Interview with Jerome Touze, Founder & CEO of WAYN
WAYN (Where Are you Now) is a web social network that lets people connect based on where they’ve been, where they are now, and where they’re going to be in the future. The company has received $11M in series A funding in November, 2006. It has about 8.5 million users so far and is growing at a rate of 15 to 20 thousand users per day. I caught WAYN’s founder and CEO Jerome Touze while he was visiting his company’s development center in Poland. We talked about how location can play a central role in online communities. Jerome also shared with me his thoughts on LBS and how he’s heading his company in that direction.
WAYN Numbers
The company has received $11M in series A funding in November, 2006. Until about 2 months ago the company, under the influence of one of its advisors, Steve Pankhurst (from Friends Reunited, UK’s equivalent of classmates.com), had been following a subscription business model where 70% of its revenues came from users paying 7.5 British pounds/month and the rest coming from advertising on the website. Since the funding of the company there has been a change in the competitive lanscape characterized by lower barrier to entry, more communities, and savvier users. So the company is aligning its busness model with other social networks making the service open for anyone to join. Jerome is reducing his company’s dependency on subscription revenues and expects the company’s revenues to be split at 80% ads and 20% membership fees going forward.
WAYN is projected to have almost 5 million unique visits for the month of August. I presume this number would be higher than the coming months because that’s when a lot of people are coming back from their summer vacations.
Users & Usage Behavior
Social network users are known to be polygamous. Users on WAYN might also be members of Facebook and HI5. So how does their behaviour differ in this travel-focused social environment?
The common denominator between WAYN’s users is their interest in travel. That is not to say that they have to be heavy travellers. Some WAYN users have never travelled before but are interested to meet up with tourists visiting their city and show them around. Another group of WAYN users travel quite a lot and the service lets them log their trips, share photos from their visits, recommend places they’ve visited, etc.
The top two reasons why people join WAYN are:
- Reconnect with friends that they haven’t spoken to in a long time and find out where they are now in the world and what they’re doing.
- Capture their travel experiences through photos, videos, blogs, reviews of hotels & restaurants, etc.
When I asked Jerome about WAYN’s main differentiator he said that:
Online communities are based around interaction. […] What drives this is the interaction is the information about the members […]. If you look at classmates.com the reason you interact is because you have something in common, i.e. you went to the same school. On a dating site you’re interacting because you’re attracted by each other. On WAYN it’s the same thing. It’s interaction. But based on something we bring them that they have in common: where they’ve been and where they’re going to be in the future. So if you’re going to Paris next week, and a person from the same hometown is going to be there at the same time as you, you can hook up.
Out of the three central location bits: where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going, the one that plays biggest role in initiating contact between users is where you’re going. The past trips information is very relevant from an individual perspective and plays on the nostalgia factor.
WAYN’s Mobile Ambitions
Jerome thinks that the mobile environment is not quite ripe for location-based services but that the inflection point is near. And he’s not going to wait until the ‘wave’ gets big to enter the game.
WAYN is in talks with service providers to see how it can offer its services as a ‘direct application on the handheld’.
One possible application would be to pick your cellphone when you land and enter your location. This will automatically alert you about the things that you can benefit from within the area, like discounts at restaurants. Users could also opt in to receive an update on which other WAYN travellers from their home country are currently in their location.
Location-Based Services Highlights
The company seems to be fully aware of the potential of location-based services and is putting its resources in that direction.
Unlike other newcomers to the LBS market, WAYN has an advantage stemming from its already existing database of location-based information. This content can make the company’s mobile product useful as soon as it launches. The same advantage applies to online recommendation sites like Yelp.
In its shift from web to mobile, the company will have to be insightful about changing user interests and behaviours. For example, mobile users might be more interested in where their WAYN friends are right now (think about Loopt) than where those friends might be travelling to next month.
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