Hotspotty Improved: Deep Research For A Better Way

The Hotspot­ty team was gra­cious enough with their time to walk me through some sig­nif­i­cant improve­ments of their Heli­um tool. 

Bot­tom Line Up Front: If you run a fleet of hotspots, using the newest ver­sion of Hotspot­ty will make man­ag­ing pay­ments FAR eas­i­er, will improve your deploy­ments at scale, and will help you assess the impact of PoCv11.

Do you need this if you’re not run­ning a fleet? While it’s still use­ful, the pay­ments & assess­ment fea­tures won’t have as much impact on you.

At the end of the day, no mat­ter if you’re got one hotspot or ten thou­sand, the win­ning for­mu­la is:

Do a good job, accu­rate­ly report what you’ve done and you’re most like­ly to earn the most possible.

-zee Gristlek­ing

Quick dis­claimer: I ran­dom­ly select­ed hotspot and wal­let address­es for the exam­ples in this blog post. With one excep­tion, I have no idea who these peo­ple are. All of this is pub­lic infor­ma­tion, but none of it is con­nect­ed to any offi­cial Gris­tle King work or clients.

With that out of the way, let’s dig in. I’d rec­om­mend sign­ing up for an account at Hotspot­ty and hav­ing a sep­a­rate win­dow open with your Hotspot­ty account while we go through this.

You can watch the inter­view I did with them on this new ver­sion, here:

We’ll start with a few def­i­n­i­tions, then go into the work­flow rec­om­mend­ed by Hotspotty

Hotspot — This is a phys­i­cal hotspot that has been added to the blockchain and has a three word name (Rhyth­mic Red Roost­er, etc)

Loca­tion — This is where your Hotspot phys­i­cal­ly is. That should be with­in 150m of where you’ve assert­ed it on the blockchain (using the Heli­um app). You may have “mis-assert­ed” for pri­va­cy rea­sons or to clear a hex. Loca­tions can also be used as “pro­posed” loca­tions where you’re think­ing of putting a hotspot. 

Con­tact - This is a per­son asso­ci­at­ed with the Install. They could be the installer, a host, a part­ner in your busi­ness, a refer­rer, or some­thing else. Each Con­tact can have a dif­fer­ent (or none at all) com­mis­sion applied.

Install — This ties togeth­er the above three things: The Hotspot itself, its phys­i­cal Loca­tion, and the Con­tacts asso­ci­at­ed with it. 

I’ll warn you up front; Hotspot­ty is NOT the sim­plest way to man­age just a few hotspots, and can be overwhelming/overkill if you’re not run­ning a fleet of ’em. If, how­ev­er, you ARE run­ning a fleet, well, Hotspot­ty is an excel­lent tool.

So the work­flow goes like this: Order Hotspot–>Create Pay­ment Structure–>Assess Locations–>Identify Contacts–>Receive Hotspot–>Create an Install.

An Install con­nects the Hotspot, the Loca­tion, and the Con­tact. The order can jum­ble around a bit depend­ing on what you’re doing, as you’ll see. Let’s start at the beginning.

First, you order your Hotspots. 

While you’re wait­ing for the Hotspots to arrive, you’ve got a few things to do in Hotspot­ty. One is to cre­ate the struc­ture for what you’re doing, start­ing with your com­mis­sion structure.

Are you going to pay a 20% com­mis­sion or a 50% one? Is there a stan­dard installer fee you’re going to pay? Do you have part­ners you need to split this with? Each one of those splits is asso­ci­at­ed to a Label in Hotspotty.

Let’s go into Hotspot­ty’s Set­tings and get this set up. Make sure you’re in the Work­space (not the Map), then look for Set­tings on the top right.

Once in Set­tings, look for Com­mis­sions on the lit­tle menu on the left, then set up tem­plates for what you’ll pay out. I added Host, Refer­ral, and Partner.

Now you know WHAT you’re going to pay, you’ve got choic­es as to your next steps. You can add Con­tacts or you can add Loca­tions. I’ll start with Con­tacts, but what you do will depend on your scenario. 

For each Con­tact you can add Labels. A Con­tact can have mul­ti­ple Labels. The default labels come from the Com­mis­sion set­up you just did, but you can add cus­tom labels; I added an “Installer” label for old Ivan, then used it for Gris­tle King as well. I mean, I’ll get my hands dirty. 🙂

Cool, so now we know WHO we’re work­ing with. Let’s find some Loca­tions that we think might be good! Obvi­ous­ly the steps of what comes first, Loca­tions or Con­tacts, is up to you and depends on your set up. With one fleet client I’m work­ing with, we know who the main part­ners are and the installers, but the Hosts are added as we bring them into the system. 

Check out Grand­ma’s house, your office, the radio tow­er over yon­der, the taller moun­tain over­look­ing the city, your lock­er mate’s broth­er’s friend who knows the main­te­nance guy over at the Empire State Build­ing, etc. If you need help, I’ve got a blog post over here about how to do an assessment. 

Once you’ve added your Loca­tions into Hotspot­ty take a look at what they’ll do to the trans­mit scale, whether or not they’re too close to oth­er Hotspots, and how they’ll change the trans­mit reward scale where they’re placed.

You add Loca­tions over in the Map, up at the top left. Click on the Loca­tions tab, drop a pin, drag the map, then add what­ev­er infor­ma­tion you’d like to the Loca­tion. Yep, Ivan be climb­ing on this one. 😉

Once you’ve got a cou­ple loca­tions in, it’ll look like this. The dot with a bor­der around it sig­ni­fies a Loca­tion (vs a Hotspot.)

Now we’ve got Labels, Con­tacts, and Loca­tions, all we need is to receive our Hotspots, do an Install, then make Payments!

Let’s say in Test Loca­tion 002, above, the Hotspot isn’t actu­al­ly going in that spot for pri­va­cy rea­sons. Again, for demon­stra­tion rea­sons, let’s say this Hotspot is actu­al­ly Striped Tin Coy­ote, but Helen Host does­n’t want the world to know where she lives. We change the Loca­tion to be where it actu­al­ly is, then on the Heli­um App we assert the Hotspot 102 meters away from where it actu­al­ly is. Hotspot­ty helps us keep track of that dif­fer­ence with Place­ment Distance.

So now we’ve got a Hotspot con­nect­ed to a Loca­tion and a Con­tact. Voila, an Install!

If you’d like to go deep­er into how you’d use that on a fleet, I’m avail­able for hire. Yes, if you’re run­ning a fleet, you can and should go WAY deep­er; this was just an intro.

Ok, that was kind of com­pli­cat­ed. What about Pay­ments? This is way easier.

Payments With Hotspotty

Pick a Hotspot; we’ll use Broad Lip­stick Fal­con. In this case, Ricky Refer­rer told us about this spot, Ivan Installer did the install, and Patrick Part­ner man­ages it. We’ll add all three of those Con­tacts by adding an Install to this Hotspot.

In this case, I’ll use the assert­ed hotspot loca­tion, then I’ll add the Con­tacts to this Hotspot.

Once you click “+ Use hotspot loca­tion” it’ll bring up the next tab, where you start to add Con­tacts. Like this: 

Once you’ve got every­thing prop­er­ly labeled and the Com­mis­sions assigned, it starts to get way eas­i­er. Go to Work­space –> Com­mis­sion Reports.

Then hit “Gen­er­ate report”, fill out the date range and run it. I think I set mine back to Sep­tem­ber of 2021. Wait a sec­ond or two, and then click on your new­ly gen­er­at­ed report. It’ll look some­thing like this. The coolest part is the “Pay con­tacts” but­ton at the top right. Hit that.

That will bring up a QR code allow­ing you to pay all of those con­tacts from your Heli­um app wal­let. Yep, all at once. Up to 30 con­tacts at a time. Bam.

That’s it, pay­ments are done! 

That should help you get start­ed using Hotspot­ty’s lat­est ver­sion. It IS com­pli­cat­ed, and you’ll spend some time just bang­ing around var­i­ous win­dows and tabs for a bit. Don’t wor­ry, with­in a few days you’ll be whizzing around like Max and crush­ing all your Hotspot man­age­ment tasks. 

If you want to use Hotspot­ty, head on over to their site and fire up an account. If you just want some­one to use and man­age this com­plex & pow­er­ful tool for you, I have a few slots per month to help fleet-deploy­ment clients get through the start up phase.

Rock on, and enjoy using this pow­er­ful tool!