The Nathan Barry Show

[00:00:00] Charli: A brand is a funny thing. It's not really what you say it is. It's the impression you leave in someone else's mind.

[00:00:06] Nathan: Today I'm sitting down with Charlie Pley, who is the creative director here at Kit and we're breaking down the Convert kit to Kit rebrand three months later.

[00:00:13] Charli: Rebranding isn't just about what you're putting out.

[00:00:16] They're publicly what people are seeing of you. It's also about how we operate internally, right? Having the right assets there gives you that confidence to have conviction in what you're selling.

[00:00:25] Nathan: If someone's listening and they're like, okay, brand strategy, I've heard those two words put together, but what does that actually mean in practice?

[00:00:30] Charli: Yeah, the brand strategy is your like, vision for the reputation you want to build, the like, personality you're trying to craft. Yes, creators care about earning more money. They also care about a lot of other things. Ultimately, they have this deep connection with their audience. If we understand that, we want our brand to resonate with that audience.

[00:00:49] Nathan: What's been fascinating to me is watching people react. to the Kit brand versus the ConvertKit brand. The talent is excited. Hearing Matthew McConaughey being excited about launching on Kit. Tom Brady's manager talking about why they selected Kit. Brand matters so much.

[00:01:03] Charli: And I think what enabled us to do that was.

[00:01:12] Nathan: We're back six months later. You're on the podcast. Yes. A lot has happened in the last six months.

[00:01:17] Charli: Yeah.

[00:01:17] Nathan: When we last recorded, we had basically just finished announcing that we were going to rebrand to Kit.

[00:01:23] Charli: Yep.

[00:01:25] Nathan: At Krafton Commerce, that was wild. And we talked through all of that, but then really all the work came.

[00:01:32] We worked on it a bunch beforehand, but so much work came to launch the rebrand. I don't want to dive into that in this episode.

[00:01:38] Charli: Yeah. It's so funny to think that the last time we recorded a podcast, we didn't know. What the kit logo was going to be, what our color was going to be. I think we might've been in the middle of color discussions.

[00:01:49] It's wild to think how fast that all happened and how far we've come since.

[00:01:54] Nathan: Yeah. So we want to go through four lessons that we've learned in that process, but first I feel like you and I have changed a lot as leaders over the last. 12 months in particular.

[00:02:05] Charli: I am a completely different creative director now to what I was like this time last year.

[00:02:11] It's wild. I think that going through the rebrand like I had to make so many decisions every single day almost about this rebrand and there was just no choice but to have confidence in those decisions.

[00:02:24] Charli: I could not sit there and worry oh should it be this one or this one. I'm going to be honest, I did do that for some things, like the color.

[00:02:31] Nathan: Yep.

[00:02:31] Charli: But mostly you just have to commit and move forward. And I feel like that has now led into like the general way that I work at KIT. The way I manage the brand studio team is just okay, trusting in my gut, having conviction and moving forward with it.

[00:02:46] Nathan: Yeah, I think often in life, especially if you work as your own you're able to delay or defer.

[00:02:52] And in this process, you couldn't do that at all.

[00:02:56] Charli: Nope.

[00:02:56] Nathan: It was like everything has to fall into place.

[00:02:59] Charli: Yeah.

[00:02:59] Nathan: And everyone is looking to you like, Charlie, I'm trying to rebrand, an app. What color are we using? Should these

[00:03:05] Charli: buttons be, yeah.

[00:03:06] Nathan: Yeah, all of those things. And if you're like, I don't know yet.

[00:03:09] Charli: Yeah.

[00:03:10] Nathan: Then there's a lot of people saying, I'm sorry, but that doesn't work for me.

[00:03:15] Charli: And also the decisions that are made had to be good.

[00:03:18] There was a lot riding on this. We were picking the color that's going to be our brand color, for a

[00:03:22] Nathan: very long time. For a

[00:03:23] Charli: long time. Our logo, for a very long time.

[00:03:25] It's not like I could use the excuse of, Oh, we can pick now and then maybe we can change later if it doesn't work out. And so that, that was a challenge also. But I think that also was entrusting my gut and learning how to give really good critical feedback to the agency. So that we would reach that result that we needed.

[00:03:41] Nathan: Yeah. Yeah. So I want to dive into the four lessons that we talked about last night. And the first one is really about the process of the rebrand. I thought it was like, okay, we start from scratch and now we have to build up from zero of this new brand. But because you led the team in doing this whole thing in public, we carried over so much.

[00:03:59] And then we got to, we got to start to build this new brand on 90, right? Because we brought people through this whole journey. We talked about it a little bit in the last episode when you were on about how important it is Or like how happy we were with our decision to rebrand in public Yeah, and now like I could not imagine doing it any other way,

[00:04:23] Charli: right?

[00:04:24] I think that your impression is that when you rebrand you're starting from scratch because that's what a lot of brands do

[00:04:29] Nathan: right,

[00:04:29] Charli: right? Is there like we are completely new now like we need you to see us in this new light And they don't bring you along on the journey or tell the story of what they're trying to keep from their old brand.

[00:04:39] Because there's a lot that we wanted to keep from ConvertKit, right? We got where we were for a reason. There was a lot of things that were successful in that. And there was a lot of new things that we needed to bring in to get to the next level. And we got to make that choice. of what we're bringing along and tell people the story of that along the way.

[00:04:56] Nathan: Yeah, something that we had is Converter was a very sincere brand. A lot of the way that we told stories, it was about the emotional arc of someone's life as they, learn to earn a living as a creator and accomplish these things and all of that. And that's still a big part of Kit.

[00:05:12] Charli: Yeah. So I think the lesson is, if you bring people along in the process of your rebranding, one, you don't have to start from scratch, and two, you can keep the things that worked for your previous brand as you build on top of them for your new brand.

[00:05:26] Nathan: I think that's very true. I knew we had a lot of brand equity in ConvertKit.

[00:05:31] Nathan: but seeing it play through this whole process, it's just been Absolutely amazing.

[00:05:35] Like watching people like desperate for next episodes of the new brand and all those things that made a huge difference.

[00:05:42] Charli: Yeah, it really did. And we had a lot of feedback when we first announced this that people were saying, Oh, but you've been doing this for 10 years now. Why are you throwing that all away?

[00:05:52] And we're like, we're not.

[00:05:54] Nathan: Yeah, I didn't feel like we threw any of that away.

[00:05:55] Charli: No.

[00:05:56] Nathan: The only thing that I miss from ConvertKit as a brand.

[00:06:01] Charli: I'm like, where are you going with this? I don't think

[00:06:02] Nathan: I've told you this before. The only thing I miss is being able to search the web for mentions of ConvertKit and know that when those characters show up in that order, they're talking about us.

[00:06:14] Yes. Whereas now with kit, someone's talking about their soccer jersey or.

[00:06:19] Charli: A

[00:06:19] Nathan: sewing kit or any of these things.

[00:06:21] Charli: Yeah.

[00:06:21] Nathan: And, we have to be, you have to know based on context. Yeah. Or if we're actually tagged at kit.

[00:06:27] Charli: Yeah.

[00:06:28] Nathan: Yeah. Or something like that. But that's the only thing.

[00:06:31] Everything else that was great about the ConvertKit brand, we were able to carry forward very smoothly. And we didn't throw anything away that we cared about.

[00:06:39] Charli: Yeah, exactly. We did get the feedback from people as well that Kit was too generic as a name. And I think that searching it comes into play there.

[00:06:47] But I think already, we've only been Kit for what, three? Four months at this point, right? And already it means something to people, right? Like already we're seeing people talk about us in a new way, and it's yeah, we're putting meaning onto the word.

[00:07:02] Nathan: And so another thing that people said would happen a lot is, we'd lose our search rankings.

[00:07:06] Because it, we didn't just do a rebrand, we did a domain migration. Yes. And everyone's don't do that. And they had all these examples of WooCommerce going to woo. com. Yep. And then. changing back. And so there was like, the whole SEO industry was watching to be like, how is this going to go?

[00:07:24] And I was just talking to Colin, who leads our SEO, and we're now at 105 percent of our search traffic from before,

[00:07:33] Charli: which

[00:07:33] Nathan: is pretty wild.

[00:07:34] Charli: Yes.

[00:07:35] Nathan: I don't want this to come off as bragging because that's not what we're trying to do. But in a few different cases, we did things that you should not do as a company where you're like, Oh, there's too much at stake.

[00:07:50] And so don't mess with those things. Don't switch domain names. It can't be done effectively. Don't change the name of your company.

[00:07:56] Charli: 10 years in,

[00:07:57] Nathan: 10 years in, you throw away all this brand equity, all of those things. And I think that we have left a case study behind of you can to these like wild ambitious things.

[00:08:10] And do it in a way that it's hard, but it's not long term costly.

[00:08:17] You don't lose something.

[00:08:18] Charli: Yeah. And if you care about it enough to go into the details and making sure you're bringing with you what you want to bring with you, it can happen. And I think what enabled us to do that was the time we spent with Koto on developing our brand strategy, which is something that, we had.

[00:08:34] as ConvertKit, but it was fuzzier. It was never as intentionally crafted as what we've put together for Kit. And that has given us something that we can use to, like a filter to make decisions through. For, yeah, all the decisions we're making, what we want to keep, what we want to leave, it all comes back to the brand strategy, which is what we're trying to build.

[00:08:53] Nathan: If someone's listening and they're like, okay, brand strategy, I've heard those two words put together, but what does that actually mean in practice?

[00:08:58] Charli: Yeah. The brand strategy is your vision for the reputation you want to build, the personality you're trying to craft with your brand. Because a brand is a funny thing.

[00:09:09] It's not really what you say it is. It's the impression you leave in someone else's mind. And so you have to make decisions to try and Leave that impression with them when they interact with your brand. And it's not really up to you at the end of the day what it ends up being, but you can make choices to try help get there.

[00:09:25] And so that's what we've done with our brand strategy. And I keep coming back to these three words because you want to have something easy to remember. So the personality traits is bold, expert, sincere. And so everything we do, we can run it through those three words. And that's really helped us make the right decisions along the way.

[00:09:41] Nathan: Yeah. So how would you describe, I don't know, bringing that to life or other aspects of the brand strategy? Let's say you hired a new designer to your team or someone whose job is to live and breathe this brand. What would you be telling them?

[00:09:52] Charli: Yeah. First we have a brand strategy deck that Koto made for us that really walks you through it and walks you through what it's based in as well.

[00:10:00] Cause they did a bunch of research and came to this key insight that. Yes, creators care about earning more money, but they also care about a lot of other things. And ultimately, they have this deep connection with their audience, and they want to provide value to them, right? And that's what it's based in, it's it's more than making money.

[00:10:20] It's about true value, connection, getting your time back, the freedom, and all those other things that come along with it. And if we understand that, we're understanding our audience, and that's what our brand is based on. We want our brand to resonate with that audience, with people who care about that.

[00:10:35] We care about it too, and that's what we're trying to showcase.

[00:10:37] Nathan: Yeah, that makes sense. One thing that's different is that Kit is much bolder of a brand than ConvertKit. What are some ways that you brought that boldness through?

[00:10:49] Charli: One of my favorite ways is with our custom typeface. It's we, yeah, we got to design it from scratch with Koto and HotType like TypeFoundry.

[00:10:58] And it was really fun to just make every little decision about the letters. And it's such a great typeface. It's got personality, but not too much. Because you can still read it. We want everything to be legible that we write. But you can literally just take our brand, ColorBlue. Put Kit Sands on top of it.

[00:11:15] And it looks like Kit,

[00:11:16] Nathan: it's our brand. Yeah.

[00:11:17] Charli: Which is not something we had as ConvertKit. We did really feel like we had to put our logo on things for it to feel like us. . And I think that's because our brand was fragmented, where we weren't making decisions based on a clear brand strategy.

[00:11:30] It was more about gut feel. And maybe some personal taste thrown in there as well. And that just leads to, I don't know, some inconsistencies and something that isn't got a lot of conviction behind it. Whereas Kit has more conviction behind it.

[00:11:45] Nathan: You mentioned that the ConvertKit brand was fragmented. I think part of that is from where it started, being fragmented.

[00:11:52] Because we made the Seva brand.

[00:11:53] Charli: Yes. It was never meant to be a ConvertKit brand.

[00:11:56] Nathan: And then we actually just ConvertKit in that same font. And, it had to be a lot of things had to be designed. The

[00:12:04] Charli: creative director I am now would never do that. I'd be like no. We have to start from

[00:12:09] Nathan: scratch.

[00:12:09] You have to start from scratch. You're, based around the company name. Is there anything else in brand strategy that has been impactful?

[00:12:15] Charli: I think that maybe brand strategy feels like something that. is difficult for folks who aren't brand agencies to put together, but I think what I learned from working with Koto on it is really it's just your vision clearly documented in a way that's easy to remember for you and anyone on the team to come back to and uses that filter for decision making.

[00:12:36] And so it doesn't have to be a fancy process. You just have to describe like, How it is you want people to see you. Yeah. And keep coming back to that.

[00:12:43] Nathan: What about the messaging and positioning? Because we spend a lot of time on that.

[00:12:47] Charli: Yes, we do. And

[00:12:48] Nathan: there's different parts of it.

[00:12:49] Charli: Yep.

[00:12:50] Nathan: We talked about how Kit is the email first operating system.

[00:12:52] . For creators who mean business. . Early on in the process is when we came to that Creators who mean Business Line.

[00:12:58] Charli: Yes.

[00:12:59] Nathan: And that just resonates because there's a, we have a level of sincerity, but so do the creators, so the creators and it mean business that has multiple levels to it.

[00:13:09] Like we're here to build a business. We're not just messing around on social media for the fun of it. And then we also, we mean business at yeah, it's sincere, it's intentional. It's okay, if I'm, if someone means business, then they're very good at what they do.

[00:13:24] Yeah. And they're going to approach it with this drive and resilience that other people don't have.

[00:13:29] Charli: And they're building a business with meaning as well. Yeah. For their audience.

[00:13:33] Nathan: Yeah. And so another thing that we say is, we exist to help creators build valuable businesses and we have a few, it means very similar things, but valuable means, we're.

[00:13:45] You want to build equity or enterprise value or like the talks to revenue, but then businesses that deliver value. That's something that we've always had with ConvertKit where we would say Hey, we're here to help you earn a living, not make money. One make money sounds cheap. Yeah.

[00:14:00] Living is Hey, there's a lot of work that goes into this.

[00:14:03] Charli: Yeah.

[00:14:04] Nathan: But then we've also always centered around the audience. The creators who we've worked with are the ones who are delivering value. And they're saying, I am here to serve my audience and my business will grow as a result of that.

[00:14:18] Compared to, there's a lot of people in the make money online world who are saying, my audience is an ATM that I go and just withdraw cash from whenever I want. They're there for me.

[00:14:31] Charli: Yeah,

[00:14:31] Nathan: and a kit creator or a convert kit creator is totally different and we've carried that through I think really Yeah, and now we have the short phrases.

[00:14:41] Charli: Yes, they can articulate that. Yes. Yes And that's where like we've made a change recently actually on the brand studio team is that we've moved Isa who was previously our senior storyteller into a senior writer role. And she's bringing with her the like depth of understanding of creators and the ability to write really sincere words that like, honestly, she makes us cry all the time, right?

[00:15:02] With her stories. But that is now being applied to like our product messaging and in how we talk about our product. And we didn't have someone on the team before whose role was to write the copy that expresses our product. It was pulled together from a bunch of different members of the team.

[00:15:19] And I think this is another way that Kit is operating, is investing in the words, and knowing from that process with Kodo how important it was to go back and forth on every little detail of the words, and now we're going to get to do that more often.

[00:15:33] Nathan: Yeah, exactly.

[00:15:34] Charli: And I think that's another thing we've learned, is that rebranding isn't just about what you're putting out there publicly, what people are seeing of you.

[00:15:40] It's also about how we operate internally and the shifts that we've made in, our mindset as a company. That before we didn't have a writer on the team, now we know that's something we need. ConvertKit didn't have a senior writer, Kit does.

[00:15:55] Nathan: Yeah, what are some of those other shifts that you've seen in the transformation?

[00:15:58] Charli: Yeah, I think that we've all leveled up our expectations for ourselves. In a way, like we're aiming for a higher bar of quality, and we're not afraid to use the resources to help us get there. Yeah. Like, when we rebranded Sever, ultimately ConvertKit, we didn't use like a big agency. We worked with a studio, and that was They

[00:16:21] Nathan: did the design for us.

[00:16:22] Yes, just the design.

[00:16:24] Charli: And that was how ConvertKit approached things. For us, for Kit, we worked with a larger agency who had that strategic expertise in house as well. We spent a lot more money on it as well. And we weren't afraid to do that. Because we knew it was an investment in getting to the quality that we needed to have for this long lasting.

[00:16:42] We're doing that more and more as well. Right now we're working with a dev agency called SquareBlack on our website. We previously just had Corey, our senior front end developer, working by himself on it. And now, we're making sure that we have extra resources to create more at higher quality, and we're investing in that type of thing.

[00:17:02] Nathan: I think that the kit team really brings out bold so much more. We take a bold action. Some of these ideas of how we're going to build functionality or announce it or some of these moves, we're just like, we're doing it. We should, but okay, that feels a little scary.

[00:17:20] Charli: Yeah.

[00:17:20] Nathan: And as ConvertKit, we deliberate on it for a long time.

[00:17:23] Maybe we'd choose the safer option. And as Kit, we're like,

[00:17:26] Charli: Let's do it.

[00:17:26] Nathan: We're, it's, there's much more of a trust your gut because I think with the brand strategy and the principles and all these things, all the work that we put in, we have the same shared understanding.

[00:17:36] And so then we can say, I think we should do this.

[00:17:39] And, someone else on the team is yeah, it's right in line.

[00:17:43] Charli: Yes.

[00:17:45] Nathan: And so the shared understanding allows us to take bold action.

[00:17:48] Charli: Yeah.

[00:17:49] Nathan: One example would be ConvertKit as a company was scared to launch a an app store, a platform, because it's such a huge undertaking. To do it well, this is a decade long commitment.

[00:18:02] Charli: Yep.

[00:18:03] Nathan: And it's not playing it safe. That is as hard as it gets in software development. And Kit is we, of course we would do that. We're in it for the next decade. We know it's going to be really hard. And then actually bringing the experts, that's another thing that instead of trying to do that with who we had on the team, we brought in Katie, our new VP of product.

[00:18:23] Who were, she led product for square e commerce before, right? So she has a ton of amazing expertise. We brought in Dan as the director of design who knows activation and, all of these things very, very well. And we brought in Rohan who built out so much of Shopify's app store strategy.

[00:18:39] It's who does the absolute best Shopify? Great. Let's bring some. And so I think that another difference that ConvertKit, we would have said, Hey, let's do it homegrown. We'll learn. We'll interview people who know how to do this. And at Kit, we're like, no, we're.

[00:18:53] Charli: Straight to the source. Yeah. Who's done

[00:18:55] Nathan: this before.

[00:18:55] Yeah. And it makes a huge difference.

[00:18:56] Charli: Yeah. It almost feels like Kit has more self belief than ConvertKit did as well. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that is showing up in us as leaders too. We've got more belief in ourselves now as Kit. Yeah.

[00:19:07] Nathan: Yeah. We do for sure.

[00:19:09] Charli: Another example of ConvertKit vs. Kit is the way we've run this retreat that we're on right now.

[00:19:14] We're coming to the tail end of. Previously, we would have a bunch of sessions and they would all be like focused on different topics and we'd be strategizing and we'd end up coming out of the retreat with a long list of stuff we wanted to do when we go back to work.

[00:19:27] Whereas this week, we've had what we've called Create Week, which is like a hackathon where we took a problem we wanted to solve and worked in small groups to like, Try solve it this week.

[00:19:37] Let's not make the plan and then do the work later. Let's do the work together now while we're here. And it's been so much fun.

[00:19:44] Nathan: I want to go back to that in just a second, but I'm realizing that ConvertKit was very the strategy was maybe very clearly articulated all the way down. And with Kit, what we've done is we've articulated a more high level strategy and then had people be more self directed underneath that.

[00:20:05] So as an executive team, we as ConvertKit, we'd be like, here's what we're doing. Here's what everybody, each team is doing underneath that. And our 2025 strategy for Kit was actually not even one page long. And then the team said okay, here's how we're going to get

[00:20:19] Charli: there. Yeah.

[00:20:21] Nathan: Build up underneath it.

[00:20:22] And the tie into crit week is that it's very self directed where we didn't say, here's the projects. We put it out there and said, who would like to lead a project? What's your pitch? And everyone knows the strategy and where we're going. So the pitches were all really good, but then we ended up with 14 individual leaders from all levels of the company.

[00:20:43] Some most were individual contributors. Some were managers, some were execs, and you got this wide range of projects. And then everybody just said, Oh, this seems interesting. I want to I want to join it. And then everyone just dove in and built things. Like I worked on a project where we used AI to develop apps and we ended up taking two non developers on our team and they built apps that they knew would be either be very meaningful for themselves in their role.

[00:21:12] Or for their co workers. So Shiv, who's our creator educator, he used AI to build a tag management app that his creator growth counterparts would really value. And then Maggie leads our agency partnerships, and she wants an agency dashboard. And so she built

[00:21:29] Charli: it. So

[00:21:29] Nathan: she built it. And that was like this bold, ambitious thing that, you to bring to life.

[00:21:36] Yeah. And yeah, this week we just dove in, did a hackathon, and it was amazing. I don't know if it's in the shot, but there's stickies and things behind us from some of the stuff that we built. But that that fast paced, Just dive in and do it. Yeah.

[00:21:51] Charli: Yeah. And also what Nathan probably wants to tell you but won't is that his team won the most progress award.

[00:21:57] Nathan: We did. We did. We have a little trophy to prove it to. That's something that I really want to keep going as we build out Kit, is this idea of taking bold action and saying, hey, we can build the future and so we're going to do that. Instead of oh, talk about what's possible for a long time or how to do it.

[00:22:14] And then base it in reality. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:22:17] Nathan: And instead it's no, I can make that happen right now.

[00:22:19] Charli: Yeah. Yeah, that was really fun this week, actually. We dove into a, it's the most we've ever talked about AI, I think, as a company, is this week, and we're all we're using it to help us build faster to get these proof of concepts out.

[00:22:32] I built something in Replicit for the first time, and it was really fun, and that's something where oh, I've never considered. Being able to do that.

[00:22:40] And now, oh, with AI, it's possible.

[00:22:42] Nathan: And we're spending so much time on the scaffolding to make that possible.

[00:22:46] Charli: Yes.

[00:22:46] Nathan: That was actually the project that I was on the team that worked on was, we made tutorials.

[00:22:51] Yes. On how to do this. And yes, we built two apps, which was wild that actually worked out. And they're production ready in there. Production ready might be a little stressed.

[00:23:01] Charli: Yeah, even those times, yeah. They

[00:23:02] Nathan: are definitely internal team.

[00:23:04] Charli: Yeah. Production ready.

[00:23:05] Nathan: But really it was about the create tutorials along the way so that anyone else can follow along.

[00:23:10] Like I started playing with this a month or so ago. Oh, so

[00:23:14] Charli: you got a head start on Create Week.

[00:23:17] Nathan: Yeah, exactly. So we cheated. That's it. No, so what I did is I was like, oh, I want to try to build an app for the kid app store. And I think I can use AI to do it. And I hit so many roadblocks and I didn't understand this.

[00:23:27] And so then I pulled together a team and said, hey, let's Figure out how to how to overcome all these roadblocks and then teach our community how to do that. For example, an OAuth authentication between the app that you make and kit so you can display data total pain to do. But now we got to the point where we have one perfect prompt that you can put into an AI agent and it will do that tire for success.

[00:23:52] It should normally take you days. And you like watch it do all those things and does it in, two minutes.

[00:23:57] Charli: Nice.

[00:23:58] Nathan: And that's wild. But then, really, I guess this is the thing that Kit's doing. Kit is thinking in scalable terms, everywhere of not just how can I do this, but then how can I make the platform so that everyone else can do it?

[00:24:09] Charli: Yeah. Yeah. Isn't it interesting to hear how we're even talking about this like Kit does this? Yeah. Yeah. Whereas I don't think we ever really said that Asberg kid like Convert Kit does this, but we can have conviction around that. Now

[00:24:22] Nathan: the next lesson, and this is something that is probably obvious to you, but I have really internalized.

[00:24:28] is brand matters so much. I've always cared about design, and I've always cared about product, and, and company culture, and all these things which collectively they come together and they make a brand. But I've never been the brand strategist or obsessive about these things. But what's been fascinating to me is watch The kit brand play out the last three months.

[00:24:52] We have closed more star or celebrity creators in the last 60 days, 90 days than the entire rest of the company history combined. And the rate that it's happening is wild. And we worked for a long time for that to happen, but just. As a quick aside, it's Ellen, Matthew McConaughey, Lil Jon Hasan

[00:25:14] Charli: Minhaj,

[00:25:15] Nathan: Morgan Freeman Tom Brady is launching his newsletter right now as we're recording this, like today.

[00:25:20] Oh, wow.

[00:25:20] Charli: He's

[00:25:20] Nathan: launching his newsletter on Kit. That was actually a really fun retreat moment was we got the news that he's launching, we're all here together and we got to celebrate. But what's been fascinating to me is watching people react to the kit brand versus the ConvertKit brand.

[00:25:35] I think it's ConvertKit. Everyone treated it as okay, cool. Yeah. It's we have a thing that we're doing and ConvertKit is a tool that we'll use to do that. And the behind the scenes managers care about tool selection, but the talent. Doesn't know her care as kit people just accept us in all of these conversations in a way that they didn't.

[00:25:55] And the talent is excited. Like hearing Matthew McConaughey talk about being excited about launching on kit, hearing Tom Brady's manager talking about why they selected kit, all of those things. It's just, it's a different level and you see it carry through in everything, like the pitch decks are a huge thing, like what your team has done to set, our sales and partnership up for success with these amazing pitch decks.

[00:26:19] Like we went. We had a very tight timeline to pitch Tom Brady and because they wanted to launch for the Superbowl because he's calling the Superbowl in a week, right? The Superbowl is in eight days. He's trying to launch his newsletter, grow it in advance of the Superbowl. And so we had the absolute tightest timelines, but we pulled all that together and I think we, we did that entire pitch in 24 hours.

[00:26:44] And their team was just blown away and it is because of how the kit brand came through all of this.

[00:26:51] Charli: Yeah, and as creative director leading the brand studio team, our sort of like audience or like the customer we serve is our internal team, really, in that we have to make sure we're providing them with the assets to do their jobs, to reach their goals.

[00:27:06] And it meant so much to me to hear Maggie on our sales team just rave about how proud she feels to present these kit slides to folks. And I like, I honestly think that as someone getting on calls, like having the right, It gives you that confidence to like really have conviction in what you're selling and I think it helps and I think that's showing up and it means a lot that Maggie is just like proud to present them,

[00:27:34] Nathan: right?

[00:27:35] Yeah. And we're just winning deals left and right with those and the momentum that comes from us is just wild. And when Maggie said that, she was like talking about the level that people are blown away by the quality of the brand and the presentations and everything else. And she's talking to these huge agencies, the big talent agencies in Hollywood.

[00:27:56] She's talking to marketing agencies and everyone else. And these are people who like probably see a thousand pitches a year, and so it's at the highest level and we're blown away. Like when the, we got the verbal agreement from Tom Brady to, to sign with kit his manager said, Hey, I just want to say that if I could describe the kit team in one word, it'd be professional.

[00:28:20] Like the way that you guys have delivered on this, the thoughtfulness of the full launch strategy and everything else just blew us away. And to get that level of unsolicited feedback, you know that, all right, this is working. And all of that effort put into a rebrand really matters.

[00:28:39] And so I go back to those comments that we saw, probably you and I were reading as we recorded last time in June, where. People are very positive, enthusiastic, but there's some of these other ones that are like, Oh, it's going to be a big waste of time and all that. And it has been absolutely the best move.

[00:28:57] And it helps individual creators because what happens is we're building the momentum that we have is insane to me. And it builds up this incredibly strong network that then benefits every other creator on the platform. Cause now Tom Brady is bringing in advertisers who are like, Hey, what other newsletters can we sponsor?

[00:29:17] And that's cascading down to, the rest of our professional creator base. And then as the brand reputation grows, and the product improves, and more and more creators come on it's just absolutely wild.

[00:29:28] Charli: Yeah, it's so cool. And I love hearing those stories, because our sales team's so great at reporting back Oh, we closed this deal, but also why?

[00:29:35] And stories behind it. And hearing the things that were mentioned as a reason we were chosen. Relate back to our brand and our brand strategy and what we're trying to build, the reputation we're crafting, that our sales team are clearly doing a great job of readying. And that's really special, because brand is one of those things that's hard to measure the impact of by itself, because by itself it doesn't do a lot, like it has to be applied to other things to have the impact.

[00:30:00] So to just hear brand coming up, in these, all these touch points as the reason that people are relating to us, are choosing us, I'm like, okay. Yeah. Now I feel like I'm doing my job

[00:30:09] Nathan: yeah. And we did a, an exercise with all of our managers and leadership where we did a SWOT analysis.

[00:30:16] So you go through and look at our 2025 strategy and where we're at in the market, you do strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and you break it down. And everybody did like research and thinking about it in advance. But then, wrote a bunch of stickies down and like under strengths, there was a whole bunch of stickies around brand and it just shows like how much we believe in it and how everyone is seeing it play out.

[00:30:39] Charli: Yeah. It's awesome.

[00:30:41] Nathan: Actually, this is a good moment. My phone kept blowing up with a whole bunch of things. And it's the announcement of Tom's newsletter.

[00:30:49] Charli: Oh, nice! I was like, why? Are people texting you, like?

[00:30:51] Nathan: No, it's all the reposts and messages on, yeah, on social of we're excited to announce that Tom launched his newsletter.

[00:30:59] Look at that. Launched it on a kit. Woohoo! Get access to the seven time Super Bowl champion's thoughts on business, media, leadership, health, and of course, football. And then this is the first reply, the power of Kit. Look at that.

[00:31:10] Charli: Nice.

[00:31:12] Nathan: All right. With that moment recorded, I'm now going to put my phone on do not disturb so that we can record uninterrupted.

[00:31:18] And then I'm going to go answer like the next 50 texts that I'm about to get because everyone's going to be very pumped and excited. I think the last lesson that I want to talk through is that the rebrand, like the work of the rebrand continues so far beyond the okay, here's the finished brand deck and styles and everything.

[00:31:39] Like when, Kodo has an agency who helped us through this whole process when they're like, all right, we're done.

[00:31:45] Charli: This project. Thanks so much. Yeah, this is

[00:31:47] Nathan: finished. That's like when the real work began.

[00:31:50] Charli: Yeah, for our team, especially, like it's, yes, Koto can build this beautiful thing for us, but it's on us to implement it and to get that right in the execution.

[00:31:59] Nathan: What are some of those things as you go through the implementation of the brand, basically from. In finalizing all of the details to now, that really stood out.

[00:32:10] Charli: What stood out to me was, what we're trying to counteract of what we're doing as ConvertKit, is that we wanted to keep consistency.

[00:32:18] And so I was really strict on making sure that everything we were applying the kit brand to was consistent, that we're making consistent choices in like, how we use the ratio of our headings to our body text, or like anything like this in the assets. So that we're starting from a good base. Because. If you start from that point, it's just easier to continue it than if you put out a mess and then have to fix it later.

[00:32:40] Nathan: Because

[00:32:41] Charli: that's what we're dealing with ConvertKit.

[00:32:43] Nathan: The systems all the way through. Yes. Systems. Anyone who's listened to me knows that in the last three years I've become obsessed with systems and flywheels. Yes. And we have Yeah. We've brought that through. Yeah. In so many ways.

[00:32:56] Where we're just like, look, we're going to do this over and over again.

[00:32:59] And, because before on Design Things, you or I or David or someone would

[00:33:03] Charli: jump in and we,

[00:33:04] Nathan: We do these one off things. Yeah. And we'd get it out the door. Yep. It's interesting. We ConvertKit was scrappy.

[00:33:13] Kit is, moves with the same pace, but is deliberate.

[00:33:16] Charli: Yes.

[00:33:17] Nathan: And it's the systems that allow us to do that, right? Actually ConvertKit couldn't have turned around a pitch for Tom Brady in 24 hours. Kit can, and can do. A pitch that wins and blows them away because we have these systems that are so built out.

[00:33:32] Charli: Yep.

[00:33:32] Nathan: Like we did tap in designers at the end, like Jackie on our design team came and helped us out. But she was like, Hey, I've got tickets or something. I need to leave at five o'clock and we're like, okay, that's in 47 minutes, and so she helped us clean things up and all of that, but we were in a good place because we had such a good thing to start from.

[00:33:49] And that Yeah, we're able to deliver because everything that we've done with the kit brand is systematized. Yes. And so we really put in the work up front to set ourselves up for success. Over the next five plus years.

[00:34:01] Charli: And because we were having to apply this brand to everything, right? There was so much work to be done.

[00:34:08] We really learned very quickly that simplicity is best. And we set ourselves up for this by crafting a typeface that had a lot of personality. Like I was saying before, you can just have a color on the typeface and it looks like Kit. And whenever we would start to get more fancy and Oh, let's add in more elements.

[00:34:25] It like felt too much and it started to not feel like Kit. And so it was like, great, okay, we can do this faster because all we have to do is just keep things simple.

[00:34:35] Nathan: All right, so those are the four lessons that we've learned. I think doing one of the most iconic and successful rebrands of the last decade.

[00:34:42] Charli: Not that you're biased at all.

[00:34:43] Nathan: I'm slightly biased. But when you think about, now we're at this point, right? Yeah, agencies and design sites and all this have written case studies on how we did the rebrand and all along, it is something that people will study so much, but I want to go back to this idea of leadership and personal growth.

[00:34:59] If you could go and sit down with Charlie 12 months ago, who either has, who has just finished announcing this to the team, like we're going to do this. What advice would you give her

[00:35:12] Charli: just trust your gut?

[00:35:13] Nathan: Yeah.

[00:35:13] Charli: Yeah, I honestly think that you invited me up on stage to present The announcement to the team is like it unlocks something for me.

[00:35:22] It was like, okay, this is your seat at the table

[00:35:24] Take it.

[00:35:25] Nathan: Yeah,

[00:35:25] Charli: and so then I just like I did

[00:35:29] Nathan: And that's the thing. It's like for any creator listening. I would just say like you belong

[00:35:35] Charli: yeah,

[00:35:35] Nathan: take your seat as the leader of this thing and and be bold and execute in that way.

[00:35:40] Charli: Yeah, for sure. And I think as a creator, when you're running your own business, you don't need someone else to give you that seat.

[00:35:47] You have to give yourself that seat and start, I guess, seeing yourself at a higher level. Because I think that's what you did for me, was like, open up. My mind to see my position in the company as something bigger than what it was like I was over here in my little corner leading brand studio team I've always been quite like a visible person in the company just because I like to make jokes in the zoom chat and team meetings But this was like, yeah, it gave me the Permission, that I had somehow been waiting for to, to step up and lead across the company.

[00:36:20] And maybe the advice I would give to myself before you asked me to present was like, don't wait for that permission. Just act like you have it already.

[00:36:28] Nathan: The other thing that has been a big theme at this retreat is this idea of dreaming.

[00:36:32] Isa, who we've talked about a few times, she wrote a book about dreaming.

[00:36:36] Yeah. It's this And having these big dreams and pursuing them and so many of our creators do that. And we did something at this retreat that we'd actually done six years ago, which in Oceanside, California as ConvertKit, we had we serve a lot of like technical marketers and authors and bloggers.

[00:36:55] And we had done this big wall of stickies and photos, magazine cutouts of like dream creators that we would love to pursue. And it was a whole thing of getting the team to think bigger. Yeah. Because the names up there felt ridiculous.

[00:37:09] Charli: Yes. At the time we were like we might as well put it up there, but it's not going to happen.

[00:37:13] Nathan: Yeah. And so earlier this week Isa referenced that wall. She was talking about how we had put this dream out there and how we'd achieved and gotten some of those names. And so many more that were like even bigger than people that we'd listed there. And so that was one set of dreams.

[00:37:31] And then another is I've talked about in my newsletter, an annual review and something, my speech to the team to kick off the week, I talked about four big dreams that have come to life for me that I never thought would happen. One is rebranding the company to a brand that like would carry us forward for a decade or more, like building a truly iconic brand.

[00:37:51] The next is bringing Kit Studios to life. We have the Boise location. Chicago might be open by the time we publish this. Like the next one is our free plan. Like so many people, when people recommend Kit, what I hear over and over again is, Oh, you should start with Kit. They have 10, 000 subscribers for free.

[00:38:08] Charli: And people are like, Really?

[00:38:10] Nathan: They don't believe it. Yeah.

[00:38:11] Charli: What's the catch?

[00:38:12] Nathan: The catch is that we're bootstrapped and profitable and we want to invest in the community. And that's something that I've always wanted to do because I admire Figma so much as a company. And they took, they made professional level design tools that anyone in the world on like a Chromebook could use in the browser.

[00:38:26] Yeah.

[00:38:27] Charli: And they became an industry standard because of it. Because of

[00:38:29] Nathan: it. Yeah. And then the last one is building this app store. And there are so many things that now when they have an idea, I'll call someone up and say, Hey, I think this app would work really well for you and your business, as you serve creator clients or all of that do you want to build it?

[00:38:44] I'll give you my sketches. And so there's a bunch of apps that have come out along those lines. And I had all of those dreams come true in the last year, all as part of this journey to become Kip. And that's, was really our message to the team is. Put out these big things and then build it.

[00:39:04] That was the contract contrast of create week is all right. You can have these ideas and these big dreams and all of that. And then you can just sit down and make them happen. And I think that there is out of 14 projects, probably nine or 10 shipped something really neat. That is very useful and valuable today.

[00:39:23] And they had 10 to 15 hours of actual working to do it. Like not even very much.

[00:39:28] Charli: How do you think you either grew or had to grow as a leader to make those dreams come true?

[00:39:34] Nathan: I think a couple things. First was articulating them clearly, like believing that they could happen. Because for a long time I thought that those are too big, or that's for a company that had substantial funding, or that's, we missed out, we rebranded once, we missed that opportunity, we lost it.

[00:39:51] Or launching a free plan that's, 10 times more valuable than what we had before will cost us way too much MRR. And from this position that we have Oh, now we can't afford to lose that. And so believing that it's possible, articulating it really clearly, and then recruiting people who have the ability to bring it to life.

[00:40:12] In doing that, it just, it makes all of these things come together. And I think realizing that we, we have such a privileged position because. We do 45 million a year in revenue. We're profitable and we're not answering to investors and like on some short term time horizon or anything like that.

[00:40:31] And so it's we can take these risks and bets and we can do things because we're like. This is the way we believe the world should be. And we're gonna make that happen. I think it's interesting to watch yourself acquire new skills. And, before to get up and deliver a speech that hit all the points that I wanted to, and carried the emotional arc that I wanted to, and everything else.

[00:40:54] was really challenging. And I have, I can, think of a bunch of moments where I'm like, Oh, that could have been better. Or the, all that. And last night was one where I was like, okay, I had five bullets of what I wanted to cover. And that was all that I wrote was just the, two words per bullet.

[00:41:10] And. I was really happy with how it came together and hit all the points and wrapped up everything we're doing. And I was like, ah, there's a skill that I have now that I didn't have a year or a couple of years ago.

[00:41:23] Charli: And that comes back to the articulating the vision,

[00:41:25] Nathan: right?

[00:41:26] Charli: Being able to take what's in your brain and say it in a way that resonates.

[00:41:31] Yeah. And the, yeah, the lenss with people and expresses it clearly. Yeah. And I came out to you after it. I was like, oh man, you're such a good public speaker. .

[00:41:41] Nathan: But yeah, it just comes from that practice and everything else. Yeah. The other thing is to be able to touch on like really hard emotional things and to tell really hard stories and to let myself cry, but then to be able to bring it back.

[00:41:53] Yes.

[00:41:53] Charli: I dunno how you do that. Because when I start crying, I can't stop.

[00:41:58] Nathan: But then only there's two, two team members came up to me afterwards, and they're relatively new to the team and they both said, I've never seen a man cry in public before like that.

[00:42:08] Charli: Wow.

[00:42:09] Nathan: And that demonstrated a level of like vulnerability and leadership that was really meaningful.

[00:42:14] And that's just the, that's something that we've brought forward from ConvertKit to Kit. Yep. It's like all of us leading from a place of. Sincerity and vulnerability and all of that.

[00:42:25] Charli: I think that's why I'm here eight years later is because this time, eight years ago, we were in Oceanside on a team retreat and you cried telling the story of like why it's important for you to help creators earn a living.

[00:42:38] And I think that was when you got me hooked. I was like, okay, this is different.

[00:42:44] Nathan: Yeah. And it's I think you can build something really special if you put everything into it. And that's. When I just think about the next 10 years of Kit, it's this level of sincerity and effort and the boldness and everything else in the community that we have rallying around it.

[00:43:03] It's just, I'm very excited for it.

[00:43:06] Charli: And I think creators can see it too. That everything we're doing is because we just believe so much in creators. They care so much. That's why we do this.

[00:43:15] Nathan: Alright, I think that's a good place to leave it. It's been Amazing to go on this rebrand. Thank you to everyone watching who has followed along with this.

[00:43:22] You haven't seen it already. Go and check out the videos that we have on YouTube. Breaking it down, telling the story like we created a documentary.

[00:43:30] Charli: Yeah. And it's really good . It

[00:43:32] Nathan: really is. And if we don't just say that 'cause we made it. No. Lots of people on the internet say that it's really, really good.

[00:43:38] And then I would say. Just watch the brand, see what we're doing and implementing it. And if you were thinking about taking bold steps in your creator business, or you're thinking about doing something where Oh, I want to let go of this and pursue this new thing, but there's too much risk in that, be bold. Take those steps. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this episode, go to YouTube and search The Nathan Berry Show. Then hit subscribe, and make sure to like the video and drop a comment. I'd love to hear what some of your favorite parts of the video were, and also just who else you think we should have on the show.

[00:44:15] Thank you so much for listening.