We just sent out our December newsletter to 1,500 members….
Dear Members,
We have lots of exciting news; New Charities, New Restaurants, Christmas Gifts, New Membership Prices, Card News and a Contest.
To those who responded to our last email, thank you very much for doing so. To those who have given us their email but not signed up for the membership, just a reminder that you have until next week before membership prices increase.
New Charity
As of February, we will be supporting the Positive Women’s Network - www.pwn.bc.ca - watch this space for more details.
New Restaurants
We are very pleased to announce that Joe Fortes Seafood & Chophouse and Goldfish Pacific Kitchen are the newest live additions to LetsGoForDinner. Look for a lot more of Vancouver’s best restaurants to be added in the next few weeks and into the New Year.
Christmas Gift – Membership
These make great gifts! To find out more email us at holidaygifts@letsgofordinner.com
Membership Prices – Going Up
The price of the membership is steadily going up with the number of restaurants. By the end of next week the price will be $5. Act now…remember the membership lasts a year and half the membership fee goes directly to Charity.
Christmas “Blackout”
LetsGoForDinner.com Loyalty Certificates WILL NOT be redeemed at any restaurant between December 15th and January 1st. Please consider this when buying your loyalty certificates. *All certificates expire 90 days from the date of purchase.
Contest! Win an IPod® shuffle or a $70 iTunes® Gift Card – Ends January 21, 2009.
How to enter: Refer your friends to LetsGoForDinner and tell us who signed up. For all your friends who sign up; send an email to us at members@letsgofordinner.com with their name and membership number. Two winners will be selected: one for the most referrals and one at random. Good Luck.
The staff and management of LetsGoForDinner.com would like to wish everyone a safe and happy holiday season!
Cheers,
Craig
LetsGoForDinner.com
It has been a crazy 10 days - we had two charities give us Board approval to work with us and we were at the Angel Forum. We have had moderate interest from Investors but it is a crazy time, we have customers, traffic, charity signing contracts and investors are still elusive.
Today I went out to see a Charity and discuss our launch plans and to get pen to paper. It was quite exciting going to collect it. Possibly get it done first part of the meeting so we clear that out and move on. it happened just that way and they signed!
Tech is slowly moving along loading images of restaurants onto the drupal site so we can be ready for new version.
Training 2 restauarnts this week on the new system, closed a new restaurant on Friday. I got training as well.
Progress at least
This weeks change of weather has brought on the dreaded fall lurgy. This is slowing me down and as such I do not like talking to investors or charities, so I am emailing which is cheating really. Hopefully it will pass quickly.
Investors, post the Vantec presentation have been elusive, maybe the long weekend but no replies to our emails after expressed interest. Will be chasing shortly.
Met with Lyal on version 2.0 of the software and is looking promising. Meeting Rick tomorrow to discuss the same thing. Looking forward to getting this away. Our existing developer has left us in a pickle
Presneted to a charity, was contacted by another one while there, another replied, spoke to a VC in the US who approached us, spoke to a restauarnt interested in the solution and investing, another angel has come out of the woodwork, met 2 developers, spoke with UBC coop about Jan student, put forward development for equity, old developer helped out.. nice and asking for other bits to get POS/Squirrel live, analysed 2 weeks of Kidney Data, all in the last 2 days and 35 memberships out
Busy weeks.. many people excited about the product. Emailed 2 non-profits - 48 hours ago 1 has come back. Still waiting on 2 other charities … going slow, looks like the inertia of their own organisations will kill the interest …it is too bad. Both came back and are wandering slowly to sign.
Spoke to two online food bloggers and they are keen to meet up .. could be some potential here.
Saw an interesting product that would allows people to round up bills and the round up would be given to a charity.. nice idea.. hard to work in practice given who they are targeting.. large corporations. Noticed that Safeway is asking for donations and overlaps on this space.
A tech blog wants to write us up in a few weeks.
Need to work on our next stage of marketing and signing restaurants.
We met another charity today that liked our idea; Craig had an early discussion with them 18 months ago and they liked it then and still like it.. brilliant. I will not disclose who it is yet but suffice to say it is a good fit. We hope they will join us because the people seem great and they asked very good questions. We will be sending along additional information so we can begin to advance the discussions.
Another charity we spoke previously to came back to us today and they are progressing towards launch. Yeah!
We think we will target a small number of charities per city and grow with some of them into national and international relationships… how do charities feel about this?
Also, do they worry about cannibilisation or competition for charity money? We think our product opens up new markets as it does not compete with existing charity fund raising activities, it is a product that anyone can use… what do other you people think?
Let me know
Cheers
