Alexander’s Blog – The Making of LetMeGo

This post is the sixth test for the candidates of the LetMeGo I18N Challenge. It is the second public test. Tomorrow’s test, that won’t be public, will be the last one. Early next week we will announce the six selected entrepreneurs.

Candidates: You have 24 hours after this post is published to deliver the expected results.

Objective: Showing the human side of LetMeGo is important. You will be expected to have a blog similar to this one. In this task we will try to determine how good you are at working with blogging tools and, of course, blogging.

Task: Create a brand new blog using the blogging tool or blogging provider of your choice. Write and publish an entry written by you in either Portuguese or Spanish. Talk about your experience as a candidate of the LetMeGo I18N Challenge thus far. You must also customize the look and feel of the blog so that it is similar to the look and feel of LetMeGo (make sure it looks nice!) – If you would like to remain anonymous, you don’t have to sign the post using your real name.

Deliverable: Post the link to your blog entry as a comment to this post. Also, if you are participating anonymously please send us an email to challenge[åt]letmego[døt]com with the link. Remember to post it here as well, otherwise we won’t consider your submission.

Rules: This should be a brand new blog, not an existing blog you already own. Please do not  use the LetMeGo logo or the tag of the logo.

Questions? Post them here.

Alexander Torrenegra

P.S. If you are a candidate that has ties with Chile and you were directly or indirectly affected by the earthquake, please let us know if you need extra time to complete the remaining tests. Our best wishes are with you and those negatively affected by the recent events.

This post is one of the tests for the candidates of the LetMeGo I18N Challenge. Because of the fun and social nature of this test, we have opted to make it public.

You have 24 hours after this post is published to deliver the expected results.

Objective: To determine how agile you are with social marketing tools.

Task: To create a new Twitter account and obtain the highest number of legitimate Twitter followers you can during the next 24 hours.

Deliverable: Post a comment to this post with a link to the Twitter account that your created. You can post it anonymously if you like. Additionally, please send us the same link via email to challenge [at] letmego [dot] com. Both deliverables are mandatory. Regardless of the time of your delivery, we will count the number of followers you get tomorrow at 10 AM US Standard Time.

Rules: The Twitter account you use should be brand new. You cannot use an existing Twitter account. All the details and tweets of the account should be in the language for which you are participating: Spanish or Portuguese.

Questions? Post them as a comment to this blog entry.

Have fun!

Update: Some people have argued that this test doesn’t properly measure the Internet marketing skills of the candidates. Well, I couldn’t agree more. This test is more about resourcefulness than Internet marketing. In fact, as I mentioned to the candidates over the weekend “Initially, our main sources of traffic will be search engine optimization and our referral program. Other efforts, like PR and PPC, may also help, but I wouldn’t bet too much on them.” – As you can see, I didn’t even mention Twitter there.

We are very excited! The deadline to apply for the LetMeGo I18N Challenge was yesterday and not only did we receive hundreds of applications (387 to be exact), but many are of extremely high quality. After filtering out incomplete and erroneous applications, Leonardo has invited 154 candidates to the next stage, 87 for LetMeGo in Spanish and 67 for LetMeGo in Portuguese.

Starting tomorrow (Feb 22nd) and continuing until Sunday (Feb 28th), seven tests will be administered to all candidates at a rate of one per day. Each test will be designed to measure a different skill set. Although completing each test will take just a few hours, the candidates will have 24 hours to complete each test. On March 1st, the six selected entrepreneurs will be announced.

If you weren’t invited, I’d like to publicly thank you for your application. If you were, well, get ready! The next phase of the competition won’t be easy. In fact, I know that most of you will fail most tests. They are designed, after all, so that only the fittest will survive all the way to the end. With that in mind, I extend my best wishes to all of you.

Alexander Torrenegra

P.S. We originally mentioned that the responses submitted by the candidates would be made public; however, we have decided to make them private to reduce the chances of cheating.

Lodging staff members can now set the minimum nightly budget for which they would like to be invited to bid, and also opt out from receiving automatic invitations altogether.

When lodgings set a minimum nightly budget, they will only be invited to bid in itineraries with budgets higher than their preference. To avoid confusions, this amount will never be shown to travelers.

If a lodging opts out from receiving automatic invitations, they will still receive personal invitations. Personal invitations are sent by travelers who are interested in their lodgings, and who have already submitted an itinerary. Automatic invitations are sent by LetMeGo whenever an itinerary submitted by a traveler matches a lodging listing. As such, personal invitations are more likely to result in bookings than automatic invitations.

If you manage a lodging listing in LetMeGo, you can quickly set your invitation preference by following these steps:

• Go to My Lodgings
• Below each lodging listing you manage, click on “Preferences for Invitations to Bid”
• Follow the instructions

If you have questions or more ideas in terms of how we can improve the invitation-to-bid-to-booking ratio, please contact us.

Alexander Torrenegra

In this guest post, Leonardo Suarez, Business Development Manager with LetMeGo and Torrenegra Labs, share some insights on his experience, so far, with the LetMeGo I18N Challenge.

The first time I heard the saying, ‘Get big fast’, was back in 1998, shortly before the dot-com bubble was about to explode. Back then, I dreamed of being part of ‘The Internet Industry’. Today, I feel lucky to have accomplished this milestone. I am now proud to be part of a globalization process!

When I asked @torrenegra, in one of our meetings back in 2008, “How will LetMeGo reach the next level?”, he repeated, “We must get big fast!” I still remember the confusing feelings at that moment; some of them as a result of the belief system that I, as human being, created to avoid “uncertainty”.

After several meetings, and doing our research about Internationalization (I18N) and Localization (L10N) processes, in particular for Internet companies, we came up with a conclusion: There is no “Golden Path“, and we must create our own method to test this idea and customize it based on our resources. In such cases, “creativity” and “flexibility” become very important, to avoid self-imposed limitations set by older strategies.

The Original Idea

The LetMeGo I18N Challenge is not the first time Internationalization (I18N) has been attempted by a Torrenegra Labs venture; last year we made a similar experiment, offering a share within a proven business model (Voice123), with the same objective of “growing in different markets understood as languages”, but aimed at a completely different industry. This experience allowed us to learn from our mistakes and identify where we have to be more detailed.

Based on this previous experience, we definitely agreed that the #letmegochallenge must be most innovative, challenging, and attractive; attempting to catch as much attention as possible from a wide range of profiles from experienced and consolidated serial entrepreneurs, to young and inexperienced, yet very capable geeks. This range will be dramatically reduced when the essence of the task at hand is identified by the applicants. We are definitely NOT looking for 8am-5pm employees. We are looking for risk takers, go-getters, analytic and pragmatic individuals, who are able to manage their resources to achieve long-term goals, and everything else that defines an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurs… NOT WANTED?

One lesson learned during this process was that job marketplaces and social networks are not very eager to promote these types of opportunities. The words “opportunity”, “entrepreneurs”, which are included in the subject of the original AD, in addition to a non traditional job description, have resulted in many headaches and being banned from websites such as craigslist and computrabajo, to several emails with innovative explanations as to a “head hunting process”, and it almost made me nuts.

In the end, I learned that I have to be more conservative if I wanted to a) have the opportunity posted, and b) attract a wider range of attention. We decided finally to change the original subject to “Regional Manager for Spanish- or Portuguese-Speaking Markets“. Initially I thought, “boring, redundant”, but there was no other way to post it. Fortunately, some advanced websites allowed us to include a logo, a video, and some HTML reducing the tedium of plain text. So, I crossed my fingers expecting that the right profile would read our ad and understand that we DO NEED ENTREPRENEURS !

Finally, as result of several days of hard work and dealing with the limitations from being in a company that offers job opportunities to people able to perform a job from remote locations, we were finally able to post the ad in a considerable amount of places. You can see here the list of places where we posted the job opportunity: LetMeGo challenge (P.R., job marketplaces and networking groups).

Looking for A Needle In A Haystack

The headhunting process is always a difficult job. The job seeker is occasionally fishing on a bridge over troubled waters, and they apply to any position that they might think can fit totally, partially, or just want to get a foot in the door. This made our innovative and attractive head hunting process a virtual madness, because some market places have their own version of “one-click to submit” methods of applying to jobs i.e. the hiring process. This innovation explains perfectly the pareto principle applied to our process.

*A detailed analysis of this data will be posted after the deadline of the #letmegochallenge.

Today, three days away from the deadline to apply for the LetMeGo challenge, we have already accepted 60 challengers that will move on to the next stage of the selection process. We are ready to receive more applications, especially from people eager to demonstrate their abilities and knowledge and that firmly believe in their entrepreneurial drive. Do I already have your application?

Leonardo Suarez (@leonardosuarez)

Agile software development definitely rocks! Our own, custom-built version of this methodology, which we call RRápido, has allowed us to push dozens of improvements to our service during the past two weeks. We have published 15 new versions of the Merrcury Engine (the software behind LetMeGo), more than one per day. The changes have been processed and published so fast, in fact, that we haven’t had time to update our automated selenium tests. As a consequence, most of those tests are failing right now. Fortunately, we have hundreds of unit tests that run before and after every publication, and the system must pass all of them before publications are certified. This has allowed us to significantly reduce the chances of creating new bugs as we release new features.

Screenshot of our publishing scripts running the unit tests before a new release.

Alexander Torrenegra

We have good news, and bad news.

The good news is as follows: LetMeGo’s open beta has been very well received by both travelers and our lodging partners. Thousands of lodgings have already submitted bids for travelers’ itineraries.

New tickets for the customer service team for the month of January. The open beta was released Jan 20th.

But here’s the bad news: While we expected lodging staffs to have some questions about the system (and, for that matter, to occasionally submit bids that didn’t make sense) as they became familiar with it. Unfortunately for the team, I underestimated the load that our customer service team would be exposed to… BIG TIME! In order to cope with this Gigi, Treeny, and Carmen have been each working more than 12 hours per day. Other members of the team are now helping us in customer service as well, even though that isn’t their designated role within the team: Alberto, who recently join the team as product developer; Tania, my love and the co-founder of LetMeGo; and I have all been pitching in. I haven’t been able to help much, though, as I have a thousand other things to focus on at the same time.

Fortunately, we also have a solution: We are slowing down all public relations efforts not related to the LetMeGo I18N Challenge. That will buy us some time both to deal with the backlog, and to increase the size of the customer service team. Interested in helping us out with the latter? Check out the job opening.

Alexander Torrenegra