Beacon Me Blog

Original Article: https://goo.gl/FUkf6Z

Original Article: https://goo.gl/7QDXdh

Travel has become accessible the world over, but too often we’re taken in by social media posts, website pictures and more that we miss out on the small things that make a destination so unique. We become complacent saying that the location is overrated, or tired, when in reality we never did our due diligence to find out what makes that place tick. 

We’ve struggled with this question and thought about how much we love when people give us recommendations on where to go, but the problem is that usually they themselves are travelers and are only exposed to a thin slice of a destination. On the other hand, when we talk to locals, they don’t want “tourists” invading too much of their home turf and become reluctant to give you a true insiders take on what’s great. 

It’s for this reason that Beacon Me is working with Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) and Convention and Visitor Bureaus (CVBs) because their mission is to expose visitors to as much of a destination as possible, while also providing them with a true of why their destination is special. They want people to go to the hidden gems, the new restaurants, the old standbys and everything in between. Their focus is growing the entire destination and the related economy.

Article: https://goo.gl/4vJGdx

Lifehacker’s article lays out one of Beacon Me’s core beliefs, which is that it takes time to create greatness. This ethos stands in clear contrast to one of the most widely shared phrases in Silicon Valley, “Move fast, and break things”. For some companies, it works for them. They can fly by the seat of their pants and be nimble enough to figure out a niche solution that they can then convince a customer to adopt. That’s not who we are. We never began Beacon Me with the intention of moving fast and forcing a solution onto people that didn’t really have a problem. Although we did make mistakes early on in the hopes of being an “Overnight Success”, our goal wasn’t to hit a grand slam right away. We understood that success for us would be fouling a few off and simply getting on base. 

Baseball cliches aside, we’ve reached a point where we’re confident in the solution that we’ve created for tourists and for tourism bureaus.  This happened because we did our due diligence reflecting on what was missing when we traveled, and we researched why this problem was nearly uniform in every city. We found that the tools to help encourage exploration, education and discovery of a destination simply did not exist. We were excited to discover that a solution did not exist for this major problem, but we wanted to be methodical in our approach. It wasn’t going to happen overnight. We had to take time studying what our consumers, what our businesses and what everyone in between wanted. Then we used their suggestions to craft something completely new, and wholly Beacon Me. 

Original Article: https://goo.gl/tF7ah4

The sassy bingo image above says its all. The travel startup industry is growing increasingly crowded and it seems like each idea is only incrementally better than the one that preceded it. For every startup that succeeds, there are 4 others that fail. It’s why Skift pointed out that 4 out of 5 travel startups have failed in the past 5 years. It’s a startling number, but on par with success rates in other industries. So then why are we focused on this article and tips from Hack Horizon on how to succeed? 

The reason is because those tips are great for nascent startups that have found their niche, audience, funding or a mixture of both. What if you’re still in the ideation phase and think that you’ve got something great. This stage is where we want to offer some advice and show how we got to where we are today. 

Before we ever encountered the above image from Hitlist, we took time to step back from what we were working on (recs from friends, column 3 if you’re following) and to stop thinking about how our solution fits someone else’s problem. Instead, we thought about why we encountered these travel problems in the first place. We realized that the reason we couldn’t accomplish our goal of experiencing the best, most unique, authentic places that a destination has to offer was not because no one is trying to promote them, but it’s because those that are trying didn’t have the ideal platform to reach travelers. We discovered other solutions were narrow in scope, were focused on the wrong pain points or simply forced the travel industry to accept their solution without creating something that consumers would enjoy.

Article: https://goo.gl/fHpG7E

We love how Keenen Charles’ article hits the nail on the head about the problems that plague so many Location Based Social Networks. In particular, we enjoy his focus on 3 of the most common issues at hand when trying to create a new location based network:

1) No content nearby 2) Slow content growth 3) Low frequency of posts.


Early iterations of Beacon Me felt the pain of these issues in different ways. We needed user generated content to make the map feel full. After the map (or feed) was full, these posts quickly began to feel stale and ultimately it became even harder to encourage users to make the critical mass of posts necessary to survive.

We decided not to quit and internalized these issues. We thought about different ways that we could still highlight the best local experiences without needing to rely on our users to make the posts. We realized that we should focus on what we truly wanted as travelers, a better way to discover and explore the world around us.

 Original Article: https://goo.gl/uo3S6H

When we look at PixelPin and how they are determined to reinvent the password, we see a lot of ourselves in their novel approach. We recognize that lists, paragraphs, numbers, and pins produce a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance when users are trying to quickly and easily digest (or remember) information. This reason alone is why we completely rebuilt Beacon Me from the ground up. 

The first step was evaluating what we had built and seeing how we could improve upon it. Our card based feed appeared slick, but it wasn’t doing its job of conveying location or categorical information quickly enough. We realized that a map based approach was better, but in some ways it had already been done. Pins and ratings were the rage, but they forced a users hand to hopefully discover something that they might like and even then the odds were low. These solutions weren't helping a user visually or spontaneously explore their world. Instead, we realized that a solution was already staring us in the face and it had become one of the most popular ways of communicating. HEIROGLYPHICS. wait, we mean emoji. Emoji have emerged as one of the fastest, most efficient ways to communicate a lot of information in a tiny package. It was from this moment of serendipity that we realized we could help people more easily explore the world around them by using emoji to denote local places, businesses and brands. 

original article: https://goo.gl/ym0S9H

Matt’s Take: Change is hard to do. People love doing what they’ve always done and it is hard to convince them otherwise. If an app helps a person increase their productivity by 5%, is that something that truly matters to them? To the quants of the world, the amount of seconds, minutes and hours saved is huge, but to the average person it will matter very little. 

This disconnect exists because 5% over the period of one day will seem very small. We live in a world of immediacy and unless that 5% drastically alters the course of my, your, or anyone else’s day, there is hardly reason to change established habits. 

Mailbox (purchased by Dropbox) ran into this very problem. Their goal was to fundamentally change how people used and interacted with email. They wanted to streamline productivity and simplify actions. What they found is that people are happy with established norms. Why fix what fundamentally isn't broken? In essence, they followed the cliche startup paradigm of creating a solution to a problem that they have greatly exaggerated. People love email and are firmly entrenched in their ways. It is a communication channel from the early days of the internet and it will continue to persist.

Similarly, photo applications are a dime a dozen. Dropbox subversively tried to push users to their system by convincing them to offload photos to Dropbox servers. In theory, a great solution to a big problem, namely hard drive space. They tried to accomplish this feat through their app Carousel. Dropbox also found that they could not get people to abandon old habits.

Original Article: http://goo.gl/jm9WWL

Matt’s take: When building your startup, it is easy to find good people to help you get things off of the ground. There are plenty of people out there with adequate skills willing to take your money to bring some semblance of your dream to life. The art of finding great people is far more nuanced. 

Some of the things that you MUST do.

You must trust that the development group, the cofounder, the designer, the investor and whoever else has a hand in the project will be willing to work with you, not just for you. You need someone to challenge your ideas, while also staying true to your vision. We’ve had growing pains in Beacon Me because we’ve spun away from our original design, but we’ve kept our vision and ethos the same. This persistence has allowed us to create a product that we believe in.

You must research and know exactly what you need to bring your product to life. You need to know the language, the nomenclature, the shorthand. You can’t just wing it, or else you’ll find yourself left out in the cold. We may have tried to bluff early on that we knew more than we did, but it took hours upon hours of work to become experts in finding the right people to work with and for us. 

You must know the costs going into it and forecast them accurately. If not, you’ll find yourselves feeding an ever growing balloon that will never pop. We’ve definitely let this one get away from us, but we’ve done a better job of wrangling it. We’ve kept our costs significantly lower than competitors, while in many ways created a superior product. 

Lastly, (my lastly), you must believe in yourself. If you ever show any self doubt or weakness, someone will take advantage of it. When that happens, you open the door for swindlers, grifters, and shysters. We’ve been fortunate enough to not have had this happen, but we’ve been close many times. It’s hardened me, but made me better.

Article: https://goo.gl/muv1Er

Matt’s Take: Sometimes the hardest aspect of convincing other people to love your app is convincing yourself that it’s worth fighting for. If you can’t buy in with a whole heart then there’s no reason for doing it in the first place. You need to wake up in the morning with a purpose and if believing in your app, or your company is not the first thing you do in the morning then you need to reevaluate your priorities or realize that this pursuit is not for you. 

Ryan Sheffer, the founder of Momunt, offers an excellent insight into some of the reasons why he feels that their app didn’t generate the success that he was looking for. They had publicity that lesser apps would kill for. A spot on Product Hunt, modest growth metrics, but they were never really taking off. They tried lots of different ways to make growth happen, but it never did. 

His rationale and agreement with Dave Morin that we’ve reached peak app rings true, but it also may not be the only answer. Social media apps are tricky and convincing people to change up their daily habits is never easy. They need unfailing faith from their founders and daily promotion, or else you become an also ran. In the case of other apps, you become a never was. 

original article: http://goo.gl/J6EWnI

Matt’s Take: Sh*t happens. It’s part of life and at some points it is inevitable. Yet it does not mean that you cannot be prepared for the times when things go wrong. Bugs, Competitors, Market crashes are among the litany of things that the CEO of a company could wake up to every morning. Stewart Butterfield’s mantra to himself every morning is not one of paranoia, but rather of clarity. He realizes that there is no time to rest on the laurels of a $2.8 Billion valuation. Slack has been fortunate enough to rise from the ashes of Butterfield’s previous gaming company, a blessing and a curse that other companies don't have. On one hand, he’s been given second life and the opportunity to create something truly transformative. On the other, he’s plagued knowing that failure is not only real, but also part of Slack’s story. 

In a way, Beacon Me 3.0 has risen from the ashes of prior Beacon Me’s. We tried out assumptions, broke things, and regrouped. We’ve had our own sets of successes and failures with Beacon Me, and we constantly ask ourselves “What can go wrong?”. Yet it’s not the fear of failure that motivates these questions, it’s the quest for excellence. Anticipating problems, good or bad, shows that a company isn’t afraid of the future. They are preparing themselves for it. It’s what we’ve done and will continue to do. 

original article: http://goo.gl/0Thx8s

Matt’s Take: Do I ever feel crazy pursuing Beacon Me and chasing after a market that has yet to emerge? Sure. More importantly though, Do I feel like we’ve got something great that’s just ahead of the curve? Absolutely. 

We’ve been working on Beacon Me (in startup terms) forever. We grind daily to figure out how we can create a product that people will enjoy using, and will enhance, not alter, their social experiences. We want to make the process of finding things to do seamless. Users shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to see what’s going on around them. Get in, get out, get living. It’s a mantra we preach and practice with Beacon Me.

Beacon Me is definitely an oddball in the social discovery landscape, but too often we find ourselves on the outside looking in at experiences that we wished we had known about. Why not be able to find experiences that you can actually enjoy first hand? Doesn't sound so crazy anymore to me.

Andrew’s Take: I love this article because I think it really speaks to what I strive for every day at my day job and what we, as a team, strive for at Beacon Me. I work in an engineering job where some of the most successful people around me are people who have taken an existing idea or process and made it better. When we talk about lowering operating overhead and driving up revenues this is great for the status quo. Improved processes yield better results on existing operations and lines of business. It's only when you take the time to think about what things will look like 6-10 years down the line that you find the revolutionary, game-changing ideas that don't just improve the business, they elevate it. 

Original Article: https://goo.gl/Gbazum

Matt’s Take: This piece highlights pretty much everything we did wrong when starting Beacon Me. We never considered what it meant to have a plan or how long it would take to get to market. We knew that we had an idea that we liked and we were going to take it as far as we could. 

Yet we learned that this “plan” was far from good enough. An app that appeared simple had many points of friction that would slow customers down. Sometimes parts of Beacon Me worked, sometimes they didn't and that’s even before we tried to explain all of the myriad ways Beacon Me would improve your life, short of doing your laundry. 

We then took a step back and cut out a lot of superfluous features of Beacon Me to get us back to our original idea, helping people find and share great experiences. We asked ourselves, “How do we make this happen? How do we make it frictionless for first time and long time users? Why would people want to come back to Beacon Me?” These questions and more were answered in Beacon Me 3.0, but there is still plenty more for us to figure out. We are always improving and reaching for the top, but we aren't pressing forth blindly. We have your guidance and input helping us get there. 

Andrew’s Take: One of the things I think we struggled with early on when creating Beacon Me was a lack of a true MVP. We kept thinking of cool things that the application could do and then adding them in on the spot. This led to a slow, bloated application that did a bunch of things reasonably well but never did anything great. I really sympathize with a lot of what this article mentions about the Everest app. Luckily for us, we aren't burning $90K+ per month, but we've none the less learned some of these early lessons. We've spent much of our time lately trying to get back to basics and do a small amount of things in ways that are truly original, intuitive and purposeful. As long as we continue to have great, active users to help us iterate, we'll have a bright future.

Colton’s Take: The lesson that the founders tell of the rise and fall of Everest is one that we see time and time again. An enterprising group of founders has an idea they continue to build and build on. They hit a sticking point, and try to tack features on in order to push through it, and ultimately they lose sight of why they built the product in the first place. Currently, as I’m spending lots of time studying the best ways to prepare for success in a New Venture while earning my MBA in Entrepreneurship, these lessons are beginning to seem obvious, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

This week we offer our thoughts about our upcoming version 3.0 launch and what we are most excited to offer our users! 

Matt’s Take: It’s been a process finding out what makes people tick, and what drives their daily lives. We’ve found time and again that people don’t need more steps to complicate their lives when there are perfectly good substitutes out there. Keeping this in mind, we reimagined Beacon Me not as a swiss army knife to attempt everything at once, but rather a pair of binoculars to see what’s around you. These activities can range from a walk in the park to a pop up beer garden to a secret EDM show. There’s no commitment to go to these places, but sometimes you need help in finding out that they exist. We will never force our users to sign up, and always will encourage them to get out there and live life to the fullest. Beacon Me 3.0 makes this happen with a completely new approach to “social networking”, it’s social living.

Colton’s Take: I’m most excited for Beacon Me to help users uncover more of their city. 3.0 is all about helping people find what they love to do and connect with people who love doing it.

A great writeup on how people should handle starting up. We should all be ready for “the worst of times”, not just the glory years. 

Article: https://goo.gl/ANntdu

Andrew’s Take: I love the concept of the "peace time general." I think many of us who are just entering this space, Beacon Mobile included, are used to a magical time where people are willing to invest in anything and tech startups are a dime a dozen. For many of us, I'm sure the thought that this might not last forever hasn't fully occurred to us. This is a great reality check and reminder to stick with a great product that sells well regardless of the economy. Being a peace time general or an arm chair quarterback is easy, it's when times are tough that you find out what you really have to offer. 

Matt’s Take: It’s amazing to think how many people do not prepare for the worst. We see the world the way is, and expect it to always be this way. The solutions we make for peace time problems then become insignificant very quickly. Being cognizant of this fact, we need to place ourselves in a position to excel when things inevitably fail. The world is at a precipice right now and I think that it would be an excellent time for startups everywhere to self reflect and examine how they can continue to truly help the world. If their solution is not a long term one, maybe it’s time to find another problem to solve.

Colton’s Take: I love Gary Vaynerchuk. As a Wine Industry Professional, marketing guy, investor, founder, and leader I think he’s got an amazing tale to tell. Plus, he has no technical know-how, he’s just a guy with a big dream, a lot of energy, and hustle. When he drops knowledge on the general public via social media, like this, I think it’s generally a good idea to listen. So what is he saying here? I think he’s taking a life lesson that our generation really needs to hear, and tailoring it to his audience of young, hungry entrepreneurs. His lesson is this. The fact that your idea/business/app means everything to you counts for absolutely nothing. You don’t get points for trying. Nobody is going to hand you a trophy (in this case their hard earned cash or valuable attention) just because you showed up or worked hard. Success will not come quickly. Success will not come easily.

Better yet he gives us 3 lessons on how to plan for and survive in a world where reality hurts. 1 - Build a team of people with the same motivation and passion about your ideas as you, but different skill sets. 2 - Build something that actually matters, and matters to more folks than just you or you/your friends. 3 - Know what it is about your idea that matters to others and tell THAT story, not the one about how you made it or why you like it.

Original Article: https://goo.gl/8hCQH1

This week’s article could not ring more true as Colton begins his MBA journey, Matt gears up to teach another year of Latin and Andrew sets his sights on his own graduate studies. 

Matt’s Take: No one would ever accuse Steve Jobs of being a great engineer. In fact, it’s well known that he was not. Nowadays engineers at Facebook could easily defeat Mark Zuckerberg in a coding contest. Does it mean that these so-called “experts” are/were frauds because they weren't specialists? Absolutely not! 

Rather it’s through their diverse backgrounds that they were able to create a vision and pursue it. Zuckerberg famously said that if he had not gotten into computer science, he would’ve been a Classics professor. His love of the classics helped him focus on simplicity, while also inspiring him to singularly pursue greatness. Similarly, Jobs was inspired by pursuits as diverse as calligraphy and Buddhism. We all know how these interests shaped the ethos of Apple. It is clear that these “liberal studies” shaped and molded two of the greatest minds of our time to think outside of the box. In hindsight, it is possible to see that these men were clearly destined for great things, but at the time it would have been impossible to say that these pedestrian interests would have changed the technological course of history. 

Andrew’s Take: Jack of All Trades has been a dirty word in our culture lately. A friend of mine jokingly said to me the other night that "jobs these days are impossible to get without a masters and, by the time our kids are in the workforce, you won't be able to get a job without a PhD." He was being hyperbolic but that sentiment does feed into our culture of specialists. Graduate school is encouraged and almost mandatory for success in some industries.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE LINK

This week the team tackles a tough one that’s close to our hearts, is the app revolution really dead?

Matt’s Take:

“The right experience at the right time”. Beacon Me was originally designed to do 100 different things all in the name of making life easier. We’d take care of planning events, set location based reminders, make finding parties a breeze, and clean your kitchen sink (not really), but the principle remained the same. We bit off more than we could chew and we forgot about the importance of the user experience, inside and outside of Beacon Me. We didn’t ask ourselves “where would the user experience Beacon Me?”, “what’s the best way to connect them with experiences?” or even, “Why should they use Beacon Me to find experiences?". We figured that we made the tools and that the users would figure it out for themselves. This method clearly didn’t work.

So let’s take a step back to our redesign. We mention our redesign a lot because we really have gone back to square one. We scrapped the old and came up with something new. Beacon Me was redesigned as a platform that revolves around experiences because we live in a world truly filled with experiences. They are all around us, and shape our lives. We should not have to sift through the mud to hopefully find a diamond, but  instead should have the ability to pick and choose from the best diamonds around us. We know that we are on the road to accomplishing this goal because like the author said we’ve figured out how to pair users with the right experience at the right time.

Colton’s Take:

It’s not about the tech. It’s never been about the tech. Even when it was all about the tech, it still (really) wasn’t about the tech. Gates, Jobs and the rest aren’t visionaries because they were better than others at building or honing the technology, they are visionaries because they saw how their technology could enhance, optimize, and change its user’s daily experience.

What this article argues is two things - first, that we’ve been living in the app revolution. In this microcosm of time and experience, we have been placing value on the development of applications, of tech itself. This is a bubble. We know its a bubble, and we are at the point of bursting. Second, this article argues that for apps and new technology to be of real value, it must focus on experience rather than novelty.

While this may sound profound to some folks in our industry, it’s not new news to the team at Beacon Me. As Matt and Andrew also state, we built the kitchen sink in the first iteration of our app. It had lots of whizz bang features and plenty of ways we knew it COULD help users, but we weren’t really accounting for their overall experience. The new platform is ALL about experience. Simple, fast, lightweight, social, and inspirational we envision a world where the Beacon Me Experience enhances your daily experiences. This is the experience revolution, and we’re all in,

Andrew’s Take: