We&Co Thank Different

Administrative professional’s day

Hi We&Co friends, did you know that today is the perfect day to take your favorite administrative professional out for lunch? Buy them something nice? And thank them on We&Co? Yes, today is Administrative Professional’s Day and while I curse the name of a certain card manufacturer for inventing crazy holidays to juice sales (I’m looking right at you Valentines’ Day), this is a day that means something to me. Why? Because my mom was an admin when I was growing up. She made the trains run on time (both in the office and our house full of rowdy, rambunctious boys). It was her job, and the job of tens of thousands of people just like her, to make sure offices ran as smoothly as possible. 

So while we’re always encouraging you to thank your favorite bartender or barista, take a second to sit down and write out a nice heartfelt thank you to the administrative professional in your office. Like our pal Maria who’s been thanking all the fine folks at 200 Office here in Atlanta. Its a co-working space and Danielle and Hayden have been doing an awesome job taking care of her. They deserve your thanks too!

Happy Thanking!

—TJ

Looking for a few good super users

Dear We&Co fans,

We want to talk to you. That’s right. You. Our user base. We’ve officially kicked off development of v2 of our iPhone app (WOOT!) and want to hear from you what would make We&Co the most fun, viral, and helpful app around. Thanking is great and all but we want to make it much more than that. And really we just want to build a cool enough app so we can sell it to Facebook in a year and a half for $1 billion. Just kidding (ok sort of kidding?). So here’s the deal:

• What: We&Co user focus group. We’ll chat about features and upgrades to the next version of the app and get feedback. 
• Who: We’re wanting 5 or 6 super users of We&Co. People with feedback! Nice things are welcome but we want honest, unfettered feedback so even if you think we suck at something, tell us. Parts of the We&Co team will be there but who cares about us. We want you!
• Where: We&Co HQ. 800 Forrest Street, ATL 30318
• When: Thursday, April 19th, 7pm

We’ll supply beer (most likely cheap) and pizza (none of that fancy Double Zero fare. We’re talkin Felini’s people). Interested? Shoot TJ an email: tj@weand.co.

Thanks!

—TJ

Why We&Co Exists: Yvonne at Corner Bakery

One of the most common questions we’re asked at We&Co is “why does something like We&Co need to exist?”. I mean, there’s foursquare, yelp, and a billion other apps where we can share what a service experience was like. So why another. Today we went to The Corner Bakery in Buckhead and our experience helps demonstrate why something like We&Co is around. 

We sat down and decided to tolerate the pollen with a spot outside. After sitting for a few minutes, the sweetest, most genuine woman emerged with our food. Her name was Yvonne and there couldn’t be a nicer person on this planet. She set our food down, asked what else we might need. Fred noticed there was something slightly amiss w/ his order and she hesitated not a second to run back in and correct the mistake. After she returned, she had the biggest smile and asked if we needed anything else. We chatted with her for a second and before she left, she gave each of us a hug.

Fred, Jared, and I could not have been more pleased with our experience. Corner Bakery is great and all but I’ll be returning not because of the place, but because of Yvonne. She made the experience memorable and overwhelmingly positive. And with We&Co, we can recognize and connect this great experience to an individual person, not the place. So Corner Bakery, if you’re reading this, please pass along the thank you from TJ and the thank you from Jared!

—TJ

Who else likes a little competition?

Now that we’ve recovered from our post #sxsw induced comas, we have some new We&Co goodies to push out this week:

For you the user

• Foursquare! Whaaaaaat? We already mentioned it but its so cool we think its worth mentioning again. Checkin when you thank. 
• Clearer language for users who have location services disabled in Android and iPhone (come on guys, turn geolocation on! I promise we won’t be creepy).

For you the business

• Picture: You can now upload a custom profile picture for your business. If you don’t give us one, we’ll use the default foursquare image.
• Messaging: The ability to message all of your employees via the dashboard. One thing we’ve heard from a lot of business owners is that they don’t have a simple, concise way to send a message to all their employees. Now you can. Just click the  button on the dashboard. Don’t have access to your business dashboard? Contact Michael to get the hook up. Its free. What are you waiting for?
• Weekly email digest: Too busy to keep tabs on how many thanks you’re getting? No problem. We can now send you a weekly email that sums up the activity at your place over the past 7 days.

For you the service professional

• Profile claiming: You can now claim your profile via our mobile web app. If you’re in the mobile web app on android, iPhone, or blackberry, and spy your profile and you have not yet claimed it, click the “Claim” button in the top right corner of the screen 
• Points: Ok, we think this is the coolest part of the release. We all like a little bit of rivalry with our coworkers, right? Well the points system attempts to gamify that rivalry. Now when you pull up the my account section of our website, you’ll see a new section at the top:

• This section will tell you where you rank among your co-workers in our new points scheme. We now track and assign points for 7 different actions in the sytem: getting and receiving thanks, recruiting a new user to the system, filling out tips, completing your profile, sending thankbacks, and claiming your profile. Whenever you do one of these 7 things, you’ll get points (different actions get different points). We went ahead and tallied points up starting January 1st so if you’ve been active on We&Co, you’ll already see points for your account. If you don’t see any points, go get some! Update your profile, get someone to thank you, etc. 

With this release we’re also REALLY close to having some basic APIs ready to release to the general public. We have a little more work to do but soon you’ll be able to start using We&Co data to build your own apps. 

-TJ

Day 2 and 3 SXSW: We survived (only barely)

Ok, so perhaps I’m a little behind on the pictures and storytelling from days 2 and 3 at #sxsw. We got busy! And when we weren’t at a party, an interview, or some such thing, we were sleeping. That’s basically what you do in Austin: sleep 4 hours a night and party hop hoping you run into some influential blogger (usually only running into a free beer and BBQ sandwich).

Anyways, some pics from days 2 and 3 at #sxsw!

Breakfast at the Texas Bread Factory. Eric takes the best creeper @weand_co pictures of all time. Well, almost as good as Fred when he photos the person giving him a foot massage.

Pre interview at Tech Cocktails. This was the theme of the weekend: ingest energy drinks whenever possible.

On stage. Note to future interviewees: think of your most embarrassing story b/c if you’re put on the spot and think of something horrifically embarrassing (which is what would have happened to me), it could get awkward.

Post Hounds’ show at the CNN party.

Being part of the dotco family means getting invited to private house parties. And almost falling into an indoor pool. 

Sneaking into the CNN party as  ”members of the band” and handing out We&Co koozies to everyone at the party = my guerilla marketing achievement for the year.

SXSW Day 1

We landed in San Antonio in the morning and were kindly greeted by sub 40 degree temps and driving rain. This is Texas, right? I mean, I’m from this state and promised sunshine and warm temperatures. But this is more like Atlanta in January kinda weather. Either way, we didn’t let it dampen our enthusiasm. So we headed off for Austin (startup protip: fly into San Antonio and save, save, save!).

The big highlight of the first day was our pitch at the Startup America party. This was at the same venue that Austin City Limits is hosted at and we were there courtesy of our awesome friends that run the .CO domain registry. We got to pitch in front a few thousand people and totally freakin nailed it. Folks left fired up, #sxsw koozie in hand, and wanting to get their thank on. It was great!

After that we headed to watch our pals the Quiet Hounds play at the Cooking Channel party. We spread more joy, pins, buttons, cards, and yep, more koozies. We ended the night at the Driskell chatting hardcore technology at 2 in the morning with other nerds. I may or may not have promised to write the next version of We&Co in Node.JS. I usually get in other kinds of trouble when I’ve had a few beers. Only at #sxsw.

Thanks for all of the encouragement so far everyone! The support means the world. Keep it comin!

Some pics from last night below!

At Moody Theater

Jared about to go on the television. New fangled video cameras via iPhone.

This is how happy we are when we watch The Quiet Hounds

Post show mingling. 

No shoe left unadorned.