A Tale of Two Brothers
From a design project to a business strategy and product overhaul
In the beginning: A tale of two brothers
When we first sat with Ross and heard the story of he and his brother Chris, the founders of Covered, we were hooked…
When they were kids, they had a lemonade stand (of course). They sold water together (a big market with low-priced competitors). Whatever they could do to hustle up an idea, they went all-in on. On winter nights, they spent a lot of time in the hot tub brainstorming ideas of how to take over the world together.
When we heard this, it was apparent they’ve held the entrepreneurial spirit for a long time (it was also apparent how misspent and lame our childhoods were, but that’s for another story).
When the brothers moved to Colorado, they happened to both be looking for a home loan at the same time (because — brothers, right?) and they’d complain together about the arduous task of trying to find home insurance.
In true form, they started kicking around ideas like, “Why isn’t there an ‘Orbitz of insurance?’” and, “Why can’t I just pull up a mobile app and buy insurance on my phone?” (You know, nerdy shit that entrepreneurs say.)
The brothers started sharing this idea around the interwebs and, much to their amusement, demand was immediately there. They were on to something.
So they promptly sketched out what they thought might be a cool mobile app (like ya do). They downloaded a template of a phone, printed a series of them out, and started drawing out the flow by hand.
And they quickly realized they had no idea what they were doing…
“We just knew it needed to be badass and that neither of us could make it badass.”
- Ross Diedrich — Co-Founder, Covered
They started calling around to friends in the design industry and found a ton of options, none of which matched the criteria they set, which were:
1. Trustworthy
2. Experienced
3. Recommended
Eventually, they landed on a good friend/client of L&M, Brianna Bullentini, founder of RAWBRY and powerhouse behind The Basement in downtown Reno. Bri gave us the nod (along with many more of our projects including West Elm, iCrave, Bombora, and more). We jumped on a call, heard the above story, and fell in love with what the brothers were setting out to do.
Apparently, the feeling was mutual.
“After conversations with several other firms, it was clear that L&M were our age, spoke our language, exuded professionalism, and had an incredible track record. Right away we knew it was a no-brainer.”
- The Covered Team
We took on this project for very little. Our goal, in the early stages of L&M, was to help a company like this make money. We were small and our overhead was low, so it was an investment on our part.
As usual, we didn’t just want to make spec. We wanted to bring this company to the promised land.
A hesitant (but hearty) start
The first scope of work was to help the brothers raise funds through building a prototype of a mobile app. We both agreed it didn’t need to be developed. They just needed something that made sense and was appetizing for investors to acquire funding and take it to the next level.
“The opening line from Covered was, ‘We want to create an app for millennials to pay for home insurance.’ Instantly, I was like (to myself), ‘You’re fucking crazy,’ but we made it work anyways.”
- Peter Laxalt — Creative Director/Founder, L&M
We had a hunch their initial direction was a little off the mark, but it was a good idea, nonetheless. They needed something quick, so we wanted to prove that we could at least knock out this initial scope beyond spec.
We ended up building a whole new UX and UI flow in InVision that was geared towards millennials.
They also wanted a landing page to direct people towards that got the essence of what they were doing across to anyone curious.
“What’s the smoothest way to disrupt this industry?”
- Binh Cao — Evil-Thinker, L&M
“Some might consider L&M’s opinions, thoughts, and insights to be road bumps, but we found them to be incredibly refreshing and challenging. This has been really good and has forced us to step up our game. If we’d hired a yes-man type team, we’d have a completely different app at this point.”
- Ross Diedrich — Co-Founder, Covered
We started researching insurance, which, of course, is extremely boring, dry, and unappetizing.
Our obsession kept us moving forward — how could we make this interesting and seamless? But at the end of the day, we did. Their mobile app for millennials looked and functioned amazingly well…
Ross and Chris took the screenflow to a few investors to pitch them on the idea of the home insurance app for millennials.
No one bit...
This positioning wasn’t flying with investors who wanted to see an ROI. The concept just wasn’t cutting it.
From designers to advisors: Advising through a pivot
By this time, we’d built an incredible rapport with the brothers and were taking on more of a business mentorship role. From our work with startups and the venture capital world in Silicon Valley, we’ve seen similar cases with clients before.
Immediately, we took off our designer hats and threw our advisor hats on to help guide them through this difficult moment.
“Not only did they do the work, they took the time to educate and mentor throughout the process.”
- Ross Diedrich — Co-Founder, Covered
Making it appetizing
Our focus was on repositioning the brand. Ross and Chris brought up the idea about making the app into a tool for loan officers. It was said as a side-thought, but our ears watered (does that even happen?) at the idea.
Of their users, the loan officers were the audience who had the greatest problem and the most skin in the game. They needed their clients to be able to have home insurance to buy a house. To do their job, they had to lock this in and currently, it’s a daunting, tedious task. Covered enabled them to do this in the quickest, simplest, most optimized way rather than having to fill out info on separate insurance vendors’ websites, comparing across multiple tabs, etc.
This pivot showed a direction that could attract investors. Although they didn’t seem too stoked about a pivot, we immediately got behind it and championed the shift.
And so the discussion of a B2B platform was born.
Fly me to the moon: New horizons after a successful pivot in position
It was a bold move, but we had so much conviction behind this idea that the brothers decided to do some user testing and surveying to get an objective opinion.
User testing glaringly showed that people loved the app and design, but didn’t want to actually purchase insurance on their phones. If they were doing something as serious as this, they wanted to sit down at home, compare rates, etc.
That was it. We went all-in on a desktop version that a loan officer at a computer could use when they’re sitting with rabid homebuyers to close the deal.
“I wanted to make covered like the charger of an iPhone for loan officers. It’s necessary, cheap, painless, and it always works. You just use it without thinking about it. It’s not even an afterthought.”
- Peter Laxalt — Creative Director/Founder, L&M
As we suggested, Covered found a development team to bring in for the back-end programming for the web app (Slant Systems, who’ve been awesome to work with, btw).
This is when things started accelerating. The loan officer niche proved to be the perfect positioning of the business. Although the pivot was terrifying, it was a monumental step in defining their MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
As momentum grew, the Covered team brought up the desire to launch in the app store. Again, drawing on our experience with prior clients in launching apps, we advised that this might not be a great idea. We shared with the team some of the design metrics the Apple app store uses for determining and ranking which apps they feature.
We wanted to keep them from prematurely releasing the app and diminishing their chances of success in their launch. After our counseling, they’re now pairing the launch with some media plays that (fingers crossed) should prove much more impactful.
What we learned
A huge thing we’ve learned with Covered is that design matters.
Covered looks nothing like a startup company on a budget. Their design is in the same league with companies that have been around for five years.
We also learned that you can design a fantastic product without laying down one line of code and people will see value in it if the design is there. There’s so much value in making a really good product first and then develop the backend second — not the other way around. Hi-fi prototypes are a priority. It’s cheaper to invest in design and product development than it is to invest in development itself. Show them what it can do and then put the guts in to make it happen.
In closing
The Covered story is one of our most meaningful partnership stories to date.
We started with Covered when it was nothing more than the idea of a couple ambitious brothers sketched out on white computer paper and we worked with them through a challenging pivot into the success they’re seeing today.
When we started working with them, it was just the two brothers. A lot of our business consulting was done pro bono because we wanted to show that we had the chops for not only beautiful design but turning a profit for a company we loved.
Today, they have a team of fifteen on their Slack channel. Being a large part of this growth, not just as designers, but as trusted advisors, makes us so happy that we didn’t just bang out the initial scope of the phone app screens and move on.
“We’ve received so much more than high-quality design work with L&M. We’ve received friends. We’ve received business partners. And we’ve received coaching and guidance into a completely foreign territory and uncharted lands. We’ll keep L&M as a part of our core team for as long as we can.”
- The Covered Team
Today, they’ve closed their first round and are scheduled to launch the web app in the spring of 2017. They’ve landed several huge media opportunities and are poised for tremendous growth.
To say we played a sizable role in this makes us see how important this work is and how much the edges are meant to be tested.
Design is far more than pretty screens and clean code. Design is an all-encompassing aspect of a business from the way the product itself functions to the way it’s positioned and accepted by investors and the marketplace at large.
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