In 2006 I spent several months living in Buenos Aires, travelling around South America in between freelance contracts. When I returned to San Francisco I was contacted by former ETRADE colleagues who were looking to launch a new startup in the mobile messaging space. This was before Twitter was born, and at the time there were enormous hurdles and challenges to create mobile shortcodes, campaigns, and services. They were looking to create an advanced tool that integrated with mobile carriers and could handle massive spikes in traffic.
Our first meetings were held in my home office, and soon we had office space and began to build the team. I was hired as employee #1, with the core duty of devising an interface and flow for the product and collaborating with our engineering team on solving the carrier interface challenges. Our founders were very busy with fundraising and strategic partnerships so they relied on me to act as the defacto operations leader. This meant I managed site operations from security, IT, facilities, HR, and more. This experience allowed me a vast knowledge of building a startup.
After acquiring two other companies in the space, Waterfall was acquired by Upland Software for $24.4M.
Branding
At launch the name of the company was Waterfall Mobile, which was later shortened to Waterfall. I created the original identity for the company, and as we grew I hired a Creative Director to take over those tasks and drive our brand.
Product Design
Our core product offering was MsgMe, a mobile marketing platform for companies, brands and organizations to communicate with customers or provide key information via text. In a time before the proliferation of smart phone apps and ubiquitous wifi, SMS shortcodes provided an off-device solution. MsgMe bridged the gap between brands and custom shortcodes. We integrated with carriers and created a trusted and robust platform that could be managed and published by anyone.
Through our proven work with MsgMe, we learned an enormous amount about SMS communications, especially during a disaster or emergency. AlertU was created for schools and office campuses to communicate with their students and employees in an emergency. Utmost attention was given to making the user experience extremely fast and easy to use under duress. This exercise was helpful to explore how to get the interface out of the way of the primary user need.