What is XSharp:

XSharp is a startup that I joined back around 2016/2017. This was around the time when I wanted to explore my interest beyond market research since I was longer interested in the topic. XSharp presented a product that I thought was intriguing, an algorithm AI that was supposed to help you make small decision like “where to eat” or “where to go get a haircut.”

Essentially, it was a product seeking to squeeze itself into the local search category and compete with directory apps like Yelp and Yellow Pages. The spin, was that it would be an automatic search rather than having the app user search and make direct decision. Wali…the AI, would do it for you.

What is Wali:

Wali is/supposed to be an AI counterpart to assist you in your everyday decision making needs. Sounds impressive but with all AI product, it requires a tremendous amount of data in order to delivered onto the “promise land” (as it were.)

The starting point of this type of data collection was to integrate itself into small businesses as a rewards program. It would supplement existing POS software by tech integration and through either custom build or API integration, we would collect consumer data via rewards program interaction between business and customers.

At the time, most rewards program are a supplementary fees so when we came into small businesses telling them we would cost next to nothing and our goal wasn’t to make money off of the business owner, they were immediately intrigue.

The Problem:

The problem remains of the complexity of merging grand technology ideas with small business owners who are more like artisan craftsmen rather than your average white collar tech worker. Of course this didn’t mattered all too much since they didn’t care about what we were doing with the “data” we were collecting. They only cared if our rewards program functioned as expected, low bugs, ease of understanding and people can use the app without being confuse, both for the business and their customers.

There was an immediate gap in product understanding. Lacking in content to tutorial the product, business owners would often call up sales which was taking their time away from making sales and moved sales into more of a customer success role.

As for top level inquiries into our product (i.e direct search via Google,) many people seemed to not understand what the hell we were selling. There were people in the market interested in buying a “rewards” program though, the keyword which we were sort of optimized for, but unfortunately, this keyword is extremely competitive so we got drowned in the noise.

Because of the the high competition we did have people coming into the website and if those small number of people did come through the website and they either don’t really understand what we were selling or we weren’t telling them succinctly, this was a problem. Not just with content, but with SEO in general.

Basically, the company didn’t really have anyone on staff to do technical SEO, but they called the role a content coordinator because…at least in my opinion, they didn’t quite understood what they really needed.

Hence where I would come in.

My Role:

The primary function of my role was to solve the lack of content that the company had not been generating. The goal was to educate potential client into what we were, and to help ease of onboarding via content.

This was sold to me primarily a copywriter/content generator function but I knew I wanted this job because I knew this was an SEO and top funnel marketing problem not a “content problem.”

The secondary function was to provide a sense of brand with Wali. See, while they had the character design (of the greenish rabbit,) that same character didn’t seem to have a brand voice. It was kind of just generic corporate speak when they did anything via Social Media or with content creation. And since no-one was minding the Social Media stream all that much, I took over this process since I was creating content anyway.

What I did:

XXX