Startup Spotlight #92: Woflow

Woflow helps platforms and marketplaces automate the entire merchant data lifecycle for their merchant partners.

Mar 01, 2021

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I got the chance to speak with Will Bewley and Jordan Nemrow, co-founders of Woflow, about what they are working on at their startup, and any advice they have for emerging entrepreneurs.

Woflow is the world's first Merchant Data Platform. We help platforms and marketplaces automate the entire merchant data lifecycle for their merchant partners. Through customer feedback, Woflow focused on the niche of helping food delivery companies with catalog digitization and management. Since then we've built out a full automation platform that's the first of its kind to incorporate complex task automation and merchant data management at scale.

Jordan Nemrow (Co-Founder & CEO) is a programmer and has been working on startups since college. Jordan has worked on many projects, from D2C indie-music sales, to an SMS-to-postcard service, to burrito pre-order apps. Jordan joined a large HR company via a startup exit in 2016 and hacked the initial Woflow app out of pain for manual workflows being performed by Operations teams in large companies.

Will Bewley (Co-Founder & COO) left London and finance in 2015 and moved to San Francisco to pursue his passion for tech. After seeing the inner cogs of a few startups he started working on Woflow as a side project with Jordan at Workshop Cafe.

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Startup Spotlight: Woflow

Woflow cofounders Will Bewley (left) and Jordan Nemrow (right).

Problem: Scaling a platform used to need a complex web of manual processes and a mix of onshore and offshore teams. Each platform faces a similar problem so we made their non-core processes the core of ours.

Market: Our key market is food delivery and periphery food tech sub-categories that need access to structured data. Our estimated global TAM for the data stack in food delivery is over $1B globally.

Solution: The Merchant Data Platform gives teams a user interface and API to our data services (such as catalog creation and maintenance). The data services are provided by our ML-powered task automation engine.

Team: In normal times Woflow has an office in FiDi San Francisco with some remote team members. Right now we're a team of over 20 spread out over the US, Singapore, Brazil, the Philippines, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Recent Success:

Bewley and Nemrow: During the first wave of lockdowns, we transitioned into a remote-first team quickly and successfully. In March, we were apprehensive and didn't want to unnecessarily worry our team, as some large tech companies were switching to WFH. But by mid-March, before SF's stay home orders, we made the decision to ask our team to not come into the office on Monday. In hindsight this was obvious, but when you have momentum as a team it was a scary step to take. That weekend, I had done a lot of prep - Googling for info about remote-first, reviewing emails from our investors, and talking with other founders. Back then there was very little information available. We took cues from teams that were successful at remote-first, like Buffer and Automattic. We quickly came up with our "Remote Work Handbook" (here
- a bit outdated but still coherent for Nov 2020) and adapted it over time.

This set us up for success in the times ahead. As it became more obvious that it would be for the longer term, we needed to constantly communicate with the team and show support in different ways. An example was we recently held a half-day virtual offsite. It included breakouts and working sessions to mix the team up as well as some fun (ice breakers, 5 min meditation session, Jackbox games). It's important to have a consistent message and positive outlook, putting your team first during difficult times.

Recent Struggle:

Bewley and Nemrow: One of the hardest things when creating a new niche has been figuring out pricing. We started as a SaaS business, licensing our software to teams. We priced it at the high end ($150-250/month/seat) justifying the price by how efficient it made users (5X more productive). We were able to capture market share, but deals took longer to close, and we only focused on enterprise. Now we sell a simple API to automate and handle data management. We shifted to transactional and subscription-based pricing. A constant pain point with prospective customers is they don't really know what their current all-in cost is. We're creating a new vertical, which cost is compared against the old way of doing it. So, we have to be bold and work with our customers to establish the correct cost base to price off. Stripe has a really good in-depth post about pricing (here).

Founder Advice:

Bewley and Nemrow: First-time entrepreneurs don't fully understand the value of finding and dominating a niche. Solving a problem that people are willing to pay is a necessity for a successful business. Large obvious TAM markets are often crowded, and competitive markets are dangerous for a new startup. But they can often be broken down into smaller niches. From the outside, these look like small markets, with few customers. Digging in, you'll realize that they will often be underserved and are looking for a specialized solution that solves their exact pain point — rather than a generalized solution they're trying to make work for them. The trick is to find these niches, that have large players willing to pay and nail the specialization before broadening your market. Own your own vertical and you'll be surprised with the whales you can hook!

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Bewley and Nemrow: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Shannon Goggin, Founder of Noyo: Noyo is building the digital infrastructure to bring health insurance enrollment into the modern era.
Trey Griffith, Founder of Xkit: Xkit handles getting access to your customers’ other SaaS apps whether via OAuth2 tokens or API keys so you can build integrations faster and focus on features that matter.
Arisa Amano and Bob Remeika, Founders of Internal: Internal is the ultimate tool for teams who require granular app data to resolve customer issues and do their job.

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