The Singaporean lifestyle app has started in October 2014 and has rapidly evolved since then, what are the news?
In October 2014, the research of the founder and now CEO Lam Tran has led to found this company that we are calling WisePass today.
What led the company to start in October 2014 and how does the company look like today?
Origin story
The company started in 2014 with the goal to create a genuine relationship between brands consumers. With such mission, the main challenge was to build a consumer product that could find a proper market fit.
Market Fit
In August 2016, the company found a market fit where paying customers were willing to pay a monthly flat fee to get some products that were valuable to them. It was a membership priced at 6,000,000 VND ( roughly 300$US at that time) monthly for a free bottle of whiskey everyday at some selected bars or restaurants in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Seed Funding
In 2017, the company had its seed funding of 400,000$US for a valuation of 1,000,000$US pre-money led by the company Expara. The product evolved rapidly to offer lunch, dinner and Starbucks during that year alone, not mentioning as well the expansion in a second city, Hanoi.
Expansion
In 2018, the company started to expand across new markets in Thailand and the Philippines. It kept as well evolving its membership with new services such as movie access, hair salon access and resort access within that membership for 300$ a month
Brands
In 2019, a major shift happened with the introduction of a new plan starting only at 8$ per month. That was a dramatic change for the company as it disrupted mostly the way it used to operate. Each redemption from the subscriber used to generate a cost before. Not anymore. That has shown the company a new path to profitability and led the company to break even in November 2019
2020
The first quarter of 2020
During 2020, something happened. An unprecedented pandemic that took the world by storm. It has changed everyone’s plan, including WisePass. Indeed, the company now is mostly focused on data warehousing, refining and eventually monetization. These brands that decided to use the platform to embrace digital transformation and stay relevant to their consumers.
For brands, WisePass is a B2B SaaS marketing platform that enables them to build a first party data consumer base. It helps these brands to acquire, engage, promote and reward their users within a single platform.
The second quarter of 2020
The company has managed to close a funding round and has focused deeply on developing its tech infrastructure in order to grow the subscriber base in Vietnam and rapidly in the rest of South East Asia.
Today it’s all about automation and the ability to operate more efficiently every single task within the company. We ask ourselves if what we do will make things faster, simpler and cheaper. If that doesn’t meet these requirements, we’re simply focused on other tasks that can help us to make us get there.
The rest of the year 2020
The company has planned to remain profitable and cash flow positive within 2020 and work mostly on improving its core product by developing new features enabling subscribers and brands to do more.
It’s also an era where we are taking time to hire data scientists with the ability to generate some insights for brands to reach their consumers more meaningfully. The belief is that brands will always have the need to reach their consumers to send them a message but we are building a platform that lets them to be more relevant and meaningful through a more data-driven approach.
