Kris Ciccarello
(Photo Credit: Kris Ciccarello)
Name: Kris Ciccarello
Title: CTO at Wisr
Favorite restaurant in town? Red
Favorite thing about Cleveland? The Metroparks
Q: Kris, tell us about your journey. What led you to co-founding Wisr? I started programming young – before high school – trying to figure out how to get extra minutes on our AOL monthly subscription, if anyone remembers those. After college, I worked at a custom software shop on all kinds of different applications and learned a lot about many different businesses, and how to help them solve their problems. It was basically like an applied version of going to business school while sharpening programming skills at the same time. After doing that for a while, it led to me wanting to work on my own business and my own sets of problems, so I started looking into the local startup scene in Cleveland. After getting my feet wet by making a move to lead engineering efforts on a B2B online auction platform, I started an online writing platform called Beegit with some local entrepreneurs. A lot of lessons were learned there, but it was a successful journey that had many complex technical challenges to solve. Beegit ended up becoming NgageContent, an inbound marketing and technology company, and they’re still doing well. During that time, I had been talking with one of my current partners, John Knific, about a cool idea to create an online platform to help college students and engage college alums by giving them an outlet to volunteer their time by helping current students jumpstart their career networking before graduation. It turned out that idea came from Kate Volzer, who had been busy researching and drumming up demand for a product to meet that need. After meeting Kate, I jumped in and started building the product, and the rest is history.
Q: What has been the most exciting aspect of engineering an online engagement platform? What we’ve really built is a B2B2C platform – we’re building B2B tools and integrations for our direct customers, which acts as the backend of a B2C platform for their students. It has been both fun and challenging to solve and prioritize how to make the biggest impact for both our customers and their community members. We need tools to help promote and manage engagement at scale, while making the experience exciting and friendly for students.
Q: How have digital engagement trends evolved in the last few years, and what challenges has that presented for institutions? The big shift has been going from static content that is broadcasted out to a list or user base, to more personalized content based on interests and analytics. Even further, the use of predictive modeling to push content just in time, right before or at the time the person is most likely to engage with it. This type of sophistication has been developed in the consumer marketing world over the past 5-10 years and is now becoming the expectation in higher education.
Q: Obviously, Gen Z uses technology differently than any generation in history - how have they influenced your product? We’ve really focused on how to best connect with digital natives by giving them access to digital peer groups, with the added context of going through the college admissions experience together. They can use an online platform to both discover programming that might interest them and get advice from “their future selves” – students who have just been through an experience similar to the one they’re about to go through – using chat-based systems they’re used to.
Q: What have been some of the challenges of building a company in Cleveland? With our primary product being online and our workforce fully remote, we haven’t experienced any downsides to being located in Cleveland. It is well documented that venture capital access here is lacking as compared to the coasts, but I would strongly caution against taking that kind of capital anyway, for most new startups. Build your business, turn a profit, keep your leverage; there’s no reason that doesn’t work well in Cleveland.