Wayme - city virtual guide
Challenge
How do you spend your vacations? Do you travel a lot? While doing this, we hired a tour guide. It wasn’t comfortable, as we do like make a selfie, but the group won’t wait for us. After we found out several audio tour guide apps. “Great tools!”, I thought. “It should be very exciting!”, I thought. Unfortunately, audio tracks were unprofessional. I paid 0,99$ and up to 4,99$ for the audio track. Unfortunately, both were Wikipedia style. What is more, catching other noises was easy. Some “tour guides” were chewing something while the record. It was frustrating. Why should any user pay for such “quality”? So, this was the moment when the idea appeared. Aim Every vacation trip is an exciting time, and nothing should poison it. So, the goal of the app is providing tourists with the ultimate user experience: Every city or place has own stories that are not published. There is no sense to buy a tour if every word you hear you can find on the internet. So, there should be no Wiki-style records; There should be no low-quality records. Every user should be involved in the story as deep as possible. It is not professional, and there is no a will to listen to any story with switched on TV on a background. It should be comfortable to use the app even abroad. So all audio tracks should work offline.
Solution
Research That’s not possible to cover all countries and stories about every place. Based on this, it should be a marketplace app. 1. Targeted audience Category 1: - tourists 18-30 years old; - mainly iOS users, as they travel more and are more tended to make purchases; Category 2: - tour guides and people with higher education who have a lot of stories and has the will to share these stories with a world; - 24-40 years old; 2. The app should be launched as fast as possible to cover the wider market 3. Tools for idea testing and promotion - Landing page + SEO; - App Store page + ASO; - Angel List; - Facebook + Facebook for Business; - Instagram + SMM; - Vkontakte. Agreed Requirements for the First Launch 1. Design: Since first launch the app should have unique and minimalistic design. 2. Technical features: possibility to review list of available tours in 1 city; opportunity to download the tour and listen it after (offline); provide users with a tour preview (photos, audio track); track location and launch the record only when a user is in particular place. Development Stages 1) Technical Specification & UX development. 2) All development process was divided into stages; we used Scrum and Lean practices for this: analyze whole requirements; split main points for the first app version to launch the app faster; let the marketing work and continue the development. Release & Promotion Firstly it was closed beta-test. People, who left their emails on the website were invited for personal testing. Our guys gave them iPhones and looked at them: their emotions, their movements, their feedbacks. It was just the first part of closed beta-testing. Next step was distribution beta via TestFlight. For those people, who left their emails on the website, our team sent invitation emails and codes to TestFlight. During this stage, we got a lot of feedbacks and in-app analytics. Based on this data we enhanced the first version of the App and finally were ready to promote it worldwide. The first version of the App was launched locally in Dnipro (Ukraine). And after that, step by step scaled to other cities in Ukraine. And on the 4th month scaled to Europe.
Results
Currently, the app is available in 5 countries: USA, Germany, Singapore, Ukraine, Czech Republic. The app received $40 000 investments from Facebook in program FbStart. What is more, founders of wayme were accepted to Y Combinator’s program Startup School and successfully finished the course with the presentation at Demo Day. Fall 2018. wayme established a partnership with the city government of Dnipro, and from October it’s the main tourist service of Dnipro city. New features and partnerships will be announced on social pages on Facebook and Instagram. Follow the project and be up to date.
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