Interviewing at Dashbell [2014]

Interviewing at Dashbell [2014]

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  Name / Email/ Skype / Phone # * Jon Chang How would you respond to this? * "Help, i've signed up for an account but I can't find my password and your service has locked me out! I'm losing my patience with your product!" Hello *|FNAME|* We apologize that you’re having trouble accessing your account. The problem is being looked into. To help us quickly resolve this, please provide the email address and hotel name associated with your account so that we can retrieve your password. Please accept this discount towards your next month of Dashbell. Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this problem has caused you. Thank you for bringing this to our attention so that we can ensure a better experience in the future. Sincerely, Jon Chang What do you want to get out of this role? I want to build a well-oiled, sustainable marketing program at Dashbell, and I want to work alongside dedicated, thoughtful, and fun people who aspire to achieve the same goals. I believe this opportunity to run marketing for Dashbell will allow me to do both. After being the one marketing guy at a quickly growing startup, running US business development for an international PR agency, writing and reporting for various publications, and building an introductory marketing class for high school students, I’d like to refine my various experiences to a concentrated discipline. From what I understand, Dashbell needs to hit specific marketing goals this quarter. I would love to focus on specific marketing channels to help reach those goals. Create a sample marketing email to send to a group of top independent hotels in an English speaking market. * Think about which features you would highlight and how you would approach the hotels to draw them in. Subject: Boost Your Direct Bookings with TripConnect Hello *|FNAME|*, Dashbell understands that, as an independent hotel, the huge commission travel agencies charge you can take a big part of your revenue. We also know how challenging it can be to
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  attract travelers directlyto your site. To boost your revenue and direct bookings, we’ve created a simple solution. It’s called TripConnect! TripConnect, powered by TripAdvisor, is the easiest and quickest way to grow your business without paying high costs. Travelers ready to book on TripAdvisor are sent straight to your Dashbell booking tool. All you need is a TripAdvisor Business Listing Subscription and a Dashbell account. To make this even better, we’re offering a special 30 day free trial to our all-in-one reservations platform! For more information, please read our blog post about TripConnect or message chat directly with us here. We’re looking forward to working with you and exceeding your expectations! Sincerely, The Dashbell Team What do you do for fun? * Cooking and playing music are my major hobbies. I grew up in the kitchen cooking traditional Chinese recipes with my family, so spending an hour or two trying new recipes helps me wind down and de-stress. Taiwanese Beef Noodles is a specialty of mine, and often an office favorite! I also casually play saxophone with a New York rock band. It’s comprised of a fun group of middle-aged guys who love 80s rock. If you could run any kind of marketing or sales campaign for small lodgings, what would you do, how would you do it, and why? * Be Creative! Most small lodging owners don’t understand the value of a Unique Selling Point or how to determine what their USP is. If they do, they may not know how to refine it into a marketing message. To help, I’d create an easy-to-use tool on Dashbell to help small lodgings find and understand Unique Selling Points. By pulling the small bit of metadata from its website and having its representative answer a short questionnaire, this tool will be able to refine the small lodging’s USP, messaging, and niche market. It’s simple, but highly useful. This tool could be used as incentive to sign up for a Dashbell account, or as a way to upsell Freemium customers. After mapping the inputs and results with the Dashbell team, the product should only take a few hours to code. Most of the required funds to build the tool can be covered by the free credits Elance offers for startups. Plus, leveraging my existing relationship with Elance could gain Dashbell extra credits. After creating a dedicated landing page to sign up for the tool, it would be marketed via email, press, and Pay-Per-Click campaigns. • The emails would use simple messaging, such as, “What makes your small lodging unique? Use our simple, easy-to-use engine to find your selling point and gain new customers!” • Small industry publications and blogs are likely to pick up the story, especially if paired with other news (i.e. – new hires, milestones, industry expansion). • AdWords, Bing, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit offer credits for first time advertisers. It’s not a lot of money, but is just enough to test whether or not the channel is appropriate for
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  the campaign. Atminimum, these PPC campaigns could provide a small amount of inexpensive leads. How do you prioritize the following priorities for Dashbell? * Marketing Email, Customer Service, Conferences, Follow Up Phone Calls, Market Visits 1. Customer Service 2. Marketing Email 3. Follow Up Phone Calls 4. Market Visits 5. Conferences Do you live in Boston? How do you feel about moving if not? * I currently live in Brooklyn. Moving to Boston hasn’t been on my radar until I happened upon this opportunity. I’m definitely open to the idea of relocating; however, I’d prefer to have the option to spend a good portion of my time working remotely from New York. There are only so many hours in a day, how do you stay organized and prioritize in a quick changing environment? * My experiences working in a fast-paced startup environment have forced me to create a system to stay organized and efficient. I operate by the 80/20 Rule. Overall, 80% of my time is devoted to a long-term goal, while the other 20% is flexible to day-to-day surprises and smaller tasks. Of course, some days are exceptions filled with immediate problems and opportunities. To help decide where that 80% of my time is devoted, I create a 1-year roadmap of company goals. By triaging these goals and breaking the roadmap into quarters and months, I’m able to develop actionable responsibilities and projects. For instance, the first 3-weeks at Dashbell will be devoted to building a sustainable email campaign and beta testing messages, lists, and timing. I also use the peak of my day to focus on creative and challenging problems, then the least energetic and caffeine-enhanced part of the day – usually later at night – is assigned to completing busy work and smaller tasks. Paste a link to one picture that describes you. * http://jonchang.net/hey-dashbell/