Launching

day 1 of the beta launch a huge success

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Thank you to everyone that participated in the beta on day 1.

We learned about and fixed a number of bugs and already have an update (version 1.1) that is going live now. You can see the Change Log in the menu above for everything that was fixed or added.

We had an instant snafu at launch which was pointed out to me on Facebook, thank you very much, but Brandon corrected it last night and the tests have been very successful all day today.

I’m very pleased with how willing all of you were to test it for us. Thank you!

Ginny has already passed me for points, so of course were going to re-write the points engine 😉

I hope you love our changes and the program itself.

Thanks again for sharing it on Facebook as well. 

Beta, Launching

The Beta is LIVE!

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home page of the be.alocalhero.com website
home page of the be.alocalhero.com website

I’m very excited to announce that the LocalHero Beta is now live and that we have a new domain, blog.alocalhero.com.

The blog will come up at the new address and the app beta can be found at be.alocalhero.com  – clever huh?

First create an account. Then do the following:

  • Commit to which local companies you do business with.
  • Connect to local organizations that you volunteer or serve.
  • Take action and record it.

Everything you do as a LocalHero earns points.

It’s up to you how you use the beta. Fake data or real. Do so for a week. Share it with friends. Get as many as you can signed up.

At the end of the beta we will ask you to make a choice. Start over with a clean slate and delete all your beta data or keep it and go from there.

Once you see it you will realize how simple the idea is. That’s on purpose and it’s actually harder to do than you think. We worked very hard to keep it simple. My thought was, that if it’s complicated or tricky and cool,  you won’t use it.

I’d love feedback during the beta. Don’t save it until the end. There is a convenient feedback form link in the footer of every page. Use it often. Even if you just have a question.

I’ll post results of the beta as well as our plan for future development. The list is long of new features.

I’d like to acknowledge the team at Project A (Mat, Rick, Paul, Brandon, Bax, James) They took an idea I came up with only a couple of months ago and in their time between projects developed what you see today.

It’s very different from anything we have ever done.

We also have mobile apps getting close to being ready so that you can use an app instead of a web browser.

Remember, If you post something it may be public, unless you explicitly mark it as private and right now we only mark Actions as private.

Our goal is to get as many people on the beta as possible to stress test it as well, so please feel free to share it with friends, encouraging them to take a few minutes to beta test it as well.

Thanks for being a part of our movement.

Be a Local Hero : Commit, Connect & Take Action.

Features

Roadmap from version 1.0 to 2.0

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Once you see LocalHero 1.0  I’m sure your mind will spin like ours on great ideas and features. Send us your ideas on the feedback form and we will let you know if we decide to include it.

I’ll try to document our ideas here so you can get a feel for the direction we think we want to take. I say “think”, because I also know that we can switch gears on a dime as we see people using it and get more ideas from them or from how they use it.

Roadmap from 1.0 to 2.0

1. LocalHero Profiles – be able to see a public profile of any localHero.

2. Follow, Friend – be able to follow or friend request anyone from their profile page.

3. Share – In the same vein of Commit, Connect and Take action I want share to be just as important. LocalHero really only starts to work if you can encourage others in your community to share what they are doing or share it to new communities so it can spark.

4. Give or Shout out – If you want you will be able to give points to another local hero because you think they deserve it and you can say why. You can also do just a shout out, which won’t give them points but will let everyone know why you think a person should be recognized as a local hero.

5. Flareups. When you share LocalHero to a new community and it takes hold, you get points and you get to watch your impact on the growth of the movement.

6. Organization pages. When you commit to doing business with an organization, you can see who else says they will as well.

7. Local ISPs – when a local ISP adopts LocalHero they will have their own branded page so that it makes sense instead of saying ashlandhome.net. 😉

8. Hero Walls in Public Spaces – I’m working with movie theaters, malls, airports, TV channels to show the hero wall. One thing this does is get you notoriety for your awesome work and another thing it does is help oread the word.

You can expect version 2.0 to launch and be on display at the Ashland Chamber Old Fashioned 4th of July Parade and in the park afterwards.  Unless we get it done sooner, then you will see version 3.0 😉

Creating

Welcome to LocalHero

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Greetings,

Welcome to the LocalHero blog, where I will be documenting the development of an idea into what I hope becomes a movement.

My name is Jim Teece and I’m the co-owner of a couple of local businesses in Ashland, Oregon (Ashland Home Net and Project A).

I’m pretty involved in the community and a couple of years ago I was called a community super-hero by the local media. Friends gifted me capes and masks to help with my new persona. It was all quite fun and very tongue-in-cheek.

It got me thinking that the community I live in is filled with these community super-heroes but they don’t get the recognition they deserve.

I also started to think about the “buy local” movement. It’s simple. I see a lot of bumper stickers. I see a lot of locally owned businesses trying to get customers to commit to do it and some do, but I kept thinking there must be a better way.

When Apple released the iPhone and exercise apps became available people would track their exercises and sometimes share it or brag about it on the social space. So that got me thinking as well.

In Ashland we have two choices for Cable TV. Ashland Home Net and Charter. Ashland Home Net is small. Locally owned and operated. A sponsor of most of the local community events. Charter is a multi Billion dollar company. When I ask people with the “Buy Local” bumper sticker where they get their cable TV or Internet , many answer with a non-local answer. I’m investing in my companies’ abilities to compete based on capabilities and features. Yet people don’t think about where they spend, in some cases over $100 a month .

So I came up with an idea.

What if we could start a LocalHero movement to do the following:

1. Let all the LocalHeroes get the recognition they deserve.

2. Let you do more than put a “Buy Local” bumper sticker on your car, but also have a tool to help you see all the places you could buy local.

3. Create a fun way for you to track your LocalHero Actions and get kudos and points for basically living a local life.

That’s the basis of what we are going to launch here in the month of April.

I chose to debut this at the Ashland Independent Film Festival with hopes that an audience that is already leaning toward this mindset will find the idea fun and worth getting behind and letting their friends know.

It won’t cost anything. I’m sponsoring the whole thing. No grants. No donations.

On April 11th, I’m hosting the Ashland Chamber’s Ashland Innovators  conference and I’ll unveil it all there.

Of course I’ll be the first user and will accept beta testers so let me know if you are interested.

I’ll be blogging about the development as we progress and I invite you to subscribe and follow along. It’s going to be a great journey.

LocalHero. It’s a website. It’s an app. It’s a movement…

It’s a LocalHero and it’s you!