Matt Murray / Widewail
Start Here Podcast | Episode #74 | 6/15/2023
From an Xbox handle to a cutting-edge trust-marketing platform, the word “Widewail” has played a pivotal role in shaping Matt Murray’s journey. Hear Matt’s inspiring story as he shares how his visionary company is revolutionizing the landscape of customer reviews, creating a new era of impactful feedback.
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Transcription:
MATT MURRAY
We’re not the type of company that’s trying to raise a whole bunch of money, hire a bunch of people, and burn a lot every single month. We, my wife and I, said in the very beginning, we want to be stable, we want to be profitable, and we want to have a fantastic place to work, and we’ve stuck to that.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
From the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies, it’s Start Here, a podcast sharing the stories of active, aspiring, and accidental entrepreneurs. Today we sit down with Matt Murray, A/V veteran, Dealer.com alum, and co-founder of VCET portfolio company Widewail, a pioneer in the trust marketing space. Welcome. This is Sam Roach Gerber –
DAVE BRADBURY
And Dave Bradbury.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
– recording from the Consolidated Communications Technology Hub in downtown Burlington, Vermont. Matt, welcome back, my friend.
MATT MURRAY
Thank you so much. It’s fantastic to be here.
DAVE BRADBURY
Great to see you here. Five years have gone by quick, huh?
MATT MURRAY
Unbelievable, unbelievable.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I’m getting a little emotional over here.
DAVE BRADBURY
Well, it is really early on a Monday, so yes. We’re all a little weak.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Nothing to do with you, Matt. Okay, I just want to start at the very beginning. Tell me about you. Where are you from? What kind of kid were you? What kind of high school student were you? Give me a little glimpse into little Matt.
MATT MURRAY
Yeah, I’m a Vermonter, born and raised. Let’s see, Essex High School. I would say that I was not the most committed student. I did go to the University of Vermont really for three or four semesters and then just said, you know what, I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to get out of here. I joined the Navy and did that for six years, stationed in Jacksonville. That was an incredible experience, frankly, sort of formative for me in a lot of different ways.
And then I didn’t know what to do after that. Not having really marketable skills coming out of the Navy, I called my folks and said, hey, do I still have a bedroom? And they said, yeah, sure, come on home. I had about three or four months of exploration. I kind of had to decide, am I going back to school to finish up, or am I heading into the private sector?
And at the time, I had an offer to manage the Borders bookstore, if you remember on Church Street. And looking back I’m glad I didn’t take that path. Some of you don’t even know, Borders was a thing on Church Street.
DAVE BRADBURY
It was a big thing.
MATT MURRAY
Yeah, it was a top-of-the-block sensation. But at the time – and some of you can sort of connect to this – I would do almost anything to get out of my parents’ house. I was 26 years old. I would do my laundry at the laundromat, and I’m sitting up there reading a book, and I see this ad for what I thought was a telemarketing company. It was like, “Cool, snowboarder, come on down, hit the phones,” type of feel, and that was not my bag. But I went home and my mom had clipped the same thing out of the paper, right? So it’s on the breakfast bar.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
A little hint.
DAVE BRADBURY
We’re talking about hardcover books and newspapers, I love it.
MATT MURRAY
Yeah, totally. So it was an informational session. I went down, there were probably 60 people there. They were looking for a quorum of underemployed or unemployed Vermonters, because they were trying to scale up a partnership with the Vermont Department of Labor. I met Dan Jackson, who went to Saint Mike’s, and my stepdad was one of his professors. I had that great personal connection, and then it was like, yeah, let’s go. I joined Dealer.com in the spring of 2007.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Wow. You made it sound pretty fluid there, but going from military life to civilian life is not easy, especially moving back into your parents’. Were you feeling motivated to do something exciting and new and different, or were you just kind of in a rut there?
MATT MURRAY
I left out an important part. I went from the Navy to Manhattan, and being 26, it was like, oh, man, in Manhattan, right? And I had a buddy who was living –
DAVE BRADBURY
Bright lights, big city time.
MATT MURRAY
Yeah, totally. I had a buddy living on the West Side working at Initiative Media, and I think he was a media buyer at the time. And he said, “Just come on up, we’ll get you a job.” So I went to New York without a job, assuming that I would just slot in.
And I got a Manhattan apartment, the whole thing, and ended up over the course of a year interviewing at Initiative eight to ten times. Every single time the job would open, they would call me. “Put on your collared shirt and come on down.” And every time after the process, they would say, “Internal referral, somebody else snapped it up from inside the company.” And so I basically spent that whole year slinging drinks and waiting tables. Talk about feeling like I was in a rut. A great cash business, whatever, but you’re working from 4:00 PM to 2:00 AM, just a bizarre lifestyle. So I gave that up. That was when I called my parents and said, this is silly.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Okay, and then you got your Dealer break, love it.
DAVE BRADBURY
This is a Monday morning mood.
MATT MURRAY
We’re going deep.
DAVE BRADBURY
Let’s get it up here a little bit. Tell us what Widewail is. How did the name come up? It’s like a favorite pair of corduroys or something?
MATT MURRAY
That’s a great start. Widewail is a trust marketing platform. The goal really is to help local businesses shape the narrative digitally. All of their prospects are consuming reviews, social comments, and media generally to try to form an opinion about the transaction that they believe they’re interested in, whatever that is. Am I going to this restaurant? Am I buying this car? Is this my new dentist? We all have to gain that confidence toward the transaction.
The name itself, I was in the Navy, I learned how to play guitar, and immediately thought I was going to be a producer. Like, I’m going to start a production company, it’s going to be amazing. That was Widewale at the time, like the corduroy, W-A-L-E. I actually still try to find the notebook, it’s somewhere with the name in it. But I didn’t start a production company.
Years later, as Dealer.com was really kind of experiencing explosive growth, I thought, hey, you don’t have to have a billion-dollar company. You could have twenty $50 million companies, but you need that parent. And that was the name Widewail, that kind of came back. I didn’t do that either, but it became my Xbox handle.
DAVE BRADBURY
Got it, got it.
MATT MURRAY
So I’ve got a boy, my son. We would play Xbox together and I would log in as Widewail. And years later when we started the company, if you go try to find a domain, it’s almost impossible. So Widewail came back up to me. At some point it became W-A-I-L – like the old Burlington band, I would find out – a ’90s Burlington band, Widewail.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I believe the husband of one of the musicians is a VCET member as well.
MATT MURRAY
That’s bizarre. I’d like to meet him.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
You touched on it a little bit, but I don’t even remember if this was the term when you started the company. But talk to us about what trust marketing is and how that space has evolved over the last few years, because it’s moving quicky.
MATT MURRAY
Yeah, totally. When we started the company, really we did that because reputation management had moved from something that was an ego-based sell – so you could go to a business owner and say, hey, you’re a 4.1 on Google, your competitor is a 4.5, you’ve got to fix that. And people would buy it. But that’s, again, an ego-based sell. You’re going to have high churn rates. There’s less demonstrable ROI.
In 2016, Rachel Botsman does a TED Talk – she’s a trust fellow at Oxford, by the way, a brilliant woman – the TED Talk was called, “We’ve stopped trusting institutions and started trusting strangers.” Really compelling for me. And then it was followed up by, hey, reviews are a huge part of local SEO.
Now we had demonstrable ROI, something we could really sink our teeth into. And so we used to just educate. Every pitch was education. Here is all of the proof that more reviews are going to help you show up better in local search.
Over time we brought Rachel Botsman and trust marketing back to expand the scope, especially as we added additional products. Now we would lean into the vision, and the vision is to help create trust between businesses and the communities they serve.
DAVE BRADBURY
Because that leads to commerce? Why would I want trust?
MATT MURRAY
The thought Rachel planted in my head was, in the last 20 years specifically we’ve seen more institutional and corporate failure than at any other time in history. Examples of that, half of the Fortune 500 has turned over. Accordingly to Edelman less than a third of consumers trust the brands that they buy. We’ve watched the BP oil spill, hacks at Nike, Yahoo!, and Target. Think about Volkswagen’s “Dieselgate.” Americans trust media less than they ever have. The list just goes on and on.
Now in that same time period, we’ve seen this explosion of networks, marketplaces, and platforms. Every consumer can just grab their phone and sort of stress test their decision, try to find confidence before they go spend their hard-earned dollars on whatever that transaction might be.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Can you run us through a case study of one that sticks in your head, of a company you’ve worked with that just went from zero to 100?
MATT MURRAY
Well, this will be fun because it’s local. The vast majority of our business is outside the State of Vermont, but during the pandemic Jenny Carlson at Code Style Club launched her business.
DAVE BRADBURY
I love Jenny.
MATT MURRAY
Yeah, she’s the best. She launched a men’s salon during a pandemic. That’s really difficult.
DAVE BRADBURY
Basically a week before shutdown.
MATT MURRAY
Right. And I’m thinking, oh gosh, Jenny – I’d sort of followed her along from a couple of other establishments, and I started talking to her. I’m like, look, you’re going to need social proof, number one, during a pandemic, to make people feel comfortable. Like, hey, other people are coming in and getting these services. So there was just that trust right there.
But then she’s competing with these businesses who’ve been around Burlington at the time – you think of some other local establishments, without naming them – that have been around since the ‘90s. Like, how does she compete against that well-embedded set?
So we set her up with Widewail Invite and she started driving a ton of reviews, asking every single guy who left, like, “Hey, leave us a review.” They were getting texts on their phones. And she rocketed to over 100 reviews in, like, 60 days, and just surpassed competitors.
Now, in the back end – at the time it was the Google My Business profile, now it’s the GBP – we’re monitoring her GMB performance, and the number of visits, calls, and asks for directions just went through the roof. And we used her, frankly, we used her in case studies. We would show prospects all of the country, like, look, this business went from zero to 60 in basically 90 days.
DAVE BRADBURY
And your hair looks great, too.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I swear, that woman cuts the hair of every entrepreneur and investor in the State of Vermont. I’m going to start going to her. I don’t know what she can do with this, but –
DAVE BRADBURY
You should, yeah. They take women and children now.
MATT MURRAY
That’s where you go for gossip, too. You can learn a lot about the community.
DAVE BRADBURY
Okay, let’s get off of that tack.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
You’re scaring him, Matt.
DAVE BRADBURY
Well, Ethan Bechtel is a regular there, too.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Of course.
DAVE BRADBURY
He’s a talker. Right, Ethan? You co-founded Widewail with your wife, Angie. Tell us about that partnership. What works well, maybe what hasn’t. In a very productive way, nice, she’s going to listen to it kind of way.
MATT MURRAY
Yeah, absolutely. So, we had just had a son. We just had Lincoln in January of 2018, and we launched the business in July. But the partnership there was simple. She’s got 12 to 14 years of operations experience in retail. She managed people who were actually in charge of this function in Denver for years, and so balancing me with that reality of what it’s like to work at the local business was huge. Everything from, how should our product work? How should we be talking to our customers? What’s a good cadence? What’s going to work for them? And over time, now she basically heads all of operations at Widewail. But she’s that anchor, and we can always go to her and say, what’s it really like for the local business?
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Well, I think that’s so important for what you do. And Dave and I, the number one thing we look for when we’re hiring is retail or hospitality experience. Because once you’ve done that, I swear you can handle anything. It just makes people that will do whatever they need to do. They’re quick learners, they’re empathetic, they have a thick skin. I love that she was able to take that experience and turn it into – because I think people don’t talk about that, too, is like how relevant those skills are in a tech company.
MATT MURRAY
We do the same, as a matter of fact, especially in sales and on our response team. Folks who have great service backgrounds, they wear a hundred different hats and can always present the company best even at times of stress.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I have a question, because this seems to me to be like a really big ask and a really big lift. Maybe it’s not, and times have changed and I’m sort of behind, but how do you get customers to create video testimonial content? Because to me that’s like, how could you ever get them to do that?
DAVE BRADBURY
Yeah, a lot of friction there.
MATT MURRAY
So we asked ourselves a question – this was actually during the early pandemic – what else could we get people to do with an SMS prompt. So the basics there being, we’re getting people in the real world to do something. Like, celebrate that. And so we started talking like, well, wait a minute, how cool would it be – TikTok is exploding – if we could get people to turn their phones on themselves?
So we built the tech and started to kind of test it, and almost had, like, an internal pool. People were saying things like, “Demographic would matter. We’re never going to get an older generation to do this. “That was one of the big ones. A second was, “People will never do this for free.” The “What’s in it for me?” thing came up. I actually had a client, a very large client in Boston, bring that up and say, “How are you going to incentivize?”
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I would have asked the same thing.
MATT MURRAY
And lo and behold, the very first video we ever got was from an octogenarian in Florida, a customer of a Mercedes-Benz store in Jacksonville. And he got the text, unincentivized, and turned his phone landscape – what’s up, pro – and gave an amazing video testimonial. And at the very end he said, “Look, I didn’t buy my vehicle here, I have it serviced here, but the next time you can bet I’m going to buy from this store.” And it was like –
SAM ROACH-GERBER
And now he’s Head of Content at Widewail!
DAVE BRADBURY
Or he gets a new Mercedes whenever he wants.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I love that story. That’s so good. I realize I stepped ahead a little bit. I got excited, and that has been a big question for me. But can you talk a little bit first about just the trajectory of the platform? What did you start with, and then what have you sort of built since then?
MATT MURRAY
So we started with tech-enabled managed services, a very basic theory there, and powered a lot by Angie, frankly, my wife. If we can build trust with our customers through a high-touch managed service, when we release software, they are much more likely to buy, right? And so we started with a very lean business case, like, hey, we’ve got to hire people, and we’ve got to build software and offer a product that is very affordable but has a very high value.
And that was the birth of Widewail’s Engage product, which now powers thousands of businesses across the US. I mean, last month alone, just our direct clients – forget our resellers or licensing partners – we took in over 40,000 reviews that were managed by our team. Forget the social side of the business, even.
And that really played out well. And that’s turned into is great net dollar retention and all these wonderful low churn metrics, like the platform. Our customers never wonder if we’re doing our jobs. Managed services, followed by software products. We’re going to actually release another product here in about 60 days to the software side, and continue to bring really great value to the existing customer set.
DAVE BRADBURY
Can you talk about how reputation or reviews impact SEO? Is it just keyword-based or sentiment? What’s going on there? What’s the magic?
MATT MURRAY
Sure. There are a lot of different contributors to what you see in the Map Pack. The story I like to tell is, imagine you went to a conference in Manhattan, and at lunchtime you’re so fired up to go to a New York deli. If you backed up to maybe 2014 or 2015, in that time frame and earlier, if you did that search, “Deli near me,” that very first result was going to be the closest deli. Everybody still frankly expects that today.
Given the birth of trust marketing and Google’s belief in this concept, it’s much more likely today that Google will say, “Yeah, there’s one that’s close to you, but if you walk two blocks further, everybody there is saying the food is fantastic, the service is wonderful.” They clearly have a high transaction volume because of the frequency of their reviews, and they deserve the first spot. So it’s what the customer talks about, it’s volume, frequency, and quality of reviews. Does that location have a response strategy? And together, it’s telling Google, I feel safe – Google feels safe – sending its searchers to that offline experience.
Now, if they did not do that – let’s talk about the negative side – let’s say I take my family to Cape Cod. One of the kids, I don’t know, gets an abscess tooth. This stuff happens. Everybody with kids knows the worst things happen at the absolute worst time. I ask Google to give me the best dentist near me. If I go there and they start pulling teeth without Novocaine, I’m not only going to be really upset with the doctor or the dentist, I’m going to be upset with Google.
And they’re not interested in that. Search is Google’s ATM. 90% search market share for everything in the world, across every device. They continue to iterate on that, and have really brought sort of customer voice into the algorithm.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
That’s awesome. And yeah, I think we are starting to take that for granted, but it wasn’t that long ago that you really had to dig into it and be pretty savvy to understand what you’re being fed. So I think the change in the last few years has been monumental.
DAVE BRADBURY
Can I ask a question, Sam? It used to be that if you had a negative review or a negative experience – let’s say I was buying something on Amazon, right – and either that experience or the vendor upset me in some way, I would tell seven people. The negative was just more profoundly shared. Is that still true? Does that far outweigh the positive experience, or is what you’re doing sort of leveling that up?
MATT MURRAY
People don’t think about this, but upset customers are so much more likely to leave a negative review. They feel like they’re doing a service to the community by saying, “Hey, don’t go here. I had a bad experience.” So unfortunately – and we sort of feel this – unmanaged, those comments tend to be more negative than the reality of the business experience.
So today we know for instance, 85% of consumers trust reviews as much as a personal recommendation from friends or family, and the volume at which we’re seeing people leave reviews is just increasing every year. It’s becoming easier. People understand the utility of the review, so they’re much more likely – especially if you make it easy, plug Widewail Invite – to leave that feedback online.
DAVE BRADBURY
So a 1-star is equally perceived as a 5-star?
MATT MURRAY
You know, it just depends. I would almost ask you, when you go to evaluate a product at Amazon – everybody does this differently – are you the type of person who reads the last ten, or do you sort for just the negatives to see the worst-case scenario? How do you do it?
DAVE BRADBURY
On Amazon, I assume they’re all fake.
MATT MURRAY
Yeah, you’re not alone. 15%.
DAVE BRADBURY
I’ll go try to find a product in a brick-and-mortar or something a little bit more – someone who’s a member of the community – because I feel like there’s social capital they have at play for allowing chaos on their side. But that might just be me. What do you do, Sam?
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I’m a qualitative gal; I like to just read the reviews. Star rating doesn’t matter as much to me, if I’m seeing the same, “Runs a little small” 45 times, and it’s the most recent comment. I’m like, okay, that seems legitimate to me. And like I think some of the most powerful are like the negative reviews that are like, “I’m giving this three stars, but only because it came late.” I’m like, okay. So I think that stuff matters to me more.
MATT MURRAY
So you’re looking for the worst-case scenario, and that’s kind of common. And there is a beauty to the negative review. We talk about this all the time. It’s the business’s opportunity to show that they care, right? And you know, you sort of feel, if you go to a review site and it’s five stars and 1,000 reviews, something’s wrong, right? They’re cheating. And generally they’re probably review gating, which is now expressly prohibited by all sites and the FTC. You can get in a lot of trouble doing that. But this used to be the way. It’s like, let’s just get happy customers to leave reviews. Consumers then go, well, this can’t be real.
So in today’s world when we see a 4.5-star rating and 1,000 reviews, that’s a fantastic business. They’re doing a really great job, and they’re humans. Once in a while they make mistakes. That’s fine. How do you recover?
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Honestly, if I am shopping on Amazon, I look almost exclusively at the volume of reviews. I don’t even really care what the rating is, but if there are like 50,000 reviews on something, I’m like, okay, a lot of people are buying this for a reason.
DAVE BRADBURY
The product’s been there a while. How is ChatGPT, AI, content generation – like, are you losing sleep over that? Are you taking advantage of it? How is it impacting your business?
SAM ROACH-GERBER
The smirk on your face right now, that is so good.
MATT MURRAY
We are so excited about it, to be frank. A business like ours that has an extraordinary amount of unstructured data benefits immensely from a platform that can understand natural language and spit out insights. The very easy application – you’ll see everybody do this – is that chat-style feature, right? Where it can help a customer of ours respond to reviews faster by giving them a suggested response. Great, we built that.
What’s more exciting, and we believe truly the future of our platform, is to take all of that feedback over a month or a quarter and tell the business about itself. Here’s what people loved specifically. Here are the three dishes that were best at your restaurant. Here are the ones that were maybe underwhelming. Here’s what folks thought of the ambience and the staff at your location. You don’t have to go buy a million-dollar platform from a huge enterprise software company – that will remain nameless – in order to get –
DAVE BRADBURY
He knows competitors are the next question!
MATT MURRAY
– in order to get feedback or really summarize what your guests think. And so we’re talking about it, I mean, literally every day. You could ask the Wailers, it is a huge part of where we’re focused.
DAVE BRADBURY
Sam, I don’t know if you noticed his shirt with the Widewail logo, but you’ve had the AI in Widewail since 2018.
MATT MURRAY
Jake pointed that out, our Director of Marketing. Immediately, Widewail, got the AI right in there.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
The Wailers, not the Worcester hockey team. Those are your employees. Maybe a boring question, but I’m just curious, is there an industry limitation here? Do you work with just specific industries, or can anyone work with Widewail?
MATT MURRAY
So we’ve got great concentration in automotive because of our roots. Our CTO is from auto, Angie’s from auto, and I am as well, technology side. So we got to revenue through the industry that we know best. We also have established multifamily home property management.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
What low-hanging fruit there must be there.
MATT MURRAY
Anything that’s a considered purchase is a great target for Widewail. Now, that said, most of our value is delivered through automation. While we do receive inbound leads, and we have customers in literally every single vertical, we are very thoughtful about extending the platform into new verticals and making sure we have the right integrations. Think of Zoho, HubSpot, or any CRM; we need that technical connection to automate our products and bring the best value.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
What type of business does it not work well for?
MATT MURRAY
Fast casual dining right now. Think about businesses that don’t have contact information. Maybe you just swipe a card that isn’t connected to any kind of loyalty program. If we can’t get contact info, most times businesses try to use the platform manually. So somebody at the business has to be responsible for filling out a form or uploading a CSV, to send out all those texts and get that feedback. People-powered processes over time, they just fail.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Let’s say you’re starting a new business today. How should you think about this from the start? Because I think a lot of businesses kind of think of it as an afterthought, like, the “oh shit” moment. So how do you suggest incorporating it from the start?
MATT MURRAY
I had a restauranteur say to me, “This is the perfect launch product,” and I love that. Code Style Club experienced that. Not that it doesn’t bring value to every phase, but if you’re a brand new business, you need a megaphone, right? And to get consumers to be that megaphone early on, you’ve got a leg up. You’re trying to catch the competitor down the street. How do you prove that you’re better, early? All those happy customers are your opportunity.
DAVE BRADBURY
You alluded to competition, and million-dollar-plus kinds of ways. Can you talk a little bit about competition, how you view it, and how you beat it, I guess? And then what’s the entry point for a retailer that might want to begin this, in terms of price per month or however you charge?
MATT MURRAY
Yeah, of course. So our industry is not new. In fact, you can go back to 2000 and see reviews on the Better Business Bureau. Everybody’s familiar with their type of reviews. Or Yelp, Yelp has been around forever.
DAVE BRADBURY
Is Yext one too?
MATT MURRAY
Yext is more kind of business listings.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Everyone’s been personally victimized by Yelp at some point.
MATT MURRAY
Yeah, we could do a whole session.
DAVE BRADBURY
It keeps reappearing on my mobile phone. Like, it just won’t delete.
MATT MURRAY
They have an interesting philosophy. We could come back. So there’s competition that’s multi-vertical, right – a Reputation or Birdeye are good examples of companies that are cross-vertical – they serve everybody. Then there are vertically-aligned competitors. We’re finding over time, frankly, that we generally outperform vertically-aligned competitors. The beauty there, or the reason for that is we built for automotive first – which is highly complex, with thousands of transactions at every location every single month – so when we take that to a new vertical that might do, let’s say, 50 sales a month, we are overengineered. We’re ready to handle multiple departments. The amount of feedback we can provide and reporting is just more complex than they need.
So on a vertical basis, we perform very well. Those cross-vertical competitors are highly funded. They’ve got a huge lead in terms of time to engineer their platforms. They have thousands of employees. We’re looking at them all the time and saying, how are we better? And one of the fundamentals is our 10% rule. Everything we do has to be 10% better than what we’re aware of in the market today, because it’s competitive. Were it all white space or green field, things might be different. You might just release and go. In our case, we’re pretty thoughtful about every product and feature.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
How do you ensure that it’s 10% better? Like, what’s the gut check there?
MATT MURRAY
So obviously we do our homework. We go see everything we can see. We’ll use trusted clients who may have used those solutions before to understand their shortcomings. But I will tell you, in comparison to some of those, we beat them in service every single time. And this seems very basic. One of our values is that we are responsive, and obviously, that plays into our managed services. But look, if you reach out to us you deserve our attention. And that’s somehow not always the case. We don’t fundamentally understand that, but we never leave work with a customer or a prospect kind of hanging out in the wind.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
You walk the walk.
DAVE BRADBURY
Love it. Can you tell us a little bit about your capital path. How did you and Angie start and fund this along the way? As you took outside money and investors, what were the trade-offs, the good, the bad? What would your advice be to the next veteran living with their parents’ home in Vermont?
MATT MURRAY
So we do have an advantage. While I was still gainfully employed and receiving a paycheck, we hired Adam Burnett – who’s now our CTO – to start building the platform. I just wrote him an SOW. It was kind of, here’s the rate for this basic, and then we would add features as we went. There were six or eight months of development that we could fund ourselves.
When we decided to launch the company and stop taking income, at that point, I mean, we have four kids. That was a moment, plenty of stress. Six months in, as the end of 2018, we just said we need a little bit of padding. We went to some really close friends, trusted mentor types, and just took 150 grand, something to help us sleep at night. We actually never ended up using that 150 grand – we sort of rode it and the revenue carried us from there – but mentally, that was huge.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
You can’t send the kids with ramen every day.
DAVE BRADBURY
Literally he was standing 15 feet away from us, and I had no idea that he was raising that angel money.
MATT MURRAY
Yeah. I had no idea how to do that, by the way.
DAVE BRADBURY
You picked a couple of really great individuals to show you.
MATT MURRAY
Yeah, I can’t say enough – it was [00:33:10 Mike Lion], [Rick Gibbs], and my father-in-law who wrote checks early on and just said, “You can do this.” And maybe that was more valuable than the money, in retrospect. Fast forward to the spring of 2021 –
SAM ROACH-GERBER
First of all, that’s a long time. That’s impressive.
MATT MURRAY
Yes, thank you for that. We could feel that the business, number one, had met product market fit. We had products at that point that we could sell. We just needed to grow faster. And again, these guys, Mike and Rick, said, “What you’re feeling is they need to raise money. Like, this is how it works.” And I said, “Well, thank you.”
SAM ROACH-GERBER
How do you know? You just know.
MATT MURRAY
Yeah, thanks guys. So in that round, we raised $1.5 million. VCET was part of that round. A huge thanks to you all, of course.
DAVE BRADBURY
Finally, we were able to put some money in. I called you over two Decembers, like, oh, maybe he and Angie need a little Christmas money. I’m trying to buy common shares, but they declined.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Patience is a virtue, Dave.
MATT MURRAY
I will tell you this from a philosophy perspective, though we’re not the type of company that’s trying to raise a whole bunch of money, hire a bunch of people, and burn a lot every single month. We, my wife and I, said in the very beginning, we want to be stable, we want to be profitable, we want to have a fantastic place to work, and we’ve stuck to that. So today while we’re watching tech infrastructure crumble under capital demands – nobody wants the down round to all these problems – like they’re firing everybody.
DAVE BRADBURY
They’re burning a ton.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
It’s sickening.
MATT MURRAY
And that’s not a path – and we’re very open about this with the Wailers – that’s not a path that we’re interested in. We all want to keep doing what we’re doing, enjoy it, and spend money. Be capital efficient, essentially, and send money wisely.
DAVE BRADBURY
What planet are you from? It’s very different hearing that versus some of the mainstream media. He’s amping for his TED Talk, I think.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
He’s pretty close, I’ve got to say. So how many people do you have on your team now?
MATT MURRAY
Today there are 46 Wailers. We should be in the mid-50s by the end of the year. We’re feeling incredibly positive about the traction in property management and our ability to expand there. Just from a metrics perspective, our churn was about 1% per month in the first quarter. That’s world-class. We’re well-positioned to continue doing what we’re doing, release some additional products, and continue to grow the business. And we’re profitable.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Can you talk to us a little bit about your hiring strategy? Some companies are really struggling with it right now, especially with housing and childcare issues and all that. What do you look for in the people you hire, and what would you kind of recommend for companies that might be struggling with that right now? Or is it just that you’re so bad-ass that they just come to you, they want to work there, and it’s cake?
MATT MURRAY
No, Vermont has so many great opportunities right now. It’s such an exciting time to be part of this ecosystem. I’ll tell you that every time we hire, we try to use our network first. I believe in that personal connection of the Wailers to bring us really talented folks who will fit our culture. And I’m not looking to hire 20, 30, or 50 people at a time, so we can be a little bit more thoughtful and selective. In terms of what we look for when we hire, for the majority of roles that the company today we’re hiring for the person. Skills can be taught, character cannot.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
You’re speaking my language.
MATT MURRAY
The place where that starts to change clearly is where we need some hard technical skill, like our CTO. If you need a mid-level or senior-level engineer, that changes things. But we try to keep that ethos of good people first, and we can help you mature along the way.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
How did Riley Dickey get in there?
MATT MURRAY
Probably by mistake.
DAVE BRADBURY
He has a way of showing up with a nice smile.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I just knew he was going to, so I had to get a dig in there somewhere.
DAVE BRADBURY
He leaves us from his, doesn’t he!
MATT MURRAY
Riley’s been fantastic. He’s a connector, and you need those people. We have a handful of people within the business that are just well-networked, and oftentimes bring us the next opportunity or the next team member. And Riley has certainly proved to be one of those.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
And for people who are looking for a job, what better review to say, “I love my job, I love working here, and I think you would too.”
DAVE BRADBURY
And most of those 46 folks are in Vermont, correct?
MATT MURRAY
That’s right. The team members who are not, were here in Vermont and then moved. So New Jersey, now Brooklyn, Denver, we have team members, and that’s worked fantastically. I mean, we supported them through the move. They’ve taken their jobs with them. They’re thriving in a new community, but they’re still with us every morning. We have our morning meeting. And being a company that’s history is now primarily COVID, most of our team knows Widewail from 2020 forwards. We’re really good at doing this hybrid thing.
DAVE BRADBURY
Yeah, it must have been fun to take the masks off. “Oh, that’s what you look like!”
MATT MURRAY
It was actually a little weird, the first time we all got together in Hula. People commented on that, like, we’re really this far apart. We all had those experiences, right? It was different.
DAVE BRADBURY
And I love your journey, too. You started at your home. You worked out of VCET for some months. Chase Mill, you had an office. Then you had another house, I think you moved the team into, I think a rental or something, and then have this great pace at Hula today. So really, really nifty.
You’re also on the advisor or investment committee to the Dudley Fund, that makes investments in up-and-coming companies here. What does that side of the table look like, Matt? What have you learned?
MATT MURRAY
Well, I’m a first-time founder. My wife and I have never started a business before, either one of us. And that commitment to Vermont – I mean, our match to the Dudley Fund was perfect. Jim Crook, Allison, John Antonucci, they all said, “This is a mission-based fund. We’re trying to invest in Vermont. Let’s find companies, maybe they’re even pre-revenue or just very early, but have great potential to hire here in the state, and help fund them.”
And that experience for me, I mean, the majority of it is learning. I’m surrounded by people who are so much more experienced than me on that committee, that just to listen to the way they evaluate a business helps me see my own. I can’t say enough about that experience and the companies that we’ve funded. I mean, it’s been unbelievable.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Yeah, we really value having the founder perspective, especially someone actively doing it, because you think differently than an investor. That’s so important. While we’re sort of on that subject, are there any local resources – local meaning Vermont – that have been really helpful from when you started Widewail to now?
MATT MURRAY
So my own network, obviously. I think sort of the family tree in Vermont – and in my lifetime, it goes to even to IDX. Think of all the great opportunity that was brought by their exit. And I see the Dealer.com leadership following in their footsteps. Biocogniv. I can’t wait to see the result of Beta and their progress over time. A founder who doesn’t reach out to VCET would be silly. There’s so much great guidance you can get here, and just rubbing shoulders with folks who are in the same phase as you has extraordinary value. But if you don’t – I think there are sometimes – sometimes folks think, I should just be able to figure this out. I see other people start companies, I should be able to. There is no founder who did it by themselves.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I think that’s a Vermonter thing, too, a lot of DIY sort of, you’re failing if you don’t know how to do it on your own. I think the best founders are the ones that ask for help, and that hire people that are better than them at other things. And so I think the ones – especially the ones that are successful raising money and the ones that are successful hiring – are the ones that like you can escape as a service provider. You see them everywhere, because they are out there, and it makes it much easier to help those folks because they come to you. They want to help. Those are also the people that help other founders, which I think is really cool.
DAVE BRADBURY
They learned to pay it back, pay it forward. It’s a lonely thing, starting your company. You, your family, the dog, and then you got to have other folks to commiserate with and to share. Starting to wrap it up here, what’s next for Widewail? Show us the road head.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
60 days, a new product, right?
MATT MURRAY
New product listings management, so helping businesses ensure that their core listings data – you think first of name, address, phone – is correct across all listings, websites, and navigation apps. Alexa, voice search, all those things.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
So the fact that people think our Middlebury office is still open, you could maybe help us with that.
MATT MURRAY
It’s a perfect example. There’s nothing worse – we can all connect to this – it’s a Saturday. You needed maybe to get some cleats for your kid because soccer season is starting. You look up a business on Google and it says they’re open. You get there and they’re closed. That is a perfect example. Or you think you’re calling a plumber because you have an emergency, and the number’s wrong, it’s been dead for five years. Some of those basic things really erode trust, and we’re after building trust.
DAVE BRADBURY
That sounds like a tall order, to scrub the information out there. Good on you.
MATT MURRAY
We’ve been talking or thinking about it since 2019. We did so much research.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I’m sure you’re solving your own problem, too, in many ways. I’m sure it’s a pain in the ass.
MATT MURRAY
Widewail is the first consumer. We’re on the product today prior to launch.
DAVE BRADBURY
It’s kind of terrifying, he’s going to go home and review, or maybe you pre-reviewed us and it’s just going to bot in here.
MATT MURRAY
Do you have Widewail Invite at VCET?
DAVE BRADBURY
Of course, we’ve been users from the start. We’re just trying to get the door open consistently. Sam, why don’t you take the magic wand question, please?
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Oh, I’d love to. All right, Matt. If you could change one thing in Vermont today with a magic wand, what would it be?
MATT MURRAY
Childcare.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Yes, thank you! I just start crying.
MATT MURRAY
I can’t believe some of the things – so the place where my children go today is unbelievably fantastic, but has a 120-family waiting list. That waiting list carries them at least two years out. Other local service providers I’ve heard recently have increased fees up to 40% to cover some of their fixed costs. I mean, there’s just an incredible affordability and access issue to childcare. And if you can’t solve that problem, how are we going to create the next founder? That is a fundamental issue in the house that doesn’t release the parent from that stress ever. So if we can solve that, I mean the economic impact is clear.
SAM ROACH-GERBER
I’m also one of the lucky ones. I have amazing childcare for my son. But he’s almost two, and I got a call from one of the daycares where we’re on the waiting list, like, last week. And they were like, “Hey, we have an opening.” I’m like, he’s 2 years old.
MATT MURRAY
Yeah, thanks, guys. Thank you! Appreciate it!
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Well, thanks, Matt. Yeah, that’s a big one.
DAVE BRADBURY
Thank you, Matt Murray, for coming in and sharing a little bit about Widewail. Look at you, kid. Look at you!
MATT MURRAY
Thanks for having me. It was super fun.
DAVE BRADBURY
This has been Start Here, a podcast shares the stories of active, aspiring, and accidental entrepreneurs. The series is supported by the Vermont Technology Council and Consolidated Communications. Let’s get back to work. Let’s do a review today!
SAM ROACH-GERBER
Oh, yeah – of this podcast!
