Blogs
Contribute to Gifts by Credit Card
You can now contribute to a gift using your credit card rather than having to have a Paypal account.
It's been the most requested new feature so far - so we're pleased to announce that it's live.
It makes contributing to a gift even easier. But rest assured, Paypal still handle the transfer of money - to give you that safety and security guarantee.
So, when you make a contribution to a gift you'll now be shown a confirmation screen that allows you to login to Paypal to complete the transaction - or click a section below which expands to allow you to simply enter your card details (see the picture above).
We're always working to make Wraply better and easier to use - so do let us know about any features you wish Wraply had. Use the 'contact' link below.
Online Shopping Reaches £5bn a month
Ecommerce continues to grow, but a major milestone has been reached - with consumers spending over £5bn online last month.
That's up 18% compared to July last year, and is the highest rate of growth since 2007.
These figures are reported in Computer Weekly and on the BBC.
And, as Wraply users know, the web makes it easy not just to buy something yourself, but also to organise a gift for others!
Birthday Gift Ideas
It's great having Wraply to help you and your friends get together to buy the perfect gift for someone - but what gift should that be?
Thinking of birthday gift ideas is hard - we know that. That's why we're going to regularly blog about great gift ideas, creative gifts we spot, and special offers on gifts we hear about.
In this first article I'm going to suggest great ways to brainstorm birthday gift ideas. Whenever you have to think of a birthday gift idea for someone, simply work through these steps:
1. Useful Gifts
This is the place to start. We always appreciate gifts more if they make a difference to our everyday lives. The great thing about Wraply is that, as a group, you can now afford to get this kind of gift - rather than each just getting some kind of £10 novelty gift that will just end up in landfill in a few months!
So what would be useful for the person you have in mind? What does their weekday life look like? Do they have a long commute? Maybe an Apple iPod Nano 16Gb would help them pass the time?
Perhaps they like food, but don't have time to cook when they get home? A slow cooker means they could just pop the ingredients in before they leave the house, and come home to a delicious dinner.
I'm not suggesting specific gifts so much as simply suggesting thinking through someone's day - in the week or at a weekend - and thinking about where you could make a difference with a gift.
That's the kind that will end up being the perfect birthday gift.
2. Gifts for Hobbies/Passions
Another area to think about is what they do in their leisure time - or dream of doing.
Some people have obvious hobbies like golf or gardening. But others may have less visible pass-times - writing, collecting something, some kind of art or craft and so on.
But you could also think beyond hobbies to their passions and ambitions. Maybe they've always talked about starting a business, learning to sing or play an instrument.
Really thinking through this area - perhaps even brainstorming with others who know the gift recipient - could spark a great idea for you, that will end up bringing a big smile to the birthday boy or girl's face.
3. Experience Gifts
For those who really do have everything and don't need more stuff, 'experiences' can be the perfect birthday gift. Virgin Experiences and Red Letter Days are the market leaders for gift experiences in the UK.
Maybe your gift recipient would like to learn how to make michelin star style canapes and cocktails, or even take a flying lesson! There are hundreds of experiences offering everything from adrenalin to pampering.
4. Memory Gifts
Finally maybe you can give a gift that will either capture memories for the future - a photoshoot of the family perhaps. Or something that brings back memories from the past - perhaps a big framed print of a treasured photo, or a specially made book of photos, letters or even recipes.
Brainstorming in each of these areas could help you to come up with the perfect birthday gift idea. Good luck!
Wraply is Live!
We've been quietly live for a while now, with real customers using our site as they discover it. This has helped us find and iron out a few minor issues to make Wraply even better.
We're now ready to officially go live, and start telling the world about Wraply to spread the group-giving goodness.
Thanks to everyone that has used Wraply to get their dream gift so far - hopefully it's made quite a few people very happy!
Wraply - one month in
It's now been a month since Wraply was piloted at the Launch48 weekend.
Behind the scenes the Wraply team has been busy, and we're very nearly ready to unveil the fruits of our labours. Here's what we've been up to:
- Recruiting the founding team, and deciding on our roles and way of working
- Arranging offices for Wraply HQ
- Setting up the limited company
- Opening a bank account
- Setting up business Paypal account
- Getting legal agreements in place
- Setting up accounts with suppliers
- Designing the site from the ground up:
- Writing user stories (the features for our users)
- Deciding on what will be in the first release (after 3 iterations)
- Being really strict about making the first release very basic - the minimum viable product in Agile terms
- Designing wireframes - the rough layouts of the site
- Development decisions, including the server setup and the framework to develop on. After considering a number of options we went for the Kohana framework, running on an Ubuntu/Nginx/PHP server. We decided on Drupal for some non-core parts of the site, such as this blog and our media centre.
- Designing the data model - how data will be structured and handled in our system
- Graphic design of the site
- Building the site:
- Configuring the server - a lot of optimisation has been done
- Setting up a distributed version control system, enabling a number of people to work on the code separately and track all the changes. We opted for Git
- Setting up the codebase
- Developing the controllers - the code that runs the site. Although this is just one line here, this is one of the most lengthy and difficult parts of building the site. Iman worked very long hours on this.
- Developing the views - what is displayed by the site, based on the wireframe designs developed by Kay and Trenton
- Adding some javascript goodness to improve the user experience
- Applying the graphic designs to the site
- Testing!
- Planning the marketing:
- We worked out some key decisions around our brand, specifically what our brand values are - what we stand for, and how we want to be seen.
- Kerry did a lot of research into what our target customers are searching for when it comes to gifts, to give us a clear picture of what content we need to develop for the site. She also gave others in the team a training session into how to do this
- We launched our Media Centre to provide press releases and background resources to media contacts
- We developed a media plan, deciding which outlets our target audience reads, watches and listens to, and which we should target initially
- We looked at social media options, and planned our use of this communications channel
- We launched this blog to provide another way of connecting with the outside world
So all this is done (or nearly done!) and we're preparing to launch. But our first release is going to be done quite quietly, without much fanfare, to allow us to see how things go with live users.
We'll then be doing extensive user testing, and watching how the site performs with real live users, before making a second release - and that's when we'll begin to tell the world about it.
Challenges
Of course, the path to a site (and a business) launch never goes smoothly and there have been a fair few challenges to overcome.
At first, the process of bringing the right core team together after the launch48 weekend was more difficult than it should have been, but ended well - with a great Wraply team, and also another great team formed from the other participants from launch48 who are going to develop their own project separately.
Then, once we were up and running, the challenge was to keep good communication going - especially as people were doing this in their spare time, and working from home. Communication within a team that's working remotely is always more difficult - so we used a couple of key tools to keep in touch. We have a specialist team site that has our private team blog, a docments area, and most importantly the project management system that tracks all our tasks, user stories (features) etc in each iteration, and working towards each release. We also use Yammer (a kind of private twitter for the company) for short updates and Skype for conference calls.
Then, just a week before our planned release date, one of our developers had to travel back to India at short notice for a few weeks for family reasons. So we extended the release by a further week, and other members of the team helped out our lead developer, Iman. Zeshan ended up doing some server management, and I did some frontend work - taking the designs from Trenton and Kay and applying them to the site. This involved a bit of a learning curve with Kohana, and also with javascript. But in a startup everyone has to get involved with everything and it was actually a great experience.
Resisting Perfectionism
The temptation is not to release anything until you feel it's perfect - and the key to succeeding as a start-up is to resist this and get your product out there as early as possible to start testing with real users. Only that way can you truly understand what they want, and how they expect to use the site.
So the challenge for Zeshan, who is leading our team in this phase, has been to keep us all moving towards an early release even though our natural instinct is to wait until our site is more polished. In his weekly team update email last week he gave a great quote about this:
Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn had a great quote about this: "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late."
I think this is very true. And actually, although you may be embarrased, your customers don't know what little features and tweaks you pushed back to later releases in planning in order to get to a minimum viable product specification for Release 1.
On my personal blog I'd previously written an article about Twitter, and showed some images of how their site evolved from what was actually a really rough and ready first release: http://www.steveparks.co.uk/blog/steve_parks/twitter_and_evolution_busin...
So when we launch the site it will be basic, but it'll be only 5 weeks since we started work on the idea - and a second release will be hot on its heels, and a third release, and fourth release and so on. We have some fantastic features planned for future releases, but the first release is just about getting the core functionality live.
A start-up wins advantage by moving fast and embracing constant change. That's just what we plan to do at Wraply.
Wraply & Leon
The Guardian has started a small business section which includes the twitter business diary of Henry Dimbleby, the founder of Leon's Restaurants.
I'm going to be particularly interested in following his diary, as the Leon restaurant in Spitalfields Market is very near Wraply HQ - and is where we hold some of our planning sessions to build our own business!
The photo above was taken on the 5th November, with four of the Wraply team - (from left to right):
* Iman Samizadeh, our lead developer.
* Kay Tsang, our lead designer.
* Me
* Venu Tammabatula, developer.
The purpose of this meeting was to discuss with Iman and Venu the user stories that the product team had written for Release 1 of Wraply.com (User stories are like feature specifications for those of you not used to Agile Development, of which we operate a very basic version). That's why you can see lots of index cards in the background!
Leon's was great for this kind of meeting because of the big tables, the wi-fi, and the great food which was also good value. The staff at this branch were also extremely kind and helpful, allowing us to spread our work out, and giving us waiter service in the section that's normally self-help, just so we could have one of the really big tables.
Thanks Henry, and all at Leon - we'll be watching you grow your business, while we're busy starting our own at your tables!
Wraply featured in TechFluff TV Launch48 roundup
On the Sunday of Launch48, Hermione Way from TechFluff TV went round interviewing the team leaders again - and edited into this little video.
Starting Work on Wraply - Launch48 Day 1, Morning
This is part of a series of posts about the Launch48 weekend at the Paypal HQ in London, in which six web businesses developed a prototype of their idea in one weekend.
On the Friday evening we had selected which six projects would be developed, and my idea for Wraply was chosen (hurray!).
On Saturday morning we all gathered back at Paypal's offices for our first team meetings. I'd put together a plan the night before for how I wanted to organise the team, and started putting it into action.
Organising the Team
I believe that 15 people, particularly strangers, can't work effectively in one big group - as things would descend into endless debate. We only had two days, so we needed to focus on execution rather than discussion.
So the first thing I did was create small sub-teams, with someone clearly in charge of each. Those team leaders would then meet regularly to share information and make key decisions before going back to their teams to 'trickle-down' key info. I also tasked one team member with enabling communications between groups. He would float around all groups learning what they were up to, and then sharing what the other teams were up to. He would also monitor our overall progress against plan.
Setting the Vision, then Letting Go
I started by setting out the vision for Wraply, what we would achieve by Sunday afternoon, and how we would work to get there. Then we split into our four sub-teams and began work.
I then had to make sure I wasn't tempted to get too involved in the work of each team (because I love getting stuck in to design, coding etc), enabling the team leaders to take charge and make the decisions.
Here's what the teams began work on:
- The product team started designing the site in terms of the featureset, and the journey the users would take through the site.
- The development team started with a discussion about available resource (see below), and then key decisions about the language and framework we would develop on. They then started working out the data model based on an initial feed of info from the Product team.
- The marketing team began by setting up a blog, twitter, flickr and all sorts of accounts at other social sites, ready to start building buzz.
- The business team did some competitor research, set up relationships with one or two key partners (thanks to Reshma from Seedcamp for helping that to happen via her contacts on a Saturday morning!), and made decisions on the business model.
Finding Resources
On Saturday morning our lead developer, Ram, was worried that we didn't have enough people on the team with PHP experience. So one of my first tasks was to try to bring extra people onto the team to help.
I began asking around, and was pointed towards Iman Samizadeh, who had arrived on that Saturday and was looking to join a team.
When it comes to getting what the team needs, I have no shame - so I ended up actually begging on my knees for Iman to join our team. Thankfully he did, and turned out to be a fantastic developer - really smart, with a lot of experience of the Paypal APIs that we really needed.
Lunch
The teams made great progress, and as we were all so deep in work one of the team members (Brij) and I popped out to get pizzas for everyone from Strada. Brij used his negotiation skills to get a 50% discount and we marched back triumphant with 10 pizzas, and other snacks.
Startups are all about begging and blagging!
Interviewed on TechFluff TV
On the Saturday of the Launch48 weekend I was interviewed by Hermione Way of Techfluff TV about Wraply.
Launch48 - the Wraply Pitch
In my previous post I wrote about the first part of the Launch48 weekend - the conference giving advice and training to web entrepreneurs.
To recap, the idea of Launch48 was for 150 entrepreneurs, developers, designers and others to gather in the Paypal HQ in London to develop 6 web businesses over a weeekend.
At 7pm on Friday the 16th October, the time came for everyone to pitch their business ideas.
I'd been trying to decide between four different ideas I had that I thought would be suitable for developing on a weekend like this - but before all the presentations started we had to register the idea we were going to pitch. I'd been blogging on the Launch48 site all afternoon to get other delegates feedback on the ideas to help me pick one, and as I stood in the registration queue I chose Wraply.
The Idea
The concept of Wraply is that the gifts we really want are out of the budgets of our friends, family and colleagues as individuals - but if they all grouped together to give a gift you'd get the perfect present. Wraply enables you to create a gift page for your present, and then promote it to anyone you know - who can then contribute towards it. It saves them time and effort, and prevents you from getting unwanted presents.
I would have two minutes to explain the idea, the customer need and the business model! This would be tough.
The Pitch
Altogether I think somewhere near 30 people pitched ideas - and the evening demonstrated lesson number 1 from the weekend: Presentation skills are vital in business. There were some good ideas that the audience didn't really understand because they weren't communicated well enough - and there were some ideas the audience couldn't even hear!
Fortunately presentations are something I'm well versed at - I do public speaking professionally - so being heard and being clear wouldn't be a problem. What was difficult was communicating a whole business idea, along with revenue model etc, in just two minutes.
It's part of the reason why I chose to pitch Wraply, because it's such a simple idea which many people can identify with.
My presentation went fairly well - but one surprise of the evening was that two other people pitched almost identical ideas with different brands! That showed me two things:
- It's incredible how often your 'amazingly unique' idea gets dreamed up by someone else, completely independently. That's why smart people refuse to sign NDAs before being pitched an idea. The idea matters less than the execution - you just have to get on and make your idea happen.
- It's a good idea. If 3 out of 30 people had spotted this need out of a world of business opportunities, then there's something in it.
Reshma from Seedcamp suggested we merge into one project, which we agreed to - but the organisers wanted to keep track of exactly whose ideas were the ones voted through, so asked us only to merge once the voting was complete.
Wraply and one of the other gift pitches went through to the second round - and then Wraply was voted through to the final six. So we were pleased to welcome the other two gift idea people into the Wraply team for the weekend.
Winning Teams
The business ideas selected to be developed over the weekend were:
- Wraply.com - my idea for a group gift-giving site.
- The Amazing iPhone Race - using GPS to create a game using the iPhone.
- VA finder - enabling individuals to use the services of virtual PAs.
- Jaza - allows you to use your phone to scan the barcode of a bottle of wine in restaurant and find out more info about it, or buy some bottles for home.
- Verifi - helps you protect your creative work by timestamping and encrypting it.
- Given.org - enables you to seek sponsorship for charity events from big companies via Facebook.
Selecting Teams
Now that the six teams had been chosen, the leaders had to stand in different places in the room, and all the other delegates could choose which team they wanted to work on by going to stand with that person. At wraply we ended up with a team of about 15 to start with (although 3 more gravitated to our team over the weekend).
We went for our first team meeting, to introduce ourselves, and it quickly became clear that the first problem to solve was a lack of developers. We had a PHP dev, a Java dev, and a .net dev! We decided to develop the site in PHP, and my first challenge as leader was going to be to get the resource the team needed to succeed - find out how in my next post (hint: it involved begging on my knees!).
But what was great is that we had a really strong team on frontend and user experience. We want our target customers' parents to be able to use the site, so this was important.
End of day 1
So, with the pitches over and the teams selected, we all headed home or to hotels for the night - and I sat up working out a plan of action for the weekend.
In my next post I'll set out what we did on the first day of actually building the prototype of Wraply.
