Today I am talking to Charli Prangley (pronouns she/her). Charli is the creator of the YouTube Channel CharliMarieTV. Every week, she shares insights into life as a professional designer alongside tutorials and advice on design tools and concepts. The channel has over 200,000 subscribers. But by day, Charli works as the Creative Director at ConvertKit while building her channel and podcast called Design Life, on the side. Today we’re going to specifically talk about the rebrand from ConvertKit to Kit.

New Zealand-born and half-British, Charli currently lives in Valencia, Spain. She’s passionate about side projects and helping creatives improve their craft and process.

“Creators are working on brands too and need to learn about what it takes to build a great brand. And maybe this can be our way of showing the process, giving them some ideas of ways they could approach or think about their own brands as well.”

– Charli Prangley, Creative Director

Transcript

Hey there and welcome back to another episode of Unbreakable Brands, the podcast where we dive into the resilience strategies and mindsets behind successful businesses. Today I’m talking to Charli Prangley, pronouns she/her. Charli is the creator of the YouTube channel, CharliMarieTV, and every week she shares insights into life as a professional designer alongside tutorials and advice on design tools and concepts.

The channel has over 200,000 subscribers, but by day Charli works as the creative director at ConvertKit while building her channel and podcast called Design Life on the side. New Zealand born and half British, Charli currently lives in Valencia, Spain. She’s passionate about side projects and helping creatives improve their craft and process.

So welcome Charli to the show.

Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here and to talk about ConvertKit rebranding to Kit.

We’re gonna specifically talk about the rebrand from ConvertKit to Kit. So this year I attended the Craft + Commerce conference that ConvertKit, soon to be Kit, puts on each year where they publicly announced the rebrand.

And so if you didn’t know, just to give a little bit of context, how I found ConvertKit was through their email marketing platform. I use it for this. I send all my clients to ConvertKit if they don’t have a platform they already love. Like I love it. I’m obsessed. So I was excited to come to the conference and then there are so many other things happening with the platform beyond email marketing. Which I’ll let Charli, of course, get into. But if you didn’t know, that’s, that’s what we’re talking about here. So you should definitely look it up if it hasn’t crossed your path yet. And I want to start by talking a little bit about your background, Charli, and what led you to becoming the creative director at ConvertKit originally.

I actually joined the ConvertKit team seven and a half years ago, a long time. I was the second designer hired onto the team and I joined to take over all of our brand and marketing design work, which was what I specialize in as a designer. Over the years, I have grown a lot at ConvertKit and I think a little over, about four years ago, I took over leading the brand studio team, which is where an in house creative team to meet the needs of other teams at ConvertKit, but also to work on building our brand, building up brand affinity and brand awareness and just creating something that creators resonate with is our responsibility as a team.

It resonates with me and most of my clients. So it’s pretty aligned. You’re doing an incredible job.

Thank you. Thank you.

Let’s just dive into the rebrand. So ConvertKit is moving to Kit. How long ago did this decision start to be chatted about and then what led to that big decision?

The idea of renaming our company is something that I remember talking about with Nathan in my very first job interview. So seven and a half years ago, we were sat down over breakfast. Interviewing there was very casual back in the day. We have a much better process in place now, but this was like a breakfast meeting, I guess.

We were talking about the company, the future, and Nathan was outlining that he’s got such big dreams and goals for this company. I want it to become a big iconic brand. And I don’t think ConvertKit is a name that will help us get there. It sounds like a WordPress plugin. It sounds too technical.

So he’s always been on the lookout for something that could level us up in this way. Kit specifically as a name has been something we’ve been interested in for a few years, but we had this criteria for a new name for our company and owning the dot com was part of the criteria. We wanted it to be a short name and we needed to have the dot com to be able to take it on as the name of our company. And so it was actually our Director of Engineering, Brendan, had been checking domain sites, and he’d been checking for years, like every month he’d look and see, is kit.com available yet? And one day it became available. So this was late 2023 is it started to become a real conversation of okay, this is an actual possibility now.

Is this something we take on? And is now the right time? We’re a 40 million ARR company. We’ve been in the game for 11 years, by this point. Is this a change that we really do want to make for our future and for the future of the greater economy?

I want to hear more about the criteria later on because I know a lot of folks listening. I’ve had several clients myself who end up going through a rebrand process at various different sizes and whether it’s because they got a cease and desist because they didn’t trademark first, or for whatever reason. I think having those criteria of this is what we want the future, the vision, the name to actually be. It’s going to be so valuable to hear from you.

But before we answer that, I know there was a previous rebrand that happened or attempt to rebrand that happened. And I know there’s a lot of folks listening who have used it, who are skeptical, which I was surprised about. So I came back from the conference and I went to a podcast meetup and a bunch of folks there also use ConvertKit. And so I was like, “Oh, there’s a rebrand. I’m so excited about it. It’s so cool.” Like as a brand designer, I can see a lot of the vision behind it and they’re like, “Oh, they’ve already done that before.” And I didn’t actually know about that, so I was like, what do you mean? And they’re like, “Yeah, so we, we’ll have to see how this one goes.” And there was like a little bit of a pause.

I wanna hear from you about that whole process initially and what you guys took from it for the new direction

I love that you’ve asked about this because it is something that a lot of folks have brought up and quite rightly so, and we know that we have to show people that we’ve done our research this time, and this isn’t something we’re going to roll back like the last time.

This was in, I believe it was 2018 at Craft + Commerce. We launched a new rebrand and it was all like fully complete. And we were like making the switch that day and we were changing our name to Seva, which is a Sanskrit word that means selfless service. And we thought that it was the definition of the word, right?

Just like a definition of any non English word is just what the word means. And it was only after we launched with that name that we started hearing from folks in the Hindu and Sikh communities saying, Hey, this isn’t just the definition of a word. It’s actually a sacred practice for us. It’s really meaningful for us in our religion, in our culture.

And that’s when we went into listening mode, hopping on calls, like really understanding the background of this word. And we made the decision that we can’t move forward with Seva, our company name. It’s not ours to use as the name of our company. So we rolled back to ConvertKit and that’s where we stayed for a long time until we came across the opportunity to rebrand as Kit and to do things right this time and learn from that past mistake that we made.

What about the feelings, the backlash, like how did you navigate? Because that’s a monster to kind of work around.

Yeah, and ultimately I’m really proud of Nathan, our CEO in particular, for making the honestly bold choice to roll back and to say publicly, hey, we were wrong. This was not the right name for our business. And so even though we’ve already designed this new brand and we’ve launched this thing publicly at our conference and said, we’re excited about it, we’re going to roll back because it’s the right thing to do. And I really appreciated that, like integrity, I guess.

And I think that a lot of our audience did as well, appreciated the integrity behind that decision. And like you said, quite rightly, people are bringing it up this time and making references to it, which we did expect to happen. This time we wanted to do rebranding differently. Because of that past mistake.

And so one of the things we’re doing this time is rebranding in public. When we announced this change at Craft + Commerce, we didn’t have a new logo to show everybody and a fully fleshed out brand that we’re going live with, we wanted to do things our way and work in public as one of our company values and bring creators along the journey of it so that creators and their feedback and input can be a part of crafting our new brand as Kit so that we can make sure that ultimately it’s something that resonates. So that we can make sure is there anything we haven’t realized any like negative perceptions of the word Kit that we haven’t come across yet that someone will tell us about during this research phase.

And so that’s why we were branding in public and also why before we even committed to buy the domain, I hopped on calls with a bunch of creators and like got their perceptions on the word Kit, “Like based on the name alone, what do you think this tool would do for you and your creator business?” And so, yeah, we really learned from that past experience by doing a lot more research and letting creators in on the process a lot earlier.

I love that. I’m a huge proponent of building human-first brands and always bringing your people along with you. Rebranding publicly in this nature is not really done commonly, so I think it’s like a trailblazing idea and I love it because you’re building this integral like buy in with your people as you make a big change for a company that’s 11 years in and has so many folks as a part of it. I think that’s such a cool concept is the choice to rebrand publicly.

Was that an idea you came up with along the way? Like what brought about that choice?

So at our team retreat in February, we were all together in person in Mexico because we’re a remote company and so we get together twice a year. And we were doing what we call a pre-mortem, which is where before a big project, before we start it, we sit down as a group and we think ahead, “Okay, let’s say this was really successful. What might we have done to make it that way? And how can we plan to do those things?” And then the other way as well. “Let’s say this project was a huge failure. What might we have done wrong that led to that? And how can we mitigate against those things?” So it’s really our chance to think about potential weaknesses and opportunities in what we’re doing. One of the opportunities that one of our team members wrote on a sticky note and put up on the wall was work in public, bring creators along the journey.

It was partially about learning from the last experience where we didn’t speak to enough people before we went out there and announced the change. But also just in realizing this is a very “us” way to do this process. We’re very transparent as a company. We’ve got all of our financials public up on Bare Metrics.

We share a lot of our processes as a team. As a YouTuber and creative director, I share a lot of the work that I do for ConvertKit on my YouTube channel as well, and that’s not only allowed, but encouraged, and so it comes naturally to us and we thought there could be a lot of value in doing this. Like you said, creators are working on brands too and need to learn about what it takes to build a great brand. And maybe this can be our way of showing the process, giving them some ideas of ways they could approach or think about their own brands as well. So yeah, it was a way we could teach, a way we could learn, and just a way that feels very “us” to go about doing this.

Beautiful. I think it’s just amazing. I’m obsessed with the idea and I’m obsessed with following along, which is so fun. And anyone listening can also follow along.

Yes, it’s fully transparent. You can follow along on kit.com. The core pieces of what we’re producing for rebranding in public is we’re doing a documentary series about the process. To really document all the details, the decisions we make along the way. Very soon at the time we’re recording this, I’m going to start sharing publicly some like screenshots of things we’re designing on my Twitter account that our brand account will share as well of giving those inside details and getting folks perceptions and opinions on them along the way.

Oh, I’m excited to see that. The visuals are always the fun part, right? That’s the sexy part. So, I want to go back to the criteria.

What were your criteria for selecting the name itself, Kit? Because I feel like that’s the first big decision is committing to that. What had to be in place?

We wanted it to be one word that was easy to hear and spell over the phone. I cannot tell you the number of times someone’s like, “Oh, where do you work?” And I’m like, ConvertKit. And they’re like, what? And maybe part of that’s my accent. But still, we wanted it to be like a simple word, easy to hear and spell.

We needed to own the dot com, like I said. And because part of what we’re trying to solve for is ConvertKit sounding so techie, we didn’t want the new name to sound too techie. And we also wanted it to be a name that meant something tied to our vision and mission of what we’re doing as a company.

And so there was a lot of different options that have been thrown out over the years that check those boxes. But when Kit became available as the dot com, we realized, yes, this checks all of these boxes. Now, you know, what we offer to creators is like a kit of tools to help them run their creative business to make it more valuable. We feel that just makes total sense for us as, as a name of our business. It’s already been part of our name, and so we’re hoping that the switch won’t be too distant in people’s minds, which I know that ConvertKit to Seva, like we did before, was quite a drastic change. And we know that we offer and help creators do much more than convert, right?

We’ve had a few people through this say, why didn’t you drop the Kit part and just become Convert? You know, why wasn’t that the one part of your name that you chose to go with? And it’s because we’re trying to open ourselves up for opportunities in the future. And we already help creators do more than convert. And so why would we go all in on that as our name? Kit allows us to build on something more for creators going forward.

That’s such an essential conversation with naming a brand in general. Are you going to box yourself in to a specific thing or service? That’s something I see a lot with my clients and folks I work with is they’ll add like the exact descriptor of what they do at that moment to their name in some capacity and if you’re thinking long term as a legacy brand or something that you’re going to build into more than a business, it has to be considered: What box are you putting yourself in with just the name alone? And is it going to limit you in the future? So I love that that was one of your key pieces.

So, with the change, brand equity, maintaining that, holding that, holding on to things that are already working so well, because you have so many folks who are so dedicated. What were conversations around that like when it came to the rebrand?

I think it helps that Kit is already part of our name. So, we see this as us growing up and evolving rather than becoming something completely new. As part of the research I’ve been doing, I’ve been asking creators, you know, their perception on our brand as it is currently. And what we’ve learned is that a lot of what creators love about our brand is actually it’s our team and the heart we bring to our work when we show up at events, when we communicate with customers online, that sort of thing. It was less so about our visuals and how they were showing up. And so that gave me a lot of conviction that we still have our great team and we still very much believe in creators.

And at the heart of Kit is the same as what the heart of ConvertKit was, you know? And so that’s not changing. What we’re doing is changing how we show up. We’re changing our strategy, both to our brand and to our product, to allow us to better serve creators, reach more creators. But the vision we have as a company and like, the reason we exist, that still remains the same.

And so it’s really just about us evolving. How we show up to better fulfill it for the future. And that’s why I hope anyway, I mean, as we’re talking, the brand has not being completed and we haven’t launched it yet, so I can’t know for sure. But those are the reasons that I hope we will hold onto a lot of brand equity is because if anything, this new brand we’re crafting as Kit is going to better express the authentic, sincere belief in creators that we have now as ConvertKit.

But sometimes I feel like it doesn’t show up. Unless you meet our team, unless you get to know us personally. Whereas, you know, to increase our reach, we need that to be true. When you land on our site, for example, we want creators to feel like this is a company that really gets me as a creator without having ever talked to one of us.

And so that’s what we’re aiming for as Kit.

I just want to add to what you’re saying and that that was my personal experience and that’s how you and I met was around eating cinnamon rolls around the table at the end of the night. So I felt like everything is an open conversation and an open book and in a creator economy that is relatively new. I think it’s so important to have that and not have any form of gatekeeping. Otherwise, how are people able to grow in something that is relatively new? Like when you look at the larger picture of all the things, you know?

Yeah, totally. We’ve had folks too who see us as the, we’ve been doing this 11 years, and what a lot of companies do at this stage is they go way more enterprise and they start serving like the big businesses. And so that was a question we had when we said we’re rebranding is creators are like, “Well, do you still care about us?” And it’s like, absolutely.

We one hundred percent are still focused on creators and helping them build valuable businesses. And we think that a creator business is like the next generation of big businesses, you know, like the creators who are sending email via ConvertKit today, selling the products on ConvertKit Commerce, they are the big businesses of the future. And so by serving them, we are serving, the businesses of the future.

Yeah, one hundred percent. I mean, I think that’s where it’s going for sure. And that people generally care about people now, making sure people are like a part of it. There’s a big distrust of the big companies and like what are you trying to sell me and like what are you know? Is this a scam? And so I think the creator economy is the positive backlash to that. Humans that we can build relationships with and trust over time, which is so cool.

Agreed.

So through this open process, which I know you’ve started, what has been the most exciting and surprising thing? And then something that kind of set you back so far at this very moment.

One of the most exciting things for me was honestly being at Craft + Commerce when it was finally announced publicly. And so, by that stage, we had already started work with an agency. We’re working with a brand agency called Koto, and we’re working with their London based studio on the brand, and they’ve been fantastic, super collaborative. We knew that we didn’t want to outsource our brand to an agency and just be, “Here, make a brand for us and come back when it’s finished.” We want it to be a part of the process.

We just, as a small team, couldn’t handle it all ourselves and we wanted to bring in the experts, but we were quite far into the brand strategy, figuring out phase as we launched at Craft + Commerce. And it was perfect timing, honestly, because we were able to do some testing of how some brand strategy stuff we were thinking about was going to resonate.

And so myself and David, the senior brand designer on my team, we hosted a workshop at Craft + Commerce called Rebranding in Public, where we like shared some of the journey so far. And we got to, at the end, have a conversation with creators, posing them some questions related to our brand strategy to figure out like, how does this resonate? What does this mean to you? Like the idea of value, for example, is something we keep coming back to this idea that the creator economy is a value exchange where as a creator, you get value because your audience is supporting your work. They’re paying your bills through supporting your products and things like that.

But also you are providing them value in return, you know, and they are getting to grow as humans based on what you’re teaching them, what you’re sharing with them. And so we really liked that idea of building a valuable business. And so, we talked to creators a lot about that and the conversation around it and the depth that those conversations went to made me so excited to think about building a brand that has a depth to it and that isn’t just about like growth, monetization, and those surface level things. We really want to have more substance to us than that, because we know that creative businesses have more substance to them than that.

And so that was a moment where I felt a lot of conviction around what we’re doing and what we’re building because the way creators were leaning into the conversation. It was just a really great experience.

In these conversations, do you find folks in the creator space are very aware of the rebranding process in general of brand strategy and then design? Or is this also educating? Because I know I spent a lot of time educating.

The second episode of our documentary series is all about Brian’s strategy and the process of defining that. And so I really hope that’ll be quite enlightening for folks to see the journey that you go on to figure out like what it is you want to study. But yeah, I have not so far discovered many creators who do innately understand brand strategy and I think honestly a lot of creators would benefit from thinking about it a little more and having more clarity into it can really be helpful for making decisions right for your brand and so yeah, I’m excited about that being part of the process.

I’m excited to see how that lands too. What I find different about creators—and in particular, those who maybe lean on the personal brand side, maybe their influencers or however they kind of build their business model—is it’s so tied to them and their identity. There’s this gap. They’re like, “Well brand strategy doesn’t maybe make sense for me, I am my brand.” But if you’re gonna grow it over time, you really can’t be your brand. You know Marie Forleo isn’t her brand. She’s a complex human and has separated that a little bit through brand strategy, which gives so much structure. So, I’m excited to see how that changes creators’ perspectives as they’re building large brands, whether they know it or not. Yeah as they’re building the foundations to become a large brand in the future as well, even if they don’t feel like they are today.

Right. Another thing where I noticed like, “Ooh, our understanding of the brand Like creation process is very different” is when some creators—we announced in June that we were rebranding. And when we said we will be like officially becoming kit in September—they were like, why is it taking you so long?

That is a really fast timeline actually to implement a rebrand, to craft a new identity that’s going to last us for the next decade. You know, actually these things take time. There’s a lot of decisions you have to make as part of a rebrand. And especially when, you know, you have another job to do as well.

We got to keep the business moving, as our brand studio team and serving all the the rest of the teams within ConvertKit as well. And so, we couldn’t do it any faster than this, basically.

Yeah, I would say that’s rapid pace, for sure. That’s interesting, but also not surprising because I walk through that all the time with my own clients of, “No, we can’t use what we need tomorrow because yeah, we’re not just like generating a logo You know, it’s a little deeper than that, which is important.”

So as you’re going through this, I want to ask a question about functionality and creativity because I think when folks are thinking about a brand, sometimes there can be a lot of tension between those two things, whether it’s on the website or the visuals or what are the words we’re going to use and that sort of thing and can it be deep, but also be straight to the point.

So how are you navigating and balancing creativity and functionality in a rebrand?

Yeah, that’s a really good question. It’s been, and this is an area where I’ve been so glad that we’ve been working with Koto on it, the brand agency, because they’ve really run the process. We have these meetings where we come together and discuss all the work and separately, but also how it’s coming together.

I can share here and I haven’t talked about these publicly before, so here we go. We’ve settled on three core brand personality traits for our brand. I’m going to show up as bold, which means for us, strength and conviction and having opinions and being unafraid to share them around the ways that creators can best grow their business.

Sincere, that authenticity and the deep genuine belief we have in creators and their value. We want that to come across through our brand. And then the third word we’re using as a trait for our brand is expert. We want our experience and our expertise in the creator economy to come across and to be that guide for creators as they navigate their business.

And so we have these three personality traits that have been A, really helpful to have as, you know, talking points as we’re reviewing something. Personal preference can start to come in and then you come back to, “No, no, no, but these are the traits. Does it align with these? Or like, what is it doing best?”

But what I’ve been really learning at all seeing spelled out is that not every single aspect of our brand is going to hit all three of those traits equally. Some will hit it more than others. And it’s the like combination of how everything comes together that ultimately creates the brand.

And so as we’ve been thinking about the functionality and the creativity, it’s really been, “Oh, I really like this. This is super creative, but is it leaning too far in this direction compared to the rest of what we’ve got going on? We actually need this to be a bit less bold and a bit more sincere, for example.”

So that’s been really useful to have as a frame for decision making. And then another area that’s coming to mind, especially right now, because I’ve been deep in like color palette mode today, is around accessibility for colors. And thinking about that alongside creativity and a color palette that’s like super expressive and works together nicely.

We also need to make sure that there’s enough contrast in the colors we’re using to be accessible for folks who have low vision or are blind. And so that’s something that we’re keeping in mind as well. I just want to say that’s like one of a thousand decisions. Okay, color palette and then accessibility within that color palette and what are tints and shades we can use beyond that? It’s honestly been one of the hardest decisions to make as well, quite honestly. Color has been surprisingly hard. I don’t know why I didn’t think it would be this difficult.

There’s so many feelings around colors. So many subconscious feelings that we don’t even know about. And then our own personal feelings of what we like or don’t like. And every color has already been used, you know, like, yes, you can design a unique looking logo, but every single color and shade of color is some other brand already.

And so you’re really having to pick like the best combination of colors in your palette and like tying with the rest of your brand to bring your own like brand personality to it. And yeah, you can’t rely on just like one color alone to do all the work for you.

You’ve said a couple things in our talk. One was like combinations of things in context and the other was as your brand evolves and grows. And I think those are just two really important golden nuggets of information in our conversation of like your brand as a whole is a combination within a context. So, colors is a great example. You’re not necessarily going to mix up a new color. How are you going to put that in with images and shapes and textures or whatever other elements to make your own unique combination? And then you said like this you envision Kit going into the next decade at least, and then it will evolve during that time. And so I think that’s another important piece you mentioned several times is like this is an evolution.

We’re at an evolution point now. And then that doesn’t mean that in the future we won’t adjust things. Which I think is important to pull away from that conversation is, just because you did a brand once doesn’t mean you can’t adjust as you grow. And you should, right? As you learn things about how your audience reacts to the brand, how it’s perceived. So really what we’re doing now as we complete quote unquote our rebrand, our new visual and verbal identity as Kit is that we’re building the foundation that we’re going to iterate on from here on out.

And as an in house brand and marketing designer that is what I do best. Actually, my skillset doesn’t lie in creating brands from scratch. And that’s again, why we worked with experts on this, but my skillset lies in knowing what to test and what to like iterate on and what to question, what to research, what to try to help a brand continue becoming better and better, more and more resonant, more and more compelling for the target audience that it’s reaching. And so that’s why this project’s fun, but I’m also really excited for the next five years where we get to do our iteration as well.

Right, right. And you said something that frames that so well, “One of our personality pieces is bold and what that means to us is.”

I think that was so important too, because bold can mean so many things to so many different people as a word. And then I imagine that’s a part of the research too, of like, it means this to us. Because we’ve already talked to all these people, all of our people, I should say, this is how we need to show up to better stand out, to better reach the creators that we want to reach.

On that note, in the next 5, 10 years, what are you excited for? What are some fun things that you see happening in the future?

The thing I’m excited about most is this as an opportunity to better align as a company. I think you can get, maybe the word is complacent, I don’t know, but like when you just have a gut understanding of something and you’re making decisions based on that, what your gut says might be different to what someone else’s gut says, right?

And so we’re using this moment, this evolution point as a chance to bring the the whole company in together again and to make sure we’re all making decisions from the same point, not just about our brand, but also about our product strategy and both of the brand and product strategy, very intertwined.

You can’t have one without the other because the point of the brand is to promote the product at the end of the day. I’m really excited for the ways that our product will evolve over the next five to ten years and as we fully embrace the opportunity that being Kit gives us to lean into what it is that creators need, going beyond converting.

That’s something I’m excited for and I’m also just excited as a creative professional that a rebrand brings selfishly. I’m excited to set up better systems so that we can stay on brand better, because things were getting a little bit inconsistent around the places. I can say that because it’s my own work that I’m insulting around the place as ConvertKit.

Yeah, I’m just excited for this fresh start, a chance for us to show up more consistent and aligned going forward.

As you go forward, what are your measurements of success? What are the metrics? I’m sure there’s monetary metrics, but what metrics have you guys set up? Where and when are you checking in after you launch?

So right now for the rebrand, because we have already partly launched, right? We’re measuring public sentiment and we do this through a tool called Mention, which tracks mentions of ConvertKit and rebrand and words related to that around the internet. And we’re looking for sentiment that is either neutral or positive. At this stage, I’m okay if people feel neutral about it, because we haven’t shipped our new brand and proved to anyone that this is valuable to them yet. So that’s what we’re looking at, and largely right now, the perception is very positive, so that’s exciting.

There’s definitely, some loud, questioning, challenging voices out there, we’ll say. Which is fair enough, and we appreciate that too. But I’ve also been excited about how much positivity and excitement there is around the rebrand, and particularly around the way we’re doing it, rebranding in public.

But honestly, the core measure for us will be the, like, adoption of Kit as our name. And I say this, the core measure for me and my team: how is our branded search traffic doing as Kit? Are people referring to us as Kit when they write an affiliate article, and things like that? Is our new name, new brand, being used and is the messaging that we put out there as Kit, do we see that reflected back when creators are talking about us? And that’s a measure that we use today is to see what’s resonating with creators is as we describe ourselves, what do creators pick up on and what did they feel is true enough that they then use it when they speak to their audience about ConvertKit.

So we’ll be looking for that with Kit as well.

I love that. That’s amazing. I already saw several times you had like ConvertKit with a little arrow to Kit, and I’ve already seen other people using that. Yes, which has been very exciting. Yeah, it’s so cool. I mean, I’m going to use it in the, you know, title of the episode.

Thank you. But I was like, this is really neat. People just sometimes need to see it and like copy and paste to put it in place. But I saw that happen, right away, but that was cool to see just in a small nugget of what I’ve seen. Yeah. And that’s another thing why I’m excited that we chose to rebrand in public as well is because it gives people time to get used to the idea, you know, and it gives us time to have conversations around it.

And each time I’ve spoken to someone who’s like, “Yeah, whatever, I don’t care that you’re rebranding, but like, I don’t understand why you’re doing it. Like, why would you change ConvertKit? It’s already great.” And so I get to explain to them again, and test it. Okay. If I explain it this way. Does that resonate with them? Like, do they understand it then, you know? And so it gives us more and more chance to get our messaging right. And to understand, yeah. What, what is actually resonating with people. Yeah. Even though we launched it at Craft + Commerce, we’ve been talking about it online. I know there’s still going to be a lot of people who the first time they hear about this change is when the app looks different for them. There’s a banner right now that like warns that we’re becoming Kit, but yeah, it’s easy to ignore. We all know people don’t read and everything. And so we can’t get everyone now. And so, yeah, it just gives us more opportunity to get that right for that moment that we do officially become Kit.

And that’s such an important conversation to have in a brand that’s so established and already really solid. Because what I see a lot within the space is maybe folks either had no brand really, they kind of like threw it together themselves. Or they had one and it wasn’t great and kind of falling apart and like their foundation was crumbling. And so they rebrand and the acceptance and excitement is automatic and incredible and leads to like revenue increases. But when we’re having this conversation, this is about a brand that’s already established, has so many people behind it is really strong in general. And so I just appreciate you breaking that down in the nuance of this being a much larger decision and being careful about the full launch, because knowing that it’s not going to be like all welcome arms, there’s going to be some challenges or some don’t get it people at the beginning, which is why I really appreciate that in our conversation today.

Yeah. And I think that for us—you asked about measure of success and talking about rebranding—seeing an increase in revenue. I don’t think that’s going to happen for us immediately, right? I’m not delusional. I don’t think we’re gonna become Kit in September and all of a sudden our like metrics shoot through the roof.

But what I do believe and why we’re doing this is that in the long term that will be the benefit that we get because of this new foundation we build and because of the new way we get to show up to better explain what it is we do to better reach creators. I know that’ll happen in the future and it’s not gonna happen immediately.

And we’re okay with that. Because we’re investing in the long term, you know?

Yes. As brands should be. Not that I’m biased in any of this as I’m like, I’m so excited. On that note, this will be my last question. I want to hear about that conversation around the emotions of a rebrand when you’re not like us, who’s like, this is going to be incredible and work. And how did you as the director lead people when it came to that conversation? Because there are a lot of “is this going to work” kind of feelings around it.

I’m not sure if you’re asking based on our team itself or creators in general, but I’ll say that we’ve been navigating that with both groups. And the way we’ve been doing that has been similar for both.

It’s listening to, okay, what is your concern here? What is your fear? Because usually there’s some sort of fear of change or effort or something like that involved. Really listening to that and then often it’s a fear that isn’t actually valid. It’s a fear of something they’re afraid might happen that we’re already know we’re not planning on doing.

And so you can reassure them of that, which is great. But yeah, it’s definitely listening and also just understanding that some folks are going to need to see the full package to come on board. And that’s just a fact. Some folks won’t even be on board right away at the moment. They see us showing up as Kit, as a new brand, because we need to prove it to them.

You know, we need to prove that this is valuable to them through the decisions we make of what to include in our product going forward over the coming years. And I hope that one day they look back and they’re like, “You know what? They were right.” But it’s also okay if that doesn’t happen for a while. I just want to keep trying and keep showing everybody that we have creators at the heart of all of this.

And yeah, I hope one day we can get everyone on board with that.

Yeah, that’s beautiful. And there’s all those types of buyers in your world, the emotional buyers, people who are on board right away, people who can’t visualize and need to see it. And then they’re on board. And then folks who are like, prove it to me, which is fine.

I can be that way too, as a buyer sometimes. So I get that. That’s fair enough.