Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: With the way you’re running the business today, have you identified levers where if you just throw money at it, you’re going to grow orders of magnitude faster?

Taylor Tyng: Yes. It’s actually been one of the most interesting things. The focus on the type of product that we were building was a little bit too broad. We had customers who were paying $99 and customers paying over $10,000 a month. By focusing our choices on segmentation of customer base, which were lower acquisition cost, and in turn created longer lifetime value, a lot of those trends within that segmentation led us to a focus that just eliminated low-value activities across the business.

Our ARPA has gone up on every single plan that we have. Even making the simple choice of focusing on specific areas of improvement has had enormous effect, which has shaped our roadmap. That’s just on the operations side of it. The other side that’s really noisy but is starting to pay dividends for us is, we are on the managing aspects of 360 and VR content creation, which is an unknown area. We’re starting to see people arrive because we have a history and because we actually have the ability to put these formats into these core workflows. We expect that to be a place for us to invest further to help our customers’ workflows as everyone is looking for solutions right now.

Sramana Mitra: When I asked you the question earlier on about price points, at that point, you were basically catering to all the customers that were coming to you. One of the ways to gain leverage is by selecting which segment you want to go after. Usually, it’s the customer who gives you more flexibility in terms of acquisition costs and budget. It seems that you have now figured out where the leverage lies and you want to scale in that segment.

Taylor Tyng: Absolutely. We didn’t grow up making a product for individuals. If you look at the prosumer world of content collaboration, there’s a lot of people there. For us, it was about dealing with a larger organizational issue and making sure that we are able to capture and unlock that for those corporations. It allows us to be much stickier. It also aligns more with the tenets of who we are and where we would want our product roadmap to go. If you look at the global enterprise content management, it’s expected to be $9.4 billion by 2018, which is double than 2014. Within that, you have subsets. The opportunity and the trends with the way these companies are moving into those are aligned with the direction we wanted our product to grow. The other part is the trends around content. Everyone is telling stories and everyone is doing it with video.

Sramana Mitra: Video is a huge trend. Just in August, LinkedIn has launched a video product. It’s only available to the Influencers. We are a power use of that product. The product is early, so we are in the middle of giving them lots of feedback on the product. It’s a video creation product. It’s amazing how all the marketing activities are shifting towards video. That trend is not lost on us at all.

Taylor Tyng: Our focus is around the agency, advertising world, and its customers. If you look at it from a brand side, every time new technologies emerge, they find specialty within agencies and/or other production arms to help them navigate this new technology to produce content. As that becomes more known, they start to pull that back in-house. You’re really seeing a transition from brands doing more in-house with true in-house agencies that can do full service. The ability and the speed in which they are producing programmatic video content is enormous. We had over 13 years of content uploaded just last month, which is an enormous amount.

Sramana Mitra: You can see it all over the place in social media. It’s all video right now.

Taylor Tyng: The biggest area of growth we’re seeing is through these three platforms – Apple, Google, and Facebook and they are really starting to shape the way we experience the Internet. It’s interesting to see how the rest of the world is able to play in and create new distribution opportunities. The world of OTT will be interesting to see and we are excited to be a part of it.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services: Taylor Tyng, CEO of Wiredrive
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