Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Wrike CEO Andrew Filev (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to a bit more of a chronological story. I understand the philosophy of how you built the company. It’s very interesting what you can do today in terms of really doing these kinds of testing on all marketing exercises at a very dramatic level. Today’s world allows you to do things that it didn’t allow earlier on. It’s really extremely effective if you have the mental bent to be able to do it in a rigorous scientific mathematically-oriented way. Talk about some of the strategic things that you did in the course of 2007. What were the inflection points? I get it that you were growing at 100%. What were some of the strategic moves?

Andrew Filev: A lot of it comes down to the product. Over the years, we had completely rewritten the product. We didn’t put the business on hold for a year. It was more of a gradual rewrite. I think, right now, every single piece of code that we have has probably been rewritten. Over the years, we’ve always interacted very closely with customers and got their feedback both at mass and individual levels. We wanted to understand how they run their businesses, what challenges they’re seeing, and how we can be helpful for them to resolve those challenges. Doing that continuously over the years, we’ve learned a ton. That got reflected to the product a lot.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of the product differentiation through all this exercise of iteration and customer feedback, what has emerged as the key differentiator of your product versus other collaboration tools out there?

Andrew Filev: I would say there are two things. One is we are the best in the market to bring work management capabilities and collaboration together. There are those that have fairly advanced one way or another but when it comes to bringing them together, we’ve the strongest offering. To give you an example, in our product, we have collaborative editing capabilities that are similar to Google Docs, which none of our direct competitors have. We know that people have to achieve their goal and they need to collaborate. Our vision is you have to bring those two together in order to be successful. That’s one big differentiator.

Another big differentiator that is more subtle, but super important, is that our product is much more flexible and scalable than others. Where it connects to customers is, through the years, we’ve talked to so many of them. I’d like to say that for different companies, project management means different things. We learned that complexity and we embraced it. A lot of the competitors, when they come to market, are very naïve. Because of that, some of them shut down. Some of them, over the years, learn what we’ve learned but they’re several years behind because we started this journey early. We quickly lost that naïveté. When we realized and embraced the fact that it’s complex, it became our mission to build a tool that’s super simple but helps people to tame that complexity.

The incorrect way would be to build 10,000 different features. The better way to do it is to build a super flexible product that is light and at the same time, very powerful. We have provided the ability for people to collaborate across the team. One of the big things is not just the fact that we have workflows. There are specific workflow products in the market, but they’re separate tools and expensive. They require configuration whereas in our tool, business users can do that. More importantly, because we know that real life is complex, you can have five different teams in one account. Each one of them can have their own lightweight workflow. They will still work happily together. They will send things back and forth between them.

Basically, it all traces back to my personal background where when I created Wrike, I was managing teams in different locations and working on 20 projects. The challenge is not, “How do you manage this one project where you’ve got five people in one room?” It doesn’t matter what you use. When you have a lot of balls in the air and you want to make sure that none of them drops, that’s where most companies drop a ball. Every individual is great and smart and they work super hard. As a CEO, you’re looking at the company and say, “I have this idea three quarters ago. We need to ship it to the market and it’s still not there.” People start looking into individual performance. More often than not, it’s not individual. It’s more of how do your teams coordinate. To me, that’s subtle and not all companies realize that. A lot of value is hidden and lost that way in companies.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later: Wrike CEO Andrew Filev
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