Andrew Filev is the founder of Wrike. Visit the company blog here.

Can you tell us a little about yourself? What is your background?

I enjoyed computers and programming since my childhood years. So an obvious choice for me was to become a software developer. Later a new technology platform emerged and I saw a great opportunity in it. I opened a software consulting business that has transformed and grown over six years into an 80-people software outsourcing company.

Along the way I had plenty of ideas for starting this or that product, but I kept focusing on the services business to provide enough fuel for its growth. Since my daily job was in management and I didn’t write code, I used long holidays to implement prototypes for some of my ideas. One of my “pet projects”, which I started during New Year holidays at the beginning of 2004 captured my mind and I just couldn’t stop working on it. My vision was to create a tool that could help people to share plans and get things done. More than three years passed since the initial prototype was developed and a lot of innovative ideas became what is now known as Wrike.

Why did you name the service Wrike?

People like this name and easily remember it. Don’t you?

Currently how large is the team and company?

The Wrike team has about ten people now. We are in an incredibly productive stage of the growth. Everyone in our team focuses on what he does best and at the same time professional inter-support and delegation take place seamlessly.

How are you getting the word out about Wrike?

Most of the people who try Wrike, like it. They start assigning tasks to their colleagues and sharing plans with friends through the system. It creates a wave of new users. The more people from your social network use Wrike, the more you benefit from it.

We might look idealistic, but we believe that people will help us spread the word. In return this allows us to operate in a lean manner and thus provide very attractive pricing. The basic version of Wrike is free, so the price is unbeatable.

How much time, money, and work does it take to keep Wrike up and running?

When we launched our first beta we printed special t-shirts. On the front side it reads “I enjoy my 90-60-90”. It’s about weekly hours in our work schedule that it took to complete the beta. You can look at the pictures on our blog.

There are so many things to be done in the area of collaborative planning software, that for next 5 years we’ll surely be pretty busy.

Is there anything you've learned during the process of launching Wrike that you can share with other entrepreneurs?

I would like to share excitement, passion and love. You can’t learn those things. You just either love what you do, or you don’t. If your passion happens to be a valuable business, that’s your biggest reward.

Guessing that you are passionate about what you do, the missing piece of the puzzle is coming up with the business model and validating it. Validation has different faces ranging from getting your first thousand of users up to becoming profitable. There are also indirect things like singing an investment deal, which means that VCs with all of their vast experience believed in your idea. Or it may be winning a start-up competition, when a jury understood the beauty of your solution after 10 minutes presentation.

For me the moment when Wrike received the LeWeb3 award was a full pay-off for my sleepless working nights before the beta release.

What Web 2.0 services do you use on a regular basis?

Kayak, YouTube, digg, flickr, feedburner, technorati, del.icio.us, wikipedia and many others, sometimes even without noticing it.

Are there any blogs you read on a daily basis?

I read quite a bunch but very irregularly. There are days, when I can scan through several hundred posts. Then there are weeks, when I don’t have time to open my RSS reader. My heroes are bloggers who has spent their time to writing a note about us. Thank you for your support!