Dear Seamless - What Happened?

I've lived in New York City for a majority of my adult life. I also don't know how to cook edible food, so I rely on the vast number of food delivery options in New York - Seamless, UberEats, Postmates, etc. Whether I eat at 6pm or 11pm - I know I can tap on an app and get a meal delivered to my living room. 

I've been using Seamless since the first week I moved to the city. And lately, it has gone downhill fast.  

1. The tracking system that the app uses is antiquated and far worse than what I'm now used to in the era of UberEats. For example, yesterday I ordered a meal and it was delivered to me in about 30 minutes - faster than usual. As soon as I sat down to eat, I get a notification that my food was on the way. 
2. The app has taken a turn for the worse every single time. A few days ago, I tried to enter in a new credit card and kept getting an error message. No specific error message, just a generic one. Given that many of the Seamless competitors support Apple Pay, it's annoying to have one app that doesn't support it. 
3. Seamless also doesn't maintain any sort of proactive quality control or customer service. When I have issues with Postmates or UberEats, there is always an alert or phone call that indicates what the issue AND the resolution is. However, that hasn't existed with Seamless - despite their customer service being excellent when you reach out to them. 

In an era of mobile first, it's sad to see original disruptors not being able to deliver. And the issue is not unique to Seamless. Postmates has yet to accurately quote me on an order and UberEats is still learning the ropes. 

Mobile is important and a cohesive user-experience is more important than ever. There's a base level of expectation and with dozens of competitors in each market - the best one wins. 

50 Hours on Airplanes

It’s that time in my family - where people start getting married and move on to the next stage of their lives. 

In March, one of my cousins was getting married in India. She lives in Singapore and flew there a week before the wedding. Her younger sister, was flying from Singapore on the same day that I was scheduled to land from New York. 

In the interest of making the week as memorable as possible, I decided to do something crazy - swap my tickets that took me from New York to Abu Dhabi to Mumbai - a mere 16 hours on a plane to a ticket that had me flying from New York to San Fransisco to Tokyo to Hong Kong to Singapore and then finally to India - a trip that kept me in transit for nearly 50 hours, just so that I could surprise her on board. 

Here’s the thing - I loved every second of it. 

I’ve been flying for well over 25 years. Flights between New York to Los Angeles are second nature and 14 hour flights feel extremely familiar. 

It helps to know the ins and outs of airline operations. It helps flying in first-class. It helps being comfortable in unknown surroundings. 

Commercial aviation has become incredibly comfortable and for someone who still glares out the window for every take off and landing, it remains one of the very few places that is awe inspiring. 

Climb on. 

Amazon Echo and the Smart Home

In December of last year, I received an Amazon Echo as a gift - and it has slowly changed the way I do certain things. 

If you are unaware, the Echo is a smart device that is designed to be the hub of your home. 

I’ve only scratched the surface of what Echo is capable of, but here’s how I use Echo on a daily basis:

• “Alexa…wake me up at 8am”
• “Alexa…what’s the weather today?”
• “Alexa…when is my next meeting?”
• “Alexa…play some Bollywood music.”
• “Alexa…trigger find my phone.”

Alexa essentially does whatever you ask it to do. It’s a combination of Google Now and a one-way assistant. And it works really really well. 

Over the past month, I’ve stopped using the alarm on my iPhone to wake me up or searching for “Weather 10010” everytime I’m ready to leave my house. 

While Echo may only save you a few minutes a day, it is capable of doing a lot more when partners start integrating their services with them. 

For most consumers, it also makes terms like “smart-home” and “internet-of-things” a lot more understandable. If this is the future, I’m glad Amazon is leading the way with a consumer-friendly product. 

We’re in the era of platform stagnation and smart engineers are looking to do more now that computing power enables consumer level adoption of virtual reality, augmented reality and much much more. The video below is shot on a $350 camera that stitches 360 degree video in a few minutes. For professional content creators - it’s a step forward in a very big way! 

Experience the blizzard in 360!

Posted by Aanarav Sareen on Saturday, January 23, 2016

It’s an exciting time to be working in technology and as things scale up, I’m looking forward to being a part of it. 

The Story of Poln: Demystifying E-Commerce

Find qualified new customers with the simplest ad platform available! Automate your advertising, boost traffic, and generate new revenue.

Nearly $250 billion in annual revenue is generated by small to mid-sized online retailers. They come from different backgrounds, they're passionate about what they're selling and often times, they dedicate all possible resources into building their store. 

However, having worked in data-driven organizations, I've been shocked to see the disregard and lack of return in a way that is absolutely unacceptable. Retailers start with small test campaigns across marketing platforms that are so challenging to use that you need a computer science degree to understand them. And then retailers blow through their budget in a few hours by not knowing the shortfalls or the stop gap measures for many of these outlets. 

The only thing that does is leave a very sour taste. 

Why isn't new user acquisition easy? Why aren't ad platforms effective? Why the mystery surrounding the very core of what makes a business work?

And that's the reason why we started Poln. Poln makes new user acquisition easy and helps people sell more products. That's it. No complicated budgeting menus, no random pricing mechanism and no inflated promises. We've seen the platform, at the very least, double the conversion rate for many of our retailers and for some, it's been an OK investment. 

Advertising is part science and part creativity. I was on a plane back from Los Angeles after spending some time analyzing a client's e-commerce store and was horrified to see the technical performance of a very well known agency. The work that they had developed for this specific client was awful - broken links, no effective call-to-action buttons and a laggy experience at best. 

Here's the thing - good advertising requires a good ecosystem. And despite all the changes going on in ad-tech, I'm proud that our small team has been able to help so many brands. Our results speak for themselves and our goal is to help the hundreds of thousands of online retailers who've gotten lost in the process of reaching and acquiring new users. 

Poln's simple. It's effective. And if you're a retailer looking to try it - email me directly at asareen@poln.co. I will personally make sure that it delivers for you. 

The Leap of Faith Principle

Holidays are a great time to reflect on the past 12 months and anxiously plan for the next year. And if you're lucky enough to be in New York for the holidays, you realize how many people come to this city primarily to find a job or to visit. And then they leave - leaving the city beautifully empty and eerily different. 

I was having drinks with a colleague of mine this week and we were discussing how our social networks consist of people who - when committed to an idea - follow through with immense passion and intense dedication. Everything around them not related to the idea fades away and they're focused on making it - the idea - a reality. 

On the other hand, when we talk about this pursuit with outsiders, they're terrified of pursuing their ideas or in awe when others are courageous enough to follow through. 

Taking this leap of faith is not easy by any means, but once you do it enough times, it becomes easier every subsequent time. 

And despite the strenuous process of turning an idea to a product and then taking a company to market liquidity - it is the absolute core of how financial markets operate. 

Whether you’re reading this on an iPhone, an iPad or even a computer - the device that you’re reading on is built by people who took that leap of faith. No one really needed computers back in the day and not too long ago, using a touch screen as your primary device was a crazy idea. 

Same thing about launching a service that could only communicate in 140 characters or somehow finding all the world’s information via a simple text box. 

All of those are created by people who took the leap of faith and changed the path of humanity. 

It is that leap of faith that drives entrepreneurs and separates *billions* of people from chasing a dream.