Right off the press!
Last Thursday I finished phase 1 of our production rollout for the new features:
- Monthly e-mails with the list of all premium advertisements so homeland fellows be aware of your services
- Our store where we can sell some products and broaden our relationships with partners to sell in our store comission based
- The e-mail marketing template where we enable you to reach expats from your own system
For now we are making sure the features are working as expecting before broadening to the public.
Let’s dive into the new features one by one and then I’ll share the technical challenges I dealt with for those.
Monthly e-mail with premium advertisements
This way we will bring your business to your audience. If you are Brazilian and live calgary, then Brazilian who lives in Calgary will receive an e-mail with all homeland premium goods and services in the platform from there.
Here’s how the e-mail is looking like:
Our store
Setting our store open doors for a couple of things. We can make some revenue by selling some goods, and we can also build partnerships with locals interested in featuring in our store comission based. I can code any specific integrations to make it happen.
So if you have a product and would like to have it featuring in our store, get in contact with us through our instagram or our e-mails:
We are able to add products to be available to your homeland fellows, or broaden it up as well if it makes sense.
Looking forward to hear from you and start building partnerships growing our communities together.
E-mail marketing for premium advertisements
I believe this is the first major premium feature. This connects businesses with homeland potential clients through email marketing.
As a business you will be able to send an e-mail to expatriates living at the same city or province as you.
You can remind your clients of your services, offer discounts, add an image (a coupon, maybe?!)… Whatever it is, once a month you’ll be able to send one e-mail marketing.
It must go through an approval process to ensure quality for our users and you’ll have a preview in your inbox on how the e-mail will look like.
Next Steps
There are a number of minor fixes and processes we want to put in place that I will be doing in the next few weeks.
Within that there is also a feedback loop I want to introduce so we can learn how to create more value to you and start planning for 2025.
For the last 2 quarters we still want to deliver:
Events/Meetups management – So advertisements and people can create and promote their events in town
Images section for advertisements – So businesses can share more of their work within the platform.
Technical Challenges
Given I have a continuous delivery in place, it was pretty simple. For some reason my github self hosted action runner wasn’t listening for new jobs.
I believe the token expired. I just created a new one on gitbub and updated my ec2 with it and that fixed the deployment issue.
This features didn’t require any major changes as I already have S3 and Rekognition configured on the application for processing and storing the images.
Only thing I had to do in production was creating a new collection for emailmarketings and products on MongoDB.
Product-wise, I am centralizing everything on Stripe. So I have my product there and for now it’s enough for selling our subscription model and merchandise store.
And keeping it real simple. I have a products collection on MongoDb and pretty much copy paste what I have in Stripe to that collection.
So now I just read from there to display the list of products and I can even target products for each country. So we can have a brazilian t-shirt, a canadian one an so on…
Thanks for reading!
I hope you enjoy what’s coming!
Cheers!
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