Building a market edge in a crowded category: A Timely Story
It’s been just over two years since I stepped out of Timely and I find myself (again) embarking on something completely new, this time solely defined by me, which I’ve coined as doing “just the fun stuff”.
For me this means helping the next generation of NZ and AU based startup and scale up ventures on nailing go-to-market, taking the 15 years of experiences, lessons and scars from CarbonCrop, Timely, Xero, Kitomba, Thread/Loop, along with corporates before those.
I haven’t shared much before about the Timely journey, mostly because I’ve been too consumed with what I’m doing right now to reflect. But late last year I was invited to speak at the Movac inaugural ‘Marketing Jam’ where I shared a bit about what we did from a marketing lens, and what I learned along the way. That was a short 10 minute talk and this is a more long-form post covering that session, which still skims over the details of a five year experience that culminated in Timely’s acquisition then, nine months later, my departure.
Over the course of my time at Timely I wore a bunch of hats, firstly as both Chief Product Officer and Chief Marketing Officer then eventually Chief Revenue Officer.
At its core, this is an overview of how a simple appointment booking software morphed into a leading global brand in the beauty and wellness sector. If you’re in the trenches of your startup journey perhaps this is worth a read.
The SaaS Revolution and Timely’s Entry
In 2001, the software industry experienced a seismic shift with the advent of ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS). This wasn’t just about technology evolving; it was about a fundamental change in how software was perceived, delivered, and continuously improved. New Zealand has since emerged as a powerhouse in this revolution; it’s a sweet testing and proving ground for new products, and necessitates a unique mindset of needing to be a global proposition, needing to look outward.
A decade after the birth of SaaS, Timely was born, initially as an appointment booking tool serving tradies, lawyers, florists, yoga studios, driving schools and hairdressers amongst many other appointment-focused service verticals. On the outside, this seemed like a super-niche focus, however scratch below the surface, and the needs of each of these markets were vast, and the competitive landscape was getting crowded, with over 150 alternative solutions including traditional methods like pen and paper competing for these businesses.
The Scale-Up Phase: Refining Our Focus
I joined Timely in 2017 at a pivotal moment. We had just secured our first significant round of funding so we could “go faster” after hitting profitability. We were strong in New Zealand, had a handful of organic customers spread across 90-odd countries, but hadn’t directly invested in global expansion.
Our plan was to focus on ‘entering’ Australia and the UK, and to narrow our target market to beauty and wellness businesses. Not because it was less competitive, oh no no no… our strongest competitors were also seeing what we were seeing:
This set of verticals valued us the most:
- they had the highest ARPA;
- were most likely to recommend us;
- had the highest product adoption rate;
- were most vocal in their feedback;
- and had the lowest churn rates
It was also a trillion-dollar industry — and growing — so it was naturally also becoming a fierce battleground.
This strategic focus was a crucial ingredient to our success. Although SMBs from many verticals continued to use us, we now had clarity in who we were serving: who we were building for, who we were marketing and selling to, and how to best support our customers etc.
Carving Our Niche in a Saturated Market
In this crowded SaaS category, differentiating ourselves was crucial and my major focus and challenge. On the face of it we looked and sounded like every other SaaS product of the era (hello 👋 Vend and Xero who we drew regular “inspiration” from), including our own competitors who we spent too much time looking at and fretting over, rather than focusing on our own game. But we did have a number of unique things going for us: our product was attractive, intuitive and did the fundamentals of appointment management far better than anyone else; our customer service was exceptional — empathetic, proactive and responsive and we were cloud-native so we could move quickly compared to some in our category.
Turning Our Unique Culture into a Market Edge
Software has become another commodity, so competing on features is a fool’s game (unless you have some truly unique, defensible tech and have invested in IP protection. Easier said than done at the pace we needed to move at).
For us, the things that made us different were driven by our values and culture. One of our core values that acted as an important guide to all of us was “Customers are our sun”. Putting customers first at every opportunity was practised across every team, function and individual as par for the course. This flowed down into how we delivered value, solved customer pain points, our speed of delivery, how proactive and responsive we were, how transparent and fair we were, how connected and aligned we were with the beauty industry… and so on.
One of my ex-colleagues summed it up to me as this:
“Care: This is always a word I come back to with Timely. It was the reason we could execute the shift to brand/community, it was the reason our support was amazing, it was the reason we got things like repackaging right, and it was the reason most of us enjoyed being there. It slowed us down and at times we probably cared too much, but it was the magic sauce for a lot of Timely’s success.“
And this became our brand which was evident in our NPS, which sat consistently above 80.
Realising our brand was our core competitive differentiator took a while for us to articulate as a business. It wasn’t a natural sell, particularly in a B2B SaaS category. It’s often thought of as a B2C strategy or reduced to the colours, logos, tone, imagery and fonts — the tangible things you see associated with a brand that “sit in marketing”. But this isn’t itself ‘brand’.
For us at Timely, embracing brand as a strategic play became how we built both a defensible competitive moat and growth lever. This meant not just aligning our marketing efforts, but reshaping our entire company’s ethos to resonate with the Beauty and Wellness Community.
In 2018 I connected up with Simon Pound who we knew from his Brand and Creative Director days at Vend, and had recently joined Previously Unavailable where he helped us articulate our brand positioning. It was through this collaboration that we honed our focus and realised we needed to go from being outsiders serving the beauty industry to becoming part of the beauty industry — much like L’Oreal or GHD. We called ourselves “beauty-tech”.
Investment in Brand Identity and Community
It’s all very well to know where you want to sit in the market, but refining and executing this vision so that it delivers commercial outcomes is where the mahi is. And it was an all-in team effort. We took it seriously and really invested in the shift:
- we hired people from the beauty industry to sell to and support this market (many on our team had used Timely in previous roles so their enthusiasm and knowledge was authentic and deep);
- we hired an ‘Industry Manager’ who embedded herself in this community, building influential relationships, partnerships and credibility;
- we set up a Community Forum where our customers could engage with us and with each other;
- we invited many in the wider beauty ecosystem (business coaches, influencers etc) to participate through authentic value-add interactions (strictly not sales) which in turn helped us manage this community and scale our content;
- we built products that were for the beauty industry and this drove advocacy which drove growth;
- we also did the ‘obvious’ stuff and changed our logo, colours, fonts and content strategy to better reflect the industry we served;
- we held product discovery sessions and feedback sessions with our community and acted on that feedback as best we could;
- we set up ‘customer love’ programs and put budget in place to surprise and delight customers when important moments happened in their lives (personally and professionally),
- we showcased and celebrated customer achievements on social media, elevating their profiles and influence within their community;
- we were genuinely looking out for the best interests of our customers and tirelessly trying to improve how we served them
This list of actions we took could go on and on…
Revealing Our Brand’s True Strength
The pandemic tested this strategy to its limits, forcing this people-focused industry to close its doors for an indefinite period of time. We shifted from “growth” as an objective to “survival”: Our customers were no longer generating revenue and they were not tied to contracts, so they could cancel at any time.
Like many other ventures, we faced an existential crisis. We switched off all growth spend, downgraded our tech-stack, cut costs at every opportunity and voluntarily took (temporary) pay cuts (that were repaid in full) so that no one on the Timely team lost their job.
This is when our culture and values were tested — was it all lip service? Or did it represent who we were? When others retreated, when our competitors furloughed or laid off their people, enforced contracts and subscription fees on their customers, and went into hibernation we did the exact opposite. It was a bold and counterintuitive move in that economic context, but entirely values-aligned. A credit to Ryan Baker’s steady leadership under immense pressure, along with our supportive board, my amazing colleagues on the exec team, and especially the pure commitment of the whole Timely team. We not only came through unscathed but experienced our highest growth ever through 2020 and 2021.
At the end of it, we knew our “Care” — our brand — how we showed up collectively, was our competitive differentiator and would outperform “growth marketing” tactics every day of the week. This was further reinforced by the feedback we received, including this (unprompted) gold from a high profile customer:
“What Timely has done for the beauty industry during this critical period highlights how good they are. They’re not just a software company, they’re a community.”
A successful exit never felt like a sure thing
What we built paid off for our founders and shareholders (which included everyone on the Timely Team, who got to share financially in its success). Timely was formally acquired by Evercommerce in July 2021.
Evercommerce is a NASDAQ-listed service commerce technology business and Timely is now one of 50+ subsidiaries. A lot has changed but it’s heartening to see the essence of the brand live on (which is not always the case post-acquisition).
Reflecting on the journey, it’s easy to view our success as inevitable, a smooth ascent, and to be honest we executed like absolute bosses, so perhaps success was inevitable. However, at the time this felt far from certain, resulting in a few broken eggs, lots of mistakes and learnings, and if I could do it again there are many things we tried cautiously that I would now execute confidently (and a few I wouldn’t bother doing at all).
I know there are lots of startups in the trenches right now that are battling to survive this economic downturn and in need of more hands-on support. Shout out if I can help.
Get in touch
[update: I have recently joined aglow as co-founder and chief revenue officer. aglow is the world’s only dedicated beauty membership platform. We combine technology, payments and beauty industry expertise to help business owners generate predictable monthly recurring revenue, build valuable businesses and achieve financial freedom]
If you need more hands-on support, I am here to help NZ and AU startups build successful go-to-market strategies. I have more than 15 years strategic and operational experience in SaaS startup and scale up companies including Xero (Head of Product Marketing for Mobile and SMB), Timely (Chief Product Officer, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Revenue Officer) and CarbonCrop (CEO, Director)
So if you’re a founder — or leading product, marketing, sales, success, pricing and people — and you’re looking for some help getting shit done or simply need a sounding board, I’d love to hear from you.
Visit Arc Studio to learn more or DM me on LinkedIn.
