We spoke with Wayin's new CEO, Elaine Wood, about the awesome culture and amazing productivity coming our of their company.
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Wayin is a social engagement creation platform that empowers brands to tap into the power of social media conversations as they happen. We allow brands to engage followers by easily capturing, curating and visualizing Twitter content on their own site.
Elaine, you just recently moved into the CEO role at Wayin. Tell us about how and why that change came about?
I used to work at Sun Microsystems with Scott McNealy. I created their portal software. Then Wayin was looking for a VP of Engineering here, and I was recruited about three months ago. The startup feel really appealed to me, and I just loved the innovative things they were doing here. The talent here really attracted me, too - it's such an amazingly talented group of people.
Tell us a little bit about the history of the company.
Wayin has always been in social media. Up until recently, we’ve been focused on internal, employee engagement, and now we’re starting to leverage the open Twitter and other social media – moving much more into public engagement. All of the tools that we created for internal employee polling and voting and things we're using to leapfrog into public engagement.
One of the most important things is that we’re trying to be a data agnostic solution. We want it to be one place where people can go and put in what they're interested in and get all of the engagement in one place.
We've been around for about two years, and are currently up to 33 employees. Almost all of the team is here, other than sales – we have a few salespeople in some key metro areas. We also have a huge international focus, and are explanding to Japan next week.
Tell us about some of Wayin's big successes?
The biggest ones have really just happened recently. We did a market research study, because we had two product offerings, an internal one and an external one. Based on that study and input from Twitter, we had such a significant lead on the external engagement that we decided to focus on that. The opportunity is much broader; external engagement is an emerging market. So getting that insight hand choosing a direction based on that was really great.
We’ve also been able to build a very strong alliance with Twitter – we're one of only 35 companies certified by Twitter, which gives us access to a bunch of their internal tools.
We launched the hub at SXSWi this year, then did that study, unified our product strategy as a result, and got the Twitter certification in May. Now we're moving to the international markets - with a big focus on Brazil, Japan, Indonesia, and India. That's a lot of big milestones! Basically we're following the Twitter expansion and growth. Twitter has asked us to be their local presence in those markets.
Any failures you've learned from?
Initially, we started as a consumer polling site. It was hard to monetize that. We had an opportunity with our legacy relationships, and instead of jumping on some of the things we did, we should have done some market research to fiture out how competitive that was. We spent a lot of money and time on those projects without doing the research.
Now, if we hadn’t one into that space, we probably wouldn’t have developed the tools we have today, but there were definitely some lessons learned. We gained a lot of graet talent out of that product, too, so with every negative there’s a positive. It may not have been the right decision for the direction, but we did gain a lot - talent, tools, relationships with companies. Even just relationships within the city event helped us a lot during that time.
What advice do you have for early-stage companies?
Do your market research – figure out what market size is, what your compeition looks like, how you can position and price your product. Especially in the software world. People create these innovative solutions, without knowing what it is, why this is the time, how to price or sell it. You can do research to figure those things out before you put the time and money into development.
Make sure you can walk before you run. We were funded well, but having that, we tried to do too many things at once. It’s really about the basics; don’t start your company on a credit card – manage your finances. I do believe that you have to have capital investment to success,but you also have to have restraint and prioritize. One of the mistakes we made was to hear about an opportunity, hire contractors for it, and then the opportunity wouldn’t close. We still had to pay those contracts. Some startup founders tend to be overly optimistic. You need to be positive, but you need reality in there, too.
As much as business is important, culture is important. There are going to be stressful days, great decisions and bad decisions. We have made a really strong effort to develop our culture – we have happy employees who love to work together and enjoy what they do. Keeping your employees happy and appreciating them is really important. A thank-you goes a long way
[ibimage==22438==Medium==none==self==ibimage_align-left]What is Wayin's culture?
We have people who love to work hard, and we really value professional respect and trust. When you have that, you get back more. Then people don't feel like they’re being managed, but more that they’re personally accountable.
We’ve definitely made it a fun place to be – we have ping pong, a keg, a lounge, we take the team out for things like a Rockies game day, and have fun events and parties. When it’s 5,6,7, at night, people are still here, because they want to be. We also really try to include everyone's families. Now people hang out even outside of work; we're all friends. It’s a group that everyone wants to be with. And that kind of culture has to be deliberate - it has to come from the leadership.
I think we also create a culture of being candid and honest. If you have an issues, we put it out there and talk about it. When people come into a culture and see that, they adapt. Even if they’re used to operating in a different way. We put everything on the table.
[ibimage==22439==Medium==none==self==ibimage_align-right]What kind of people fit well here?
We’re a typical startup, where you have to be comfortable with a certain degree of controlled chaos, flexibility and change. People that are more used to the corporate structure sometimes struggle with that – you have to be a jack of all trades and be multitasking. Everyone jumps in and helps; there’s no one defined role for people. You have to be adaptable to the turns we’re taking as a company.
What resources would you recommend for those companies?
Learn to utilize social media tools like LInkedIn and Twitter it to their fullest potential, there’s a lot of opportunity there. People are becoming more creative with how they use social media. Product launches and the way brands run competitions – people are so much more creative, and things like Twitter have really grown. Use blogs to get your message out.
The other thing I would say is to go to meetups – local events are so important. We've been really involved with the CTA, and that's created a lot of great connections for us. The events that StartupDenver does are great too.
Get to know every company around you, because everyone has connections and referrals. Even if they’re not your customer, they probably know people who are.
Why are you based in Denver?
I think it's important to know that we were founded here on purpose. Part of it was to draw from the talent and innovation from SUN, and we've also been very impressed with the talent pool here that doesn’t want to leave.
The quality of life really makes Denver a great place to be. People are so active - our bike racks are always overflowing. That makes it easier to attract good talent - peope want to be here.
From a travel perspective, Denver's really convenient - it's easy to get to either coast. LoDo in particular is great because there's lots of public transit and it's central to all parts of the city. It’s just a fun place to work.
We love where we are - we're going to stay in this space until we’re basically sitting on each other’s laps. We don’t want to split the team even on different floors. The way we have things laid out here - the day goes by so fast. That’s when you know you love your job. It’s such a cool industry to be in.
Learn more about Wayin from their company profile, via their website, or follow them on Facebook or Twitter @Wayin.
This week we also visited Inspirato and Cloud Elements. Read past weeks' profiles and learn more about Built In Denver's Startup Tour here.
