- What inspired you to create Woovi and what were the main challenges you faced during the company's early days?
We saw an opportunity on Pix to build a new payment rails. The opportunity was to be able to recreate everything that we know about payments. And we focus to bring the best Instant Payment experient for business.
The main challenge early one was to dig into the Bacen Pix Manuals to understand how to build software on top of it. How to transform an APIs into a Product.
- How do you see Woovi evolving over the next five years and what are the main objectives strategic goals you intend to achieve?
We will keep focusing on rebuilding everything that existed on payment slip and credit card on top of Instant Payments.
We will also focus on more innovation like Drex, Open Banking, ITP, Hardware Pix, IoT.
We also want to expand to more verticals.
The core will be generic to easily expand to other countries that support Instant Payments.
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How does Woovi's culture contribute to the company's innovation and success?
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Are there specific practices that you believe are fundamental to the work environment here?
Thunk based development process help us move faster without many conflicts.
Small pull requests help us move faster without many conflicts.
Automated Tests lets us move faster without breaking things.
Automation release us to focus on what matters.
Automated CI/CD to release for staging and production.
Async communication and RFC to scale engineering architecture.
Feature Flags to decoupple deployment from release.
Issue management with checklist to help us to not forget anything.
Design System and Storybook to reduce cost of building frontend.
GraphQL/Relay to make it easy to consume data.
Monorepo to decouple our code.
k8s to easily scale our infrastructure.
self-hosted to reduce our costs.
Review of issues, pull requests, design, product, code.
Written Documentation.
- In the face of rapid changes in the financial technology industry, how does Woovi stay adaptable and competitive?
We will keep focusing on the new like Drex, Open Banking, ITP, Hardware Pix, IoT.
We will also rebuild everything on top of these new paradigms.
- What was the biggest challenge Woovi has faced so far and how was it overcome?
We faced a few scability issues, and incidents in production.
We made our system more reliable, fault-tolerant, and fallbacks.
We also faced the scaling of a team to 10 developers in 2 squads.
We are also removing a lot of legacy code without breaking production.
- And what is your proudest accomplishment at the company?
We grew 8% per month in the last 12 months.
We grew to more than 500 merchants without any marketing or outbound sales.
We launch a lot of new features/products there year, and fixed a lot of bugs.
- Can you describe how Woovi integrates payment solutions like Pix and Cashback into e-commerce platforms? How do you see this impacting the current market?
We have a widget (plugin js) that the e-commerce plugin injects in the e-commerce system. So we don't need to reimplement the same UI in all e-commerce platforms.
We have some native integration code to glue this (like php in Woocommerce).
We also have a 1click integration flow to make it easy to non developers to integrate.
Checklist here https://developers.openpix.com.br/docs/integrations/ecommerce-workflow
Each platform enables us to reach more customers and grow faster. The tradeoff is the cost of this integration and partnership revenue share costs if needed.
- Given the competitive landscape of digital payments and e-commerce, how would you innovate or optimize one of Woovi’s products, such as Pix Parcelado or Cashback Fidelidade, to better meet customer needs?
Our innovation is focusing on customers instead of competitors. We will build what customers needs, instead of copycat our competitors.
Focusing only on Pix let us have a better and simpler products, than feature rich products. SLA is one of our core features, every second Pix is not working, our customers lose money.
Simpler and fast onboarding are also a killer feature.
A great customer support is also a killer feature.
- I was impressed with woovi's growth, I saw when you started, is there anything in the pipeline for this rapid customer acquisition/adoption?
Woovi's growth strategy
The first step was to invest heavily in producing content and pages to improve SEO and achieve a good volume of inbound (we created 1 page for each feature or product that we believe has potential, even before coding)
we have around 500/600 inbound leads (without marketing)
Before, we integrated directly with the bank's APIs, and onboarding took 15 days to gain access
we saw that this was the bottleneck
we migrated to the BaaS mode, of opening a payment account per company
we went from 15 days to 1 hour onboarding
another bottleneck was high churn and low conversion rate
we added CS to improve churn we added a CSI - Implementator to improve the conversion rate
throughout this, thousands of improvements to the product based on customer demands and feedback
We made the missing features, (there are still many missing)
Now we have launched the wallet mode which has instant onboarding for some verticals and with a lower pix cost for us
- What does the name Woovi mean?
Woovi means anything
- What are the main challenges Woovi faces and how can I help overcome them?
One of our bottleneck is talent (missing real Seniors).
Building a scalable system.
Increase leads per month, decrease churn, increase conversion rate.
Building products that do not exist.
- What is the culture at Woovi like?
Async and written communication and RFC to scale engineering architecture.
Developers propose and own their features.
Developers talk directly to customers to understand bugs and demands.
Very horizontal structure.
- What kind of leadership can I expect from you?
I will provide feedback to make your code and RFC better.
I will push you to make you a better version of yourself.
I will provide content, books, mentoring on how to achieve your goals
You will grow as the company grows, we more responsability and money.
You can provide any feedback (positive or negative) to me without worry of being fired of telling the truth.
- What do you expect from me after 6 months at Woovi?
I hope you understand more about our business, our vision, our product and our codebase.
You should be able to write a good RFC, review code, be able to solve bugs in production, and lead and deliver a feature or improvement by your own.
- What will my day-to-day work be like?
One squad daily meeting of 30 minutes per day (9:30am). Where we discuss progress, unblock developers and learn what the other team is doing.
Most of your time will be thinking on how to solve customers problems. Writing issues, RFCs, code, tests, documentation, and reviewing code.
- How does Woovi help me with my professional growth?
You gonna learn a lot here. Our codebase is huge, the number of concepts that you need to learn to fully understand every piece of the system will take you some time. After working here, you will be able to build your own Startup or work anywhere
You will become a real Senior Developer.
- What are the growth opportunities within Woovi?
You can grow leading more complex features and products.
You can grow leading a team/squad.
- What are the incentives for continuous learning?
The incentive is to produce quality product that solves real problems for real users. You will be impacting the live of millinons of users in a daily basis.
The bar will keep raising, and the challenge will only increase.
- What is a real senior for Woovi?
A real senior is someone that can goes from zero to one.
They need to be able to gather customer feedback and requirements.
Design a well written RFC with at least 2 proposals with tradeoffs of each proposal. Thinking a lot about how the product/feature will be used. What is the archictecture of the solution. And how to scale it.
Break the RFC in small issues and organize the order of execution.
They need to unblock themselves, and iterate towards the solution.
For instance, a Senior would read the Open Banking manual about ITP, and they will be able to propose how they will turn that in a product.
- What can I learn about "payments" topic working at Woovi?
You will to learn the basic and advanced of accounting.
You will to learn concepts about payments rails: Pix, credit card, payment slip, Open Banking, ITP, Drex.
You will learn about Ledgers and how to scale them.
You will deep dive on how all these payments really works under the hood.
You will also learn how to design systems that are scalable, fault-tolerant, and reliable.
- Can I intrapreneur working on Woovi?
You can Startup your own Startup on top of Woovi features and products.
- If I can intrapreneur working in Woovi, would you have any kind of support?
We can provide fewer fees to your Startup.
We can also shape the product to fit your Startup needs.
- feature creation vs optimization of existing ones, what is the biggest weight for woovi currently?
We have a whole squad focusing on fixing bugs and improving the existing features based on customer demands.
Bugs have the priority, then improvements, then new features. Always validating the cost benefit of each one.
- Sometimes I see Woovi devs with very difficult and specific problems, what approach do you use when you try to look for a solution and don't find anything? I imagine that in Relay, for example, there must be a large unexplored sea.
Relay is the easy part.
We have some very Senior developers here, that can solve any problem.
If we don't find the best solution for a problem, we use the closest best solution that we know.
We prefer to simplify the problem, to solve 80% of it, if necessary to avoid shipping a too complex solution.
- Are you thinking about hiring interns?
We had interns before, right now we are focusing more on senior developers.
We have a lot of hard problems to solve, that requires a lot of knowledge and experience.
We will reopen next year.
- What knowledge would an intern need to have for the internship to work, both for him and for the company?
We require the intern to know the basics:
- git
- programming logic
- algorithms
- data structures
- type system
- functional programming
- use API
- how to read a stacktrace error and debug it.
We also require the intern to understand how some systems works:
- how your computer works?
- how the internet works?
- how the browser works?
We also require the intern to be able to build:
- a simple fullstack CRUD (GraphQL and Relay)
- In recent years, financial technology companies worldwide have been exploring the Tap on Phone technology. Similar to PIX, Tap on Phone aims to expedite the selling process using NFC. It also assists small business owners by converting their cell phones into card machines. As this technology is a complete software solution, I would like to know if you have any plans to work with it in the coming years.
We will have some innovation projects on this matter, to increase Pix and Instant Payments adoption.
- What is the biggest external threat that Woovi has today? What if any regulation happens with Pix?
Our biggest external threat would be if Pix was discontinued, but Pix is too big to fail.
Another external threat would be a Startup with more money than us, that could execute faster than us, going in the same direction of our vision. We don't see this either.
- Will you sell your solution to other countries? Or does it depend on where the PIX will work? Like, I heard that PIX is being negotiated with other countries, if it happens you can provide the solution to them also?
Our core system is generic to be able to support any Instant Payments like system.
The idea is to expand to other countries that support Instant Payments soon.
- Which areas the Woovi are facing more challenges? Marketing, Development, People to be hired to work on a bunch of issues? Customer Success? Onboarding? Where are you doing or planning to fix it?
We are facing challenges on every single area, as we are growing faster.
On 2023, we built a product, on 2024 we will build a business.
Growing marketing to increase the number of leads per month.
Growing sales to reach enterprise customers, and grow our outbound strategy.
Growing Customer Success to decrease churn and increase conversion rate.
Focusing a lot on simplifying onboarding and making it faster.
Hiring talent to support our technology and business needs.
- How does Woovi approach user feedback and incorporate it into the product development process? Are there specific channels or practices in place for gathering and analyzing customer input?
We have a lot of monitoring to understand how the users are using our products and features.
We also have a customer support chat available to all users, so we gather feedback from them every day.
Every day we are learning what needs to be improved, and what needs to be built.
- Considering the emphasis on async communication and written documentation, how does Woovi provide a collaborative and inclusive work environment, especially with remote or distributed teams?
We have one sync daily per squad on a daily basis, where we discuss progress, unblock developers and learn what the other team is doing.
We have on sync customer success daily per day to understand the customer feedback of the given day.
We also do sync pair programming and meetings when needed, to move faster and share knowledge faster.
We also plan some on-site meetings to improve the team bonding.
- In terms of talent acquisition, what specific skills or qualities are you looking for in "real Seniors," and how does Woovi plan to attract and retain top talent in the competitive tech industry?
Seniors need agency to propose new solutions and approaches to new problems that appears every day.
We retain talent by providing a lot of autonomy, and ownership of the product and features. We also increase salary over time. We will also add bonus and equity as we grow.
- How does Woovi stay ahead of technological advancements and industry trends to ensure that its products remain cutting-edge?
We will focus on more innovation like Drex, Open Banking, ITP, Hardware Pix, IoT.
We are always thinking in better ways to do what we are already doing.
We have a lot of automating in place to upgrade dependencies every day. We use codemods to update old code patterns and pay off technical debt faster.
We are also experimenting with LLM to change every single part of our company.
- What do you think are the biggest challenges in creating a good product?
The biggest challenge is that you never going to get it right at first. You always need to iterate to get it right.
It is the Innovator's Dilemma. You need to build a simple first version, to see what it is missing. And also gather real feedback from real users.
Without real users you can't build a great product.
- How much do you think technology will change in the next few years with the exponential growth of the market? How to prepare for it?
AI will accelerate technology growth faster than ever.
Every day we are learning a lot, and incorporating new technologies and new learnings in our stack.
We are always revisiting everything to see how can we ship faster and make our process better.