Digital Marketing is a Breeze with Tailwind

Danny Maloney was introduced to Oklahoma City in 2005 by his future wife, Megan McGinnis. In what was intended to be a week-long stay, the couple visited Megan’s family here and sampled the city’s restaurant and entertainment venues. It didn’t take long for Maloney to kick the tires on all that OKC offered in that first visit 15 years ago. He and Megan cut their OKC trip short.  “We felt like we ran out of stuff to do, so we went down to Dallas,” Maloney said.

Born in New York and raised in Florida, Maloney is an east coast native who earned both engineering and business degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He pursued success in the corporate world with tenures at Google and YouTube in San Francisco and AOL in New York.  Today, Maloney has planted roots deep in Oklahoma City soil as CEO of OKC-based Tailwind, a high tech startup that provides digital marketing services to small businesses worldwide. 

What lured him back here in 2012 to make Tailwind an Oklahoma City-based venture? For starters, Megan’s family lives in Oklahoma City, and there was the appeal of living near relatives. More importantly, a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity opened up here for Megan, then a recent MBA from Yale University. 

But the couple had also found that Oklahoma City evolved and became more attractive as a place to make their home.  “Visiting more and more over time, we both saw that the city was changing really rapidly,” he said. “By the time we made the decision to move here seven years later, it felt like a totally different city than the first time I visited.”

Today, with Maloney as CEO, Tailwind employs over 50 people with headquarters in Oklahoma City and an office in New York City, led by co-founder, Alex Topiler. The company’s mission is to make world-class marketing easy for everyone, with a focus on small businesses.

The Early Years

As a child, Maloney was introduced to the concept of entrepreneurship by his father, who owns a sound engineering company in the Miami, Florida, area. Maloney discovered another business mentor in college, Dr. William Hamilton, who created the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology at Penn, a dual degree program in management and engineering. “There are a lot of things from his classes that have really stuck with me to this day,” Maloney said. “I was studying engineering and business and was always fascinated by the intersection of the two.”

At both Google and AOL, Maloney took important lessons from another mentor, David Eun, now Chief Innovation Officer at Samsung Electronics. “I learned a lot in my career under his tutelage - seeing how he managed and instilled innovative mentalities in teams,” Maloney said. “That hit me at the perfect time of my career.”

The Genesis of Tailwind

Tailwind, however, was not the initial project that Maloney and Topiler started working on together. The pair first founded BridesView to connect future brides with service providers such as wedding planners and photographers. BridesView let brides browse pictures from real weddings to help plan their own. The site quickly grew to many thousands of users, as its wedding photos went viral on Pinterest. But the pair struggled to convert users into revenue.  “Brides were coming to us because they discovered our photography on Pinterest,” Maloney recalled. “So, we began gathering data and analyzing it to figure out what type of content brides were most interested in. But the clock was ticking financially.” 

The effective use of analytics to boost traffic to BridesView provided a potential alternate course for the business. With BridesView failing to generate revenue, the pair “pivoted” the business and PinLeague was born, providing analytics to brands marketing on Pinterest.  

Over two more years, PinLeague evolved into Tailwind as it expanded from merely providing analytics into offering scalable marketing expertise and strategies to thousands of small businesses—photographers, e-commerce, bloggers, local businesses—who are trying to build their businesses on multiple digital platforms, with Instagram now a big focal point. “We saw a much bigger opportunity to help small business owners and marketers who are figuring it out and want the confidence to know they are doing it right,” Maloney said. “We are educating our members and helping them become their best selves.”

The Oklahoma Talent Pool

When Maloney relocated to Oklahoma City, it wasn’t clear the city would become the base for Tailwind operations. “The assumption was that we were going to be doing more hiring in New York, and that would be our main office,” Maloney said. It turned out, they found it easier and more cost-effective to hire talented people for Tailwind in Oklahoma. “Because we are a unique company with a unique culture, there are a lot of things that people can get by working at Tailwind that they can’t get at other places in town. We were able to develop our employer brand, and that helped us stand out in Oklahoma City in a way that is much harder in a very large market like New York.”

Tailwind has incredibly low annual turnover among its employees and has become a top choice for Oklahoma City workers who possess tech skills that fit the company’s profile. “Even today, I would say that hiring in New York is harder for us, though we’re working on that,” Maloney said. “I assumed that talent acquisition was going to be a disadvantage here for us, but it has become an advantage over the past eight years.”

The Oklahoma Difference 

Maloney has become an enthusiastic evangelist for Oklahoma City as a both a place to build a successful venture and for its lifestyle opportunities. Many people still don’t know anything about the city beyond the Oklahoma City Thunder or the Bombing Memorial, but he is eager to raise awareness of what it has to offer.

Today, Danny and Megan are parents to 4-1/2-year-old Kate. They build much of their family life around her activities.  “But we still try to get out and about and experience the city and the state,” he said. “It’s great to see the culinary explosions here like Nonesuch and Grey Sweater. We’ve gotten season tickets to the Broadway shows at the civic center. We love going to the museums and taking Kate out to kid-friendly activities at the Botanical Gardens and things like that. And, of course, we’re huge Thunder fans.”

Maloney pitches the Oklahoma lifestyle to prospective employees, saying “Do you want to jump off the rat race, get out of San Francisco and stop being buried by bills?” he said. “Oklahoma City is a great place to live, and by the way, we are building an amazing product, have a great mission and our team is world-class. It’s a pretty exciting time for Tailwind!”