The lifestyle app started in October 2014 and found its market fit in August 2016 with a 300$US monthly subscription service letting its members access a complimentary bottle of wine or spirits every day. Many people have asked the same question, which is how we got the idea but few have asked what’s driving the company and its purpose. This is an essay about the birth of WisePass from the founder and CEO, Lam Tran
Recently, I’ve met Philippe Tran in one of our lunch event at Tomatito in Ho Chi Minh City. We met again to discuss WisePass and he asked me a question about how we’re branding the company. What I realized was that it was necessary to spend a certain amount of time to explain and go through the thought process to make a person realize what we’re trying to do.
I will use in that essay the Golden Circle from Simon Sinek, who explained that perfectly to explain the purpose of the company. For those who don’t know what the golden circle is, I’m putting the video down here.
The observation of the year 2000s
Every day, our decisions are driven by the data and the feelings we have about them. The more we move forward, the more we become sophisticated and get things done efficiently. I remember during the ’90s of a friend in middle school who was using the Encarta encyclopedia to get access to some information to prepare his presentation. That was a big thing before Wikipedia started to replace it.
Another example is Shazam. The discovery music app has been around now for more than 20 years and is a magical tool for people looking to identify a song. It has digitized millions of song and it takes a few seconds to recognize which singer and what the name of the song is. That’s what we do today if we want to know the name of the song we listen to.
Eventually, we can’t forget Google and its search engine. The company has done an amazing job at collecting data to organize and make sense out of it so whenever we would type a few keywords, it would simply spit out a search result list within less than a second that would be relevant to each of us.
Each of these company has a similar pattern, they’re containing a vast amount of data and will do a single thing for the end user and usually will do it pretty well (or good enough so millions of people would use it every day).
Wikipedia lets the end user learn about anything like an Encyclopedia.
Google Search gives the end users a list of search results
Shazam gives the end users the name of the song they’re listening to.
In other words, these companies collect data every day, process it, analyze it and let the end user have access in a simple way so they can do something about it.
The process would stop there and you wouldn’t be able to know more than that. If someone else likes the song and discovers the singer on Shazam, the app wouldn’t know if the end user would start to listen on Spotify or even buy a ticket to attend the concert of that artist.
If someone else searches for the best bars in Ho Chi Minh City and decides to eventually to go to one of these places, Google has no idea if that end user would have gone there or not.
In other words, there’s a disconnect between the online and offline world for these services and nobody knows if there’s a purchase being made down the road. Bridging the 2 worlds is the holy grail in marketing as it will stop relying on the old traditional model of simply reaching a lot of users and help becoming more effective in allocating capital. That is what WisePass is aiming for.
That is a long but necessary explanation to give enough context to people to realize that building such a platform has tremendous value. The problem is to build it properly. That’s when the golden circle is useful and why starting from the why and the belief is more important rather than the what question.
Why
To us, the best way to experience life on Earth is to feel alive by building memories with the people we care about. That is our definition of lifestyle.
How we do it
In order to build these memories, we are looking for the best experiences we can find on Earth and curate them by using AI.
What we started with
We happen to sell our service through an app.
The minute that I finished explaining the 3 steps, it became clearer and simpler to understand and it became more effective to communicate the message to our audience.
Break the perception of a drinking app first
We started in 2016 with drinking but rapidly expanded to the food category and let our users enjoy lunch and dinner in 2017. It was natural for them to also get a coffee at Starbucks with WisePass and quickly go to CGV to watch a movie as well in 2018.
As people were associating us with the nightlife industry, they soon realize that WisePass was now way more than just an app to get a bottle. The marketing tagline was changed from What are you doing tonight? to Anything, Anytime Anywhere.
Break the perception of a luxury product
After that, we had to work really hard on showing that WisePass is a lifestyle platform to access great places but not exclusively for high-income earners. That perception was coming from the fact that our price point started at 300$US a month in 2016. For Vietnam, that is quite steep.
In order to break that perception, we decided to create a new plan and start the pricing at 30$US in 2019. That change is significant and makes WisePass more affordable.
The move to make WisePass more affordable is not designed to make it just affordable. It opens the road for WisePass to collect more data and feed its recommendation engine powered by AI. That large data collection is critical to creating relevant recommendations to each user real time.
That is where we are standing today and if we get lucky enough, we will be able to work on the next problem!
