Mike Vichich - Co-founder & CEO of Wisely

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On Apple TV plus what is going on, everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. On today's episode, I sat down with Mike Vikich, the co founder and CEO of Wisely. Wisely is a restaurant CRM built to put guests first and grow profits. Wisely bridges the gap between guest data and the guest experience so that brands can deliver on what guests want the most, boosting customer loyalty and revenue every step of the way. On today's podcast, Mike and I spoke about his journey as an entrepreneur. The multiple different software companies that he started before Wisely, and most importantly, how they got to where they are today. So please, if you aren't already subscribed to Rise of the Young, make sure you do so and enjoy today's podcast with Mike Vikich. Okay, what is going on, everyone? Casey Adams here. Welcome back to the Rise of the Young podcast. Today we have Mike Vitchik here on the show, the founder of Wisely. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Mike.

Thanks for having me, Casey. Great to be here.

So Wisely, man, this is something that our good friend Bmax put me onto. And shout out to Bmax if he's listening. And I just found it very amazing to see the product that you've built. But for everyone out there that may not know what Wisely is, I'd love for you to give them a 30,000 foot view of what it is that you and your team have built over the years.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. And also shout out to Vmax. My take on it is at the end of the day, what makes great restaurants great is their customers feel like they matter, right? You walk in and they know Casey and you have a great time. And so one of the things that we fundamentally believe is that relationships turn into revenue and guest data allows you to create relationships. If I know how Casey's interacting with the restaurant brand. I know what you like to eat, drink, your name, like, what your hobbies are, and I actually treat you like a human being rather than a number. You drive sales. And I think everyone from fine dining restaurants on down through Starbucks has figured that out. That's why Starbucks puts so much effort and energy into having their baristas learn the names of the people that are regulars. And that's a quick touch point, but it's super impactful.

I love that. So where did Wisely begin? Like, take us back to when you and your team first created the concept of Wisely Man.

It's a long and somewhat painful story, but a fun one. I mean, for me, it began I was a server in restaurants when I was growing up. And I would say that's where I had the insight that what I just said, right. That relationships drives revenue. Never thought that would be an important thing in story in my life. Turns out that it was. But I think I just saw early on that if I really cared who the people were and I learned their names and what they like to drink and built an actual authentic relationship with them, that I got tipped more. And then I saw that they started coming back more. And then that made my managers happy because they were spending more money. And then they ended up telling my managers that Mike's doing a great job. And then the managers put me in better sections on better nights. So literally, as a server, all I had to do was care and everyone was happier. It was costless. I didn't have to do anything else. That was throughout high school and college. And like I said, I never thought that would turn into anything. It's just kind of my broader approach to how I build relationships today is you try to help people and give first, and then it always comes back to you somehow or another. But when, you know, after college, I was at Accenture for five years, had a great time there, traveled a lot, worked with some of the biggest brands in the world in financial services, technology, med devices, all over the place, and left. And then with Tyler and Josh, back way back in 2012, we built three different consumer apps from 2012 to 2016, each of which failed for different reasons. Happy to take you through it, but like the net of it was, it's really hard, as I was telling you about on our last call, it's really hard to catch anything in a bottle on a consumer app. But then it evolved into what we are now in like late 2016, focused on B2B. We don't have a consumer brand anymore, and we never planned to got it.

So you guys transitioned and had many pivots to get to where Wisely is today. I remember you saying that.

Yeah, man. It's one of those things I never really knew. As I mentioned to you before, I never knew what Steve Jobs meant when he said, stay hungry, stay foolish. And the foolish part, I think is really important in hindsight, and I didn't get it at the time, but I. It's a lot of work and a lot of failure. And, you know, but you can't go into it expecting that. And I think for us, like, we just kept believing and finding the next thing and bobbing and weaving and just frankly not giving up, even though we were really, really close to it a few times.

When was the tipping point for you guys at Wisely when it comes to adoption and starting to bring on some of the first clients and businesses that were to test the products? And what was that process like in the beginning?

So I guess the somewhat short version of it is this is like the third consumer app that we built. Okay, well, I'll give you the somewhat short version of it. Is it cool if I tell you over the course of.

Yeah, 100%.

So the first app, whatever, that was a failure actually. It got written up in the Wall Street Journal and my mother was proud and blah, blah, blah. But none of that mattered, right? So it failed hard. The second one that we built was we thought that Netflix does a great job recommending movies and Amazon does a great job recommending physical products to buy. But there wasn't anything like that for the real world, like the physical world that we. Well, pre Covid used to walk in all day long. What we built was essentially a way based on someone's purchase transactions to be able to get a recommendation graph. Right. So people like you also like this restaurant if you're visiting la, right? As opposed to like just review online reviews, which we didn't feel like were that high signal. So we built that. It failed for. I mean, it was actually featured by Apple a bunch in the App Store. Got hundreds of thousands of downloads. It never went anywhere, though. It was around that time where it wasn't really working out that I started, you know, going out and doing something novel called talking to customers. I went out and started talking to a bunch of people. I lived in Ann Arbor at the time, so. And still do, but went around to business owners in Ann Arbor. Literally walked into hundreds of businesses and started just chatting with them. And one of the things that one of the guys said to me, owned a good pizza restaurant in Ann Arbor, said, look, man, last thing I need is another consumer app that I have to manage. I have Google, I have Facebook, I have Yelp, I have TripAdvisor. I don't need another one of these things. But what I would love to know is when one of my regular customers walks in and, you know, a light bulb went off in my mind back to when I was a 15 year old server and I'm like, oh yeah, of course you want to know who the regulars are and you know, when the high potential guests are in. And that was just something that didn't exist. There was and still largely is no CRM for a restaurant. And that insight, I think was probably like summer of 2014, we built another consumer app that was a loyalty app that used beacons in 2015 that also died. And then in 2016. So I would say we had the right problem, but the Wrong product in 2015. 2016 was when we shifted into right problem, right product. And then since then it's been, you know, a little easier.

Yeah. What were some of the biggest lessons you learned from those failures that led up to the right product in the right time?

Man 2 that come to the top of my mind are believing your own bullshit. Number one, I was guilty of that. Right. There's the physicist Richard Feynman says the easiest person to lie to is oneself. And I again didn't really know what he meant when he said that. But like, I'm guilty of having lied to myself way too many more times than I would love to admit, honestly. So I think, you know, I used to start from here's an idea, how do we prove that it's right to here's an idea, it's probably wrong and how do we make it less wrong? That's a fundamental flip. Second thing I would say is just related to ego. You know, I told myself and my wife and my parents and my friends three separate times that the app that I'm working on is going to be awesome. It's going to take off and I'm super excited about it. And then it failed. And then I did it again and it failed. And you know, you go through that a few times and you kind of get to a point where you literally don't care anymore. You just want to find a way. You just want to find something that works. And I think while those first four and a half years of wisely were brutally painful, like we missed payroll for months on end while they were brutally Painful. I honestly think it's a superpower now, having gone through that. So I feel fortunate to have had that privilege.

When was the point where you knew, like, hey, it's time to change gears, right? I know that you said, like, some of these apps were featured in the App Store. You had hundreds and thousands of downloads. Like, for a lot of people listening, they may deem that as, like, very successful and you have momentum. Like, when. When was the point where you knew you had to take a step back and pivot? And how did you necessarily do that? Was it just cutting it off? Does it stop working on the project? I'm very curious on that.

Yeah, it's a great question. So I'll step through each of the pivots that we made from the first one to the second one. We just categorically said, this is not going to work. Let's stop.

Okay.

Fully stopped. We had a kind of a post mortem, like, why did that not work? And then we said, okay, what's next? And we thought about it, right, as if we were literally starting a new company. And we didn't actually start a new company, but we thought about it like that. What are the problems that we want to work on? What do we find? What did we learn from the last thing that's transferable? And so we just basically picked a new idea and went after that a second time. The third time, to your point, we had hundreds of thousands of downloads and we were featured by Apple and Apple invited us out to show them what we were up to in their office. And we presented at a conference and we got some pretty good press out of it. So we're like, this might work, but we saw the numbers, we saw the underlying numbers and we're like, man, Even if we 10 or 100x the top of Funnel, it would be really hard to make this work. And it wasn't viral. So, like, we just kind of knew that we'd be pushing a rope. Yeah, we didn't kill that, though. The first time. We killed it dead and we started something new. This time we let it ride and we started it. We built another app on top of it. We actually at one point had two apps running in the App Store. Both were Wisely branded. Honestly, it was kind of weird, but one was called Wisely Loyalty. The owner was called Wisely Explore. You know, it was at the time, trying to recall, there was. I think it was Foursquare. They just had spun out Swarm as kind of a micro app. So there was this phase of like, unbundling apps that we thought might, might work. Ultimately we ended up killing the one that we kept running in the background and then worked on loyalty. And then when we moved from loyalty into like our B2B app now, we killed the front, the guest facing app. We literally like sent an email to everyone, said we're shutting it off in a month, you know, sorry. And then we just kept building from there. So I think the right thing in hindsight, probably for us at the time, the right thing was just to like kill it, move on to the next thing.

Totally. When working B2B now, what were some of the mindset changes that needed to happen when it comes to B2B versus consumer apps? And what would your advice be if someone's looking to make that pivot or even just stepping into B2B now?

Yeah, it is a different frame of mind. I guess the way that I would describe it is you have in consumer, you're largely building for like I'll say yourself, quote unquote. Right. Like you think you know what you should build and so you go do it. There are, I've since learned some more data driven ways to go at it that actually are kind of B2B ish. But you know, by and large, when you're building a consumer, you have a vision and you go build that vision. And either it works or it doesn't. And it's a binary thing. At least that's my opinion. I could be wrong about that. On the B2B side, you have a general vision, but at the end of the day, the people who are paying you, your customers are the ones that are kind of sequencing what you should work on. Right. Because we knew, for instance that. And it kind of sounds nerdy, but at wisely we believed in the power of customer lifetime value. Right. Like 20% of your customers drive 70% of revenue. As a business, you need to know who those are, find more of them, make sure they don't leave you all those things. And we, so we believe that, but like we also had to pay the bills. And so the way we sequence the features that we built on, you know, in our ultimate vision was in order of popular demand.

Yeah.

And what people would pay for. So I think you have a vision in B2B. It gets sequenced by customers.

Love that.

I've heard it referred to as like a cone, like in a hurricane, you know.

Yeah.

Cone of probability. People view a roadmap as like, you know, stops along train tracks, but really it's more of like a cone of Probability. And it could veer this way or that based on feedback that you get from customers.

Got it. What was 2020 like for you guys when it comes to working with restaurants? Covid, things shutting down? What were some of the challenges that you guys faced?

Man, I had, you know, probably got some gray hair. It was harrowing. I remember, and we're coming up on a year of this now, but I wrote it down on my calendar, so I don't forget. I think it was like February 27th of last year of 2020 that one of the folks on my board called and said, hey, look alive, this is going to get really, really ugly. And he had just gotten back from a trip where some folks were on the trip, were from Italy, and they were describing what was going down in Italy. So it was February 27th where we said, this might not be good. Then it was, I think the whole US basically shut down as March 14th. And at that point, most restaurant, actually every single restaurant wasn't even paying its rent. Like, they stopped paying and no dollars went out the door. So our revenue went from, you know, what we thought was a lot at the time to basically zero.

Wow.

And, yeah, I mean, you can't run a company like that. We were still, we still had all of our costs, most of them, but we unfortunately had to downsize the team. It was a really hard, insanely hard period in mid to late March and just get through the next couple of months. Then when it started to come back, we built the team back. We rehired some of the folks from the team. Others, thankfully, had been able to go on and get other jobs. And then we hired new folks. So we actually ended the year more people than we were in February. But from a sales perspective, we were able to triple our recurring revenue. And I think the main reason for that is that, you know, it was maybe a bit theoretical that, like, you had to own a customer relationship. You know, you had to be able to do something with your customer data before. But Covid taught everyone, like, literally, if you cannot email your customers and tell them, here's what your to go procedure is, or here's what your new menu is, or we reopened or we've shut down. Like, if you can't engage your guest, your customer, you're in a really hard spot. So fortunately, I think we caught the tailwind of that. Like, you know, I'll say June, July, August, onward through the end of the year. And I think that that was a trend anyways, but I think Covid accelerated it. Like, you hear so many times.

Yeah, it's been sped up a lot of things that were five, ten years out. When it comes to getting it back to where it is now, that's very cool. And I think, too, so many people can learn from that when it comes to the entrepreneurial journey of learning something and then coming back quickly and figuring it out. So how has the team grown and how have you maintained culture? And what do you guys do internally now with things going remote and everything shifting when it comes to the landscape of working from home?

Yeah, mostly we were remote beforehand. I mean, we had offices. We had an office in Ann Arbor, but our people were all over the country. We had an office in Chicago. We had an office in Nashville. The Chicago and Nashville ones, we just did not renew our leases on those. The Ann Arbor one we still have, but frankly, no one goes in there anymore. My son's former bedroom, we moved them in together and took over one of their bedrooms. But so I think we had gotten some experience with it before COVID so I would say that we didn't really miss a beat on that. But we started doing, like, happy hour at the end of the week on Zoom. Right. Where we just, you know, that we try not to talk about work.

Yeah.

This year there's been plenty of things to talk about. A lot going on in the world, so that was pretty easy. And then I think from a. You know, we're probably. Our goal, based on our sales targets this year, is to double the team again. So we've got a lot of folks that we need to hire. And I think what I've. What I've been doing is going back through and documenting the best people that I've ever worked with.

Yeah.

You mentioned bmax. He's on the list. What is it that's so good about bmax? Right. And, like, literally writing it down and trying to go find that in other people out there. Right. Because it is a unique thing. Like, cultures are living, breathing manifestations of their team at the end of the day. And so we want to make sure that we build on our culture and we improve our culture over time. But at the same time, there's a lot that is working now. We want to make sure that folks that come on are able to do both, are able to embody the things that we hold near and dear to our hearts and then represent ways that we can grow. And I'll give you an example. One thing that I think we were, I would say, pretty reactive in the early days for, I think, good reason, having to Figure out what product market fit looks like. But at the end of the day now I think we are much more planful, specifically from an engineering perspective where we have actual tech roadmaps we never used to. That's music to our engineering team's ears because we're being planful about that and make sure that we don't let tech debt get in our way at the end of the day. So I think it's, you know, that's a good example of like, we still want to move fast, but we want to be planful about building scalable systems.

Yeah. What would you say is the biggest thing you learned about just building tech and being able to pivot within that? Because like, as we talked about before this call, my partner and I getting into the software world, this is new to us at Media Kits. Like, what's your advice for someone just stepping in that world when it comes to working with devs and having that product roadmap laid out?

I really think that one of the biggest things is being open minded and good at critical thinking and recognize that you are probably wrong. I think that's the single greatest thing. In my experience, engineers and everyone really, but engineers especially do not love when folks are like really certain about things that are not certain. And I think people can handle uncertainty. You just gotta, you gotta tell them, right? You gotta be honest with them. So I think that's one thing, but I think the most specific thing, and I learned this from a guy who's involved with our company. His name's Arun. He was one of the founding team members of Uber Eats. And the way he encapsulated a point, I think really well, he says let the when drive the what, not the other way around. Most in a lot of software projects, you let the what drive the when. But if you say, what can we ship in 60 days? And you say something shipping in 60 days, what is it? And you throw out everything that's not like the most essential parts. That gives you a really great way to test and iterate and get what he calls conviction through experimentation. So I think that that to me, I'll never forget that line, you know, next, next thing I do any product we build at Wisely, it's always let the when drive the what.

I love that outside of Wisely, from a personal perspective, like, what were some of the early lessons from going to college? Like, did you plan on launching a software company? What were the early aspirations? I always like to dive into this when we have people on the show just to see you Know, outside of business, what's. What was going on in your life? How did you lead up to even getting involved from a software side?

So it's interesting. I, I was always like interested in computers growing up. I never was a, was a programmer, I would say in my house, you know, we were not like, we didn't have like satellite or cable TV until I was in high school, didn't have Internet until I was in high school. I had to beg for getting a computer so that stuff like wasn't in front of me all the time, which is fine. I mean, whatever. I played outside a lot. You know, that's all the rage these days. But, you know, my grandfather ran a construction company, was an entrepreneur. And I always admired like the fact that he built that company. And that was cool. And so I always like, thought in the back of my mind that I wanted to do something like that. I didn't know what it really meant. I knew that I didn't want to start a construction company, but I didn't know what company I would want to start. I was always interested in business too. You know, my uncle, when I was in high school, worked at a consulting firm and I thought that was cool because he was traveling a lot. And so, you know, I ultimately went out of college to Accenture and was traveling for five years. I thought that was. I really, truly learned a lot and had a great time. But, you know, it was. I was in the office late at night with Tyler, who is now my co founder, and we were just kicking around ideas and we're like, why don't we start that company? And we decided to, you know, begin working on, on it, evolve into Wisely until five years later.

But I love the story, man.

He was like minded in the sense, like he always wanted to start a company too. And sometimes you just gotta. You need like, at least I needed, you know, a partner that was like, no, let's just do it. Who cares? We'll figure it out. Because that was. I remember I talked to my dad when I was thinking about leaving an Accenture. And I was, I did well there. I performed, you know, always got raises and promoted whatever. But I remember telling him like, hey, dad, I'm thinking about leaving Wisely. Or sorry, leaving Accenture to start a company. He's like, are you insane? Like, actually thought I was insane.

Yeah.

But you know, the thing that simplified it all for me, man, was I knew that if I was 90 years old, looking back on my life, and I kept doing what I was doing at that time that I would be unhappy. And the next question that that raised for me is, well then why would I do this for one more minute?

Yeah, I love that. So I know you have to run, but what are you most excited about? Looking forward and where's the best place for everyone to stay connected with you and the team at Wisely.

I'm super excited. I think from a Wisely and product perspective, the next release that we have coming up in 20 at the end of the 25th, we've got a release event, getwisely.com sequel.

Nice.

I'm super psyched. We've got a lot of great clients that are going to come on and talk about all the awesome stuff that we've built in the last quarter that helps restaurants get through Covid get to the other side. I think for the restaurants that do push through and are able to make it through the other side will I think be, be better. Right. Like there's, there's going to be a lot of, I think a lot of pent up people that want, and once they get vaccinated, want to get out, try to live life as they can again. And then, you know, unfortunately the restaurant count in the country is going to be down pretty substantially. So you know, the ones that are there I think will be in high demand. So I think it's really, you know, it's, you know, pushing through the hopefully last few months of this and getting out the other side. So I'm super optimistic about 2021 and where we're headed both as an industry, as a company, as a country. You know, there's a lot of good momentum and then in terms of best way to stay in touch with Wisely and with me, I would say I'm not super active on Twitter, but I do, I'm on Twitter all the time. Yeah, you know, but we've got, you know, our company does a pretty good job at staying engaged on LinkedIn, so that's a great way to follow us.

Awesome. I'll make sure to link all that down below. Mike, I just want to say thank you so much for coming on today. This has been an awesome conversation. I appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. Casey, congrats to you on everything you're doing too. Legacy of Monsters An Apple Original Series the world, world is on fire. I decided to do something about it on November 17th. This place, it's not ours. Believe me. The most massive event of the year arrives. If you come with me, you'll know everything. I promise. Monarch Legacy of Monsters streaming November 17th only on Apple TV Plus.