Devotee

February 14, 2011 by Matthew French

Just in time for Valentine’s Day

Our engineering team was hard at work to get you a long awaited native app of Devotee. For now, the app is only available for iPhone, but Android is almost finished!

So go ahead, download it if you have an iPhone. After that, get out and around in Pittsburgh, earn some Devotee dollars, and get yourself some free stuff from the businesses we work with. I’ll give you a head start: Franktuary, Carson City Saloon, OTB, Mullen’s, Carson Street Deli, Town Tavern, McFadden’s, and many more!

Also, if you are in the Big Apple head over to Hello Pasta, Playwright Pub, Public House, and a few more great spots will be available very soon!

Check out our site at devotee.com to get a full list of rewards around you.

Okay, we have to get back to work to get that Android app out and a bunch more businesses to redeem rewards from. If you have any problems at all with the apps, feel free to email us at us@devotee.com and we will help resolve the issue.

One last thing, you can still use the great web app on your mobile browser!

January 19, 2011 by Bold

Facebook Places is now available to earn rewards on Devotee. Facebook Places shares your current location and what you’re doing there with your friends.

To use it to earn free stuff, open up the Devotee app on your iPhone or Android phone. Go home > Change Settings > Enable Facebook Places. If you don’t see that option, make sure you have already connected with Facebook.

January 6, 2011 by Matthew French

Happy New Year from Devotee

We here at Devotee would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year! We have been fortunate enough to have met some great people in the year 2010. The last half of the 2010 was one of the most exciting times of our lives (that is, until we go cliff diving) and we hope to say the same about 2011 this time next year, if not more.

We have a ton of people to thank. We would like to start by thanking every business that has worked with us as we started Devotee. Without the great small businesses and owners that understand how to run a business, our dream would not be possible. We constantly are working to make a better mobile experience that gets customers of those businesses to promote the great experiences they have to their friends.

We would also like to thank AlphaLab for all the hard work they provided to us through their program, and also the people they allowed us to meet! We would like to wish good luck to all our comrades from our AlphaLab class and that they have continued success with their startups in 2011.

As for us, we have an exciting year ahead (as would any startup 6 months in right??). For starters, we are sticking true to our vision of providing the best way to for customers to earn real rewards from businesses they love. Likewise, we will provide those businesses with a simple way to get their business promoted (from the people that should be promoting their business…their customers) across all of these never-ending-social-media-sites-that-business-owners-have-no-clue-what-or-how-to-use.

Keep up to date with us on Twitter by following @devotee or find us on Facebook. We love feedback and value everything our users and business owners have to say about what we are building. Keep an eye out for Devo and the gang as we look to accomplish our goal of growth in the fun and fast moving location-based service market.

~Devo and the gang

November 4, 2010 by Bold

Facebook Deals

Yesterday, Facebook announced Deals. Local businesses can offer special discounts and free items to their customers if the customer checks into the business using Facebook Places, similar to how a Foursquare deal works. Businesses can reward a first-time visitor or a repeat loyal customer. The best part is customers can get rewarded for bringing their friends, which is perfect for businesses and could make for a fun Friday night.

Facebook has 500+ million users and 200 million mobile users. This is a giant opportunity for businesses to reach local people online who they might not normally reach with traditional advertising. Also, encouraging your customers to bring their friends (and giving them a comparatively small reward for it) is a great promotion technique. The goal of any promotion should be to get more butts in seats, so why not reward your customers directly for doing so?

Facebook Deals is going to be huge, but it’s not without it’s problems. The number one concern is privacy. Facebook has a culture of openness and some people may not be willing to share their exact current location to people online. Currently, the only way to earn these rewards is to share your current location in real time, a privacy and security concern for even devoted Facebook users.

Facebook Deals is the way of the future. Facebook is the biggest social network, but it isn’t the only one. Businesses should do everything they can to encourage their customers to talk about them on Facebook, but they shouldn’t ignore great communities like Gowalla, Flickr and Tumblr. Unfortunately, Facebook Deals only allows users to get rewarded for checking in on Facebook and doesn’t take into account any other location-based network or any other social network in general. Facebook Deals doesn’t encourage sharing an experience of visiting a business, it’s just another way of saying “Hey I’m here.”

For a business owner, the tough part of all of these fragmented deals is that they can quickly get out of hand. It’s a huge undertaking to manage a Foursquare deal and adding more separate deal sites to the picture only complicates things, although the benefits can definitely outweigh the time commitment.

The mobile discount space is only just getting started…

October 18, 2010 by Matthew French

Devotee Contest

We love rewards! I mean, that is what Devotee is all about! So we had a small contest here in Pittsburgh to dish out some real rewards to some of our most dedicated early users. The contest went great and attracted tons of new users. We had three lucky winners out of a pool of eligible Devotee users.

Our three lucky users were: “Diggy Fresh,” “Ian,” & “hrynewichd.” Although these were our three big winners and each walked away with $100, we had so many other great users that were among the contenders. It was so hard to only give three people a reward for participating, so we have a little something for all of our users that qualified!

Thanks to all our users who enjoyed participating and having fun while visiting our Devotee locations!

We are adding businesses here in Pittsburgh, so be sure to sign up for Devotee on your iPhone or Android at devoteeapp.com on the phones mobile browser! Once you successful sign up for Devotee, look out for “Devo” the dog at businesses!

Be sure to check back to our blog as we will be having another contest very soon!

September 27, 2010 by Bold

Table Tents

Front of the table tent

Back of the table tent

Keep an eye out for these beauties around Pittsburgh (and more places soon :-)

(Source: Flickr / kevinholesh)

September 24, 2010 by Bold

T-10 seconds

We’re almost ready to rock and roll. This is a fun and exciting time at the Devotee offices and I’ve never been more excited to hit that big green button that says “Go.” We have a month or so before we have an official launch and a hard-working month that will be.

The backend is functional but needs much improvement. Regardless of how imperfect I think it is, it’s solid and it works.

We’ve begun testing with eight businesses around Pittsburgh, from coffee shops to nightclubs. The two things we’re looking to find out are:

Do people know what this even does after the first time they see it? Will they keep coming back?
What value do businesses get out of this?

Another question I’m playing around with is how to make this thing more fun. Right the the text and instructions are easy-to-understand, but a tad dry for my taste. I’d rather have a little of Devo’s character shine through the app.

August 24, 2010 by Bold

Our Ideas

We wanted a place to write down our thoughts on many things, kind of like a library of our beliefs, a manifesto. This is a place that’s more permanent than our stream of blog posts and product updates. We have opinions on how you can run your marketing, how you can improve your customer experience, and how we should run our own company. This is where we’ll express them.

Introducing our ideas.

This section will grow as we solidify our own thoughts through our experience. Here are the first three:

Speak the truth
Set it and forget it
Too good to be true

August 3, 2010 by Bold

The business end of the stick

Now that the design is done, the fun part begins. I’ve started the programming necessary to make this thing actually work. There is much to be done.

I’m using Ruby as the programming language and Rails as the web application framework. These tools are an absolute joy to work with. I never loved using PHP, but it got the job done. It’s exactly the opposite with Rails. I’ve been using it for 4 years and I’ve never looked back.

I’ll keep you update on what I get done, but in the meantime, I’ll let Devo do the talking.

August 2, 2010 by Matthew French

Devotee got a pet!

We wanted to take the time to introduce our newest addition to the Devotee team. We have been apt to giving him a rockstarish name for now: Devo. (name subject to change) Some may remember this name, all too well, as the Billboard topping band from Akron, Ohio. I mean who doesn’t remember the song and music video for “Whip It.” If somehow this doesn’t resonate (which I have no reason why anyone in the world wouldn’t remember), PLEASE spend the 2 minutes and 50 seconds to watch this music video, it’s very entertaining to say the least and worth a few laughs!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbt30UnzRWw

Alright, well enough of these weird old guys that like to dance and sing around in yellow jump suits and red cone-like hats, let’s show you who the newest addition to the team is ;)

Devo

And now with alittle added branding…

Devotee

So why a dog? Well being that we are building a fun and simple mobile software centered around loyalty, we wanted our brand to be just as fun and simple. The core of the Devotee software is to promote brand loyalty at restaurants and small businesses through the loyal customers. Customers will be spreading word of mouth experiences with their friends and getting rewarded for doing such, all while remaining loyal to the business. This loyalty bond between a business owner and customer much resembles that strong bond between “mans best friend” and a dog owner. We wanted a branding solution that allowed users to immediately think loyalty when they saw our brand, so a dog kind of just made sense!

Other web companies have successfully centered their brands around animals to allow an easier connection to the brand by their users. A few that ring a bell…

Twitter

MailChimp

Beerby App “Badger”

Fooala

So I hope you like our logo and if you can think of any names for our dog, we would love to hear some ideas. We are not too sure how and if ‘Devo’ will stick, so any suggestions are welcome! Any names can be sent left in the comment section, email us at us@devoteeapp.com, or tweet us @devotee.