Happy Birthday to us! Walls.io is 5 years old today, so we are having a look back at our humble beginnings, how we’ve changed and what we’ve achieved in the past 5 years. Enjoy our trip down memory lane.
Walls.io before it was called Walls.io
First off, I’ll let you in on a little secret. Technically, Walls.io is older than five, but it wasn’t called Walls.io back then. The very first version of Walls.io premiered all the way back in 2010, at a social media party in the (sadly now defunct) iconic coworking-space Sektor5 in Vienna. Here is a photo from the party showing what our social walls looked like back then. As you can see, we already supported four platforms on day 1.
Back then, it was just called the “Social Wall – By Die Socialisten”. Creative, right? 😉 On Feb 25th, 2014 we finally launched Walls.io as a stand-alone product, which is why this date marks our baby’s official birth.
On a side-note, this very early version was coded solely by our CEO Michael, and some parts of his original code survived for quite a few years.
We’ve been supporting BarCamps all over the world since 2011
Word about our product spread, and as early as 2011, we were supporting BarCamps all around the world with free social walls. Here’s an example running on a vintage iPad. At this point, we’d added Flickr to our social network lineup, taking the number of networks our social wall could aggregate content from up to five.
The idea behind the brand
We’re constantly improving and developing the user interface of the Walls.io app, introducing new features and adding new platform integrations. We also like to focus on our online presence. In the past 5 years, we’ve completely overhauled our main site, the Walls.io blog, and even our logo.
This is how the product was advertised on die.socialisten.at 5 years ago:
And this was the product landing page:
Walls.io is all about collecting amazing user-generated content and displaying it in one place. This is the foundation of our current branding and also represented in the logo through the wrapping element holding everything together.
Walls.io is easy to use, lightweight, and fast, so we rotated it 45 degrees to show a very agile and straight-forward product.
The tools that help us grow
We love SaaS and rely quite a lot on different SaaS products that help our business grow. At this point, these are the tools we couldn’t live without:
- Intercom — which helps us keep our customers happy
- Drift — which helps us acquire new amazing customers
- GitHub — which helps us develop Walls.io even further
- Google G Suite — which help us collaborate and be productive wherever we are
- SatisMeter — which helps us collect customer feedback and improve our product and services
- Printfection — which helps us create amazing swag for our beloved customers
- Swat.io — which helps us keep track and reply to all the messages we receive through various social media channels.
- Sticker Mule — which makes us happy because their vinyl decals just make people happy. And we get to play around with different looks for Walter!
The conferences we attend
Each year, our team members get a budget for educational materials and conferences. This has lead the Walls.io team to a variety of conferences over the past years.
- SaaStock
- SaaStr
- WeAreDevelopers
- A-TAG
- Pirate Summit
- AFBMC
- Funnelblick
- Smashing Conf
- Chatbotconf
- Learn Inbound
We’re hoping to attend many more conferences in the future and always encourage our team to go for things they’re interested in.
Our customers
We like to think we have the best customers. Whether they get an event subscription just for a weekend or have been sticking with us for a long time, we appreciate them all. But of course, there are some special ones we want to highlight.
The oldest social wall in our system that is still active today is, admittedly, our own. The wall walls.io/diesocialisten was created on July 20th 2011.
Outside of that, our most loyal customer is e-dvertising.at, an agency from Graz running social walls for Great Lengths, a global leader in the field of hair extensions. They started their subscription in August 2014 and are still going strong.
Our user base
10.6% of our users are paid accounts. 0.84% are sponsored accounts — for BarCamps, etc. And the majority, a whopping 88.5%, of our users are free accounts. Anyone can set up a free account for a social wall and keep it for life.
Amazing brands around the world using Walls.io
2018 was the year Walls.io grew on the international market. We’re very happy to see great diversity when it comes to our customers: tech giants, universities, hotels, agencies, sports teams, car manufacturers, international airlines, financial services providers, government institutions, fashion brands, etc. all use our product. Walls.io really is “The Social Wall for Everyone”.
We’re genuinely excited about all of our customers. But sometimes, a customer will just make us that tiny bit extra giddy, because they’re one of the big ones.
Our team
At the core of every company is its team. Ours isn’t big but it’s close-knit and some people have been around from the very beginning.
Our earliest & our newest team members
Martin and Patrick from our developer team both joined the company in 2011, about one month apart from each other. Both of them are still working here today, having grown with and within the company.
Our newest team member is Magdalena. The Spanish graphic designer has joined our Walls.io marketing team this very month, working on the Walls.io blog and our marketing campaigns.
Shortest and longest commutes
The person with the shortest commute to the office is Philipp with only 5 minutes. Magdalena has the longest commute. It takes her about 110 minutes to get here from Bratislava.
Technically, our freelancer Andie is even further away in Edinburgh, Scotland, but she only drops by the office once a year, so it doesn’t really count as a commute since all she has to do is go into her home office and turn on her computer. 😉
Meet our dev team
Did you know that Walls.io is developed by only 5 people? The product is split up into about 15 repositories, with a total of over 60,000 commits and 5,000 pull requests. The top contributor alone, Patrick, has contributed over 22,000 commits to the codebase.
Our most written-to database table has seen 1.5 billion “INSERT” statements over the years.
Some insights from our support team
Our support team is the heart of every product as these are the people our customers first go to with any issues or questions they might have. We’re happy to report that our support
- currently handles over 3,000 inbound conversations/year,
- has a 93% satisfaction rate,
- and a median first response time of 8m 23s.
To take as much pressure off our support team as possible, we’ve also developed a knowledge base as the first port of call. A lot of questions can be answered without even getting the support team involved and we’re constantly updating and further developing the database.
One thing is certain: our customers love our support team.
Our most prolific writer
More than 140 of the blog posts on the Walls.io blog have been written by Andie since she started writing for Walls.io in summer 2014.
Happy team, happy product
We’re very happy with how the last five years have panned out and will continuously keep doing our best to make Walls.io the perfect social wall for everyone. So here’s to the next five years full of doing great work and enjoying each other’s company. Check out these great team moments from the recent past:
Summer BBQs in our garden
Sweet moments in our office all year round
Fun events and activities with our colleagues from the Swat.io team
Camp404
Our development team working on a new feature in a more relaxed environment during a Camp404 retreat.
