The story of Flaunt
Flaunt: Simple screenshot reporting software that helps marketing agencies retain their clients. A Chrome extension that creates beautiful monthly reports, so agencies reduce the time spent compiling them.

In Tim Ferriss’ ‘4-Hour Workweek’, Tim Ferriss defines a ‘muse’ in a business context, as any business that provides an automated source of income or cash-flow.
The creation of Flaunt was a long journey, inspired by many things. Here it is in the context of Tim Ferriss’ ‘muse’ questions:
How did you decide on this muse?
Since I was 22 I have owned a social media agency. Every month we carried out work for clients and every month we created reports, usually in PowerPoint, to show them what we’d achieved. The trouble was, the reporting took freakin’ ages! It got too much, the team dreaded report week every month, so we decided to build our own social reporting software. What we came up with was based on a simple chrome extension and screenshots, which were automatically sent to a client’s monthly report. It looked a bit like Pinterest but nicely branded in our colours and each client had their own URL from which to view their reports.
Whilst remote working in Toronto in 2015 I met some Canadian social media agencies who were keen on using what we had built for ourselves, but the costs of white-labelling our software and/or them building it themselves were too high. After writing a series of eBooks on social media management best practice I realised that a lot of my networks and followers were other social media agencies. That was when I decided to re-build our reporting software into a tool that they could use to retain clients, just like we had been doing. I approached a friend about the idea and we decided to create it as a joint venture: they build it, we market it. The decision was that simple, and Flaunt was born.
What ideas did you consider (or test) beforehand? Why didn’t they work?
I tested the idea of white-labelling our existing software for specific agencies to use, but the sign-up costs were too high. It was too much of an initial outlay and costs of acquisition for us would have been huge — requiring a full on sales process for each new customer. I worked out we needed to create something that required a simple monthly retainer from agencies, that simply increased by $5 per month per client added.
My husband (and business partner) and I have a list of criteria before getting involved in any type of joint venture, that we stick to without exceptions. This list of criteria has been compiled with inspiration from the 4HWW. They are that the venture must: be truly location-independent, not reliant on a physical premises, be good for the planet, not be service-based, be scaleable and saleable, require minimum specialist on-going upkeep, not require educating the market, able to go from set up to revenue-generation in less than six months.
Most of all, the joint venture must be working alongside people we like and trust, whose values are similar to ours.
What tools/services or resources did you find most helpful when you were getting started?
One of the first nonfiction books I read was Key Person of Influence by Daniel Priestley, who I met when we were both speaking at an event for aspiring entrepreneurs. His book based around setting yourself up as a key person of influence in your field by the ‘5P’ method, to access the upper end of the market that 99% of people within it can’t. The 5Ps are: Pitch — being able to give a compelling answer to the question ‘what do you do?’. Publish — creating content for getting your message out to the world. Product –being clear about your offering. Profile — getting your own social media and personal profile sorted, then Partnerships — partnering with performers and creating joint ventures. Sorting out the first 4 Ps enabled me to start the 5th P — partnerships — which led to creating Flaunt.
Following KPI, the books that have had the most impact on my thinking, besides the 4HWW, are Peter Thiel — Zero to One, Oprah Winfrey — What I Know For Sure and Derek Sivers — Anything You Want. I love Derek’s straight-talking, no nonsense approach to business. Sometimes the best ideas are simple, and every over-complication takes away rather than adds.
What were your biggest mistakes, or biggest wastes of time/money?
The biggest mistake was not seeing the bigger picture when we commissioned the original software. In hindsight, I should have realised that if reporting was a problem for my social media agency, it would be a problem for others too, and created the first version in a way that other agencies could use it.
What have been your key marketing and/or manufacturing lessons learned?
A key marketing lesson learned very early on was to set up our entire website as a landing page, with the same call to action multiple times throughout the page. We also opted to give people a 30-day free trial period with no card details required to join. We wanted to completely lower the barriers to trying out the software and then trust that it was good enough to convert people to ongoing customers.
Any key PR wins? Media, well-known or celebrity users, or partnerships, etc.? How did they happen?
Our first waiting list was built using a Product Hunt listing as well as telling the NomadList network about it. A lot of the people using those two sites are part of the gig economy for marketing or social media services: exactly who Flaunt was built for.
One key PR win was Buffer, the social media scheduling platform, signing up to be a customer of ours, and subsequently telling their network about Flaunt. This happened because we listed all of the services we used in our agency: Buffer, Slack, Teamwork, Xero, Pipedrive, and approached them all about our new tool. I guess they wanted to return the favour!
If you used a web designer, where did you find them?
Flaunt was born as a joint venture with an awesome development company. They are a team of 3 world-class web developers and designers, who only build projects with people they want to work with and where they will own part of the business. It’s very much quality over quantity so it was important to them that we had the experience and proficiency in marketing that matched their tech skills.
If you were to do it all over again, what would you do differently?
Although we got to a revenue-generating stage pretty quickly, we put zero cash into the business at first — only time. The first waiting list was generated from manually approaching people in our existing networks and asking favours from a friend with a large Product Hunt profile. If we’d had confidence in our product before launching, we may have started Google AdWords and Facebook ads earlier. In reality, we only ever spent money on marketing that we had earned through Flaunt. I think we could have got to where we are quicker if we’d had put cash into ads sooner.
How do you think you were most creative (thought out of the box) in building this business?
I believe the term is ‘dogfooding’, when you create a product that you use yourself. That meant my social media agency, and the 15 social media managers within it, are the biggest and best advocates of the product. Before making Flaunt we sat round and thought of the actual benefits of using our existing software, in a way that would convince other agencies to use it. Being able to take a step back and understand why something we took for granted was so good was a challenge at first, but it led to describing our offering in a way that resonated with companies like ours.
How has your life most changed after reading The 4-Hour Workweek and building your muse? Any before-and-after examples you can give?
Before reading the 4HWW I was frazzled with clients and directly responsible for 10 team members, living a 30-minute drive away from an office and always busy, fuelled by sugar to make up for not having enough sleep the night before, and dashing from meeting to meeting. Whilst I think that approach to starting out was directly responsible for the solid business I have built, it was exhausting and unsustainable!
Shortly after reading the 4HWW I created a comprehensive manual for my social media agency, and in April 2016 promoted a brilliant member of my team to be general manager. She now runs the business, has a share in the company, and is brilliant at keeping the team happy and productive and delighting clients that are brought in by the sales team.
The time I have freed up by having one team member to look after rather than all of them has allowed me to focus on products like Flaunt and given the agency a new lease of life in the process.
Since first reading the 4HWW and completely applying lifestyle design principles to everything we do, my husband and I have spent around 4 months of every year living and working in a different country. Our daily living expenses are small by design, which gives a huge sense of freedom and brings so much happiness. Our base camp is a studio flat in Birmingham (UK) city centre, where the bed folds out from the wall and every piece of furniture is there because it’s absolutely needed. The flat, and our lifestyle, follow the ‘less but better’ rule.
