WIN Minutes — Issue #6
November is over ?? Since December is full of holidays, I decided to summarise the milestones the Winding Tree team achieved. Below you will not only see texts but videos, podcasts and links which accompany them.
The 6th issue of WIN Minutes uncovers the team’s recent updates and gives an overview of the achievements, plans and hopes we had in 2022. Let’s go!
Vladimir, Marketing Lead at Winding Tree
January — February
Finally, travel is back!
The first months of 2022 introduced several positive vibes in the travel and Web3 industries. Borders were opening and people started to book flights and hotels. Conferences and IRL events were finally getting the first physical attendees in years. On the WT side, the team continued working in multiple directions.
Here I need to remind everyone of the inspiring news we received a year ago:?Partnerships with American Airlines?and a large corporate travel buyer signed by?Simard. It was a huge step towards our vision of creating a decentralized travel marketplace and a very promising milestone for the project and the industry.
Parallel to this partnership was the launch of a new initiative. It is the decentralised booking platform for the B2C market known as WIN. This project was born in?Mestia?where Maksim Izmaylov (the founder and CEO of Winding Tree) met with MFW (the OG and former Winding Tree team member). They brainstormed various ideas around the platform and future protocol to kick-start the year.
March — April
Let’s build!
The first spring months of 2022 were full of energy and creativity. New team members (including the author of this newsletter) joined the project to develop the idea into a product and build a strong brand.
That was the very moment when the creative work on?WIN??? (stands for?WindingTree?Innovation?Network) was launched. We experimented with code, design, and with messaging. As a result, the pilot project was launched in Amsterdam where the first big Web3 event of 2022 took place.
Behind our simple but straightforward front end, we had a smart contract. It enabled accommodation bookings with xDai on the Gnosis chain.
As easy as it sounds now, it was highly challenging to make the thing work back in March. We had to bring numerous pieces of a puzzle together.
The scope of work was the following:
As a result, we saved 20,000 Euros ?? for the?Ethereum community?and created the first hotel bookings through Metamask. That was a very inspiring experience shared in this video below.
Another milestone was the workshop held in Amsterdam. Partners from hospitality, fellow Web3 builders and Winding Tree community members met to talk about decentralization in travel, DAO structures and problems, which can be solved with help of these new technologies. It was a very insightful discussion for all the participants.
May
Planning is important!
I need to be very honest here. The team was extremely inspired by the results achieved in Amsterdam. Everything seemed achievable and easy to do. Therefore we were looking at numerous Web3 events happening here and there. Luckily we managed to focus on two main once European conferences: ETHBarcelona and EthCC.
Thanks to data collected in Amsterdam we had two main insights from the attendees:
June
Let’s meet!
Winding Tree is a fully remote company. Therefore conferences give unique opportunities for some of the teammates to meet each other. We seized such an opportunity at EthPrague. 6 people from the team gathered in Prague to hack, spend a good time and build new bonds in the Ethereum community.
A huge amount of work was performed on the side of partnerships to prepare for events in Barcelona and Paris. FYI these cities are among the most popular destinations for tourists from all over the world. And it seemed that all the tourists decided to visit only these two cities in July 2022.
No surprise that most of the hoteliers the team was reaching out to were not as enthusiastic about experimenting with blockchain as we would expect them to be. Nevertheless, Vincent Somsen (the head of partnerships) managed to provide rooms in hotels for the attendees of EthBarcelona and EthCC.
In June we also launched the WIN Minutes newsletter to update the community about new features of the product. All the insights from June 2022 ??WIN Minutes 01
July
Cold shower!
Both the EthBarcelona and EthParis events made us face reality, like taking a cold shower on a winter’s morning. We didn’t get as many bookings as we planned. Reasons? Multiple. Price, location, marketing, timing and many others. One of the most important takeaways was the fact, that hoteliers had too much work after the lockdowns and hardly any interest in innovations.
Despite all the efforts to bring more Web3 developers and enthusiasts to the platform to book their first hotels on the chain, the numbers were low. Something was wrong, something was not working.
Nevertheless, both events helped us promote Winding Tree and attract the attention of travellers, the Web3 community and accommodation providers. The latter showed their interest in blockchain technology during the workshop we organised together with our friends from Barcelona:
领英推荐
Gian Franco Mercado and Albert Pérez Llanos the founders of the?Web3 Educational Program for Accommodation Providers Daniel Ferrer and Angela Bustillos from?ExplorinsPanot?the local NFT artist
During the workshop, we shared ideas and examples of how brands would create tailored experiences for individuals using NFTs enabling them to support local communities and crafts. Below you can watch the Livestream:
Both conferences attended brought several insights to change the strategy and focus on building a multi-chain platform with?stablecoins?to be used for bookings. It took me some time to summarise the ideas and the vision of the product in one?article.
Following the feedback from the community, we published the first part of the?Transparency report. It gives an overview of the project, finances and direction.
More insights from July 2022 ??WIN Minutes 02
August
Sprints!
New goals brought new bright minds to the team. Robert S. , Sil Kreulen ?? , Eliane Nohra , and Nabil Abbas joined Winding Tree to work on content, front page and UI/UX, as well as to improve the?communication with our community. That was a huge and important step that help to get the team more aligned around the product.
Thanks to? Cristina Pardo Requena ?(the lawyer and project manager of Winding Tree) and Mathieu Tahon (the CTO of Simard) we created an agile system of work. Each sprint brought new features to the product.
One of the biggest challenges for WIN was to find the product market fit. We decided to go global and provide travellers with hotels in 50+ most interesting cities for Web3 developers, digital nomads and IT specialists with a chance to make the trips sustainable in many ways.
August updates ??WIN Minutes 3
September
BETA soft launch!
Each two weeks developers were delivering new updates making the new platform operate smoothly. In September we tested the platform multiple times creating the first bookings for various events:
From one side we heard a lot of supportive POVs. People were happy to learn about the platform linking real businesses with Web3 technologies. But there were a lot of those, who sincerely didn’t get the idea of using blockchains in Travel.
Processing the data collected from the events mentioned above, we continued the work to prepare the dApp for the biggest Ethereum conference that took place in Bogota. Luckily we got in touch with the SmartTokenLab team. They were developing a special ticket attestation tool, which helped the attendees and sponsors to communicate.
Thanks to this partnership WIN received a very cool option. For every holder of a Devcon ticket, there was a chance to get 50 USDC cashback for each successful hotel booking.
Lots of insights from September ??WIN Minutes 4
October
Group bookings!
One of the insights from EthWarsaw was about Web3 teams and their travel expenses. We assumed that the projects with sufficient crypto funds might need a platform where they can book hotels using stablecoins. Therefore the Group booking mode had the highest priority in the first sprint of October.
Devs and partnerships teams were working hard on the process when the marketing team was reaching out to fellow Web3 builders to onboard them to WIN. As a result, we created the first group booking for our friends from? Kleros .
They requested a hotel for 10+ people in Bogota.We managed to get the best price and arrange the payment with xDai on Gnosis Chain. That was an extremely important and insightful experience, which helped us improve the entire process. If you travel with a group and would like to book with stablecoins learn more about?how to make a group booking with WIN.
October was also an important month in terms of fundraising both for Simard and Winding Tree. All the October insights ??WIN Minutes 5
November
Regrouping!
Following the developed marketing strategy we were getting in touch with the event organisers, podcast producers and fellow Web3 projects. Our hardworking manager Maya managed not only to build huge databases with contacts but also to establish contacts and relations with many projects and individuals who share the vision of Winding Tree on podcasts, Twitter spaces and numerous calls.
Thanks to our content manager Rob we continued growing organically growing the community of Web3 and Travel professionals on LinkedIn.
December
Looking back at the amount of work performed by the teams it is hard to believe that we made all this within less than a year. But the number of bookings as the main KPI was not met. Therefore a hard decision was made to put WIN on hold and focus on the products, which are already working. One of them is?ORGiD.
What concerns the platform?Beta.win.so?is going to operate like before. You are more than welcome to book your next trip WIN making it more sustainable with?the rewards you get after checkout.
Thank you for reading and sharing your feedback! It was my huge pleasure to work on WIN Minutes and inform the Winding Tree community about the activities and news from the team. Hopefully, these newsletters were fruitful and helped us to improve communication.
Sincerely,?Vladimir???