• Modals don’t work properly in mobile browsers.
• They are bad for SEO, as they add a lot of Javascript to the code.
• If you are not signed in, we have to ask you to leave the listing anyway, so that you can sign in or sign up.
• In order to circumvent the issues above, we ended up making the code dynamic, which in turn gave us a lot of headaches when setting up a caching mechanism for the listings.

The solution? Get rid of modals windows and AJAX. Starting next week, travellers will be shown a new page when they decide to contact the hosts. All problems above are solved by this. In fact, today I’m QAing this simplification, coded by @tufla, in our dev servers.

Photo by qisur

Here is a short timeline:

• Jan, 20th: The LetMeGo Challenge was announced.
• Feb 20th: The deadline to apply was reached. 120+ applications were received.
• Feb 21st: 67 candidates were selected to move on to the next round.
• Feb 22nd – Feb 28th: Seven tests were administered to the candidates, one per day, to test different skills.
• March 10th: Three candidates moved on to the next round: Chris Cancado, Martin Omedes, and Sérgio Rebelo.
• April 5th – Nov 4th: A seven-month test started. Each candidate launched a version of LetMeGo in Portuguese under a different brand.
• Today, Nov 5th: After tons of analysis, the winner of the challenge is announced.

I wish Chris, Martin, and Sérgio could all win. They have all demonstrated themselves to be great humans and professionals with the skills required to make LetMeGo a successful venture in Brazil and Portugal. Still, one winner must be selected, regardless of what we would prefer in a perfect world. So then, the winner of the LetMeGo Challenge in Portuguese is…

Sérgio Rebelo!

Congratulations Sérgio!

Why Sérgio?

We analyzed the performance of the challengers in many areas, including resourcefulness, speed, copy-writing, customer service, market penetration, social marketing, search engine optimization, and business development. Of course, Sérgio didn’t lead in all fronts, but he did in most. Well done Sérgio!

What is next?

Sérgio has a great challenge ahead. If anything, we have learned that the Brazilian and Portuguese markets are quite different. Sérgio will work together with us in our New York office to hone these strategies. We will also attempt to reach agreements with Chris and Martin so that they can help us with our plans.

Credit where credit is due

While the candidates all worked very hard, I want to acknowledge the hard work that the LetMeGo team put into making this contest a success. They all invested an overwhelming amount of time and effort to make sure that the challenge was properly executed. @leonardosuarez and @gigiborja deserve a special mention, since they handled most of the planning and logistics. Great work, team!

Alexander Torrenegra

P.S. I haven’t yet recovered from writing this post; however, I must get ready for the end of the LetMeGo Challenge in Spanish. It will be announced next week, in Bogota. Stay tuned!

The LetMeGo Portuguese Challenge will end Friday, November 5th at 5 PM ET. The winning team will be announced with a blog post. The leader of the winning team will be invited to New York City to work with us for three weeks, all expenses paid. The three competing teams are BoraViajar.com, led by @martinomedes, MeuDestino.com, led by @chriscancado, and QualquerDestino.com, led by @sergio.

The LetMeGo Spanish Challenge will end Tuesday, November 9th in the evening… in Bogota! The team leaders will be flown to Bogota for five days and four nights. Bogota is the location of our Ninja development team. On the third night of the trip the winner will be announced at a private dinner. They will also be attending the next BogoTech meetup on November 10th, and sharing their experiences. The three competing teams are AlojameYa.com, led by @hmgauna, Bukyx.com, led by @androlindsay, and ReservaIdeal.com, led by @betolive.

May the force be with you all!

Insider’s info: Until a couple of months ago, I was against the idea of allowing our users to sign in to LetMeGo using Facebook, Twitter, or OpenID. For a while, I thought the process was clumsy and confusing for most users. I changed my mind as Facebook improved its interfaces to make it very clear to users what they are and are not sharing with LetMeGo. As for Twitter and OpenID, they still have a long way to go before I am convinced.

Alexander Torrenegra

Photo by Ray-Franco Bouly

There is, in fact, logic behind this technique. as I explained in a short message that I shared with my team a couple of weeks ago:

With most members of the team, we have negotiated an end date to our working agreement. The length of the agreements have varied from six months to five years.

Why do we do this? Most of you know the answers:

I think that companies are tools to achieve professional, financial, and human growth. Nevertheless, there is usually a limit in the amount of stuff you can learn while performing any given role, as well as the motivation and energy that you can put into it. As a consequence, I think that in most cases there should also be a limit in the number of years each person performs a role.

In addition, I think that none of these subjects should be secretive or should be a taboo: switching teams, moving from one company to another, quitting and starting your own business, etc. All of them can be openly discussed as all of them may help you grow. By forcing a deadline in your existing role with the team, we promote the open discussion of these alternatives.

Please note that the agreements are flexible. At any time, you or your team leader can start a conversion regarding an extension of the agreement. Here are some tips I suggest you take into account, whether as a leader, or as a team member:

• The topic of the agreement end dates should never be a taboo or a secret. Be open about it. All others should know it.
• Remember to discuss the end dates of the agreement whenever you or a member of your team assumes a new role.
• Don’t wait until the very end of the agreement to discuss opportunities to extend it. The sooner, the better.
• Agreements should only be extended if both the team member and the team leader believe that it may be a good idea to extend the end date.
• Don’t freak out when someone leaves the team. After all, people joining and leaving the team is the idea! I want to force that situation to happen, along with all the consequences it brings as described above.

Here are two examples:

German joined the team in March 2008. We agreed on working together for three years until March 2011. When the LetMeGo Immersion happened, we agreed on reducing the agreement by six months in exchange for him participating in it. The new end date was September 2010. At the end of last year we agreed to extend our agreement until December of this year.

Treeny joined the team in July 2009. We agreed on working together for one year until July 2010. A couple of months ago she assumed new responsibilities as a manager. When she assumed the new role we extended our agreement for five years, until the year 2015.

If you have questions or ideas, please let me know.

BTW, we will be updating the LetMeGo Intranet to list the end dates of the agreements of each member of the team.

Picture by emma.kate.

Why are we creating sites that target different niches? There are several reasons:

• We are going to be able to perform split A/B testing using full sites (each site may be considered a split)
• Multiple sites should help us in the search engine optimization.
• Because we can. Really! The Merrcury Engine is quite flexible and we wanted to experiment with it by pushing the envelope.