1Brand

On April 1st we finally launched publicly after two years building and in beta. Our launch included 1Brand for Agencies, an entirely new product that we've been planning for years. We sprinted hard to build the product for a big marketing campaign we have locked-in for this week (the week of April 5th). Everything came together beautifully, but also at the last moment. We had planned a Product Hunt launch from the beginning, but there was just so little time in the schedule. April 1 was when we had to launch.

We rallied our friends and family, and the Product Hunt community and got over 100 upvotes, ending the day at #10. We also got more than 150 signups and 20 free trials. I'm confident that if we had focused and planned more we could have done better, but I also see the strong engagement we got on a middling PH effort to be validation of the need for better brand growth tools.

And, we probably won't do another launch on April 1 again. No matter the great outcome, it doesn't feel good to be beaten by toilet paper. Or a table.

I have exactly one customer who bought 1Brand on the monthly plan in March. This customer subscribed last month and, this month, the subscription renewed and they did not cancel. In this environment, that is a huge win and I'll take it. I attribute this to chatting with the customer the day before they purchased and creating a personal connection.

We got our first paying customer for 1Brand today! I'm excited because this was a complete stranger, not a friend or contact, so it adds an extra bit of validation.

We had been driving some traffic to our beta with a link on a friends' blog. This was giving us 3-5 signups per day, and is a key source of the feedback that we've been using to iterate and improve the product. One of the important things we've learned during the feedback process was that our pricing was to complex. We simplified the pricing last week, and finally put our paywall up. Fingers crossed, we waited for that first sale. But...

Late last week we discovered an issue that was blocking some users. If they navigated back at a certain point in our process, their account would be stuck in a state where they couldn't see the core value of the product, and couldn't proceed until they fixed it. That bug is actually still there (but we have a plan and are working to fix it). But we left the paywall up until we can fix it. We burned our ships. There's no path backwards from monetization.

Last Friday, someone messaged us on Intercom with some actual, legit product questions. He's working on a new project and didn't have a live website, but has a brand and had been asked to put together a brand book. I responded immediately and answered his questions, letting him know we were the easiest way to build that brand guideline. We only offer a PDF export of your brand guideline when you subscribe to the annual plan, to avoid users paying the monthly fee and then canceling. Our prospect asked if he could upgrade to Annual if he liked the results which of course he could. This morning, without prompting, he onboarded and subscribed!

Oh, and our PDF export feature isn't even done yet...

There are two great lessons that I learned through this process:

• Does a blocking issue block everyone, or just some users? If it's not blocking everyone, keep moving (and fix the issue as you go)
• Selling before a feature is ready can be really helpful, even if it doesn't feel great to do. If the customer believes in you and you've got a good story that the feature is on the way (which we do) then they're likely to wait around. Worst case they churn and you've still learned a bunch.

We sent 20 emails yesterday, and I woke up to one demo call scheduled for tomorrow! We built a scalable prospecting system by using Zapier to integrate Hunter.io and Mailshake. We scraped 5000 agency listings to test our approach, and there are 65k more in our data set we can reach out to!

A key to our successful approach was investing in unique research, and high-quality design. We researched 517 brands and their brand guidelines, and did an in-depth analysis of trends. We're reaching out to agencies. They can book a call right from the page, or complete a lead form to get the source data.

https://www.1brand.co/the-state-of-visual-brand-strategy

We spent 5 1/2 months building our product, gathering customer feedback along the way. We've built a beta product that we're proud of by finding talented junior engineers who are a good culture fit, managing and mentoring them ourselves. After 5 1/2 months of development, we've got a great product and two engineers who started very green and are now very solid fullstack Javascript devs.

First sales pitch and pricing discussion with our ideal customer persona. It was also the first time we showed the actual product (alpha state) instead of clickable prototypes. We learned that:

• They were open to the $40k price point.
• To get that price, we may need more capabilities. But those were next on our roadmap ;)
• They are willing to share examples of their expected outcomes.
• Our further-out roadmap items are even more interesting to them.
• They care about efficiency, not added value.

We're supporting self-service buying, and a Sales-assisted buy path. We wanted to create an automated process to support both, with minimal product differences and engineering work.

The flow we created to achieve this was: Sales send prospect a link to signup with a tracking code > Prospect signs-up for free trial > Prospect agrees to buy > Prospect signs agreement > We send prospect a link to a hosted payments page> Prospect pays > Webhook picks-up payment event, and upgrades their free trial account.

We think this is the most elegant solution for supporting both use cases.

We demo'd the product for the first time yesterday. We had to work around product limitations, talk around issues, and jump to the prototypes for 1/2 the functionality. But, we confirmed willingness-to-pay, validated our current core hypothesis, and learned a ton about our market. It was a friendly audience, which made it easier than it could have been. And, we got a first sale that we can use as a reference customer.

The key lesson for me is: Start talking and pitching to customers as early as possible. You'll learn enough that it's worth the time and emotional toll of any rejection you might get.

Initial product development is complete. We've switched our go-to-market plan, and are focused manual sales to larger agencies this summer and have delayed a big marketing launch. The product is ready to demo to these prospects, and we've begun setting meetings. We've got more development to do over the summer before a marketing launch, but the core functionality is usable. Since we're self-funding and growing on revenue, we decided to start selling as early as possible.