5 on Funding with Kelly Nyland, Founder and CEO of Whym

Welcome to 5 on Funding! This weekly newsletter asks venture-backed startups 5 detailed ways they plan to use the new funding to scale their companies.

Quick Facts About Whym:

Company Description: Whym makes commerce effortless by helping brands capture intent-to-buy and close the sale wherever they meet their customers. Brands use Whym’s patented Text Me This Item feature to let shoppers remember products they want to buy later in a convenient, personalized text message thread. Shoppers can collect products and buy everything at once using Whym’s universal cart - enabling multi-brand checkout and eliminating account creation. Whym’s executives include former Snap team members, Founder & CEO Kelly Nyland, Co-founder and COO Rhenee Bartlett, and VP of Engineering Ryan Hornberger.

Industry: Fintech

Amount Raised: $4.3m Seed

What 5 things will you do with this funding?

Key Priority for Funding: Building a solid data structure

1. Creating a Data Infrastructure

“Data is the most important thing across the board for most companies. Our definition of what data is consists of several things. First, we have internal data–our goal here is to connect all of our systems in one place so any person on our team can truly understand what is going on. We use a combination of Big Query for our data lake, Google Data Studio, Amplitude, Mixpanel and Segment. This helps us tie our financial, product, marketing and sales data together. We onboarded our first instance of Salesforce as a very long-term investment, and we use different applications that plug in, but this is the data source for our SaaS pipeline.? We’ve also added all of our own telemetry to our application and almost everyone on our team has access to this data to build their own dashboards and understand key inputs that drive the business on both the product and GTM front.”

2. Hiring

“Hiring is a really tough nut to crack, especially if you are seed stage and you can't necessarily afford a lot of recruitment support. We did a combo of looking outside US using a very boutique and focused recruiting firm. We also took the approach of working thru our application lists. Fortunately, completing a? job application is one of the top 3 things people like to do after vising our website! We can’t believe it, but the press announcement has filled our inbox with investors, partnership opportunities and resumes. Now it’s just about finding the first 20-30 core team members that will be with the company for 5-7 years and hopefully up to a successful exit or IPO.”

3. Exploring New Marketing Channels

“We plan to explore other types of go-to-market channels. It's very difficult as an early-stage company because you typically find one channel and stick to it once it’s working for you versus being more experimental. We are exploring what it looks like to work with affiliates, partnerships, and influencers and brainstorming other ways to get scrappy. There are tons of communities and networks we’re connected to–so exploring what events could look like? including sponsored founder dinners, meetups, tech weeks and things like that.”

4. Optimizing Our Software Stack

“We want to ensure we are efficient with our tools–like using a collaboration tool to reduce seats where we can. We are also going back to our investors and asking about portfolio benefits to get deals on tools like Google Cloud services, AWS, Twilio, Segment and others like this.”

5. Creating a Flexible and Dynamic Remote Work Culture

“We want to create standards and execution for team communication. One of the ways we do this is to have each team member complete a DWP, also known as a distributed work profile. It encourages everyone on the team to talk about how work fits into their life versus the other way around. Before assigning accountability to people, you must open the door for transparency. This transparency starts with allowing everyone to share how they work best.”

About the Founder and CEO: Kelly Nyland is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Whym. Over the past 15 years, Kelly has had a hand in building four successful tech companies, two of which have realized public offerings during her tenure. As CEO Whym, she has garnered the support and backing of well-respected Silicon Valley investors. As a product, sales and marketing executive, she has introduced over 120 digital products, software, apps and consumer electronics to market in 40 countries. Kelly has worked across a variety of emerging technology sectors including mobile VR / AR, artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning and voice-enabled TTS / STT.