Gelmy Tun Borgos helps in the kitchen making tortillas
with her mother in their home in a small village in the Yucatan.
Adriana Zehbrauskas for NPR
'Of course she can go to the store by herself'
So
maybe the Maya children are more attentive in the origami/toy
experiment — not because they have better attention spans — but because
they are more motivated to pay attention. Their parents have somehow
motivated them to pay attention even without being told.
To see
this Maya parenting firsthand, I traveled down to a tiny Maya village
in Yucatan, Mexico, and visited the home of Maria Tun Burgos.
Researchers have been studying her family and this village for years.
On
a warm April afternoon, Tun Burgos is feeding her chickens in backyard.
Her three daughters are outside with her, but they doing basically
whatever they want.
The oldest daughter, Angela, age 12, is
chasing a baby chick that's gotten out of the pen. The middle girl,
Gelmy, age 9, is running in and out of the yard with neighborhood kids.
Most of the time, no one is really sure where she is. And the littlest
daughter, Alexa, who is 4 years old, has just climbed up a tree.
"Alone, without mama," the little daredevil declares.
Right
away, I realize what these kids have that many American kids miss out
on: an enormous amount of freedom. The freedom to largely choose what
they do, where they go, whom they do it with. That means, they also have
the freedom to control what they pay attention to.
Even the little 4-year-old has the freedom to leave the house by herself, her mother says.
Gelmy, 9, and sister Alexa, 4, climbing trees in the backyard of their family home in the Yucatan Peninsula.
Adriana Zehbrauskas for NPR
"Of course she can go shopping," Tun Burgos says. "She can buy
some eggs or tomatoes for us. She knows the way and how to stay out of
traffic."
Now the kids aren't just playing around in the yard.
They're still getting work done. They go to school. They do several
after-school activities — and many, many chores. When I was with the
family, the oldest girl did the dishes even though no one asked her to,
and she helped take care of her little sisters.
Tim McGraw & Faith Hill, Hot Air Ballon Glow, 4th of July Celebrations and More!
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them in the link below along with some highlighted events and more on
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Convention & Visitors Bureau
815 E. Saint Louis St., Suite 100
Springfield, MO 65806
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My name is Yun Zhang and I am the CEO of Wyze Labs, as well as one of
the founding members. We founded WYZE Labs in July 2017 and launched
our first product, a smart home camera – the Wyze Cam – in October of the same year.
Within our first six months of launch, we’ve been fortunate to have
sold over 300,000 units and foster a thriving user community that we
rely on every day for product feedback.
Our mission at Wyze Labs is to make great smart home products and make those products accessible to everyone.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
Wyze has four co-founders and we all met while working at Amazon. As a
team, we have a very deep understanding of retail operations, including
both e-commerce and big box chains. Team members have worked at
Microsoft, Best Buy, REI, Groupon, etc. At each of these companies, as
well as Amazon, roles varied between team members. Some of our team
members have expertise in operations, some in marketing, some in sales,
and so on. We complement each other very well when we bring it all
together. This is absolutely at the core of our success since we are
able to see problems from many angles and perspectives.
We discovered that in the smart home market, customers only have two options:
Expensive premium brands
Cheap, low quality me-too brands with little-to-no customer service.
With our extensive background in retail and operations, we thought we could make a difference in the smart home space.
We also found that most of the smart home products on the market are
difficult to use and non-intuitive for the user. Different smart home
platforms confuse customers. We believe smart home products should be
simple so we decided to build a Wyze smart home ecosystem with one
simple Wyze App.
We also looked closely on competitors and did our market research.
I'll refrain from using any competitor names, but we ordered a number of
competing units and all of us carefully reviewed them. We discussed the
pros and cons of each device and shared our experience with each other.
A lot of our research was just being customers ourselves and
identifying what we liked, disliked and identified as missing from the
experience.
We believe that if we focus on users and products, we can make great
products and offer those products at disruptive prices. This way,
everyone will have the ability to enjoy the power of technology.
Learn how e-commerce businesses are earning as much as $100K/month.Get our exclusive interviews in your inbox!
Describe the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing the product.
We have strong relationships with suppliers in China, allowing us to
produce great products at competitive prices. We formed this network by
completing an intensive search around the world, traveling to meet
factory owners and networking. We were able to identify manufacturers
that shared the same beliefs and mission as our own: Products should
have good design, high quality and affordable pricing.
We started with a smart home camera because visual connection is a
deeply rooted human need. Once we knew which product we wanted to
launch, we worked with our ODM partner to license the hardware for Wyze
Cam. This turned out to be a great first product, because on the
hardware side we were quite satisfied with what the partner already had
to offer.
We then put our focus on the software and hired a great engineering
team to create the firmware and the Wyze App. Ease-of-use and the user
experience were of utmost importance to us during this process and we
think we accomplished that task as our customer feedback has been
extremely positive.
Describe the process of launching the online store/business.
Direct to consumer is an important part of our business model since it allows us to offer the lowest price to our customers.
We created wyzecam.com
as our e-commerce platform and prepared three months for the launch. We
used Wordpress and WooCommerce, which were easy to set up and optimized
for user experience.
For the launch, we targeted the technology enthusiast audience. We
chose a technical audience because we believe this customer can resonate
with our mission and will understand the enormous challenges we are
solving with this tiny camera. Another major benefit of targeting this
group is that the audience is a very bright and engaging group; a
community that we can lean on for product improvements, upgrades, and
general bug fixes.
Finding this segment was a mix of gut instinct and careful research.
Since we're all former Amazonians, we've picked up some great skills
along the way in our careers for identifying retail market segments with
potential.
Our thought process looked a little like this: We have a camera with
great specs at a $20 price point; an impressive value against what's
already on the market. But we have no time or resources to convince
people that it's an impressive value offer. Therefore, we wanted to
target people right off the bat that would just 'get it.' That is, we
wanted to talk to people that would understand right away how disruptive
this camera is at a $20 price point.
On launch day, we sold 10k units, selling out our entire US
inventory. We felt incredibly blessed that our customers understood our
value proposition and supported our efforts to change the smart home
industry.
One of our mistakes we continue to learn from is our
under-forecasting of our product launches. With such rapid success in
the first few weeks of launch, it was extremely difficult to know just
how successful our camera was going to be.
Because of this, a good portion of the last few months Wyze Cam has
been out of stock, causing a negative customer experience. Fortunately,
our strong operations team was able to work closely with our
manufacturing partner to get us quickly back in stock.
Since launch, what has worked to attract new customers?
We do not invest in traditional marketing & branding. Our spend
on digital ads is close to nothing. Instead, we allocate what would have
been our marketing dollars into creating value for our customers. For
example, we spend all of our efforts towards product development,
improvements, and customer support as opposed to Facebook and Google
Ads.
Our tenet is making and being friends with our users. We ask ourselves these two questions every day:
What products are you proud of making for your best friends? And
What price would you offer to your best friends?
The answer: Great products priced at cost.
Our main marketing strategy has been word of mouth. We let our
product speak for itself and recommendations from our customers have
exponentially grown our business.
This has earned us steady and significant traffic to our website. www.wyzecam.com
is ranked #28,080 in the US by SimilarWeb and our webstore conversion
is well above industry average; something our entire team is proud of.
Several press events also have been extremely successful for us. I
would say our most successful mentions have been in the below
publications:
How is everything going nowadays, and what are your plans for t future?**
Our business is growing and we continue to double-down on our user
experience and the value we add to our customers’ lives. This means
forecasting more accurately so we remain in stock, correcting bugs as
they are identified, adding new features and products customers demand,
and providing great customer support along the way.
Regarding the structure of our business, we operate with a low
margin, high volume model. This creates value and drives efficiency for
our customer. We strive to build long-term trust with our users and do
this in a few different ways: We have created an engaging user forum on
our website allowing the Wyze team to directly interact with our users, a
beta testing program to hear direct feedback related to product
experience, and monthly newsletters updating users on our business and
any new launches.
We recently launched an accessory, which is a mounting kit for our
camera. We did this because we saw a lot of people from around the
forums and social media sites request it.
In terms of major product launches, we do have products in the
pipeline but for the most part we are keeping this close to the vest.
For the time being, we want to ensure our v2 Wyze Cam has dedicated
resources focused on it to make sure we can provide the customer with
the best experience possible.
Users and products are the two motors that drive Wyze forward.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Our big learning: Be honest and transparent to your customers.
We launched Wyze Cam v2 on 02/15/2018. We took tens of thousands of
preorders and promised to ship on the 02/28. We produced 80k units and
received them in Seattle but found defects right before we were about to
ship them to customers. The defects were not found in all units, but
the probability of defect rates prompted us to pause all shipments to
customers. From our experience at Amazon, we understood that we would
rather take a hit on short-term revenue in favor of long-term customer
satisfaction.
We decided to return all 80k units to our factory in China. We
immediately started root cause analysis and discovered that the new
manufacturing process for our v2 camera led to unforeseen quality
issues. Due to high standards and the complexity of the new
manufacturing process, our manufacturing yield was very low.
We delayed the shipping of preorders by one month. The delay impacted
tens of thousands of customers, which was really a hard pill for us to
swallow. We did our best to communicate with customers every week,
updating them on progress we’ve made with their orders through email and
social media posts. We made sure customers were aware of the delay, the
cause of the delay, and the recovery plan.
We received tremendously positive responses and support from our
customers. They supported us to overcome the challenges while going
through this difficult time. This incident actually tied the Wyze team
and Wyze customers even closer.
This Thursday, June 21st, our engineering guru, Tao, will be answering YOUR questions on Reddit from 2pm - 4pm PDT
Product Updates
Alexa integration is almost here! This is a big one that we know folks have been waiting for.
We've completed the dev work and are now working on the final
certification with Amazon. We can't wait to have this completed and will
let you know as soon as it's done.
Get to Know Us!
We've been featured in two recent interviews. If you're interested in learning more about Wyze and our vision check them out! Business Insider Starter Story
Wyze Cam Pan
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