I am writing this blog entry (not posting it, though) as I fly to Hong Kong to start a small business trip to China. The objective of my trip is to learn about the lodging industry in Asia and, primarily in China. We want to make sure that LetMeGo and the engine behind it (Merrcury) will have what it takes to easily release a Chinese version of it. Why China? The Chinese market and US market are as different as it gets. If the Merrcury Engine is flexible enough to work in the United States and in China simultaneously, it will be flexible enough to work anywhere else (or at least I hope so). China also intrigues me. Ebay, PayPal, Yahoo and many other successful Internet companies in the US have failed to make it in China. I look forward to learn as much as I can to avoid this from happening to LetMeGo.
The trip starts in Hong Kong. I will then visit Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Beijing, and then Shanghai. I will be meeting Chinese web entrepreneurs along the way. I have also scheduled meetings with executives of two major travel portals in China: Ctrip and Elong.
While on the flight, I just finished the documentation of use cases and user interfaces of the billing scope of the Merrcury Engine: the Waterrs Scope. This system will take care of tracking the commissions that lodgings will pay LetMeGo in exchange for the bookings that we get for them. Coming up with the business logic was tricky: accounting systems aren’t too complex to build but, for most people, they don’t make a lot of sense. I wanted to create something that was friendly and easy to understand. I had to rewrite some use cases several times, but I am happy with the result. Travelers will never get to see this interface. It will only be experienced by the staff of lodgings.
On a similar note, Maestro just completed the creation of the wireframes and screenshots of the Kubrrick Scope. The objective of this scope is secret for now and we will only make it public when we go live. All I can say for now is that Maestro, as usual, did a great job fitting a lot of useful information in a very small space and in a beautiful manner. Thank you Maestro!
Alexander Torrenegra
Alexander is LetMeGo's co-founder and jefe. Here is his LetMeGo 