Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When did you launch Wiredrive?

Taylor Tyng: Wiredrive was officially founded as a sole business in 2008, but its story probably started around 2003.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next in the story?

Taylor Tyng: We got to a point where we had a lot of legacy issues. We were trying to move from a web  design agency-based world into a product-based world. There were a few things that became turning points within our organization. Number one was, we were early in the game, so there were no commercially sound or viable frameworks for building the technology. We were building all our platforms ourselves so we needed to make some quintessential decisions of how we wanted to shape the future of Wiredrive.

There were some organizational and functional changes that we needed to make with the way we operated as a business. I think that’s outside of the technology conversation, but the biggest changes within the business are generally within the culture and people more than the technology. Making sure that we were all set out and marching in the right direction became a real priority. We had come out of an organic business from which we had created a successful product. It had the origins of where we came from so we turned to it as a point of recognition more than something that we set out to become.

Wiredrive has been privately owned for 17 years without funding, which is not something you hear a lot of. There was a little bit of soul-searching about how we wanted to organize ourselves and how we wanted to attack this developing opportunity as we saw this behavioral trend of people wanting to be able to work on the web and, now, on mobile. We saw a lot of the work behaviors changes or trends that we could start aligning to. With that came some opportunities to move in the direction and fulfill our vision of what we are today.

Sramana Mitra: You hear it more on the bootstrapped stories. You do hear it but not in the venture world. Touch upon the milestone inflection point where you found strategic moves that took your business to the next level. Whatever those are, just touch upon those.

Taylor Tyng: Once cloud arrived as an actual budgetable and approvable opportunity within enterprises, we started to see the trend of people looking for solutions. One of the things that we wanted to separate ourselves from were the lightweight products that were doing the freemium blitz growth type of mode. Coming from a place of value-driven creation, we still wanted to focus on the larger issues that organization and teams needed to solve.

At that point, we decided that we’re not going to be a product for individual users. We’re going to be a product for enterprises and organizations. As far as the strategic separation was concerned, one of the biggest opportunities we found was within the inner workings of an organization. You can Google anything in the world other than what’s inside your own company. The ability to solve the fundamental issues that teams face and unlocking those assets is incredibly hard to do. By staying focused on that mission and understanding our customers’ needs, we are able to continue to be successful in this space.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive
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