Company: FiddleFly
Website: www.fiddlefly.com
Headquarters: Columbia, Maryland
Year Founded: 2011
Twitter: @fiddlefly
Brief Company Description: FiddleFly is a powerful suite of tools and support that web professionals worldwide use to provide their clients with amazing mobile sites.
By Alex Kutsishin, co-founder and president
A Better Way to Go Mobile
Like some of the great inventions of history—the microwave oven, penicillin, and even Coca-Cola—the birth of FiddleFly was never planned. In early 2011, while working with clients at MOS Creative, a creative marketing agency based out of Columbia, Maryland, we realized the potential for incorporating mobile-optimized websites into our clients’ campaigns. Seeking a simple solution that we could offer in-house, we challenged our developers at MOS to create a program that allowed us to easily and efficiently build mobile-optimized websites. The result was a software platform that relied on simple commands and drag and drop technology that literally had us building fully functional mobile sites in minutes.
Almost immediately, the praise for our mobile web builder began to flood in and what started as a simple solution to an in-house problem began collecting buzz from just about every direction. Clients were raving about its simplicity and sheer convenience. Before long we realized our newest secret weapon needed to be shared with the creative world. That’s when we decided to branch out and build a new company based around developing our mobile web building software and helping the creative professional world find a better way to go mobile. As a result, FiddleFly was born.
While FiddleFly is a software company, our roots still remain in the creative realm. Keeping that in mind, we’ve always made sure to do everything we can to tailor our product to helping other creative web professionals like ourselves. We’re not out to target the end user, instead we would much rather make FiddleFly an essential tool in every agency, web design studio, development firm, and creative team’s mobile business strategy. We have a network of affiliates around the world ranging from printers and designers, to web development professionals that we will even refer businesses to whenever possible.
With the mobile web exploding faster than any market we have ever seen, it didn’t take long to arrive at a place where just going mobile was no longer enough. The online experience is now a unified one, and while mobile web users may have different needs than desktop users, their expectations for mobile sites are just as high (as they should be). Within months of creating the first FiddleFly platform we decided we needed to focus on making customization as convenient and limitless as possible. We injected a host of new capabilities into the software that revolutionized the mobile web building process for a second time while still holding true to our original mission of keeping things simple.
The fact of the matter is that mobile users are not a forgiving bunch. Visitors will decide within the first four seconds whether or not to remain on a page, so we wanted to give web pros the tools to build sites that not only keep users engaged, but will keep them coming back. With our new custom features (plus a constant stream of new innovations to make our software even more powerful), sites built with FiddleFly are able to achieve a level of dynamic creativity that other template-based mobile web builders can’t begin to match. We don’t just want to keep up with the mobile web boom, we want to help web professionals build the sites that actually raise the bar for everyone.
Because we have a product that we truly believe in and a target audience that is well defined, we tend to be rather selective when it comes to marketing FiddleFly. We utilize social media channels such as Twitter and Facebook, however we are far less concerned about amassing a certain number of followers than we are about creating meaningful conversations with people that can truly benefit from using our product. Mobile is nothing if not a means to connect the world and shorten the distance between people and businesses, so all of our marketing efforts are targeted at opening the doors to communication and the sharing of creative ideas.
Communication is so important to us that when we formed our company we included a department we call our Customer Expansion Team. The team is tasked with assisting our clients in the design and development of great mobile sites, as well as providing tips and industry information for managing their mobile web business. This service is free to all of our customers and helps ensure that everyone who uses FiddleFly sees profits from their mobile initiatives.
While we may still be a young company and our team is relatively small, we are growing every day, right alongside the mobile web. If that means moving to a new office (which we did in January) or bringing new and talented faces to our team (which we did earlier this year) or simply introducing new programs and features (which we are doing all the time), we don’t hesitate to do so. We are always looking for talented people with the energy and ideas to help keep FiddleFly at the forefront of the industry.
The beauty of the landscape we are operating in is that the mobile web has yet to even scratch the surface of what it will become. We like to think the same could be said about FiddleFly. Now that the world has opened its eyes to the fact that mobile is no longer the future, but rather the present state of the web, the sky is the limit for our company. We believe we have an opportunity with our platform to help change the way the world interacts, and I don’t know about you, but we think that’s worth working our tails off for.
FiddleFly – www.fiddlefly.com
