Meet the founder of WOLF
I’m Martin Rosinski, founder of WOLF, The World’s Online Festival. I am also the person behind Palringo, the first-ever chat app to go live on the Apple App store, which I took to market in 2008.
I was born in Krakow, Poland in 1984. When I was four years old I moved to the North East of England where I still live now, in a small town on the outskirts of Newcastle.
Since as far back as I can remember, I always had an innate curiosity for all things science and technology. As a kid, I was utterly fascinated by how things around me worked, often dismantling everything I could lay my hands on and then attempting to put it back together!
When I was eight, my dad introduced me to the idea of computer programming – and I was once again instantly hooked. I felt that just by learning and rearranging basic instructions on a screen, I could create entire worlds within the computer – limited only by my imagination.
My hobby intersected with the professional world when I started to assist my dad with various commercial projects. I helped write code and design electronic instruments to find elusive problems in complex industrial mechanical systems. This was the foundation of a family business in which I was granted special permission from Companies House to become the youngest director in the UK, aged 11!
What inspired you to launch WOLF and what is the end goal?
In 2003, when I began my studies at Newcastle University, I brought one of the first ‘smartphones’ – an HTC SPV E100, which ran an early version of Windows Mobile. It was a clunky and archaic device by today's standards, but it captivated my imagination. I could foresee a future world wherein everyone carried such devices in their pockets, connected wirelessly to each other and to the world’s information, containing a whole range of software-based mini-worlds (later to be termed ‘apps’).
With this in my mind, I set out to build one of my own and designed the first social app in existence – a walkie-talkie style app which I originally named ‘Switchboard’, which later became Palringo.
And it hasn’t ever stopped evolving. We’ve continued to innovate and have just rebranded Palringo to WOLF, The World’s Online Festival, which offers a user-created festival environment filled with group chat, live audio shows, friendship and entertainment.
How did you fund the launch of your business and what creative strategies did you use to execute a minimal cash flow?
Building the first prototype was an exciting but originally solitary experience. After demonstrating the initial functionality, I managed to raise a £650K seed round – which was sufficient to build a small team and fully prove out the concept.
In the early stages, we worked as a very small but dedicated team - each of us wearing many hats. With zero marketing budget, I personally began to introduce our service to small online groups who I believed might be interested - and we started to see an influx of seed users. From that point, word of mouth took over.
Subsequently, we managed to raise two further investment rounds (totalling £5m) - this enabled us to grow the company to the point of profitability.
After 2012 our proposition was strong and organic growth really started to take off – as we experienced a flood of worldwide users rushing into the service. It was a joy to watch various online communities embrace the platform as the preferred host for their online conversations.
Were you nervous at the outset?
Absolutely! Nervousness, however, is physiologically indistinguishable from excitement - so I prefer to frame it as such.
How important is company culture and what is your top tip to get it right?
Put simply, it’s vital. Instilling culture and ensuring everyone understands a brand’s values can be essential to lock in the soul of a business. Company culture and belief isn’t about hanging meaningless words on the wall, it’s about everyone living the values and understanding the business and what it’s trying to achieve.
When we initially had the idea to rebrand to WOLF, we started with a distillation of the essence of what makes our offering unique.
The rebrand presented us with a perfect opportunity to revisit our values and engage our employees. We gave them licence to help us inform what those new values could look like and as we evolved as a business everyone invested into the idea. And, that’s the key – everyone playing a part in creating the culture.
Once you’ve done that you can put the words on a wall, because they mean something to everyone. We’re now The World’s Online Festival through and through - my favourite meeting room is a bell-tent on an indoor meadow - a place to dream up ideas and explore technical challenges in the setting of a festival campsite.
What’s the most important question entrepreneurs should be asking themselves?
This is a difficult one to answer because ultimately there are two equally important questions that every entrepreneur needs to ask themselves. Firstly, why? and secondly, what?
Why are you doing what you’re doing and what is it solving?
The market need and the product or service that you’re thinking of offering needs to fit together. So many people with a fantastic entrepreneurial spirit fail to interrogate the answers to these questions in enough detail. They get so immersed in their idea that they lose sight of the problem it’s setting out to solve.
If you can answer the why and the what then you can move onto the exciting bit… the how!
What plans do you have for your business over the next two years?
I’m very excited by our latest efforts to relaunch as WOLF. Our new positioning perfectly captures the spirit of what we’re working to build – a global online community platform that engages, entertains and connects people from across the globe in a shared online experience like no other.
Right now, we’re focused on the launch of WOLF and navigating our way through life post Covid-19. We’ve seen a 50% uplift in user engagement since the country went into lockdown so we’re looking at how we can continue to offer real-life virtual entertainment to smart devices – particularly relevant as we see more and more key events such as Glastonbury taken off of the events calendar for this year.
New features will play a part in the coming weeks and months and we’ll continually be adding to the festival experience of the app. I’m confident that we’re building something that is very exciting and particularly relevant as we learn to live a slightly different way of life.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt so far as an entrepreneur?
Many entrepreneurs, myself included, initially struggle to delegate effectively. There’s an overwhelming temptation to always be personally involved in every detail - which can be counterproductive to the aim of building effective and scalable teams.
Over time I feel I’ve learned the right balance - instilling the right vision and spirit where constructive, while letting go of the need to be involved in every detail.
What do you think gives a brand longevity?
An enduring product-market fit is essential - as is the spirit of agility and innovation required to adapt to a changing technological and competitive landscape.
Too many brands become complacent - ships too big to steer. While there’s certain inertia offered by success, history is full examples of agile incumbents stealing the show from under established market behemoths.
Market rivalries between Apple and Microsoft, Netflix and Blockbuster, or Facebook and Myspace were highly fascinating from this perspective.
How do you believe the evolution of tech will affect your industry over the next 10 years?
Fascinating question!
I believe we’ve entered a phase where for a while we’ll see a general incremental refinement of existing mainstream technology - increasingly affordable devices with ever-higher specifications, more refined user experiences, more reliable and performant global mobile connectivity, and significantly smarter software powered by accelerating advancements in artificial intelligence.
Simultaneously, we’ll see significant progress in evolving the clunky early concepts of the next paradigm shift into something that begins to enter the mainstream - electric self-driving vehicles, augmented and virtual reality, neural human-machine interfaces, and embryonic human colonies beyond earth. When we truly start to approach the singularity, all predictions will be off!
What are your thoughts on failure?
Failure is often an inevitability as individuals and organisations aspire to success. We all make mistakes. We all experience bad luck. We all fail to precisely anticipate the future.
As far as I can see, the only pragmatic attitude towards failure is to learn from it - adapt and evolve. We learn the lessons from our failures and regroup - embracing subsequent challenges with a finer-tuned intuition, a broadened knowledge base, and a wiser perspective.
Do you have a morning routine or ritual to get your day started on the right foot?
I’m mildly obsessed with automating the routine parts of my household. I wake up to a simulated sunrise - delicately timed to sync my circadian rhythm with the demands of the workday. Over time I’ve carefully refined the temperature profile of our sleep environment - cooler at night for deeper sleep, gently ramping up to guarantee a warm and pleasant departure from my bed.
There remain aspects of my morning routine which I have yet to automate - but I’m working on those!
