncertainty when running a small business. Managing cash flow, long-hours, scheduling employees, the list goes on and on. When my father opened a parking lot near O’Hare airport, for the first few months, he used to count the parked cars to see if he reached his break-even point. Prior to that, he had a thriving restaurant on the same property, which he closed to start the parking lot.

Killing one profitable business to start another is risky, but so is giving up the opportunity to have a secure, well-paying job to start a small business, which many business owners have done.

This past week my partner Aksh Gupta and I stopped by Sugar Bliss Bakery in downtown Chicago to find the owner on-site, hard at work. She graduated from the University of Chicago in economics and statistics, began her career in investment banking, and now owns a sweets bakery. She could have had a stable career, but instead opened a business with no certainty of success.

Because we love small business at playOccasion, like 88% of you, we have created the Rockstar program for our merchants to celebrate the risks they have taken as entrepreneurs. Rockstar is designed to showcase and honor our merchants’ hard work through images with some pithy comment to expose their business to people through the web. We hope our effort brings more business to our merchants.

Photo courtesy: http://twobullets.blogspot.com/2010/09/rock-stars-have-killed-music-industry.html

Round-the-clock Marketplaces

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 15:59:02 -0500

Post by Eric Di Silvestro

People need to shop for goods and services. For most of history, merchants have met the demand for goods and services by opening up a brick and mortar shop with limited hours of operation.

The vast majority of people are happy shopping during normal business hours, but there are many others that, either by impulse or schedule, want to make a purchase at an odd hour. A brick and mortar store misses out on such business. Luckily, there is a way to sell to these consumers – online.

The internet revolution has completely changed the shopping experience. Today, sales can be made 24/7, even when a store is closed and the lights are off. Only 48% of businesses in America have websites, and very few of them offer the ability to purchase online. As a merchant, selling goods or services online is a huge advantage in the “on-demand” society.

Take the example of Blockbuster Video. It used to be that when you wanted to rent a movie you had to go to the video store. Today, the video store comes to you in your home, via Netflix and others. You can watch hundreds of movies and TV programs on-demand, 24/7, without leaving your couch.

I am a news addict. The internet has changed the way I consume news. I used to get an ‘old fashioned’ paper copy of the Wall Street Journal. Now I receive it digitally on my iPad and it is much easier to read on the train. Twitter is another great example of on-demand, 24/7 news channel. My friends and I rarely go to websites to check news. We access our twitter feed throughout the day to get the latest. For some, it has become their primary source of news.

On playOccasion.com, where I am co-founder, we see sales at all hours of the day - late at night, early in the morning and even during the workday when people are at their work computers. Like me, our customers are a part of the on-demand society and want the convenience of a 24/7 online store. Given that we are becoming increasingly interconnected through the internet, it is an advantage to merchants to offer online purchasing ability and have an online store open 24/7. The desire of customers to purchase goods and services online will continue to grow over time.

Analytics on Order Times on playOccasion.com

Simple Math Behind Online Sales

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 09:52:00 -0500

Many times when we talk to merchants, we are asked one similar question “why should my business have online sales?”

From a consumer’s standpoint, it’s a huge win! Customers love businesses that make it convenient to buy from them. Just look at Amazon!

Apart from the convenience factor, there is an incredible math behind selling online that cannot be measured in the offline world.

Converting visitors to customers

Let’s say your website gets 100 visitors a month. On average, 60% of that traffic tends to be new (or first-time) visitors. According Harvard University research, 80% of first-time visitors have a strong purchase intent and are likely to buy online. If your activities cost $50, 48 first-time visitors present a potential opportunity to do $2,400 in sales online.

First-time customers turn into repeat customers

According to the same Harvard research, customers develop affinity towards sellers who offer an online purchase option. In fact, 43% of first-time buyers are likely to buy again. Continuing our example, out of the 48 first-time customers, 20 will buy at least one more time - representing an additional $1,000 in sales online.

Spreading the word

Online buyers connected to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest can easily share their purchase experience with hundreds of friends. Let’s assume that a buyer shares his experience online and 10 of his friends visit your website. Harvard research shows that 30% of his friends are like to buy from your business because of that recommendation on social networks. The friends are likely to spend another $150 in online sales.

Measurable benefits

Here’s the beauty in all of this. You can calculate each and every data point I mentioned above. Using analytics, you can see how many first-time visitors are converting into customers, then how many of them come-back and buy online again. How many of the customers are coming from social networks and buying?

Takeaway: Here’s the math of potential online sales

First-time Customers - $2,400

Repeat Customers - $1,000

Referral Business - $150

I say “potential” because each business is unique and the conversion percentage can vary business to business. The math shown above should make want to take the shot, after all, you will miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Post by Aksh Gupta

Renaming Acropolitan Labs LLC

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 14:54:00 -0500

Dear Friends,

playOccasion has been operational since January 1, 2012 under the legal entity name - Time2PlayTennis LLC. The playOccasion team acquired the assets of Time2PlayTennis LLC, and instead of focusing on renaming the company, we got to work on building a business.

Over the last few months, we worked hard to validate our business model, and now think that the time is right to change our legal name to Acropolitan Labs LLC. We do not anticipate this name change to effect our external relationship with our customers and merchants.

Why Acropolitan?

Long answer: My friend from college, Paul Lee and I started a student-run investment club called “The Investment Society.” Our equity research reports were published under the banner “The Acropolitan,” symbolizing strong foundations built to last. We had tremendous success with the group. Two years after Paul and I left college, the university finance department, threatened by our success, acquired and merged the club with their puppet student club. At that time, Paul and I promised each other to start at least one company under the name Acropolitan. Paul went on to launch Acropolitan Capital L.P. in southern California but there was never a ripe time for me, until today.

I appreciate the support of my Board at playOccasion to allow me to fulfill my end of the promise. More importantly, their authorization was co-inspired by Paul’s service in the Marines. Paul Lee is a Sergent in the Marines serving in Afghanistan. We pray for his safe return!

Stay awesome!

Aksh Gupta