Wonder

Workflowy Company Analysis

Delivered August 10, 2019. Contributor: ChristineD

Goals

Determine the reason why the Workflowy platform remains stagnant for several years now. This information will be used to understand the current state of the company behind the app.

Early Findings

WORKFLOWY'S CHALLENGES
From 2014 to 2016, the company suffered due to the loss of key developers.
 Jesse Patel, the company's founder also became a father of twins and turned his priority to his growing family.
The company's co-founder, Mike Turitzin also moved away from handling the company's day-to-day operations to take on an advisory-only position.
These key personnel changes made the Workflowy stagnant for some time.
In 2015, Mr. Patel also admitted that they are off-track to meet the company's target potential.
He admitted that their development pace is sluggish and they are overwhelmed with all the action steps that they need to do.
During those times, Mr. Patel mentioned that they are heavily figuring out the way forward. They are engaged in conversation with key resources and crunching out the numbers that will make them reach their goals.
Overall, conflicts between the co-founders, increasing competition, imitators, money issues, and personal life responsibilities kept the company from moving forward towards their goals.


LATEST UPDATES
In 2018, Stefano Attardi, the company's newest addition to their small engineering team announced several plans to improve the platform.
Headmitted that an old technology behind the platform has been dragging the company's progress.
The company is now in the process of deploying a revamped core product to replace the aging technology that it has been using before.
He also admitted that they just employ a small team over the years. It was only very recently that they have hired additional resources to beef up their team of two engineers. With just a small team, updating Workflowy's code is not a priority for them before.
Mr. Attardi also announced several game-changing plans to overhaul the company such as app redesign, code optimization, and new feature development.
He is also exploring the use of new tools to make the team more productive despite their size.
He also pointed out that the app should now run faster as a result of their ongoing code optimization work.
Meanwhile, Mr. Patel said that they will really need to heavily focus on optimizing Workflowy's code before they can further move forward.
He mentioned that there are still many initiatives that they need to accomplish before they can get back on track.

FUNDING
 Workflowy's last funding round for an undisclosed amount was dated April 7, 2017. Prior to this, they have obtained a seed funding round last August 2, 2010.
The company's investors include UP2398 and Y Combinator.

Proposed next steps:

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Our initial research suggests that there are many available resources that can be used to gain more insights on Workflowy's growth trajectory. We then recommend continuing the research to look for 6-8 additional insights on why the company seem stagnant. We will further look at relevant business plans, company announcements, funding data, and other reports that show the priorities and activities of the company and its key leaders.

We also recommend undertaking another research block to look for 2-3 competitors of Workflowy to assess the competitive landscape of this space. This will be helpful to identify where Workflow needs to focus based on its competitors' competitive edge. We will provide their product offerings, competitive advantage, and target customers in a spreadsheet.

We also recommend undertaking additional research to perform a SWOT analysis on Workflowy to fully analyze the company.