Alexander’s Blog – The Making of LetMeGo

This is me doing what I do best: sitting, isolated, behind a computer screen. Tania took this photo in 2002 as we started building Voice123.

I don’t like doing myself what most people call “public relations” (PR). I personally don’t like to sell stuff, especially face-to-face. That is why, several years ago, I decided to move away from offering and selling professional services. I focused on building online marketplaces where all transactions would take place online, and for the most part, automatically. Our first marketplaces, Voice123 and Language123, are business-to-business ventures serving small niches. For these efforts, there was little need for a comprehensive PR strategy, and indeed, these businesses grew for many years without any proactive PR effort.

LetMeGo is a whole different ball game, though. Given that this is our first business-to-consumer service, and it is an upstart competitor in an industry dominated by large players where PR is virtually mandatory, I knew long ago that we would eventually have to develop a comprehensive strategy. Still, since didn’t have a clear PR effort for LetMeGo until a few months ago. Now, not only we have a plan and a person in charge, but we have brought two experts on board to help us in this front: Brett McCallon, whom I already blogged about, and Caroline Andoscia. Caroline is the founder of Andoscia Communications, a PR firm. Caroline’s background includes being the Director of PR at Condé Nast Traveller.

And that’s not it. LetMeGo recently won the PS10 competition. The prize for the winning company is a PR campaign for the Latin American market. The campaign is to be headed by Andres Barreto (@andresbarreto) with the help of María del Carmen Lara (@mariadelcarmenlara) and Juan David Vargas (@nozuan). This prize comes in very handy, as we will soon announce our plans for the Spanish and Portuguese versions of LetMeGo, for which we didn’t have a PR strategy, either.

Brett, Caroline, Andres, María del Carman, and Juan David are currently working on the PR strategy that we will execute during the next few months as the beta version of LetMeGo is opened to the public and then LetMeGo is officially launched. The results of their efforts, the PR buzz, should be visible to you quite soon.

Alexander Torrenegra