A Successful Husband-Wife Team: Moonfruit Cofounders Wendy Tan White and Joe White (Part 5)

Sramana: Whom did you raise money from to buy the French domain name company, and what was the impact on Moonfruit?

Joe White: We raised it from U.S.-based VC firms, primarily Stevens, which is based in Arkansas. We saw the revenues of the firm we acquired triple once we were able to cross-sell the Moonfruit platform there.

Sramana: Why did you end up raising funds from a firm in Arkansas?

Joe White: Initially we tried to raise money from VCs in Paris, but the scene there is really bad. We spoke to a partner in the UK, Julie Meyer, who ran First Tuesday.

Wendy Tan White: She was the real driver of the instant networking scene and I met her during that period. She sold her networking group for a few million dollars and established a VC firm. She is tremendously networked and was the person we reached out to when it came time to raise funding.

Joe White: We probably spoke to 40 firms that were interested in bringing the deal together. It was highly complex to put together a French group via a UK company with American money. It worked, and we tripled money. Wendy came back to the business in 2008, and the group was approaching $20 million. The Moonfruit part of that was smaller than the French domain name portion, but it was growing rapidly.

Sramana: Wendy, when you came back to the company, what changes did you notice?

Wendy Tan White: While I was on maternity leave, I went to design school. It was interesting going from an engineering degree to learning about the design process. The interesting thing about design is that there is no singular answer. You can have a great design and then break it and do it again. In Moonfruit we had a lot of graphic designers who were not editors. Moonfruit was burgeoning again, and at the same time social media had kicked in. I started using Twitter, and we did a campaign in July 2009 that trended on Twitter for three days. We basically told our user base that if they did a creative Tweet about Moonfruit, we would put them in a drawing for a MacBook Pro.

We did that over 10 days. People started sending us creative Tweets about what they thought Moonfruit was. People started sending in pictures, videos, and songs about what a Moonfruit was. There were 500 YouTube videos created during that period. That shifted our customer base into the U.S. It brought us an unbelievable number of U.S. customers. It also increased our subscriptions 20%. We spent £10,000 on the Mac Book Pros, but in terms of marketing for us it was huge. Our SEO also increased tremendously. That catapulted us into the U.S.

Sramana: You can’t buy that kind of coverage. That was huge.

Joe White: The response was so tremendous we had to cut the campaign short. We cut it to seven days. For those seven days we were up all night. We handled the British market in the day and the U.S. market at night. At the peak, Moonfruit accounted for 2.5% of all Twitter traffic. We were getting 500 Tweets per second. It was intense.

Wendy Tan White: That taught us to respect the power of social media. Today we still have 20,000 Twitter followers. That made us look at things like Facebook. We have 11,000 people on Facebook. We also set up an open customer support system and a ticket system that allowed other users to chime in. Social media channels are very powerful and should be managed respectfully. We now do a lot of our product development using our communities.

This segment is part 5 in the series : A Successful Husband-Wife Team: Moonfruit Cofounders Wendy Tan White and Joe White
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