WAND

Hi, WAND's CEO here writing a quick note about what's below.

On December 10th, 2019, we launched WAND. Today, is the 2 year anniversary of that date.

It’s hard to say whether it feels like the time has flown by or whether it feels like it’s been five times as long. I suppose it depends on the day.

It’s been over a whole year since we sent our last update to this platform, so figured it was high time to shoot out an update as to what we’ve been up to.

That update, including the state of our business and what's to come lies below.

On to it —

Into the Fire

In February of 2020, probably 70-80% of our customer side users were short term rental hosts (Airbnb, VRBO, etc). We had found our niche, leaning our development and marketing hard into the customer segment that was using our product like they needed it. Needless to say, things changed fast. We went from revenue positive to back under the bridge, as the floor fell out from under us.

Our immediate solution was to pivot into longer term rentals, but that meant rebuilding our user base nearly from scratch, and the landscape for reaching those users was going to be drastically different.

Whereas before, we would circulate in-person events for our niche and run aggressive digital advertisements towards that same user persona, that wasn’t going to work this time around. With in-person gatherings out of the question for the foreseeable future, and a flooded digital landscape driving ad costs through the roof and beyond the point of ROI, we turned to higher touch forms of customer engagement.

This meant cold emails to property managers, postcards to apartment complexes and even handwritten letters to home and condo associations, pitching the value of WAND to their residents.

It was working, but not fast enough. Prior to the pandemic’s beginning, we had learned 2 things that drove us to extend our expenditures a little too far in hindsight. Those things were:

-Customer Acquisition Cost
-Lifetime Customer Value

#1 told us what it cost us to acquire users, and #2 told us how much they were worth after acquisition. This data drove us to spend ambitiously to acquire as many customers as possible through the channels that were working for us, right up until they weren’t. Fast forward back to a changed landscape, and we’d left ourselves little runway to maintain our growing team and platform overhead.

Whatever It Takes

We knew we needed to diversify and look for a faster turnaround on where we could bring in revenue. For a brief stint, this looked like us doing our own formulated cleaning product, but when all was said and done, we didn’t have enough volume to make this more than a break even effort. We did a few commercial COVID cleanings, but the barriers to entry to make these kinds of gigs consistent proved too high for our contracted labor pool. Then, something else came across our plate.

At the same time as our cleaning business was slowed down, we started to hear from other service business owners who were having the opposite problem.

“I literally cannot run my business from my brick and mortar location, I need something like what you’ve built ASAP, so that I can take bookings and get employees working in people’s homes.”

Easier said than done- anyone who’s been following us from the beginning or has tried themselves, knows that the barrier to entry is high to getting a quality software platform off the ground. It could be hundreds of thousands of dollars in development expenses not to mention the months that it takes just to put that money to work and get a product into app stores.

We’d already done that though.

Repurposing our software and tribal knowledge to spin out an entirely new platform would take us a fraction of the time. So what did we do? Well, for a few months last summer, we became a full stack development agency and managed to spin out a number of marketplace platforms, spanning from shipping freight, to IT support and even news talent! Another worth mentioning that's currently in beta is BloThru- bringing hairdressers to your home, nationwide in Spring 2022.

Developing these platforms gave us the runway we needed to get WAND back on track. We used the resources gathered through these development sprints to not only keep funding our marketing efforts, but even to allocate some TLC to the core WAND platform, and push out the big 2.0 update that we did last Summer.

Where We’re Headed

Read the rest here: https://mailchi.mp/c464e6e7e20a/happy-holidays-from-wand-11247558

Coronavirus took a hit to our business to say the least, but there's a silver lining for us and that's that the world has a renewed focus on the importance of cleaning and we took the coronavirus slowdown as an opportunity to work diligently on our platform and put out a version of WAND way better than we've ever had before.
We're building back up revenue obtaining users and reaching back out to old ones. Initially, we found a strong niche in Airbnb hosts but since their usage hasn't quite rebounded yet, we're targeting property managers as our new super user category.

We're super excited to have our nose above water.
Now that we are growing positive revenue month over month, we look forward to putting this revenue back into the business in order to continue to grow our customer base and improve upon our existing product.

Having been live for a few months with solid traction and a growing user base, we've taken the time to work on and just launched a huge UI update based on the feedback we've been receiving from both customers and cleaners since our initial launch!
We're excited to see how this improved first user experience improved our conversion rates on downloads and bookings in App.

Months after our beta launch and after another stretch of fine tuning our product, we launched WAND for production usage on the app stores heading into the holiday season.
We had hundreds of dollars in sales from grass roots customer acquisition efforts and had also just begun running some of our first digital campaigns to begin to scale!

After a stretch of tune up from the completion of our MVP, we decided that our app was stable enough to launch a mobile beta and begin building up our provider base of cleaners in St. Louis where we were now located since our initial launch in Denver.

After a couple months on StartEngine which helped us raise $70,000+, we put our heads down internally to begin building out the first version of the product that would be fully supported via a rough web platform. Up until this point, we'd been using TypeForm to take booking requests through our landing page.

After self funding for a few months and validating our need statement by taking to the streets in downtown Denver to talk to potential customers and gather contact information, we decided we'd take a go at launching a regulation CF crowdfunding campaign to see if we could raise some low risk capital to give us a strong initial runway.

After witnessing first hand the struggle of finding a reliable housekeeper when working as a property manager in Denver, I started WAND w/ a Co-Founder.

We started by basing the business model off of a similar app we both used called Rover which is a Uber for Dogwalking platform.

Our simple idea was to be the Uber for cleaning.