Wemotely: The best remote benefits in minutes

Signup Experience
See your budget in your currency
Select from pre-approved experiences
Customize what you want to offer your employees, get recommended budgets
Pay with any way through Rapyd
All of your financial information in one place
You can import products automagically from your Shopify store
Have a Shopify store? Reach out, and become a vendor with us

Background...

The world is shifting to remote work, not just because of COVID, but because we can see the benefits and we have the technology. But there are issues with remote work... it's harder to build a company culture. It's also easier to manage an in person office when it comes to benefits like free food, buying equipment, and of course the special perks tech workers love like massages and concerts.

We sent out a survey and found out that many people got their benefits cut when they started working remote. They feel disconnected. And the solutions to show employee appreciation and create shared events are manual and time consuming. There's obviously an opportunity here as more and more major companies are committing to working remote for good

Our solution

We want to bring teams together through shared experiences, and make it easy to offer benefits to the new digital workforce. That's Wemotely! A manager can sign up, import their employees quickly, and set a custom budget for benefits. We tried to automate as much as possible by suggesting budgets and creating subscription payments, as well as doing currency exchange under the hood with Rapyd. Of course, managers have the option to set individual budgets and customize what product categories are approved.

We know that recruiting and retaining talent is the most difficult challenge for many companies. Did you know that 80% of employees would rather have more benefits than a pay increase?* Wemotely aims to keep employees happy and productive. A lot of employees do not take advantage of their existing office benefits because the process can be confusing and time consuming. We make it crystal clear what is allowed and what is not allowed from the management side with an easy to use and beautiful dashboard. Employees have clear limits and all the information they need in a platform which is a one stop shop for everything they need.

How?

An integration with the Shopify API enables store owners to import products and sell directly to businesses. Our plan in the future is to integrate with other platforms that offer services to businesses, and eventually offer our own services to fill in the gaps that exist... but we're starting by onboarding high quality stores from the pool of 1.7 million Shopify Vendors.

We also offer custom cards that can be manually blocked, unblocked, and controlled by the company. We hope that this can encourage easier events and more connected teams in a digital age where this is harder. It will enable simple things like team lunches without all of the paperwork and approval. Funds can be pushed to a wallet in one click, because everyone that signs up to Wemotely gets a custom wallet, and a custom card.

Card issuing, wallet exchanges, supporting multiple currencies, adding funds in multiple ways and withdrawing in multiple ways would be too much work to do in a month. It still was a challenge to build in a month, but delegating those responsibilities to Rapyd made it possible. They had great APIs and tooling, and a use case that we needed. One of our team members talked about prices in dollars, and the others in Euros. Every time we discussed things there was a mental currency exchange formula in our heads... it's great to have a platform handle this for us in the application! When we grow our business it will be easy to accept new currencies, whether its small companies in different countries joining the platform, large organizations with global workforces, or vendors in far away countries with Shopify stores that want to sell their unique offerings Business to Business on the Wemotely marketplace.

Challenges we ran into

The time constraint meant that we had to choose what to implement very strategically. Of course, this is the perfect time to build a business like this and the potential is massive. Paradoxically, working remotely proved a challenge during this time... our team is distributed across different cultures and different time zones. The stress of working on a project was immense, so we made sure to take breaks and talk about fun stuff, and brainstorm about how we would use Wemotely in the future internally in our company. We even had a group event (caricatures drawn of the team) that helped us bond and get to know each other better in a fun way.

Many other teams had challenges with the Rapyd API, but we ambitiously wanted to integrate with Rapyd and Shopify. Of course, we planned on integrating with more APIs right away, but found that many businesses keep their APIs private and we need to request access and develop a relationship before they let us couple with their data. This is going to take some time and we will need to talk to many companies in the future, which is good because we can ask them about their remote work experience and ask them if they need a solution for managing benefits.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We have a domain and a deploy pipeline set up for testing. We already have a few companies interested in opening accounts. Of course, we want to start with ourselves and are looking forward to many team lunches powered by Wemotely to continue working on the idea, even beyond the finish line of the hackathon!

What we learned

We did a lot of research on the topic of remote work, talking to several companies. We saw that organizations had similar problems but tackled them in different ways, which excited us. Technically, it was a new experience integrating with Rapyd and Shopify so lots of learnings there, but the APIs were very good. Based in Europe and America, we had different ideas of what work should be like. We learned to see past our disagreements and come together for this project!

*survey by Glassdoor