Two years of Wavy.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been over 365 days since posting last year’s update. What a year. While I could keep this to the 200+ days so far in 2020 (because it’s been a lifetime in itself), I’m going to take this story back to where I left off in August 2019.

For those who’d like to skim through, I’ve included key learnings for each season. Feel free to scroll on! For those who are in for the full story, grab a cup of coffee and join me.

On July 18, 2020, Wavy turned two. 

It’s been two years of navigating how to turn an idea into reality. Of going from beer brainstorms and blue skies to building technology, acquiring customers, pivoting, acquiring different customers, and finding product-market fit.

It’s been a whirlwind, to say the least.

A year ago, I didn’t think we’d be entering the future of work industry. I didn’t think that we’d be helping companies create a great remote employee experience … but here we are! We’re in a brand new market, building a new platform, and are focused on bringing the magic of offline experiences online.

Our why is still the same. Wavy still exists to help people come together through shared experiences. Our how is a whole lot different than it used to be… and we couldn’t be more excited about it!

Here’s what happened.

Summer (July - September 2019) ??

Last year’s update was shared on August 1st, 2019. The 30 days that followed were some of the busiest times we’ve ever had at Wavy. We were getting feedback on the beta version of our app, testing a chatbot with Narcity Media, and exploring the text messaging space. Basically, we were experimenting with different ways we could give people relevant recommendations for exploring their own city. We weren’t convinced that an app was the best solution, despite having a positive beta program so far – it was just a gut feeling. 

At the same time, we were working on some BIG milestones. In a span of three weeks, we officially welcomed Neshay Ahmed to the team as Co-founder & CTO (she had previously been our technical advisor), brought on Gaurav Chande for a contract role as Lead Developer, and closed our first round of funding. 

We had a founders retreat at the end of August, where we wrote out our own job descriptions (highly recommend this activity, by the way), talked about our vision for the future Wavy, and made the hard decision to put our app on the backburner. We were excited about the benefits of SMS vs. mobile app (higher open/engagement rates, fewer barriers to join, and a relatively uncrowded market) ... and got to work on launching a texting service. We were still planning on releasing our app publicly and wanted to A/B test the two solutions. While our app was focused on helping people discover hidden gems near them, our texting service was focused on sending people weekly ideas for experiences to check out in their own city, based on interests, location, and mood. The method of delivery was different, but both solutions helped give people relevant and trustworthy recommendations, whether they were looking for date ideas, group outings, a team event, or staycation inspiration. 

By the end of September, we launched a new website, our texting membership (which was $3.99 per month), and brought on Brooke Kennedy for an internship as Marketing Coordinator. We were on a roll! 

Key learnings:

• Testing multiple channels for your solution is SO important. Initially, we thought our engagement levels with our app were good, with 20% weekly active users. After experimenting with a desktop-based chatbot, we knew that a mobile-first solution was important in order to get high engagement rates. That led us to our app vs. SMS debate. Turns out, having 40%+ weekly active users (and 70%+ monthly active users) are numbers that can be consistently achieved through texting. It felt like an easier channel to monetize, too. So... texting ahoy! 
• Fundraising is complicated. From May to August, we basically took a crash course in the world of Angel investing, term sheets, financial modelling, cap tables, etc. It was intense. At the end of the day, we’re proud to have family, friends, and Angel investors that really believe in our mission and founding team. We couldn’t be doing what we do without them!

Fall (October - December 2019) ??

With a team of five people and a new membership program launched in Toronto, we spent the Fall focusing on growth, collecting feedback, and iterating on our texting service. We showcased Wavy at festivals, markets, and big tech events (remember those?), ran advertising and email campaigns, and tested referral programs. We interviewed as many members as we could and worked on new designs for our web app. Here’s a demo of how it all worked, by the way! 

Looking back, we had 25%+ monthly member growth, under 5% monthly churn, and crossed the $500 MRR benchmark in December. We were feeling good about our choice in texting vs. a mobile app and were having a lot of fun experimenting with tools like Twilio, Integromat, Airtable, and Zapier. I was excited about our solution and was ready to dive into 2020 with some aggressive goals – launching new personalization/recommendation features, growing to 1,000+ paid members, and expanding to a second city.

An important thing to note here is that I am the eternal optimist on our team (someone has to be). While I was feeling confident going into a new year, I don’t think that feeling was mutual across our entire team. And that’s okay. While we were seeing growth in certain areas, we were also seeing challenges in free trial conversion, willingness to pay, and our belief in the problem we were solving. As our team liked to put it – was Wavy solving a ‘hair on fire’ problem? We questioned this. How painful is it for people to find relevant experiences and events in their own city? Ultimately, we learned from certain members (e.g. those planning dates or team events) that this is a consistent and frustrating problem… but this was definitely an important thing to ask ourselves. Questioning the foundation of your startup (aka, the problem you’re solving) is so important. Especially if it’s in an industry and/or category that you personally love.  

We took a much-needed week off over the holidays and planned a team retreat when we returned in January. There were some big things to talk about.

Key learnings:

• Texting is awesome. ?? One of the coolest things about talking to our members was hearing about the fact that they were actively exploring Toronto because of their Wavy texts. We heard that people were going to art shows, new restaurants, theatres, breweries, parks, and paths because of their weekly messages. We also saw that we were getting great open rates, click-through rates, and sharing across our membership. As a (nerdy) marketer, it was very cool to see 70%+ click-through on weekly texts. The major lesson here is that unlike apps, text messaging is a relatively un-crowded channel. SMS notifications are basically at the same place that push notifications were in 2010. If you think about it, who do you get texts from other than your circle of people and sometimes verification codes? We quickly realized that being not only invited, but paid, to deliver personalized weekly texts was a very cool position to be in. 
• The larger the group, the harder it is to plan. This is something that came up again and again. While we were working to give people personalized recommendations, ‘planners’ are most frustrated when trying to align and organize large group experiences. We even had people ask if we could help plan their team events and holiday parties. This planted the seed for new group-based features and services that Wavy could help with. Foreshadowing, anyone?
• B2C growth is challenging. Since my background is in B2B marketing, diving into B2C growth was quite the learning curve. Whether it was educating consumers on the fact that we were a texting service (not an app) to working on checkout page conversion, creating abandoned cart campaigns, or trying to make a referral program simple, we were always learning. Throughout our testing, our cost per acquisition varied from $5-50 per person. Some channels led to higher retention than others. Some campaigns were a bust! All in all, it wasn’t going to be easy to achieve the level of growth we wanted. Putting a goal on the whiteboard of 1,000+ paying users was one thing… achieving it was another!

Winter (January - March 2020) ??

We kicked off this year with a team retreat. For the first half, we worked on our mission, vision, and values. We had the help of Lynette Turner and Katie McLean in running a ‘Culture Sprint’, where the goal was to discover our ‘Wavy why’. After gathering customer stories, their pain points, and reflecting on our personal motivations, we got to work with a day of brainstorms and post-it notes. Here’s what we came up with: 

Wavy exists to fuel curiosity in experiences so that people can spark plans, come together, get out of their comfort zone, and have a damn good time doing so. 

 The idea was to create a why statement that can hold true even if your product direction changes. Disclaimer: in January, I did not think that a big product change would be coming up so quickly! But, the fun part is that our why statement still holds true today. I’m proud of that. It really captures the reason we started Wavy - to bring people together through shared experiences.

We also worked on monthly/quarterly goals, user personas, marketing campaign ideas, and more. A big theme was exploring what we could do beyond our texting membership. Could we help people save, re-visit, and share their favourite places? Think: Google MyMaps, but better. Could we run a premium service to plan and book dates? Could we create corporate memberships and add-ons like planning team events, retreats, and more? These were all of the questions running through our minds. I have to admit, it made the short term goal of growing our paid membership quite difficult. It’s hard to focus on tactical things when you have so many ‘big picture’ questions swirling around in your head.  

We grew by 15% in January and 25% in February. We ran a Valentines giveaway, launched a paid referral program, a dual account for couples, and were excited about the small (but mighty) network effects we were starting to see. 

Then, came March. 

I definitely didn’t foresee the COVID-19 pandemic turning into what it did. One moment, we were packing up our desks and saying “this is crazy - see you in a few weeks!” The next, we were realizing just how big an impact this was going to have. We took the first couple of weeks of isolation to really step back from our business. To understand our place in this new reality. 

At that point, encouraging people to get out and explore their city no longer made sense. We switched gears to send our members weekly recommendations on activities to enjoy from the comfort of their own homes, ways to support local businesses, and ideas to stay social, despite being physically distant (enter: virtual experiences). We wanted to help people come together, support each other, and have positive things to look forward to in a world that felt (and still feels) pretty heavy. 

We started telling people about our ‘short-term’ pivot and were beginning to feel energized about the virtual experiences space. One of our mentors, Mihnea Galeteanu, worded this idea perfectly: “Just because people can’t be together, doesn’t mean that their curiosity, sense of exploration, and desire to experience new things with others have gone away.” Looking back, this Zoom call (which was full of Wi-fi problems, muting and unmuting, background sounds), was a pretty big lightbulb moment. 

Could we create virtual experiences that are actually fun? That bring people together, are interactive, and spark meaningful conversations between participants? Short answer: Yes. Yes, we could.

Long answer: Keep scrolling! 

Key learnings:

• Building your brand from the inside out is important. I’m so glad we started this year with a deep dive on our core values, motivations, and underlying vision for Wavy. Thanks to our Culture Sprint, we were able to come together with shared beliefs and a why statement that we all feel connected to. Plus, our values are so very Wavy. My favourite is Keep it Spicy ?? (aka, don’t be afraid to shake things up).
• When a global pandemic arises, step back. Breathe. No one knew what the f*ck to do in March. I certainly am not an expert in pandemics, so I decided to take a few steps back from everything. Our whole team did. All of a sudden, we were back to the three of us and were trying to figure out what to do next. That meant a lot of deep chats with friends, mentors, and peers in the tech space. A lot of time walking/running, playing board games, and crafting. Sometimes (a lot of the time) lying on the couch doing nothing. Honestly, those first few weeks gave us some headspace to reevaluate and reimagine things. The world was changing, quickly. That meant we had to change, too!

Spring (April - June 2020) ??

Ready, set, go. We rolled into April with some new workday routines. We started having Daily Coffee on Zoom every day at 10:00 am. We started using Slack, Monday.com, and Google Drive a lot more. I started going on mid-day runs, creating various ‘work stations’ around my house (standing desk, couch for meetings, chair for meetings, stationary bike for calls), and taking many snack breaks. I was starting to get the hang of this whole remote work thing. 

While we were figuring that out, we were also cooking up some big ideas. That first big idea was hosting a virtual trivia night on Friday, April 3rd. We picked 90s & 2000s Nostalgia as our theme, invited our members and community, and had 100+ people join in for a live game. It was filled with music, video clips, virtual drinks, conversations, and lots of laughs. Someone said that it was the best night they’ve had since quarantine started. It was super heartwarming. It also gave us the confidence to start offering trivia games for corporate teams and work with partners to provide more experiences. 

From there, we worked with Willful and TWG as our first customers (shoutout to Erin Bury and Claire Kryczka for helping us bring this idea to life). We also hosted a virtual craft beer tasting with Sonia B. from House of Sours and a wine tasting with Mackenzie P. from New World Wine tours. Turns out, people missed hanging out with each other! While Zoom happy hours can be hard to do on your own, our recipe for hosting virtual experiences in a hands-on/facilitated way was starting to work!

[INSERT: crazy idea]. Peter called me with the craziest idea to host a virtual festival. The May long weekend was coming up and the general consensus was that everyone could use something uplifting. We thought about it for a couple of days, then realized the domain stayhomefest.ca was available. A couple of hours and many phone calls later, we were set. We had 14 days to pull off a weekend-long festival. We had to build the MVP of our platform, put together programming, secure partnerships/sponsorships, sell tickets, and not to mention onboard a new team member. What started out as a phone call to a friend turned into Julia El-Safty joining the team for a 2-week project to help with sales and partnerships. It was intense. We could not have pulled it off without her help! 

Our goal was to bring Canadians together through shared experiences to celebrate the long weekend... we’re proud to say mission accomplished! We hosted 20+ events, had 25+ hosts join us, 450+ attendees, and raised $2,000+ for CAMHs COVID-19 Mental Health Resiliency & Coping Fund. Highlights include (but are not limited to): hosting Canadiana Trivia with The Sheepdogs, taking part in a nation-wide dance class with Hannah Sparling, making butter tarts with Shiela Labao, crafting ‘cupboard fancy’ cocktails with Aaron Hatchell, hosting a drag show with JuiceBoxx, having Erez Zobary close off the fest with sweet, sweet tunes... and so much more. It was a pretty fun way to launch a new side of our business, despite the lack of sleep. 

Since then, we’ve re-launched our website, hosted Stayhome Fest 2.0, and started working with corporate teams across North America to connect employees through virtual experiences. Some of our favourite moments have been:

• Hosting a ZoomBQ for 125+ of Jobber’s “Jobberinos”, with creative drawing, games, baking, and cooking. 
• Hosting a Sampler Celebration to help their team celebrate some big milestones, with cocktail making and Minute To Win It. 
• Hosting a Virtual Team Week with Fundthrough to bring their entire team (and individual teams) together for workouts, painting, games, cooking, and more. 
• Hosting team socials for TWG, like Netflix Favourites trivia or a pride party with JuiceBoxx, Kendall Gender, and Ivory Towers. 

Internally, there’s been a lot of change, too! We celebrated Wavy’s second birthday, welcomed Julia to the team full-time as our Head of Sales, and have decided to be ‘digital by default’… which means I’ll be heading out to BC to live and work from there for the next little while. 

As the world of work continues to transition to remote-first or some sort of hybrid, we’ll be here to help. Our goal is to make sure that teams can still connect, build relationships, and have shared experiences (that are a damn good time) while working remotely. We’re on a mission to bring the magic of offline experiences online. To us, that means focusing on creating conversation and connection. On making virtual events as interactive as possible. 

With Wavy, you won’t get a webinar. What you will get is a real-life experience, made virtual.

Key learnings:

• Community is everything. One silver lining this year has been people’s general openness to collaboration. From planning an event and working with new hosts (e.g. mixologists, comedians, chefs) to building partnerships with delivery companies, asking favours/questions from peers in the tech space, and more… it’s been incredible. We’ve been overwhelmed with how willing people are to listen, lend a hand, share ideas, and work together. If you’re reading this and are one of those people, thank you for doing what you do. ??
• Starting a business for the second time is easier. I’m not saying it’s easy! It also wouldn’t have been possible without our community/network (see above). What I am saying is that we feel more confident in the steps to take, validation points, and building blocks to use this time around. It’s funny. To me, pivoting hasn’t felt like we started a new business from scratch… but more grew an initial idea into a new space. It feels like a good mix of old (shared experiences, local experts) and new (virtual experiences, remote work) - which is really exciting.
• Teams who go together, go further. While there is a certain magic that happens when people come together in person, we’ve recognized that the world of work is changing in a big way. We believe that offices will still play a large role in company culture for the foreseeable future. We also believe that things like offering remote work, flexible days/hours, month-long ‘working vacations’ in new places, and hiring remote talent, are here for the long run. This new way of working means a lot less time spent together in person (or, all together). It shouldn’t mean that events like weekly/monthly socials, offsites, celebrations, kick-offs, and more should fall to the wayside. We’ve learned that these events can be offered virtually - you just might need a helping hand in making it easy, enjoyable, and meaningful.

I heard that three years marks a tradition, so I’ll see you back here next year for another recap.

In the meantime, here’s how you can help us as we continue to build Wavy:

1. Book a virtual team experience with us! From one-off events to ‘ZoomBQs’, corporate retreats, or a monthly calendar of events, we’ve got you covered. Our focus is to bring teams together through events that are interactive, spark conversation, and feel as far away from a webinar as possible. Comment below or email me directly at [email protected] to chat more! ??
2. Tag someone in the comments whose company is a) working remotely indefinitely; b) announced they’re ‘digital by default’, or c) has a distributed team. We’d love to interview them as part of our product and market research. ??
3. If you know someone in the Angel investment or early-stage VC space that’s passionate about the future of work, virtual experiences, and employee engagement, we’d love an introduction! ??