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 on physical 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.
Walls.io runs on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscription model, so our customers pay a monthly fee to run their social wall. We offer a 100% free option, as well as a Pro ($200/month) and Premium ($500/month) plan. We also offer passes for non-recurring events.
How did you come up with this idea?
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 oman phone number library 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 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.
Who are your customers? What is your target market?
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.
Number of active users : I’m happy to report that Walls.io currently powers thousands of social media walls and screens. We’re especially excited to have surpassed 1 million sessions per month on our walls this fall!
We got our first few dozen clients primarily due to our existing business relationships in the agency business. From there it was all organic growth, only recently we started investing in paid search.
What are the top 2-3 distribution channels that work best for you? Which channel didn't work for you?
We constantly test all marketing channels available to us, so we do everything from paid search, content and social media marketing, sponsorship, referral programs, reviews, integrations and partnerships, etc. I would say that for us it’s the mix that makes it work. I wouldn’t cut any of said channels. That being said, we never did marketing to mass audiences (TV, print, billboards), given that we cater to very specific target groups, which probably wouldn’t make much sense. Still, I’d like to see that Walls.io Superbowl ad one day!
Over the past year, paid search was probably the channel that contributed the most to our growth. With a relatively moderate click price on our biggest keywords, it was by far the fastest way to generate revenue. On the downside, social media displays are not a high-volume niche, so we might saturate that channel in the near future.
Content marketing, on the other hand, didn’t yield results that quickly. It could really take years before it paid off, especially in a competitive industry like ours. There is a ton of established, high-quality content in social media marketing, so you’ll find it very difficult to attract organic traffic here. The solution here is to focus on your target audience, so in our case, we don’t produce basic social media marketing content, but stick to our use cases (events, digital signage, etc.). We see this approach working, but again, it takes a lot of time (which especially we, as experts, don’t seem to have much of
Finally, we love sponsoring non-profit events, and we offer free social walls at all barcamps This is a great way to introduce our product to our target audience. It really helped establish our brand when we first started!
Tell us 2-3 growth challenges you've encountered recently (and, if you have a strategy, how to solve them).
Since a part of our business is event-based, churn is a very serious concern for us. A customer who purchases Walls.io for a conference might cancel again after the event is over. Honestly: For the event use case, there’s really not much we can do about churn. We chose to do the opposite and embrace it, offering special 72-hour event passes. This helps us get a better idea of our different target audiences and offer additional features especially for this customer segment in the future. So for us, fighting churn means improving the product and offering more targeted pricing options for different audiences.
