Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customers were adopting video advertising at that time? Who were these early adopters of video?

Taylor Tyng: A lot of them were post-production companies and commercial production companies. In particular, post-production companies were very interesting early adopters for us. They’re built around pipeline workflows for technologies so they understood the investments and how asset management systems are critical to what they do. They saw the value in us for a few reasons. One is they were trying to send videos to their customers for review and approval.

They were also trying to archive everything that they’ve done and put it into a context so that they could use it for their own marketing promotion or sales purposes. We fell into two primary workflows for them. One was servicing 11th-hour creatives – things that need to be seen and approved immediately. The other side of that was being able to leverage all of their creative portfolio at a speed that they could win new work. The former process to the workflow required a lot of people finding all of these digital assets, burn them onto a DVD and send them through FedEx to the required city.

If you’re trying to promote a show reel to a producer in New York, you have to FedEx from LA to New York. 24 hours later, you have to try to get that person on the phone to see if they saw it and liked it. We changed what was a 24-hour process to 24 seconds. We were the only game in town so there was no real reference point to do this. This goes back to when things were just back office stuff. We were able to solve large issues, pre-cloud, for creatives related to delivery and review and approval. It changed the industry.

Sramana Mitra: How were you charging your customers for this value?

Taylor Tyng: For us, there was no reference point for this so we started billing on metered storage. At that time, cloud storage wasn’t a thing so we looked at how people within organizations were purchasing server architecture.

At that time, we had large costs. The capital expense for server architecture was really high. It was more of a COGS conversation for us to make sure that we were recouping our costs and could continue supporting the growth that we were seeing. Metered storage became our basis. Over time as consolidation happened, we were out of parity with that. We have now moved to a more diversified pricing plan because as a service we provide many more offerings.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers did you have and what were their average deal sizes? Since you were bootstrapping, cash flow is of paramount importance. How did you manage the business at that time?

Taylor Tyng: Our customers were generally paying anywhere from $99 to about $10,000 a month. We had a huge gamut because we were dealing with individual content creators all the way to major motion picture studios. At that point, we had 200 or 300 customers before we turned off our design agency and formally became a software company.

Today, we’re over 1,500 enterprise customers worldwide. The one thing about Wiredrive and a lot of cloud products is it’s rather horizontal. We do a hybrid of things across the board. Depending on the size and scale of the organization, some people use us for one aspect of what we do and some use us for ten. Based on that usage, we have levers within our pricing that allow them to customize what they need based on their workflows.

Sramana Mitra: You basically took business from whoever was willing to give you business.

Taylor Tyng: Yes. When we first started, there was no reference point. When we first started, we were providing a service that solved major issues with speed and performance in video management. We were probably closer to boxed software at that time so we would charge for an install and a monthly subscription. We would also have charges for add-ons. The days of install fees for cloud software are moot as it is seen as part of the subscription and we moved to a subscription-based model for recurring revenue.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive
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