Ask Me Anything with Nalden, co-founder of We Transfer
Based in the Netherlands, with an office in Los Angeles and a very strong market in… France (!) We Transfer is the top-of-mind solution to go to when you want to send a large file. And to have a nice experience doing it (we’re talking pretty pictures in full-screen!)
We Transfer has a very interesting story. Founded by a blogger and an advertising guy, heavily focused on design and U.X., the now-tech company was self-funded for a while. And the most important specificity of all, says We Transfer’s co-founder Nalden: it’s about people.
Nalden was at STATION F to answer questions from our residents. Here’s our take on his story.
It all started with…a boat
The idea for WeTransfer started in 2008. At that time, Nalden received a lot of pictures of his dad’s boat. And those were always around 6MB (like any decent boat picture), but no other file-sharing services were satisfying for his dad.
Nalden and WeTransfer’s founder Bas Beerens then decided they would build a better service, a service even his dad could use.
We Transfer started in beta pretty naively… in Flash (that didn’t last long).
Nalden confesses: “We thought we would monetize with advertising: at the time we didn’t know how hard it is to scale this business model.”
Building a tech company with 2 non-tech cofounders
The two non-tech co-founders had to learn how to become a tech company, had to re-build the web service from the ground up twice, and it took them 3 years to become break-even.
Now with 40M+ users / month and $25M in funding (although self-funded for six years) one could say We Transfer didn’t do a shitty job. But as its co-founder Nalden puts it: “It feels like the MVP starts now.”
Raising $25M in funding after being self-funded for 6 years
“If your team is well performing and you are profitable: you don’t need funding” says Nalden.
That’s why the team didn’t feel like raising funds for the first six years of their existence. Now when you need a change in scale, in management, something new to happen: then you might consider raising funds.
How to choose investors wisely when you’ve spent so much time being 100% free, then?
Nalden’s answer: “You need to spend a lot of time with them; in the end, investors are bankers, they have different goals than what you want to do with your company on the long term.”
In February 2015, We Transfer ended up raising $25M with Highland Capital Partners Europe.
What investors brought to the table for We Transfer: they helped a lot with change management, of course brought money which means comfort, and obviously: a lot of insights and contacts to reach out to industry leaders.
We Transfer’s investors stimulated us to focus on the US. The team picked L.A. to move in, as New York is focused on media and Wall Stree, San Francisco is too much tech, and L.A. is about culture and creativity. Nalden and his team thought they could create value there: the creative industry loves using We Transfer. Plus the sun is shining.
Nalden now also personally invests in startups. “I made a lot of mistakes at first”, he humbly admits. “I always focus on people, this is the most important.”
We Transfer counts almost as many designers as engineers.
A few anecdotes are interesting to note about how We Transfer’s team is structured. As it’s a design-focused product, out of the 90 people who work for We Transfer (they plan to have many more by the end of the year), there are almost as many designers as there are engineers.
The co-founders, and especially Nalden, have an original background: he quit school at an early age because “education is a bit… dated” (his words!) and started blogging at a very early age. Blogging got him jobs in music, advertising, design, in Amsterdam and Montreal… until he realized: instead of helping brands make money, why not solve problems using tech?
Now the co-founder is not CEO. Nor is he CMO (his previous title). “I’m CIO… the I stands for information, innovation, inception, interrogation…” he explains. I…nteresting!
In January, the team brought in a new CEO — a move that’s pretty common for high-growth startups. “It’s a hard process: you give the ship to a new captain! It took us a long time to hire the new CEO” tells Nalden.
His advice on how to handle the process well: you need some help from great recruiters to create the profile, a shortlist, and meet a lot of people. The most important is to make sure they share the vision, the project, and the overall industry.
We Transfer on a mission to provide ads that don’t suck
We Transfer is definitely playing in a tough pool.
“The toughest competition are the startups you don’t see coming” says Nalden.
“Behavior is changing fast. For instance: Slack has changed how/where people are working together. If Slack is where people work together: we need to have We Transfer close to them.”
We Transfer’s revenue stream is split into ads (monetizing users) and a premium models for professionals and small businesses. Nalden and his team’s number #1 mission: kill ugly ads.
Indeed, the first thing you notice when you get a We Transfer file is the beautiful art that’s displayed in the background. Why did We Transfer chose to showcase artists? “We care about people, beauty, and art” Nalden says. Period.
The editorial team does a great job to showcase new talents from music, arts, illustration… Art represents 30% of impressions globally. That’s millions of dollars that We Transfer could have sold to brands (!) And this goes beyond beauty: the artists showcased represent a 50% gender split, from every region of the world.
With this level of expectations, sales team are challenging brands to create ads in a better way. And providing a user experience that’s the best possible is the true core of We Transfer’s business.
As Nalden puts it: “We Transfer is a mix of effortless tool (utility) and brand (overall UX)”. If We Transfer got its first users partly thanks to its influence as a blogger, it’s the product and the fact that it brought emotion to a basic need that caused virality.
“Your product is your best virality” says Nalden.
Now that WeTransfer has more than 40M monthly active users, the new designs are based on a mix of data and imagination. For buttons, they stick to our brand ID. For wallpapers (which is a big part of the web experience): since this is where the promotion of We Transfer Plus happens, they do A/B testings.
Moving on to We Transfer’s next goals: Becoming indispensable in multiple stages in people’s creative process. To get there, We Transfer is working on integrations and re-building an IOS app — wanna try it? Reach out to Nalden on Twitter!
Interested in the stories behind the beautiful wallpapers on WeTransfer? Go to their blog ThisWorks.
Get insights from WeTransfer’s staff on their Medium Channel.
Header picture credits: Etohum.com
