The Quae Summer Summary 2022

Let’s review all that’s changed with Quae’s platform and vision.

Sam Schmitt (Left) & Brendan Probst (Right)

This summer we decided to simplify a lot of Quae’s user experience and design our application to be easily understood by anyone signing up for the platform. We did this because we were preparing for our next launch in the city of Hoboken. In order to have a successful launch, we needed to be approachable to all groups in the city of whatever age, status, and administrative background.

We’ve made significant changes involved in different parts of the company:

• Development
• Our Team
• Networking
• Vision
• Marketing

Developer Update

Development included trimming the fat of our service, focusing on perfecting one experience: writing and voting on proposals.

Mobile

On our mobile app, we wanted to greatly simplify the user's experience as much as possible. This included several things:

Screenshots from the Quae mobile app

1. There is now only one post option that provides for multiple use cases.
2. The simple placement of buttons along the bottom tab and header.
3. The settings screen has more accessible options available from the initial screen.
4. The inbox now separates votes from replies and groups the responses per post.
5. The explore screen now includes people, posts, and communities as results.
6. Links can now open directly into our app, so make sure to share posts for your community members to vote on across all platforms!

Web

Our web application looks greater than ever, with a whole variety of visual improvements. We aimed to deliver a significantly better experience for the user than what was previously available.

Screenshot of the Quae browser app

1. The layouts for pages have been improved to correspond with what information you’re viewing.
2. The onboarding process is much more intuitive for new users.
3. When viewing a post, you can now sign up without leaving that page.
4. We’ve also introduced much more colorful button options throughout the web experience.

Backend

There were several significant performance improvements making Quae smarter, faster, and more responsive than before. We squashed many bugs and have delivered a much more adequate system for handling your votes in the most secure way possible.

Team Update

The Quae team has now added one more member, making our team now include three people in total. Our new member Cris Sosa is a graduate of Rutgers Business School focused on marketing and growth for the Quae user base.

Our new Head of Marketing, Cris Sosa

We’re excited to deliver much more impactful content on a weekly basis. And if you aren’t already, be sure to follow all of our social media: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Networking Update

Preparing our launch in Hoboken involved speaking with all different kinds of representatives of the city, whether that be public or private. We wanted to get a clear picture of the city so that we would understand how our service could best fit the needs of the average Hoboken resident.

Hoboken City Council

We’ve met with several council members in Hoboken and reconnected with the ones we met last year while establishing new connections with the ones we hadn’t. Overall, we’ve been able to learn much more about the city this time around and received positive responses across the board. All of the city council members we’ve met with are ready to use Quae to hear out their constituents' issues.

Bike Hoboken

We met with a representative of a bike safety organization called Bike Hoboken. In this meeting, we learned a lot about the pedestrian, bike, and car issues of the city and were able to motivate this user to join Quae’s mission as well as join our platform. We’re establishing Quae as an engine to advocate for many options and proposals that will help keep Hoboken bike riders safer in the future.

The Parking Dude

While meeting with the CEO of The Parking Dude, we were able to learn about the nuances of the parking problem in Hoboken. There are many members of the organization that advocated to protect parking spots throughout the city and conserving a person’s choice in owning a car. In the future, Quae will be a platform that car owners in the city will be able to use to protect their access to parking spots.

Constituent Services

The office of constituent services aims to offer all recognizable resources to any concerned resident of Hoboken. Our meeting with them gave us the insight we needed to understand how the city responds to constituent issues, and how we can better serve the average citizen through our platform.

Partisan Municipal Committees

We first met with the Republican Municipal Committee and quickly learned that the issues these citizens advocate for do not typically correspond with national or even state republicans. Instead, they advocate for more appropriate government spending, which is something they said they could use Quae for the get more citizen responses.

During this conversation, we spoke about recent Hoboken political issues such as the failed referendum vote for a brand new school complex in the city and we were able to draft a proposal on Quae to help gain more citizen feedback on the school issues in Hoboken.

We are still scheduling our meeting with the Democratic Municipal Committee but are excited about the talk we will have.

Fund for a Better Waterfront

When speaking with the FBW, we learned a lot more about the city’s growth and development of public spaces. There are a lot of people involved and this strong, grassroots movement here in Hoboken aims to improve and develop the space along the Hudson river and also focus on developments across the entire city. The members of this organization would love to see citizen feedback on new development projects and some of the sacrifices citizens will have to make on the changes on some properties.

Vision Update

Expanding in Hoboken

Since meeting with several city officials, we have now begun to aim our sights on the average citizen of Hoboken. In order for Quae to work at the local level, there must be a significant amount of voters on our platform. We will be spending the next year gaining traction in the city in order to fulfill the mission of providing a digital democracy for the people of Hoboken.

In-Person and Online Verification

Identity verification is at the core of what makes Quae great. We make sure that all votes on a post are coming directly from members that are allowed to vote on that post whether that be someone with a specific verified email domain or someone who is a resident of that city.

An in-person verification session in Church Square Park, Hoboken

How we achieve this level of security for the city of Hoboken is by giving our members the ability to verify their driver's license online at a small price (due to the high cost of online ID verification through a third-party service). If these members would like to get verified for free, they can either wait on an online queue for their turn to be verified or they can attend one of our in-person sessions.

For in-person verification, we offer many options: either a driver’s license, official government mail, bank statements, or an official lease. These options allow for those who do not have access to a driver’s license to approach us and we’re still able to verify that they are an official resident of that address. During an in-person verification session, a representative from Quae will take the document, allow the user to scan a QR code which will link them to their verification and in a few short minutes, that person’s account on Quae will be verified for all of their governed locations.

Feel free to join our mailing list to find out where and when we will be hosting our in-person verification sessions in the future.

Marketing

With a new member dedicated to expanding our marketing opportunities, we are able to pursue much larger projects in the space. We are going to continue our launch in Hoboken as well as continue growing our service for Stevens students.

Expanding in Stevens

Our application performs and feels much better to the end user than it did last Spring semester. This means we are confident that many more students will be able to approach Quae with a positive outlook. Using our tool can help deliver meaningful representative opportunities for students on campus and also allow students interested in student government to have a much easier time getting involved.

Reaching Out to Other Universities

Once we feel as though we’ve successfully captured a significant amount of the Stevens student body, we will be ready to start spreading to other universities in the area. We will be able to bring our level of representation to all universities we can in the following years.

Brand Ambassadorship

Going forward we are beginning to hire brand ambassadors for Quae. This will allow us to expand our team and reach a lot more of our user base than before. The goal is to get our name out as much as possible so that Quae becomes synonymous with modern voting solutions.

We’re very excited to show you what Quae has to offer and if you have any further questions feel free to reach out to us at: info@quae.app

We’d love to hear from you!