The stories that made Wingify
Part two of a four part series on storytelling for SaaS startups
You can read the first part of this series - the stories that made Freshworks - here.
Wingify’s Pune office, where I worked for close to 2 years, was a dream of a workspace. Floor-to-ceiling glass on one side allowed us to enjoy the city’s beautiful monsoons as we worked, there were well-tended plants throughout, open seating but with spaces that we could personalise, and great people all around. And because we were doing so well and I was with friends, I remember my time in that office with a lot of fondness.
It is in this office that the leadership group was having a meeting in mid 2017, as we did once a month, in person. Paras and Sparsh used these meetings to bring the leadership together and get consensus on the company’s larger issues, and these were very successful gatherings. One of the items on the agenda that day was a discussion on what made the organisation special.
I remember saying, very passionately, that Wingify’s identity was as a bootstrapped success story. That it was an example that other young startups and founders could emulate; knowing that Wingify existed and thrived was important for the ecosystem, I said, it stood up for another model in an ecosystem that sometimes paid undue attention to the big and the noisy.
I stand by that idea even today. There are other startups that seem to be following in Wingify’s footsteps these days, but none that are notable yet. We need them to be.
But the stories that I want to tell about Wingify here are the ones about its marketing.
These are starkly different from the ones I told you about Freshworks, as you will see, but what they helped achieve was no less impressive.
Here goes.
1. Wingify’s early growth
Paras has spoken about this before , and several times, but I don’t think it was ever understood how much of Wingify’s early growth and success as a startup was because of storytelling.
When Wingify launched early in the last decade, testing wasn’t widely known or done in marketing, there was no written content about it, and growth hacking was far in the future.
So Paras did what he even now does - write. Wingify’s content marketing in those years was way ahead of its time. The blogs and pages were well researched, well written, and always spoke to the target audience - the marketer. They also had a really slick website, with an attention to design detail that wasn’t common then.
(Props also to Siddharth Deswal, Mohita Nagpal, and others in the marketing team)
But what stood out was the emphasis on stories. Their case study page, navigable by industry, was what Girish (CEO, Freshworks) showed me once as a model to emulate for Freshdesk.
As a marketer, I’m (also) paid to identify what good taste looks like and replicate it.
And this was very good.
It is this attention to detail and customer stories that resulted a lot of early attention and success to Wingify.
Even today, there is a lot to be said for doing customer stories/case studies well.
They remain an incredibly easy way to stand out and close deals, and yet so many startups just outright ignore them.
2. The perspective shift that kickstarted PushCrew’s growth
A week or two ago, in response to a question about marketers on LinkedIn, my former colleague at Wingify (and now its head of growth) Ashwin Gupta named me.
This made me happy, of course, and as I wrote on Twitter - that former colleagues remember your work enough to talk it up is in itself rewarding.
But back in 2016, a couple of months after I joined Wingify to lead PushCrew’s marketing, I was in trouble. PushCrew was a new product, Wingify’s second, and I had two problems:
PushCrew, for a web push notification engine, was expensive.
The space had become heavily commoditised, in the sense that there were so many (good) web push notification products.
Now customers are smart people, and soon they were asking us questions: Why should we pay you more money when these other products are willing to charge us half (and at times even less than that) of what we are paying you?
I had no answer, and I needed one.
So I texted Girish one desultory evening, basically asking him - I have this problem, G, what do I do?
He didn’t text me that night, and I don’t think he texted me the next day either. I woke up one morning a few days later and saw that he’d replied.
I’m paraphrasing, but this was the gist of it: You can either cut costs and make PushCrew a loss leader for the company, basically making the product an acquisition channel of sorts for VWO. Or you can wrap this in a story that positions PushCrew as upmarket, and justifies the higher price - basically making sure that people want to pay that money willingly.
I went back to the drawing board.
Lowering prices meant I had to bring in a whole lot of people into the equation. I had to talk to my CEO, my product managers, I had to talk to my salesfolks (who’d be none too happy), and I would have to sell the idea to all of them.
But telling a story about the brand, that was something I could do, and needed only my own work to execute. That was definitely something that I as a marketing head could take an independent swing at.
So I did.
My team and I revamped the entire website. We rebranded and reshaped the blog into a resource for marketers who were trying to get through the ‘last mile’, a reference to how push notifications could bridge that gap. We put in a lot of effort to sound and feel and look premium. One of the stories we told in sales calls was that we knew we were priced higher, but then we were the people who make VWO. We used our flagship brand, well known in MarTech circles, as a crutch for quality. We said that we knew how to build MarTech, we’ll give you a great, stable product with proven support (VWO again), and that’s why you should buy PushCrew and not something else.
It worked. People got what we were saying, and were willing to shell out more. We grew rapidly, and this is the achievement that Ashwin pointed out on LinkedIn.
And none of it would have been possible without the story.
3. The storytelling opportunity we missed
Now that I have demonstrated how I succeeded, I also want to point out at least a one instance where I let go of an opportunity to tell a great story.
About late 2017/early 2018 customer demand for push notifications was falling off a cliff. The reason, I think, was that web push notification began to be seen as something intrusive. And we weren’t able to fight that, at least not in any major way. Even today, web push is a great way to get customers back to your website, but it is not being adopted at the rate that it was.
And I think that if we had told a better story about web push notifications, we could have sustained that high for a lot longer. Even now, the opportunity exists. See what Drift has been able to do with live chat - by calling it conversational marketing, they changed the conversation about it.
It was right there for us at PushCrew - all we had to do was figure out who was getting the most out of the tech, go deep into that cohort, and tell a story tailored for them. We probably would have been able to grow even more, even faster.
The segment needs a storyteller.
I have moved on, but I wish I had been smart enough to do something this. As I said, this can still be done. And if anyone does, I’ll be here to champion it.
PushCrew is now part of the larger VWO suite - recast as VWO Engage. It’s a great rebrand, and in the way they’ve combined both products, another example of storytelling done well. You should check it out.
PS - Just wanted to take a second to call out Paras and Sparsh, Wingify’s founders, for the great company and culture they have built.
It has given me a lot, and I’m thankful for their trust and friendship.
Note: Reminder that this is part two of a four part series. You can continue reading the series using the links below.
Part three: The stories that will make Interview Mocha
How I’m using what I have learnt to get the marketing stories right at Interview Mocha, and a breakdown of my own process.
Part four: Follow these 5 steps to create a great startup story
A framework for founders and marketers to use as they try to do the same for themselves and for their companies.
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