Sad to see Logojoy (rebranded to Looka) having hard times.
I enjoyed Dawson's interview from a couple years back: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/038-dawson-whitfield-of-logojoy
I feel like there are some lessons to be learned from their struggles. The perils of VC funding and rebranding come to mind as the obvious ones. On a deeper level, it seems to me the very traits that served him well as an indie maker may not have served him equally well as CEO of a rapidly growing VC backed company. As a solo maker, he pivoted from project to project until he hit on something that worked (if memory serves). But that same rapid iteration seems to have translated into trouble once he was scaling a company. There seemed to me a casualness in his tone when he was discussing hiring a lot of folks.
Sorry if that seems harsh, just my passing thoughts. Running a business is tough, and I hope Dawson is able to refocus Logojoy and successfully rebuild their core offerings.
TLDR: Rebranding and changing domain caused a 80% drop in SEO traffic.
Domain migrations are always dangerous. If your website relies heavily on Google to get traffic, doing it just to get a new name it's a suicide.
This comment was deleted a year ago.
It’s in the original post 😉
This comment was deleted a year ago.
Read the first article.
Good lesson here - instead of migrating a domain to a new one, just start a new company and send part of your existing business to it first.
I've purchased a few logos from them in the past, but I feel like I always end up using their service (and similar services like Brandmark) similar to how I shop in brick and mortar stores: see what I want, but buy on Amazon for cheaper. I'll find a few ideas on Looks that I think look good, but will end up creating a slightly different, more customized version myself in Figma.
Once you recognize all those logo creators are using icons from The Noun Project and freely available fonts, it's pretty easy to replicate what they do once you find something you like. I think it's a tough business, and pretty easy to clone with readily available pieces. I'm curious to see how their product evolves, as he's stated they want to be the best logo maker on the planet, yet the outputs are functionally the same as what you might get from any of the competitors, and still not as good as working with a human designer.
Interesting insight, Looka is now $3000 dollars set up and $1000
a month plus 25% revenue for their partners :O
Is there anyone offering white labeling of this functionality at human start-up costs ?
Or would you piece together to replicate?
Just doing the calculation, they expected 20-30% drop in from the source of 50% of their revenue. So essentially they were making a bet using 15% of revenue o_o while adding costs of additional headcount. Whoa!
Then they ended up losing 80% which would equate to 40% of revenue. Wow. I hope he finds a way to turn this around
Why would they think to rebrand? I thought logojoy was the perfect name for what they do
If they rebranded because they were expanding services it'd be better to test the waters with stuff like 'packages by logojoy' or 'branding by logojoy' IMHO
Also the pressure from from VC funding probably didn't help
I thought LogoJoy was a good domain name. I was a bit shocked to see them go for a difficult to remember domain.
Never understood the rebranding either.
I think people undervalue just how important their brand is sometimes. You can have the snazziest of domain names - but if you rebrand and fail to appear in Google for your old brand (and instead blogs and reviews come first instead) - you'll suffer for a long time!
Never understood the change in name. Logojoy is nice and memorable. As others have said, if they wanted to branch out, could’ve done it on separate brand or done the “xyz by logojoy”
Also take into account that they are charging for one-time purchase, unlike traditional SaaS that can still depend on existing customers to make-up for revenue lost due to SEO changes.
Definitely a good lesson for all of us here!
That's a very good point. Definitely harder to predict growth without the recurring revenue.