Another Word On Wordy
A year ago we wrote about a new copy-editing start-up from Denmark - Wordy. Since then Wordy released its product from beta, won Seedcamp this autumn and moved to UK. I talked with Anders Schepelern, founder and CEO, who shared insights from his entrepreneurial journey.
Let us remind you that Wordy offers human copy-editing of any English document at a small price and high speed. They claim to be able to process any text of 400 words in 15-20 min at any time of the day. The service was launched as a commercial product from day one: editing 400 words costs 7-8€. All revenue is split 80/20 between editors and Wordy, which means that an average editor gets an hourly wage of around 23€. Since Wordy's competitive advantage is high-quality human edge to editing (40% of the editors have a Master's degree or higher), offering a decent pay is the key to hiring and retaining the workforce. It seems to be paying off too: customer satisfaction of the service is in the top ten percentiles at the moment.
Anders shared that Wordy's biggest achievement this year was winning Seedcamp in London. Not only did it bring in advisors on board and an extra 50 000€ to the company, it opened up an enormous network of contacts that can help company grow internationally. When asked how they got to winning Seedcamp, Anders thinks that the key was having an internationally scalable product and an extremely enthusiastic team (anyone who talked with Anders for half a minute would not deny the latter). Undeniably, going to the mini-Seedcamp in Berlin prior to the one in London also helped. That's when the company's pitch was refined and clear targets were set. Right now those targets include reaching a turnover of 20 000€ by the end of the year and releasing a version of Wordy competible with any publishing service. Thus, Wordy's progress has been relatively modest but consistent so far.
Right now Wordy's team is dispersed around the globe from Lithuania to India to US while their main clientbase comes from mainland Europe. The kind of documents they edit include web content, marketing material, legal papers and even LinkedIn profiles. It's hard to estminate the overall size of Wordy's market, since editing services are right now delivered by a plethora of providers: free-lancers, local companies, in-house functions. While wordy has come a long way since its launch, it still has a lot of work to do to become a meaningful alternative to those services.
Image by crunchcandy
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