INSIGHT: Interview on the growth of Walls.io with Michael Kamleitner
Posted: Mon Dec 23, 2024 3:31 am
What is the name of your company : paredes.io – The social wall for everyone
Founded : 2014 (our company was actually founded in 2010, but we started Walls.io just 4 years later).
How many people are on the team right now? 13
What are you basing your work on? Vienna, Austria
Did you raise money? If not, how did you get money to build Walls.io?
Walls.io is 100% bootstrapped. Before we started developing our product, our team successfully worked as a software agency, building custom social media marketing apps for various clients. The agency business not only provided us with the capital to fund the development of the Walls.io MVP, but also gave us access to our initial customer base.
Snapshot from Walls.io
Can you tell us what Walls.io is and how you make money?
Walls.io is a social media hub that displays content from 15 social media platforms mexican phone numbersphysical screens, websites, widgets, apps – basically, anywhere you want. Or, as we say: Walls.io is the social wall for everyone! Use cases include exhibits at conferences, trade shows, POS, websites and widgets for hashtag marketing or deep integration via our API.
At Walls.io we eat, breathe and sleep social media for almost a decade now, so naturally we loved when Twitterwalls first appeared at nerdy tech events like Barcamps etc. Outside of the tech bubble (or “Web 2.0” as we used to call it (back then) though), Twitter was never a big thing, so we decided to take the concept forward by adding support for other, more common platforms like Facebook. Hence, Walls.io was born! Today, years later, user-generated content plays a major role in marketing and corporate communication, a fact that opened Walls.io up to many new use cases besides the obligatory events business.
How long did you work on it before launching it? When did you see your first dollar?
Building the initial MVP only took us a few weeks (I actually built it entirely myself - it was *really* rough, believe me
), but it took us about a year until we first launched it publicly. Since we had paid plans from the start, it didn't take us more than a few days to sign up our first paying customer.
Are you profitable? If not, when do you think you will get there?
Unfortunately, I can't share our KPIs with you. But as you know we have a team of 13 people and are operating in our fourth year, it's safe to assume we're profitable!
We reinvest almost all of our profits, mainly by hiring new talent! Starting a company means constantly committing to the size of your team: many functions that would normally be divided between several people must be performed by a single person, some functions even have to be neglected for a while. Still, I think it’s important to always keep that “future org chart” in mind and, as soon as profits allow, fill the next box, the most important one, by hiring.
Founded : 2014 (our company was actually founded in 2010, but we started Walls.io just 4 years later).
How many people are on the team right now? 13
What are you basing your work on? Vienna, Austria
Did you raise money? If not, how did you get money to build Walls.io?
Walls.io is 100% bootstrapped. Before we started developing our product, our team successfully worked as a software agency, building custom social media marketing apps for various clients. The agency business not only provided us with the capital to fund the development of the Walls.io MVP, but also gave us access to our initial customer base.
Snapshot from Walls.io
Can you tell us what Walls.io is and how you make money?
Walls.io is a social media hub that displays content from 15 social media platforms mexican phone numbersphysical screens, websites, widgets, apps – basically, anywhere you want. Or, as we say: Walls.io is the social wall for everyone! Use cases include exhibits at conferences, trade shows, POS, websites and widgets for hashtag marketing or deep integration via our API.
At Walls.io we eat, breathe and sleep social media for almost a decade now, so naturally we loved when Twitterwalls first appeared at nerdy tech events like Barcamps etc. Outside of the tech bubble (or “Web 2.0” as we used to call it (back then) though), Twitter was never a big thing, so we decided to take the concept forward by adding support for other, more common platforms like Facebook. Hence, Walls.io was born! Today, years later, user-generated content plays a major role in marketing and corporate communication, a fact that opened Walls.io up to many new use cases besides the obligatory events business.
How long did you work on it before launching it? When did you see your first dollar?
Building the initial MVP only took us a few weeks (I actually built it entirely myself - it was *really* rough, believe me
), but it took us about a year until we first launched it publicly. Since we had paid plans from the start, it didn't take us more than a few days to sign up our first paying customer.Are you profitable? If not, when do you think you will get there?
Unfortunately, I can't share our KPIs with you. But as you know we have a team of 13 people and are operating in our fourth year, it's safe to assume we're profitable!
We reinvest almost all of our profits, mainly by hiring new talent! Starting a company means constantly committing to the size of your team: many functions that would normally be divided between several people must be performed by a single person, some functions even have to be neglected for a while. Still, I think it’s important to always keep that “future org chart” in mind and, as soon as profits allow, fill the next box, the most important one, by hiring.