Name: Jerome Touze
Nationality: French
Age: 28
Job title: Co-founder of WAYN.com
Name: Peter Ward
Nationality: British
Age: 29
Job title: Co-founder of WAYN.com
WAYN.com (Where Are You Now?) is a travel and lifestyle social networking website with 12 million users in 193 countries. The site lets you log your trips, share your experiences, keep track of where your friends are and make new friends from different locations.
Birth of the idea
Jerome came up with the concept for the site when he was travelling in a year out before starting work at the management consultancy firm Accenture. He realised how quickly you made friends when travelling - and how easy it was to lose touch. So he came up with the idea of a map of the world that showed you where your friends were at any time. He met Peter - who was also due to start work at Accenture - at a 'meet and greet' day for the new graduate intake. They became friends, and Jerome ran his idea by him. Peter saw the potential and brought in his friend Mike Lines to work on the programming of the site. They started with a £10,000 investment from Stephen Pankhurst, the co-founder of Friends Reunited, and within three years they were able to leave Accenture, go full time on the site, attract series A venture capital investment and each withdraw £1m from the company.
Growth of the company
Jerome: "When we first started the site we operated a subscription model, similar to the way Friends Reunited worked, which worked at the time, but as more competition arose we realised that although the subscription was generating a lot of income in the short term, it wasn't really going to serve us in the long term. So in May 2007 we made everything free and it is the best thing we have ever done."
The dynamic duo secured $11m worth of investment in 2006, a sum that allowed them to make that change to the business model. As a result, the traffic levels shot up. They had 1.8 million unique visitors in April 2007, and seven million in April 2008. There is still a subscription element to the site, but whereas before the fee only secured users unlimited messaging, they now get a range of benefits including annual travel insurance, a Sim card that cuts out roaming charges and the ability to opt out of receiving advertising messages.
Peter adds, "We have now turned our attention to raising the revenue from advertising. We have hired a sales team and are looking to set up an office in the US to take advantage of that huge market - we already have three million users there without us promoting it at all. We also want to open up the 'long tail' in advertising, so as well as the big names paying for large campaigns we can offer a local bar or hotel the option of advertising specifically to people who have said they are going to be in that town."
The future
Jerome: "When we started, most of the interaction was messaging, posting blogs, videos and photos. But now we have 12 million users, we have all these people telling us where they are, where they've been, where they're going; so it makes sense to offer them the ability to book a flight, a hotel or hostel through the site, and that's exactly what we did before Christmas by doing a series of integrations with big names, such as Lastminute.com for the hotels, Hostel World for the hostels, Mondial insurance ... and a flight search in partnership with Kayak to search for the best fares across the web. We are trying to leverage from our position in the marketplace by having such a huge pool of users with an interest in travel."
Peter: "We are also moving towards a more location-centric platform. The growth of GPS on mobile phones means we will be able to enable people to interact based on literally where they are, and also let them know of any events, parties, groups or offers that are available to them in their given location."
Another plan they have for WAYN is to build services around the sort of traveller users of WAYN.com are. If you are someone who likes to go climbing and plans to visit New York, you'll want to meet different people from a bookworm visiting the same place. This model works for reviews as well, as Jerome explains. "If you go into a bar your experience could be completely different because you have different expectations [from someone with different tastes] - delivering reviews based on what you like will make the information more relevant. We will also set up groups, so if you like surfing, then you can find other surfers in every country you might want to visit, who you can hook up with."
Peter: "The other big thing that is happening is social advertising and social recommendations. Potentially users can create a trip itinerary on WAYN, complete their experiences and recommendations and then we can integrate the bookings from there so that if someone makes a booking through a [user's] recommendation that user would get a cut of the commission from that referral - people will start making money out of their own experiences."
Looking further ahead, the WAYN.com co-founders struggle to make any firm predictions. "The way things are going in technology is surprising us all the time," Jerome says. "As runners of a business it is actually quite frustrating and exciting at the same time because you set a plan saying, 'I'm going to do that in four or five months' time,' and someone comes up with an idea that is actually better than what you've already had and we have to say, 'We've got to do that now, because if we don't we're going to be left behind.' So your plans quickly become obsolete and it's a constant struggle. If you are not keeping up the pace then you're going to be left behind very quickly."
Peter: "You have to be a constant innovation engine, coming up with the next thing. But it is all good, because there are so many good innovations coming out that you just feed off the ideas of others and then refine them and make them better."
