The Personal Touch - wesabe.com Style

I've arrived in Santiago, Chile. I'm headed out to Antarctica starting on Monday and unless the penguins have set up an Internet cafe, I'll be off the grid until Dec 4th. But a few things to offer you prior to my trip.

My lovely daughter Rachel sent me a website which has an interesting personal touch.  If you go to www.wesabe.com, you will see a talk to the CEO right on the home page.

 Jason Knight and Marc Hedlund have created this service in an attempt take a whole bunch of personal spending data, pull it together and dig up some buying/saving power for the people that participate.

The Talk to Jason page pretty much sums up what Jason has in mind:

"Hi! I’m Jason Knight, the CEO and co-founder of Wesabe. Every afternoon, from 12 to 4 p.m. PST, you can reach me directly at (800) 511-8544. If you have comments about our product, questions about how it works, or just want to chat a bit about what inspired us to create Wesabe, please give me a call. Sure, I could have an intern man the phones, but I can’t think of any job more important at Wesabe right now than talking to our new members and people who are thinking of signing up. So when you call, you’ll be talking to me. I look forward to it!"

 I doubt most web start up companies will ever take this approach. I think it is yet another proof point that the connected world we live in along with the requirements to rise above the noise and be meaningful to the customer both continue to drive innovation like this.  Somebody in some big company someplace decided to slap an 800 number on the side of the box of cookies back in the 80s. Soon, almost every consumer product has some type of 'personal' way for the buyer to contact the company.  This is yet another incarnation.

As for Wesabe itself, this has some interesting opportunities. The FAQ is an informative read with respect to privacy, data usage, etc.  

Comments

[jason knight]

Rick,

Hi, Jason, the CEO of Wesabe. Thanks for mentioning us in your blog. As you can probably tell with the service our team has created - we need to inspire trust from our users, and the best way to do that is make ourselves available to them.

What I've noticed from the phone calls and the emails I've received from people is that more than needing to call...they enjoy being able to call. Again, thanks for posting and when you have time check out our service - it works.

[Richie Hecker]

Jason, good work on accepting calls from users. I have done that for both of the companies that I have founded and usually with good results. Personally I HATE beaurocracy so its always nice to cut through the crap. Wesabe seems like a cool product as well