A Day In The Life
February marks my 3rd month of interning at FiveStars. You guessed it, I give it Five Stars!
A day in the life here is sooo different from day to day. Working at FiveStars is sort of like being in the Beatles. Not to say I’m a rockstar, but I definitely jam with the best team of rockstars this side of the bay. In my short tenure here, I have done everything from interfacing with local businesses to reengineering the social media experience to rigorously testing software. The best part is that I have tremendous latitude in designing what I work on and when. I can even telecommute part of the time which makes scheduling a breeze.
One of the best parts about working at FiveStars is gaining unprecedented access to the world of startups. Being an entrepreneurship major, it makes a world of difference to see what you’re studying in classes come to life in front of you.
For the past few weeks, I have been charting new waters writing copy for various promotional materials. I’ve done everything from brochures to emails. Currently, I am re-grooving a manual designed to introduce business owners to the FiveStars experience. I am especially excited about these opportunities to write copy because they allow me to flex my writing skills and determine if I want to write professionally in the future.
As for the rest of my internship, I have no idea what’s in store. I look forward to sharing my ideas, watching them evolve, and bring them into fruition. This is what start ups are all about!
Expect to hear plenty more from me. Over and out.
-Tim
You and Your FiveStars Card – Part 1 (The Basics)
When a tired looking employee first gave me my FiveStars Card, even I was a bit confused. He mumbled something that sounded like, “mmm… reward… table seven… phone number.” That that was about all I got. I smiled, shrugged, and waited for my food, and it wasn’t for another two weeks when I finally went to the FiveStars website and figured out what it was.
So, grasshopper, I am here to tell you WHAT IT IS!
A universal rewards card. If that term is a bit unfamiliar, try these on for size: punch card, frequent shopper ID, stamp card, loyalty program, get-rewarded-for-being-a-good-customer card. Each time you shop at a business, you get a certain number of FiveStars points for the items you buy. After enough points, you can get a complimentary item from your favorite business, SHAZAM! You’re welcome.
Now comes OUR SPIN on it.
Instead of having your wallet crammed with punch cards from every business you frequent. You have one card that works at all of them.
One card to rule them all,
One card to find them
One card to bring them all
And in the dark…. oh wait…
So I may have watched Lord of the Rings one to many times, but imagine the convenience of one punch card for all your favorite local places. No matter where you got your FiveStars card, you can use it at any location in our network. Imagine the same loyalty card earning you a free coffee after ten lattes at Bean Scene and giving you a free appetizer after three dinners at Taste Buds. Imagine FiveStars. And Gollum. Ok, no more lord of the rings.
If you’re still confused (I really hope you aren’t by now), here’s an illustration:
And here’s a better designed visual aide:
The above picture leads me to my next point: FiveStars is a wild tornado absorbing everything into one card (including Dorothy and Toto and Facebook). It may not actually be that extreme, but it’s pretty close. The moral of the story is that there’s a lot more to FiveStars than punch cards. I’m not knocking punch cards, but I know you’ll be as excited as I am when I can show you everything that little tornado of a card in your wallet can do.
More posts coming… Now ride Shadowfax! (Sorry)
Jeff Doka is a FiveStars employee. He likes long walks on the beach, moonlit nights, and loyalty cards. He studied under the great loyalty gurus Ghu Zin Wheng and Cho Ni Bah under their minds he grew to new levels of limitless reward card enlightenment.Happy New Year
First post from a new member of the Five Stars Family—Tim! We are stoked to have him on the team. Lately, he has been busy writing copy for FiveStars and tricking out our Facebook/Foursquare pages. He is a senior at San Jose State studying entrepreneurship. He enjoys surfing, big words, producing music, meditating, soccer, self help books, and mastering new accents/impersonations. In the favorite food category, his favs are: candy, candy, candy, more candy, cheese cake, and the occasional NY steak(medium). His favorite FiveStars spot is Rock N Salsa. Check out his first post below:
2011 must have been the year of the bull because our loyalty program was raging. We are equally excited about 2012 and in the process of taking our loyalty program to the next level.
What’s the latest with Five Stars? We are paving the future of loyalty with facebook auto check-ins. This will allow people to automatically share their location on Facebook when they use their card at their favorite Five Stars business. What better way to spread the reward?!
Going into the future we want to do our very best to make sure the Five Stars program is a continued success for all our wonderful users. When it comes to loyalty, it’s essential to make the absolute most out of the program. There are two core components to making this happen.
1. Getting the customers excited.
2. Getting the employees excited.
When the customers are juiced through amazing rewards, they become devoted to patronizing your business every week to gain points. The only way this can happen is by having dedicated employees set on spreading awareness of the program and signing people up. The recipe for a loyal customer is as easy as getting a name and a phone number.
The sky’s the limit with Five Stars. Build your fan base today!
Happy Crisma-Hanu-Quanza-NewYears
The year is wrapping up with alarming speed, and I figured that as I wish you a wonderful Christmas and New Years (or whatever you celebrate) I’d give you a little perspective on FiveStar’s first year! It’s been crazy. It’s been wild. It’s been busier than any other job I’ve had. But it’s been a LOT OF FUN, and I hope all the great rewards you’ve received from your awesome local businesses have helped brighten your day!
So what have we been up to?
1.) Growing like bamboo shoots in the grey valleys of China: This may be a bit of an exaggeration (those bamboo shoots grow fast), but from January first to January first a LOT has changed. Last January, FiveStars was a jumble of Python code being tested in two or three businesses with a handful of users. When I arrived in March, I was the fourth person in the company (including the founders). I was the first employee for heaven’s sake–in MARCH!
Now we’ve got right around thirty employees, four hundred business, and (yes you’ve heard it) one hundred thousand people with a FiveStars card in their pockets. WOW. I mean WOW (and not the MMORPG). Let me tell you, those thirty employees have poured some serious time and effort to get us this far. So if you see anyone from FiveStars on the street, just give them a high-five. They deserve it.
2.) You used funding stone: Housemon evolved into Officemon. Yes, I know I’m a nerd, but it’s a tech company. I guess I could have included this under growth, but for me it was a big enough turning point to get it’s own bullet. Working in the same place you eat, sleep, and live get’s a little wearying–trust me.
Now, I can come home from the office, and actually BE HOME! No more programmers hacking away until the wee hours of the morning in my living room. No more laminator potpourri of slightly burnt plastic fumigating my apartment. No more servers under my bed. Phew, I got a bit carried away. Long story short, it’s nice.
3.) Los Angeles, all your stars are belong to us: Ok, I promise no more nerd references, but it’s true. FiveStars has officially expanded to Los Angeles. If that’s not exciting, I don’t know what is. It may seem like a small step, but expanding is way more exciting, stressful, exhausting, and rewarding than I thought possible. We sent some of our best guys down there to start it up, and that’s what they did.
They are living out of a house again, but that’s all part of the process. As they set up computers, desks, and operations, they signed up a handful of businesses (including one of my personal favorite LA boba places–Volcano Tea) and are already getting cards are in people’s hands.
Overall, it’s been one heck of a year. I don’t know what kind of blog post I’ll be writing at the end of 2012, but I can’t imagine it not being a good one. People have loved and used FiveStars more than we could have hoped for in our wildest dreams. Thank all of you sooo much for grabbing our FiveStars cards when you stop in at your favorite restaurants all over the Bay and LA (hey that rhymes).
I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas filled with honey backed hams and joy. I hope your New Years is filled with confetti and New Years Eve Kisses. And I hope we can keep giving you great rewards at the best spots in town from 2012 onward.
Because It’s the Holidays
Turkey is pretty amazing. Sweet Potato Casserole is awesome. And passing out in front of football games is even better. Admittedly, we did partake in a few of these niceties over the holidays, but a lot of our crew dropped more than a few hours working in the field and hacking together a shiny new version of FiveStars on their computers.
So the big question is, besides stuffing our face with Turkey on Thursday, what exactly have we been up to?
Let me break it down for you:
1.) Redesigning the GUI (that’s nerd for Graphical User Interface (which is further nerd for how the program looks to the cashier)). Ok, yes, you probably won’t directly experience the glory and easy of the new user interface, BUT you’ll notice a lot more restaurants will greet you by name, and be extra nice if you are a VIP. (you’re welcome) Just remember to register online and input all that fun info.
2.) Let me give you a demo of a tape that has been playing in my head after the holidays, “Wow, I remember when FiveStars was three guys in a living room, now we have 100,000 people who use us in San Francisco AND WE JUST OPENED OUR LOS ANGELES OFFICE!!!” It’s ok, catch your breath.
Behold my microsoft paint skills and the beautiful star falling right into the middle of LA–this symbolizes my excitement and emotions about the new office.
3.) Recruiting, troubleshooting, and enhancing! Big words indeed. But we’ve been doing all three this break. We’ve kept signing on new business right through the holidays so you’ll have more places to get sweet deals, and we’ve been signing up more people at the stores we already have! And, yes, I’ll admit we do troubleshooting too–no program is perfect–but we’ve fixed bugaboos and we are making FiveStars more efficient every day. So that means more cards, less hassles, and more places to use them.
I can see you now. You’re sitting by your computer with your hands folded, and you’re muttering something like, “Wow, if anyone has ever drank the FiveStars koolaid, it’s Jeff.”
You’re right, I love FiveStars, and I am SUPER excited we’re going to be in Los Angeles spreading deals and love. Come hang out with us or grab a FiveStars Card and you’ll understand. We’re now giving small businesses the best loyalty card platform in the world for pennies, because they deserve it. Because they help foster community and bring people together. And that’s what the holidays are all about.
So while you eat your leftovers from Thanksgiving and gear up for Christmas, grab a FiveStars Card, support local business, and know that we are spreading the good news from San Francisco to LOS ANGELES!!!!
How to Make Loyalty Work for You
Delloite Research came out with a research study on customer loyalty called Serving the Networked Customer and uncovered a few interesting statistics. Stats like retailers who take meaningful steps to drive customer loyalty are 88% more profitable than competitors that don’t. 88% jump in profitability just for loyalty? Sign me up! Another consulting firm, Parago, found a 2x jump in visits and 4x jump in customer spend for the same reason. Could there be a trend?
Here at FiveStars we are serious about customer loyalty. And for good reason: it is a tried and true way to get customers in your store more often and spending more money when they visit. But just having a loyalty program isn’t enough — we aren’t magicians after all. Loyalty programs are the tool that when used properly can yield amazing results to its wielders, but when left unused, doesn’t have the potential to drive the 88% jump in profitability that Delloite found.
So how do you get the most out of your loyalty program? Uniformly we have seen the greatest successes among the FiveStars businesses who:
- Get their customers excited about coming in the store (have a great reward!)
- Get their employees excited about getting customers involved
To elaborate a little more, customers love loyalty because it is a tangible connection between them and the places they frequent. Quality of the food and the physical store fronts are a small piece of the customer experience equation, and loyalty helps to complete this equation. Imagine coming into a store where all the servers know your name and you are treated differently because this is your 27th time here. Imagine rewarding your customers in something not on the normal menu: maybe a dessert that you can only get if you have been to the store 10 times. And think about how excited your employees would be knowing that customers this happy will always tip more! The more customers you get excited about your loyalty program, the more loyalty will be able to do for you.
New Month – New Horizons
It’s day three, and October is already impressing me. We have officially given out over 5,000 cards through a partnership with the magazine Made Local. The beautiful insert is pictured below, but please don’t hesitate to grab one!
Also–yes, I said also–last week we signed up fifty new businesses! Insane, I know. So now you can use your card at new spots from all the way down at the Beard Papa’s in Milpitas up to AK Subs in San Fransisco.
Long story short there are more cards out there in the big wide world and more places to use them to get deals. I think we are amazing too. Enjoy!
The FiveStars Dishcrawl
This is what happens when two of the Bay Area’s hottest start-ups join forces to give their customers something great. The unique fusion of FiveStars and Dishcrawl gave everyone involved great rewards just for coming out to eat on the Dishcrawl and amazing food from accomplished chefs every step of the way.
The FiveStars Dishcrawl launched in Mountain View last week and had some yummy stops lined up! Everyone came out received a FiveStars card and some points to each stop along the way! At Zucca, they got points toward a free Sunday brunch, at Moroccos they got points toward a free wine tasting, and at Hangen they received points toward a free weekday dinner. Everyone gathered on the lawn in front of Chez TJ to register for their FiveStars card and get their team pins for the Dishcrawl. The Mayor of Mountain View and some representatives from the Chamber of Commerce came out to support the event and initiated the ribbon cutting ceremony out in front of Chez TJ.
After splitting into groups, we headed around to each location for some of their speciality dishes like the hummus and pita at Zucca, the egg rolls at Hangen, and the burnt corn and kiwi soup at Chez TJ, and the delicious sangria and marinated oranges at Moroccos for dessert.
All-in-all a successful night!
Get to know us: Jingsong & Michael
I don’t know any other Jingsongs so I can safely say that I don’t know anyone like him. And obviously there is no one quite like Michael Su. They were our original two developers – Jingsong, the lead dev and Michael, the intern. Past are Michael’s intern days were he helped build the fivestars site up to what it is today and past are his pre-21 days. Also, past are his days finishing his degree at Berkeley! (ok, so he’s going back next semester, but for right now we have him full-time!)
Jingsong - The Fisherman
Jingsong is a fisherman first, and a developer second. (Or so he wishes). His tendency to rush down to the ocean whenever the salmon or halibut are running or when the bass are spawning is innate. He also is a pretty rockstar dev leading the fivestars charge in the ways of truth and enlightenment as he builds new features for the platform. So if you like the fact that you can share your favorite restaurants on facebook, track your points online or that you get free points toward your favorite restaurants when you register, thank him.
Michael on a roadtrip
This is Michael. He is happy. And smiling. He also works pretty hard. Actually really hard: he started to go blind because he was looking at the computer screen too long. (Now we make him take more breaks). He has built the entire business dashboard (owners thank him!) and he dropped out of Berkeley for the semester to launch fivestars’ platform to a whole new level. Friend him on facebook!!!!
The end
