From Ideation to Landing Page, how we came up with Achieved
Hello everyone, 👋,
We started our journey 4 weeks ago, and thought it was time to share what has happened to us, and what we have learned, with you all.
Before jumping in, you may want to read again our manifesto.
TL;DR
Achieved helps everyone in the organisation. From colleagues engagement to strategic decision making. We help everyone to focus on what matter most, align on their activities, get challenged and supported with the ideal level of social engagement.
As tech enthusiasts, we’re aiming at designing a simple solution to handle individual productivity and team alignment. We wanted this tool to be simple, delightful and interactive; but we also wanted it to be asynchronous so that people could be caught up in on their own time.
The result is Achieved, a simple tool to forecast your workday and track, step by step, the achievement of your objectives.
Phase 1 — Confirm customer need 🤓
We started by interviewing around 20 to 30 people, from business owners to team members to managers. We also did a lot of research to map the market and assess potential competition. This step was crucial because in the beginning we had 5 different business ideas in mind, and had to decide which of these had the most potential…
All of these interviews, with the exception of two, confirmed what we understood, that there is a demand for our idea but not enough competition to discourage us from pursuing it. So, we decided to move on. Carefully…
Phase 2 — Think 🤯
The first phase was focused on our network of friends and business contacts, so the next step was to introduce our business idea to the rest of the world. 🚀 We decided the best way to do this was to build a clear and simple landing page and have a strong social media presence.
When designing our website, we were inspired by current startup trends to have a very clean and lightweight website with just enough visuals and text to pitch our idea.
Even though the process of building the website itself was pretty simple and straightforward, it caused us to consider much more involved questions and choices related to our branding:
- Product name
- Domain name
- Logo
- First designs
Branding is perhaps the most time-consuming topic for an early state startup, but it’s absolutely essential. Branding involves everything from the company name and its potential to more specific website elements including its tone, color palette, design style, etc.
With our main keywords: alignment, focus, objective, achievement, commitments and celebration — we decided the following:
- Straightforward communication with short sentences, transparency, and a no bullshit style.
- Green and Blue colours, which are shown to promote feelings of trust, ambition, professionalism, playfulness, and joy.
- A minimal application design. The design should be as simple as possible to allow the user to focus on his task and on colleagues messages without feeling the heaviness of using an application
Product Name
That was probably the easiest one to come up with. We wanted to use a common word everyone would understand. We wanted to use a word on which we could build the application concept and our brand.
Achieved sound obvious to us:
- Achieved: Something you succeeded.
- Achievement: A success, something to celebrate! 🎉
- Achiever: Someone accumulating success.
Domain Name
Obviously, www.achieved.com was taken already / to expensive to purchase, which meant we had to come up with an alternative. We therefore decided to purchase www.getachieved.com which was very affordable and easy to remember.
Logo
Designing a logo is probably one of the most time-consuming tasks for an early startup. We decided to keep it very, very simple.
Achieved is about alignment, focus, objective, achievement, commitments, celebration, etc. We wanted a logo that reflects that. After few iterations we ended up with this:
Design
That’s the “oh sh**” moment. 🤯
Cool we have to idea, we know there’s a need on the market, we have the first website key messages, we have a logo, but… we don’t have any actual visual to put on our website. Oops!
Our first design of our application took us around 2 weeks.
Phase 3 — Build (The Landing Page) 🚧
Framework
We first planned to use Unicorn Platform because we found it really attractive, but we didn’t want to spend any money that wasn’t absolutely necessary at this point. We made a point to keep our budget to the bare minimum and had only spent money on our domain name and mail server. So, we finally decided to use this free library.
Pages
Our goal was to ship the website as soon as possible so we limited the amount of page to the minimum possible. We wanted to pitch the idea, list the benefits and present the app’s features and that was it. After a week or two we decided to add a few more pages.
Legal ☠️
Even though this is really boring, we really care about the legal aspect of owning a business. To protect us and users, we made it so people must read and accept our Terms and Conditions, as well as our privacy policies if they want to browse our site.
Our recommendation: don’t try to re-invent the wheel when it comes to legal term. By quickly browsing the web, you’ll find plenty of bullet proof legal terms of use.
Phase 4 — social media 📢
Along with our website, we created all our social media accounts to start building a following.
You can follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn & ProductHunt.
In our next post we’ll talk about the techniques we’re using the develop our brand reputation despite our anonymity.
