Tailwind has evolved from our founders, Alex and Danny, initially building solutions to solve their own marketing challenges while growing a new online business.
They wanted to create great content for the emerging visual social networks at the time – Instagram and Pinterest. So, they built analytics and scheduling tools for their own use. Soon, they saw friends and family in all different types of businesses in need of the same tools.
They pivoted the company to solving marketing needs for a wide set of small businesses- not just their own.
The first version of Tailwind launched in 2015 and grew rapidly by building deep marketing solutions for those visual social networks.
We became known as a leader in Pinterest and Instagram marketing, serving a broad array of business types: e-commerce sellers, creators, local service providers, local retail, hospitality, marketing agencies - and more. By the end of 2018, we had grown to 35,000 paying members.
But in 2019, our close ties to our customers helped us identify new challenges small businesses faced. Each new marketing channel they wanted to tackle took a massive amount of time to research, learn and practice - often over multiple years. Understandably, these businesses limited themselves to one or two marketing channels.
With limited marketing channels, these businesses missed growth opportunities to draw in more customers, and they carried a lot of risk. When marketing channels made changes in their products, content formats and content distribution algorithms, it could have dramatic effects on our members’ businesses.