Interview with Andrew Filev, Founder of Wrike

Wrike is a practical project management solution. It helps thousands of people to manage projects, teams, and businesses. It’s a collaborative web-based tool, it’s very easy to use and inexpensive.

I was an entrepreneur for quite a while, and I was managing a business with pretty diverse operations and several offices. I clearly saw several problems existing with traditional project management tools like Microsoft Project. In my opinion, there are three big gaps that existed at that time, and that partially exist in the market right now.

First, the most widely used project management tool is email. At the same time, traditional project management tools ignored this fact. Project Managers had to copy information there and back. That created a lot of routine work, problems with adoption, and it was unproductive.

The second gap is between strategic plans for the company, quarterly plans, project plans, and data/agenda/event plans. Those documents exist in separate worlds. Again, there is duplication of work, there is a lot of manual work, and there are a lot of slipped schedules. Things that can basically be optimized with good software.

Last, there are a number of tools, like wikis. The main description of these tools are that they enable collaboration. Traditional project management tools lacked these tools. It was a great drawback of traditional tools. Collaboration eliminates a lot of duplicate work, it helps project managers to delegate more work to the team. It helps to successfully combines bottom-up and top-down planning, and makes companies more agile. It’s a critical piece.

I was trying to find project management software for our business. I wasn’t able to, so I got some interesting ideas and started prototyping. It took me a couple of years to develop. I showed the tool to my friends and to a few customers. It got some good reviews and a number of users and from there we decided to make a real business out of it.

We have thousands of customers in different countries, and the customer base is growing. Every day, it changes, from churches to global companies. Right now, most of our customers are small to medium sized businesses. We’ve got a fairly big share of marketing departments and agencies using our product. But, again, we are not restricted. Over time, as the product matures, and as big corporations will become more open, I think we will get a better penetration in the enterprise market as well.

That’s correct. I wouldn’t say that the tool is necessary in an environment of one to five people, especially if those people are sitting in one room. They can easily communicate and keep each other in the loop. A tool like Wrike becomes indispensable for distributed teams and in teams running multiple projects.

Wrike, for example, is very good in the cases when you want to run something integrated. When you have a development plan and marketing plan, and you want your developers to see their plan, and you want your marketers to see their plan, but you, yourself, want to see a complete picture and want to have an integrated plan so all of your activities are coordinated.

In those cases, Wrike is indispensable. It works even better than some of the enterprise tools. You would be amazed, but some of theirs are quite costly and they are complex tools. They fail in a multi-project environment, because they keep everything close to one project. There’s either no way, or it’s very hard to align plans, to share one part with one department, another part with another department, and still keep those things integrated. With Wrike it’s very simple.

In the medium business, it’s got a lot of potential. On the enterprise level, there are different concerns, and those companies are really huge. We still need to become more mature to cover the companies with several thousand employees simultaneously. I’m sure one day in the future we’ll come to that point, as well.

I believe that marketing departments, not marketing agencies, is a key segment. But, in the marketing departments, they face the same problems. They have complex projects; they have multiple projects running simultaneously. They need to get a better control.

Mostly they use email and Excel spreadsheets. That’s very painful, and that’s a lot of routine work. We want to help them, basically. That’s our target segment, however we plan expand to others.

I see great demand in professional services organizations, because they often have distributed teams and they often need to track their time to bill clients. They often need to keep pretty good project management, and they often have diverse, multiple projects running simultaneously. That is a second target segment that we think benefits greatly from Wrike.

There’s also a more generic market with churches-basically the companies, organizations, I would speak, rather than companies-organizations that have distributed teams that have people or offices in different locations running different things. In those kinds of cases, a web tool can really be helpful.

If it’s a small team of people sitting in one room, they can live perfectly without a web-based tool. But, once you get more diverse in terms of geography and in terms of your projects, you need to have something to help you keep control.

Right now we rely a lot on word of mouth. Be it word of mouth coming from media. Be it word of mouth coming from our customers. As we don’t do any direct sales at this point of time. As the company grows and as we become bigger, we will plan to start direct sales, as well.

That is a future question. Right now, we can only guess. We are not hiring. We are not trying to jump over several steps at once. We are approaching this process very methodically and will cross that bridge when we get to it.

The first was a software outsourcing company. It started as software consulting and then grew into an outsourcing business, with about 100 engineers.

For me the path was quite natural, because we bootstrapped the first business and we had no business experience when we started. We had no serious money to invest. We basically got a business school degree in a real life.

We invested the money that we had from the first business that we built. So, we invested a lot, but we didn’t have any additional investors like VC companies. We will probably have to look for outside capital in the near future.

Once we come closer to ramping up direct sales campaigns, that will require some resources that we will probably like to raise from the outside capital.