Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In the chronology, where are we in now?

Taylor Tyng: I’m going back and forth within that. We’re probably around the mid-2000s.

Sramana Mitra: What is the next major strategic move and what year?

Taylor Tyng: As I mentioned, we’ve never been venture-backed. We ran two businesses side by side — the design agency and the software business. We reached the critical mass around 2008. We were at a place of profitability with our software business, so the next major move was to close our design agency, which was a rather well-renowned and profitable business and focus on Wiredrive. At that time, we also started looking at how we were to reorganize our business to go from a service agency mentality into something that had a lot more of a true product culture.

Sramana Mitra: What were the specs for the SaaS offering at this point? What did you learn from that market that drove you to the SaaS offering?

Taylor Tyng: We were going with the idea of running a subscription business and we were seeing the conversions from boxed software. People were starting to play with these ideas of doing these data-driven apps online. The proliferation of video was starting to happen, but people were not trying to push the limits of what they could do with video from a size and complexity standpoint.

For us, it meant that we were in a really good time where people were going to look for these solutions in more lightweight ways. A lot of the brick-and-mortar software off-the-shelf companies were starting to show a lot of cracks. People were starting to talk about subscription models as an alternative and were already seeing success from this type of business model. In that degree, it was really a continuation of something that we grew organically into.

Sramana Mitra: Who were the early adopters of these offerings?

Taylor Tyng: Specifically, we had top production and post-production companies – White House Post, which is a global editorial and post-production company. We also had the advertising and promotion department of CBS using our system and we were working with a large trade group for a lot of mom-and-pop electronics and manufacturing companies.

These were people who were competing against the big box stores that were doing a lot of advertising and promotion distribution. Then we had a series of top production companies at that time. We were very much in the niche of the advertising industry and the production arms of it.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find these companies?

Taylor Tyng: They found us. Wiredrive, within advertising, disrupted how the industry worked. People would ask for it by name and we saw a lot of customers find us through referrals. Wiredrive has become a verb. People say, “Wiredrive it to me.” It became an industry standard very quickly because the speed that allowed people to work was unparalleled. For us, I would say that 95% of what came to us was inbound because we were fulfilling a need that no other solution could provide.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive
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