Screenshots of the Dwolla Windows Phone 7 app, from dwolla.org/blog.
More evidence that online cash transfer startup, Dwolla, is picking up steam: they announced today that Dan Young has joined the team as Operations Manager and they recently previewed a Windows Phone 7 mobile app.
I tracked down Dwolla CEO and founder Ben Milne, which was easy to do since I hang out at their office most days,* to ask him about these developments.
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Silicon Prairie News: Young is your first “Operations”-specific hire, what does that involve?
Ben Milne (left): Essentially Dan’s role at Dwolla is two-fold.
1) Develop scalable systems for customer service and client support. 2) Facilitate and nurture large-scale business and merchant relationships.
Dan has a lot of experience in growing organizations and in setting up client support systems. In our case we need a lot of help currently with incoming merchants and facilitating the conversation / ensuring that we don’t miss opportunities because their needs do not fall under traditional customer service.
(Photo by Anna Jones Photography)
Dan is joining your team from Wells Fargo making him your first hire from the banking industry, how will that change operations?
Milne: It’s going to help us a lot with structure and implementation of escalated customer services.
Dwolla is growing pretty quickly and having someone with operational experience in these markets is going to give us insight into how to handle them as our team expands from two to 20.
Our company has accelerated from two people to almost a dozen people involved in various roles in just a few months. There is now someone whose role it is is to manage that expansion and ensure those large merchant opportunities are nurtured (not forgotten) as requests come in and we continue conversations.
Having someone with not only industry experience but in my opinion organizational experience is paramount right now. His timing couldn’t be better.
Late last week you started tweeting about a Windows Phone 7 mobile application for Dwolla, how did that come about?
Milne: We have known the Far Reach Technologies (a custom software shop in Cedar Falls) people for quite a while but never had the opportunity to collaborate on anything. Kate Washut, Chris Rouw, and I have had a lot of discussions about different opportunities but it just never worked out before.
They grabbed our API and really just went to work on building something the market did not have right now. That being a Windows 7 Phone application for Dwolla.
Why did Far Reach decide to build the app?
They said, “Would it be cool if we did this?” and I said something like, “Hell yes.” The next time I heard from them they were emailing me screenshots. So I drove to Cedar Falls to check it out. Obviously I geeked out about that time.
This is just a great example of what a good development team can do quickly when they have the tools they need. In this case their company supplied everything they needed and they utilized our standard REST API to build the app.
Pretty cool stuff if you ask me. No ego in this one for anyone. Just smart developers having a great time building something they want to use.
I bow down to Far Reach.
Here’s a video shot by Milne the night he met with the some of the team from Far Reach in Cedar Falls, and for more images of the app, see Dwolla’s post: “Windows 7 Mobile Development.”
*Disclose: The author, Geoff Wood, currently works out some of the extra workspace in the Dwolla office.
