When Life gives you lemons, instead of making a sour face, make lemonade out of it! No matter how hard the circumstances are, a right attitude with positivity can turn the table. Optimists are the real game changers! While the present cut-throat scenario is blinded by negativity, Heylets revives the optimism in you.
HeyLets is an app, that induces positive experiences sharing syndrome among users. It’s a social city and travel guide, powered by locals and built on positivity. You can use it to discover hidden gems in own city or use it while travelling to find out what locals recommend. You can follow inspiring experiences and journal your own experiences as well – for others to discover.
Your personal feed contains recommendations relevant to your location as well as interests, age and gender. It is possible by the wonders created by an interest vector-matching algorithm. Users post experiences using a picture and descriptions, so it’s quick and easy to post, and to consume in a feed.
Meet the Virtuosos!
Justin Parfitt and Dean Kelly are the inspired co-founders of HeyLets. Justin and Dean have experiences in building successful business.
Justin founded leading company FastLife International-the world’s largest speed dating company, dotcom and Visuality-a video production company. He has also worked as a creative director at a Canadian Media company.
Dean founded Zanui, which is now Australia’s largest furniture and home wares online retailer. Prior to that, he was a growth strategy consultant at Booz & Company. He was also the Head of Strategy at Football Federation of Australia.
A huge recurring round of analysis on usage was run through before the released in November 2014. Since then usage has increased over 10x, with DAU/MAU currently at 38%, and over 60,000 experiences posted by users in 91 countries around the world. Ovations to Adam Tierney, Geoff Boss, Ashley Pengilly, Alex Bush and David Landgren for putting in great efforts .
A Pragmatic Idea, Heylets!
The idea to design Heylets was rolled out while Justin was travelling to Italy. He used ‘Tripadvisor.com’ to research on next stops. However, he realised that the reviews were irrelevant to him.
“I thought “Why am I reading this review from someone I clearly have nothing in common with? There must be a better way to see recommendations from people with similar interests? I don’t want to see what not to do, I don’t have time to go through all of this negativity. Where can I see just what’s recommended for me?”
Apps like Yelp, Foursquare, etc use star ratings. So, there is a definite space in the market for a product that was purely positive with a feed that consisted of relevant recommendations.
Synopsis For The Users!
The contemporary review sites and social vents fail to connect users quickly and easily to positive and relevant experiences. The evidence says exposure to such content formats can have sub optimal socio- psychological outcomes for users.
HeyLets inspires the users to try amazing, relevant new experiences in their own cities and around the world. It makes the process of exploring review an exciting one!
“Our goal is to enrich our users’ lives as they participate in a community based on positivity. We want the Internet to be a happier place.”
Analysing The Problems Faced
When the users post a review and are asked to give star ratings, why people tend to be negative. The negativity bias the reason behind it http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200306/our-brains-negative-bias
Unbelievably, this accounts for a lot of the negativity on the platform that relies on star ratings.
Star ratings aggregate opinion comes from a diverse range of people in a world where businesses are increasingly niche and targeting more and more tightly defined audiences. The rating for a place tends to be between three and four stars. The system not only breeds negativity, but also fails to provide any meaningful differentiation.
Spooling through reviews encroaches a lot of time and doesn’t concise relevant reviews exposing unnecessary negativity. These platforms are discouraging.
The HeyLets’ Solution!
The research advises, buying experiences make us happier than buying possessions. In fact, shared experiences are the best.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2013/08/05/want-to-buy-happiness-purchase-an-experience/
Happier people live longer, are healthier, perform better at work and have more friends.
The HeyLets app uses a machine learning interest vector algorithm. It shows you a personalized feed of crowd sourced, positive experience recommendations that concerns your interests, age, gender and location. This works quite well now and will only get even better with time.
HeyLets is piggybacking off an existing habit of taking photos when they are having a great time. These wow-captured moments are making their way to HeyLets now.
It is an upbeat place to hang out. The process of discovery, engaging and fun has incredible utility, where users are easily able to wish list the experiences they would like to try to get an alert when they are nearby. They will also get an Uber Cab in a single tap.
HeyLets let’s you journal about your splendid experiences for others to discover.
Contenders in Market
The product is a multitasking platform; it faces diversified competitions in the market.
Apps like Yelp and Tripadvisor, embellishing crowd source star rating reviews stands as major competition for HeyLets in the market. It is competing with social networking site like Facebook, Tweeter and Instagram for connecting the users. Fourquare and GogoBot produces user-generated content based on star rating reviews, but it’s presented in a way that is much more social with an emphasis on following and commenting etc.
Editorial Recommendations applications like Sosh and Time Out connects users for recommendations from a small group of paid writers and journalists. Group Buying platform like Groupon, Living Social get users to buy experiences are the alternatives, if you see HeyLets as a product for sharing experiences, where the emphasis is on fine-grained, positive experience recommendation.
The Next Move!
HeyLets is addressing a $108 bn market, so there is plenty of scope for growth and a huge demand for services that connect users and businesses (and non-commercial experiences)
The next big steps involve anticipating the user’s needs and proposing experiences. HeyLets is about inspiring users to try new things in the near future. In that sense, it’s about the future, which is a much bigger space than the present.
Since there are communities that generate content in 91 countries, Heylets is looking forward to support those communities. We can expect offices for community teams in Europe, South America and Asia-Pacific sooner.
“We are aiming to win that space on a global scale.”
The Fiscal Factor
The revenue is generates by connecting users with positive experiences at commercial locations. The upcoming system will automatically communicate with businesses associated with trending experiences offering them the opportunity to upload a deal using a proprietary interface.
Since the users are already looking at the experience and they’re being connected to the business on the basis of relevance and popularity the deal only needs to be large enough to encourage in app transactions (~25 – 30%).
In addition to the user getting a great deal, this arrangement is more sustainable for participating businesses and the lack of a need for a sales team means that when we reach sufficient scale to monetize (we think 50,000 active users in a given city) revenue can grow much faster.
Since it collects a normalized set of 45 interests, demographic info and location data, the business intelligence will play a role in moving forward.
The founders also intend to leverage a large number of strategic partnerships to embed HeyLets content in 3rd party sites and apps.
There is a special offer for first 200 sing-ups. Register and get a chance to win a pair of orange or white HeyLets sunglasses and a bottle opener!
Check out the blog on http://blog.heylets.com for rankings by state and more stats. To know more, visit the website: http://www.heylets.com
