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If you’ve been around SPM for any amount of time, you know how much we love the Tailwind App. 

It is an amazing scheduling tool, not just for Pinterest but also for Instagram. The Tailwind App is also a great analytics tool to use as you work on growing your business. 

Right now, The Simple Pin Collective is about to jump into what we are calling Tailwind month. 

We’re going through all the features of the Tailwind App, diving into our How to Master Tailwind course, and giving you a look into how this tool can really help you grow your business. If you’d like to join in on this training, you can join The Simple Pin Collective at any time. 

To kick off Tailwind month, I’m interviewing Danny Maloney, the CEO and co-founder of Tailwind, to talk about the origins of the Tailwind App, and his business success story. 

Origins of the Tailwind App

 

His First Business: Collectible Re-Selling

Danny’s educational background is a mix of engineering and business. 

He’s always been entrepreneurial in nature and started his first company while he was in college. He saw an opportunity in the e-commerce space, (re-selling collectibles) that turned into a nice business that helped him pay his way through college. 

As he was approaching graduation, he decided to work for larger companies who were run by really smart business people so that he could learn from them and fill in knowledge gaps. 

According to Danny, he learned more from this work experience than he did in the classroom. He worked for companies like Google, Youtube, and AOL before he circled back to running his own business. 

His Second Business: Bridal Industry Niche 

It ended up being over 10 years before Danny felt like he had learned enough to take a shot at creating his own company. The very first idea that Danny and his Tailwind co-founder Alex started working on was during a start-up weekend in New York. Danny and Alex had been friends for a few months before this start-up weekend. 

They zeroed in on an idea to start a business in the bridal industry. They kept hearing, “I’ve never planned a wedding before, I don’t really know what I like, but I’ll know it when I see it.” This market research identified an opportunity within the niche.

Related: Pinterest Marketing for Wedding Professionals

They wanted to provide a way to show brides real pictures from real weddings and provide a way to save and identify what they liked. This would allow them to match the brides to vendors and pull off their perfect wedding. 

They tried 12 different ways to generate revenue and were never able to figure it out. Ultimately, they reached a point where they had both left their full-time corporate jobs and they knew they had to figure something out to pay the bills. 

Pivoting in the Business – Selling Analytics Technology

Danny and Alex started brainstorming a way they could pivot their business in order to make money. 

They had built some initial analytics technology to analyze what trends were in the bridal space on Pinterest. This allowed them to go back to photographers and let them know exactly what they needed, content-wise.