Wednesday, March 27, 2013
How A Snowboarding Roommate Spurred WompMobile's Mobile Software
Sleep, or snowboard? How does the need for a decision like that create a startup? That's the story behind Bellingham, Washington-based WompMobile (www.wompmobile.com), which was founded by Madison Miner. The company provides software which helps businesses to create and convert their existing, desktop websites into something that can easily be browsed and used on mobile phones. We caught up with Madison, who told us the story of how his college roommate--who was spending a lot of time snowboarding--spurred the creation of the software, and how it went from something to check the snow levels at Mt. Baker so his roommate could either go back to bed or head to the slops, to software to help any company create their own, mobile websites.
What is WompMobile?
Madison Miner: What we have, is a proprietary platform we use to convert a desktop website to a mobile friendly website. We work with small businesses, and a wide array of organizations like churches, local governments, and schools. We basically create a mobile version of their existing website, using our platform. The technology we have is pretty unique. We quickly pull the content from their existing desktop website, keep it in sync, and build mobile navigation around their existing content. Some of the benefits of this, is they only have to update their existing website, and the mobile site automatically updates. We also provide technology which is more customizable, which is not one-click, and lets them develop a unique mobile website for their business. We often will design a custom homepage and we can design different navigation and functions for the mobile website and what they have in mind.
What's your background, and how did you start the company?
Madison Miner: I'm a software engineer, who has been working professionally for the last ten years. Before Wompmobile, I worked in software engineering to automate 3D engineering. I backed into Wompmobile. When I was in college, I had a roommate that was spending a lot of time snowboarding. He's wake up at 6am to check on the snow report--I went to Western Washington University, so he'd be checking Mt. Baker--to decide if there was snow or not and if he could go back to sleep. I though that he shouldn't have to do that, and I wrote a program to scrape the snow report information off the website and check if it was above a certain value. If it was, it would call you to wake you up. It ended up becoming a pretty popular service, and soon I had request for other mountains. It was a pretty custom thing for Mt. Baker and not easy to extend to other websites, and I began thinking of a way to design it to easily add resorts. Basically, we began using CSS selectors to select content on the page of interest, and bring it out on my app, analyzing and reformatting that. Once I had that build, it turned out that didn't just work for ski resort websites. Over time, we improved the algorithm which would let us keep content styles and present things really nicely on either a desktop or mobile device. From what had kind of started as a little hobby program, and the desire to add more ski resorts, the technology evolved, and we found we had an application which really could help businesses prepare for the mobile revolution.
How is the company backed?
Madison Miner: I formed the company in 2010, and so far we'v received some angel investment from private investors. It was a small round, and we'll do another round real soon. We don't have plans for a real big venture capital funding at this point, as we're growing the business organically. We're going to scale the model soon, so when businesses want to host a mobile website we'll receive recurring revenues. We have cash flow to work with, and the investments will go to ramp up and meet demand, and hire more developers. We're really looking to raise as little as possible, but to keep growing fast. We've been doubling our business every quarter.
Did you ever think your roommate's laziness would result in you starting a company?
Madison Miner: It was interesting, because back then, no one had a smartphone. Initially, the program would call them or send them a text. There was no such thing as a mobile website. Even in 2010, when I formed the company, mobile website were still confusing to people. They didn't understand the difference between a mobile website and an app. It was a little hard trying to sell that to the business owner. Now, the market is white hot, and everyone seems to know you need a mobile website, because that's how the customers are consuming the product. Back then, we couldn't even have foreseen that the evolution of this would work out very well.
Thanks!