Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Wrike CEO Andrew Filev (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What state was Wrike at when you came to Silicon Valley? Did you have something? Did you have an MVP that you started to work on?

Andrew Filev: It was a very early prototype. I think we launched a beta version at a conference in Paris. Then right after that, I moved to the Valley. The first official launch happened when I was already in the Valley at a conference called Silicon Valley launch. There are many more conferences these days but I vividly remember those early days. That was around 2007.

Sramana Mitra: What happened after the launch? I assume that you are using the proceeds from your consulting company to get the Wrike product off the ground?

Andrew Filev: We self-funded it first. Then we bootstrapped it. Then we got venture fund. By the time we got to our first investment, we already had thousands of paying customers. When we started, I always focused on customers first.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about your customer acquisition in that beginning phase. What kind of customers did you get traction with? Was that deliberate or accidental? What were the dynamics of that early customer acquisition?

Andrew Filev: I truly believed in Internet and cloud as a distribution model. I deliberately spend most efforts to sell it online. I know in early days, it’s a pretty good strategy for entrepreneurs to go to their friends and family and get adoption that way. I think that’s a good plan but I didn’t follow it. I don’t know if it’s smart or stupid.

Sramana Mitra: It’s not a repeatable plan. It’s fine but if you can do it more through online marketing, it’s a more repeatable and more scalable way of customer acquisition. I think your instincts were right.

Andrew Filev: We went online right away. We had some customers right from the beginning. We had some East Coast customers and customers from Canada. Over the years, customers came from all sorts of industries and countries.

Sramana Mitra: How were they finding you? You were not necessarily a known company. Was it Google Search that was leading them up to you?

Andrew Filev: Partially, it’s word of mouth. Partially, it’s search engine marketing. Part of it is content marketing.

Sramana Mitra: You were writing blog posts about collaboration software?

Andrew Filev: I was spending some time writing a blog called Project Management 2.0 on what’s changing in the way we manage work. Why everybody in the world is becoming an accidental project manager and how should the project management, as a discipline, change that? Accidental project managers don’t have time to go through a year-long training. They just need some very basic things in the tools. I spent quite a lot of time writing my vision of how things were moving.

Back in the days, it was the time of Enterprise 2.0. I spoke at some events and conferences. I was conveying my vision to the world. I viewed collaboration as a super important driver of innovation in the workplace. I also view it as something that needs to happen in context. If you just approach it from the perspective of having a microblog, I didn’t feel that would resonate. Where I see the value and what people are realizing right now is when they have a goal they need to accomplish, if you build collaboration around that goal, the question is, “What’s the goal? How do you accomplish it in the best way?” That was my vision. I think I was a little bit ahead of my time. It’s interesting to see the same message resonating to different people and companies bringing it to the world. I’m super happy now.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Wrike CEO Andrew Filev
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