GoDeliver v2.1 serial key or number

Five years ago, our platform went live. A silent launch, nothing extraordinary, just a two-man army ready to conquer the online market for experiences and activities. 
Since then, we have sold 50, experiences. In we expect to sell the next 50,&#;

In this post, I want to share with you the most important learnings from the last five years.

Let me try to set the scene as a start. What is TrueStory?

Our mission is to build the place where people meet to find, share and create experiences. As a customer, we want to give you the opportunity to show appreciation for the people you love, to challenge life (and challenge it often), and to create stories and memories through shared experiences.

… and for context, here you have five years in 9 bullets:

• We have accumulated a revenue in excess of $6 million, 80% of which has been earned during the period from 01/01/ to this day
• We have sold over different experiences
• In , we had three full-time employees (all Danish); today, we have 20 employees (of six different nationalities)
• We started with $, in cash and we’ve never had any funding
• We failed to generate substantial profits until this year () and have a projected EBITDA of $,
• We built and launched a “social gifting” app that quickly acquired 15,+ users, after which we sold it without any profit (we made a difficult yet important decision to focus on our core business)
• We have replied to 12,+ tickets submitted by customers and partners, and we have an average satisfaction score of 96%
• We started in Denmark as DuGlemmerDetAldrig (translated as “You’ll never forget”). We then created an “international” brand called TrueStory, which we launched in Norway, with Sweden is soon to follow
• We have built our own booking system from scratch, tailored to experiences: easebooking. Easebooking is now sold as licensed software as well (for now only in Denmark).

When we started the company, we weren’t thinking long term. Lars (our CTO) and I were both 22 years old and just wanted to build something cool, learn a lot and hopefully make some money. Honestly.

As the years passed and our team became better and better, we began to adopt a more long-term strategy and vision. And in order to meet our own ambitious expectations and goals for the future, we need to know on what to focus.

What are the principles that will help us succeed?

The learnings from the last five years will help us establish those principles. It is learnings than be found relevant for most types of businesses.

Consider this post as a test. If you find it interesting, I can (and will) do more specific posts, where I will dive into the more experience-related factors of building this type of business.

Let’s get into it.

Always start with product selection and price

As a young online marketer, I was obsessed with tech, traffic and conversion rates. That made me forget (or at least fail to acknowledge) the importance of offering the right selection of experiences at the right price.

One of the main lessons I’ve learned from building a consumer-oriented business is to have a sharp focus on the product and the price. When running an experience portal, that means constantly seeking out the market for the best experiences that already have a demand. It also means spotting the market trends and making sure that you develop new experiences that match those trends and that you know at what price points those experiences will perform at their best (more on that further down).

During a fireside chat, Jeff Bezos was asked: “how will Amazon look in 5–10 years?” In his answer, he refers to values (or “Big Ideas”) that he is certain his customers greatly appreciates. 
The “Big Ideas” are 1) low prices, 2) fast delivery and 3) a wide selection. 
 “I know for a fact that in 10 years from now, customers will still like low prices.”

Needless to say… Jeff Bezos is right!

You can build the greatest tech in the world and do the most innovative and segmented marketing, but if your selection of products is not good enough and/or if your prices are not competitive, it will all fall apart. I learned the hard way.

The data. Now, I’m not a statistician (my greatest educational accomplishment is high school), but, as I see it, the correlation between our revenue and the development of our selection of experiences (in Denmark) is… let’s say, relevant food for thought.

Spot the demand and go deliver

I once tried creating a business around a product with no demand. That didn’t go too well. Therefore, I can’t share learnings about creating a demand from scratch and moving people towards new habits and products.

However, what I’ve succeeded in on several occasions is building a business on top of an existing demand, on top of an existing market.
 If I were better educated, I would probably say that I prefer markets (or should I say oceans?) that are somewhere in between blue and red. 
 TrueStory is no exception. People would still be booking experiences — for billions of dollars actually — if we didn’t exist. The market is there. The key learning for me is that I prefer to take an existing market and see what can be done better within that market.

In most markets, there are endless opportunities to grow and win market shares, and you don’t really need to worry about the competition as long as you concentrate on improving the customer journey.

In terms of selling experiences, we started asking: “How can we offer a better online service for customers buying experience gifts?”

Later this evolved into “How can we be the best at helping people to find, share and create experiences?” with a constant focus on improving the browsing and booking experience. It also includes a constant focus on creating the best selection of experiences — the experiences that people are already asking for (evergreen experiences) combined with new, eye-opening experiences that the customer didn’t even know existed (lab experiences).

So basically, we position ourselves in an existing market with a lot of customers and competitors, and then we get up every morning and try to create the best customer journey that we possibly can within the limits of our investing power and, more importantly, our imagination.

The data. This graph shows the revenue development of two types of experiences. The experiences that are well known, the “evergreens” with existing demand, and the new, unique experiences that we created and launched in cooperation with our partners, the “lab” experiences.

The graph clearly shows how we started off by “just” chipping into the existing market and then evolved into the platform we are today, where we’re not only offering well-known experiences, but also inspiring customers with new ones.

Does it add value to the customer? If not, don’t do it

This is such a simple approach, but nonetheless a very important one. If you want to build a great, sustainable company, you need to focus on adding value to your customers. And that needs to be the anchor in all your decisions and debates.

What does it mean in relation to creating and selling experiences?

• In our case, it means never selling our experiences at a higher price than if the customer would purchase them directly through a partner. We aim for the opposite. That can be seen as obvious, but it’s not. We have competitors whose commission is so high that they need to add it to the regular price of the experience. To me, that is customer value dilution.
• It means that if a customer has had a “less-than-what-they-expected” experience, we compensate for this even if our partner does not agree, which means it comes out of our pockets.
• It means that even though more profit is gained when a gift card expires, if a customer asks for an extension, we oblige without a fee.

And the list goes on. I guess you know what I mean by now.
If you’re about to do something that does not add value to your customer, consider it carefully. If you’re about to do something that decreases value for the customer, you should refrain at all costs.

The data. If you add value, your customers will return and buy more experiences, and they will also recommend you to others. When that happens, your brand is growing organically and you are creating a thriving business.

Define your mission to metrics

Knowing your sales numbers, margins and marketing metrics should be enough, right? It isn’t.

“What gets measured gets improved” is a quote by Peter Drucker. And it is key.

But the tough part isn’t measuring. It’s knowing what to measure in a business whose goal is to create customer experiences.

When we defined our mission — what it is we wanted to build — we needed to identify the levers that would get us there.

So the key learning is knowing what to measure and making sure to measure it; the goal is to execute your business based on your selected metrics. I love data. So the next part is a bit “technical”. I apologize for that…

Some metrics, no matter the company or mission, will be the same, but some will be unique to us and the experience industry.

We aim to navigate around 7 key metrics, with a list of support metrics for each. If a key metric is underperforming, you should be able to find the answer (and the solution) in one of its supporting metrics.

Business overview: EBITDA
Supporting metrics: Revenue group overview, average commision, customer, variable costs etc.

Vision: Created memories through experiences and experience reviews
Supporting metrics: How many people are having experiences through our platform, how are they reviewing their experience, and how are they sharing their experience afterwards? And how is our brand traffic developing?

Marketing: Traffic source performance vs. Traffic growth budget
Traffic source growth budget includes: Sessions, transactions, conversion rate, average order size. 
Other metrics: SoMe reach, profit margin on paid search, sessions and revenue from emails, active affiliate partners, organic search growth, and session quality on non-converting sessions.

Tech: Sprint completion rate
Supporting metrics: Estimate vs. time spent ratio, unit test code coverage, reviews, downtime, load time etc.

Sales: Number of partners and experiences on site
Supporting metrics: Potential partners added to Podio, efforts made and conversion rate from initial contact to agreement, regional coverage, price points, price competitiveness etc.

Customer service: Customer Satisfaction rate
Supporting metrics: First response times, ticket subject categories, chat performance etc.

Product performance: Product click-through-rate and conversion rate
Supporting metrics: Product impressions on marketplace, product wait list demand etc.

These are our mission-critical metrics that we must track, report and optimize on a continual basis! It is a constant work-in-progress and we are still far from being where we want to be, but we keep improving our data, our reporting structure, and the way we present the data.

Tool/system tips with regards to the above: Google Analytics, OKR framework, Klipfolio, Power BI, Amazon Redshift and (most importantly) Microsoft Excel!

Keep improving the customer experience

When running a more or less bootstrapped company, there is a natural limit to how innovative you can be — but you always need to try within the obvious limits.

When I look back, there’s one example of us trying to redefine and improve the customer experience/journey that has proved to be crucial in relation to our growth.

Booking — aka fixing the user experience

When we started our company, we did what our competitors were doing. In other words, pushing gift cards. So, not really selling experiences, but gift cards “wrapped” as experiences.
In order for the customer to really buy an experience — or use a gift card — they would need to contact the experience host directly. I regard that as a completely broken user experience because:

1. Buying a gift card in the “traditional” way means passing a task on to the recipient of the gift card. You don’t know what experience awaits the recipient when booking a date for the experience.

2. When the customer needs to contact the partner/host directly, it means that as the experience portal, you offer no real value to the customer and act as a useless, for-profit middleman with a shiny gift card.

So how could we break away from the way the market worked and add actual value to the customer (and host) in order to justify our existence?

The problem / pain: The problem for the customer is that the market for experiences is extremely unstructured and hard to navigate because it consists of lots of passionate hosts who don’t care about creating a great browsing and booking experience. They care about creating great, unforgettable experiences.

The solution: So, in terms of adding value, we saw the part of the customer journey that lies before the experience — and after — as the opportunity!
In other words, providing a great place to find and book experiences without any friction (and without any unanswered phone calls or emails).
It also meant removing the customer service role and booking hassle from the host/partner so that they could concentrate on what they are best at: the actual experience.

From there, we started building a booking system, tailor-made for experiences, and incorporating hundreds of hosts into the system. Let’s put it this way: it wasn’t an easy task.

Here we are, 2–3 years later: an actual experience portal with no real competition except from the big international players like TripAdvisor, Viator and AirBnB (we need to move fast). We’re still working on incorporating all available experiences into our booking system… and we’ll probably never finish.

The data.

I’m really glad that we dared to invest + hours into development and all the energy and risks that went with it, not to mention the focus required to keep on track.

To sum it all up

… my key learnings and from now on, our key principles, are:

#1 Always start with product selection and price

#2 Spot the demand and go deliver

#3 Does it add value to the customer? If not, don’t do it

#4 Mission to metrics

#5 Keep improving the customer experience

… And the main key to all of this is: focus. Focus on what works and what you have already set out to do. Learn to say no.

It took a while to create this post. Not to actually write it, but to explore what has actually worked. If you have read this far, I really hope that you have discovered something new and maybe even been inspired by my learnings.

What now? I’m going to take many of the above learnings and implement them into our company as key principles. They’ll become the main guidelines on how we navigate as a team, and eventually they’ll become firmly wired into every employee’s mindset. This is because I believe that these principles will be the most valuable ones in 2, 4 and even 10 years time.

The goal? To continue learning, building a great company, and having fun. I believe that in we have the capacity to sell another 50, experiences. If you want to follow how we get on and receive notifications when we post more, sign up here.

Thanks for reading. I would love to get your inputs.

Other resources. Most of the principles have been born out of talking very little and doing very much. That is very important to understand. Other than that, I would recommend the following: reading Jeff Bezos’ annual letter to shareholders and also the customer journey and metrics that matter at Avinash Kaushik’s blog, listening to this talk between David Heinemeier Hansson (Basecamp) and Tim Ferriss and this podcast by Masters of Scale with Reed Hastings (Netflix). If you want to learn more about the experience space, you should also check out Skift (and all their reports). Also regarding Skift: I hope to attend the Skift Forum in New York in september — maybe an event for you to consider as well? A crazy lineup of interesting people very passionated about the above: creating experiences.

1. Getting started

When you run GoDeliver for the first time the program will lead you through the setup process. If you don't have all the information at hand you can quit the program and start again where you left off later. If you make a mistake you can fix it later by selecting the appropriate item from the Setup menu.

Date format
GoDeliver allows you to choose dd/mm/yy or mm/dd/yy.

Currency symbol
You will be asked to enter your currency symbol, eg $, �.

Business details
The only required field is the name of the business.

Email configuration
If you wish to use GoDeliver to send emails to customers you must configure your email. You can do this later by selecting Configure email from the Setup menu. The port defaults to 25, you should not need to change this.

Billing day
You are asked to choose the day of the week when bills are calculated, so that you can determine the amount owed by customers when you bill them. You can choose "any day" if you want more flexibility.

After you have completed the setup, the next step is to add products to the database. Products could include newspapers and magazines if you are a newsagent, milk and eggs if you deliver dairy produce. You can add products by selecting Add product from the Products menu, pressing the F1 key or clicking on the newspaper icon on the toolbar. Enter the description of the product (eg Daily News or Dozen eggs), the price and the days when the product is available for delivery. Specify whether the product is available for morning or evening delivery.

You can edit the product details by selecting Edit product from the Products menu, pressing the F2 key or clicking on the first binoculars icon on the toolbar.

After you have added products, you should add customers to the database. Select Add customer from the Customers menu, press the F3 key or click on the customer icon on the toolbar. The required fields are the customer's name, the house name or number and the road/street. When you want to add another customer on the same street you will be able to select the street from the drop list and the other address details will be filled automatically when you tab to the next address field. You can add products which are to be delivered to the customer by clicking on the Add button. If the customer is to suspend delivery for a period (eg for vacation) check the Suspend box and enter the dates.

You can edit the customer details by selecting Edit customer from the Customers menu, pressing the F4 key or clicking on the second binoculars icon on the toolbar.

After you have added products and customers you are ready to set up your delivery routes. Select Add route from the Routes menu, press the F5 key or click on the route icon on the toolbar. Enter a meaningful name for the route, eg "Village, Mon-Sat, am" and enter the cost per customer per day. Select whether the route is daily or weekly and mornings or evenings. Select the start date for the route (which could be the date you intend to start using GoDeliver).

You can add single customers to the route by clicking on the Add customer button and identifying the customer. You can add all the customers from a street by clicking on the Add road/street button and selecting the street, or from an entire district or post code (zip code).

To remove a customer from the route, identify the customer and click on the Remove button. To change the order of a customer in the list, click on the customer then click on the new position.

You can edit a route by selecting Edit route from the Routes menu, pressing the F6 key or clicking on the third binoculars icon on the toolbar.

After you have set up a route you can display and print the daily delivery details by selecting Print route from the Routes menu or pressing the F7 key. You can choose to print the amount owed by each customer so that the delivery man can collect the payments.

2. What if some products are not delivered?

There will probably be occasions when you are unable to deliver certain products to customers on some days, or a customer may be missed on the delivery round.

To correct this, select Short delivery from the Routes menu or press the F8 key. Select the date and the route. If an entire product was not delivered, click on the Remove product button and identify the product. If a customer was missed, select the appropriate item(s) from the list and click on Remove item. If you want to change the quantity delivered, double click on the item and select the new quantity.

This will ensure that customers are only billed for the products they received. You can only correct deliveries in this way after the delivery has been made.

3. Accepting payment from customers

To accept a payment from a customer, select Find customer from the Customers menu, press the F4 key or click on the second binoculars icon on the toolbar. Identify the customer.

Click on the Accept payment button and change the payment due date if necessary. The default date depends on the billing day that you set up earlier. If you specified "any day" it will default to the current date. If, for example, you specified Saturdays, it will default to last Saturday's date.

The program will tell you the amount to be paid. If the customer pays less or more than the payment due, the balance will be adjusted accordingly.

If the customer wishes to redeem vouchers, click on the Accept voucher button. If the voucher is already in the system, select it from the drop list and enter the quantity to be redeemed. Otherwise enter a description of the voucher, the unit value and the quantity. You may accept more than one voucher for a single payment. If there are vouchers in the drop list which are no longer in use you can remove them by selecting Remove voucher from the Setup menu.

Click on the Print invoice button to print an invoice for the customer. You can create text to print at the bottom of the invoice by selecting Invoice text from the Setup menu.

Click on Email invoice to send the invoice to the customer by email.

To view the customer's history, click on the Show history button.

3. Adding a customer charge

To add a charge to a customer's account, select Add charge from the Customers menu.

Identify the customer.

Select the date, enter the amount and enter the description of the charge.

This feature is useful if, for example, a customer is delivered an item which is not on the list for the delivery route.

You can remove charges from the droplist using Remove charge from the Setup menu.

5. Setting a password for the Setup menu

You can create a password to protect the Setup menu commands by selecting Password from the Setup menu. This will prevent unauthorized employees from changing the setup.

6. Exporting reports as csv files

All reports can be exported as csv (comma separated variables) files so that they can be read by a spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel. To set up this option, select Export reports from the Setup menu. Each time a report is displayed a file manicapital.com will be created and saved in your Documents folder.

7. Removing old data

After some time your database will grow and it may be advisable to remove old data. To do so select Remove old data from the File menu. Enter the year prior to which you want data to be deleted.

It is unwise to remove last year's data unless you are sure that all customers have made a payment in the current year.

This function is protected by the Setup password.

8. Creating mailing lists

To create a list of customer email addresses, select Create email list from the Customers menu. You can choose to create the list for all customers or only customers with payment required.

A list of names and email addresses will be copied to the clipboard so that you can paste it into the CC or BCC field of your email program. Also a file manicapital.com will be created and saved in your Documents folder. You can import this into the address bok of your email program.

Similarly a mailing list can be created by selecting Create mailing list from the Customers menu. A file manicapital.com will be saved in your Documents folder. You can import this into your word processing software.

9. Backing up your data files

In case your hard drive fails or you have some other problem with your computer, it is advisable to back up your data files regularly (to CD or flash drive). You can do this by selecting Back up data files from the File menu. Identify the folder where you want the files to be saved.

GoDeliver and the Internet

GoDeliver allows you to upload your delivery routes to your Website so that your delivery person can follow the route on his or her mobile device. He or she can also adjust the delivery quantities. Then when the delivery is complete you can download the delivery route and the quantities in the GoDeliver database will be adjusted so that your customers are billed correctly.

To set up the Internet, select WebLink from the Setup menu. The name of the file which you need to access on your Website to view the route is manicapital.com After you have completed all the fields, check the box to enable the connection and click on OK. This will test your connection and upload the necessary PHP files.

To upload a delivery route select Upload route from the Routes menu or click on the up arrow on the toolbar. Select the route and the date. You can choose to show the amount owed by each customer so that the delivery man can collect the payments.

After the route has been delivered select Download route from the Routes menu or click on the down arrow on the toolbar. The delivery quantities will be adjusted automatically (but delivery charges, if any, will not be changed).

Holidays

To add a holiday when there will be no deliveries, select Add Holiday from the Holidays submenu of the Setup menu. Select the date. If it is an annual holiday (such as Christmas) check the box.

To remove a holiday select Remove holiday from the Holidays submenu.

Printing and emailing invoices

To print invoices for all customers, select Print invoices from the Invoice all customers submenu of the Customers menu. Enter the payment due date. Invoices will be printed for all customers with payments due on that date. If you do not want to see the printer dialog box each time an invoice is printed, select Printing from the Setup menu and check the box.

To email invoices for all customers, select Email invoices from the Invoice all customers submenu.

Resetting the start date

If you have been evaluating GoDeliver and you want to remove all the test data you could unistall the program then reinstall it, but then you would lose all the information on customers, routes and products.

Instead you can remove charges and payments made during the trial period by selecting Reset start date from the Setup menu. Select the new start date. Your customer data (including opening balances), route data and product data will not be affected.

SMS messaging

GoDeliver allows you to send SMS messages to customers. First you should set up an account with CDyne (manicapital.com) and they will provide you with a licence key. Select SMS messaging from the Setup menu and enter the licence key. Enter the country code if required. For example if you are in the UK, enter the country code 44 and check the box to remove the leading zero from phone numbers.

Go-deliver is a payload delivery tool coded in Go. This is the first version and other features will be added in the future.

Installation

Compile from source:

1. Clone this repository.
2. Install the required dependecies.
3. Compile and run.

Dependecies

Configuration

Currently go-deliver supports only http and https server for payload delivery. More server types will be added later. To change the port of the http server you can modify the .

Sample configuration :

Usage

The main logic behind go-deliver is to deliver different type of payloads to specific IP/Subnet address or block access for specific IP/Subnet.

Currently you have two types of objects in go-deliver.

• Payload - Used to define an object to deliver.
• Host - Used to define an object to combine with Payload object.

Payload object commands

• Add - Add a new payload to database.
• Delete - Delete a payload from the database.
• List - List all the payloads on the database.

Payload types