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Looka lays off staff as failed rebrand from Logojoy cut revenue in half

103 points by KFC_Manager 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
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dxhdr 7y ago
Reminds me of the rebrand ConvertKit did to "Seva", which they quickly realized was an enormous mistake and unrebranded. https://growthlab.com/convertkit-founder-nathan-barry-on-undoing-a-rebrand/ https://growthlab.com/convertkit-founder-nathan-barry-on-und...
dreen 7y ago
Why would a domain change cause any drop though? Surely they kept the old domain and redirected people to the new one?
- pkalinowski 7y ago
  All backlinks around the internet still link to old domain. Additional redirect causes this, together with IMO ridiculous decision by Google to derank websites after domain migration
  - yabadabadoes 7y ago
    I think Google is going with pleasing the user in this case. If I have a passing interest and finally come back years later, I have no interest in following rebranding history to figure out this isn't yet another cheap copy, if Google finds me 1 or 2 of the 3 sites I remember without irritating me or dropping me on sites I'm not sure about, they have a happy user that might be open to ads.
Mikeb85 7y ago
Not sure I'd trust these people with my branding... Logojoy is a better name, likely is easier to google, definitely easier to remember and connect to their product. Also, it's hard to get traction as a startup, re-branding that early is suicide...
- rchaud 7y ago
  Agreed. Startup names are so ridiculous anyway, what value was there in changing the name? Salesforce for example moved beyond a pure sales CRM ages ago, and the platform supports all kinds of applications, including healthcare and university application systems. They didn't need to change their name to do that.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- erikig 7y ago
  Yep, if you can't handle your own rebrand, how am I supposed to trust your AI to do my brand?
- rasz 7y ago
  A name like Looka doesnt drop out of a hat. You pay $100k consulting fee and receive it in a very nice envelope with a 30 minute pitch about its origins, emotional impact, color and connotations!
ptah 7y ago
change it back
knorthfield 7y ago
That’s the kind of pain you’re in for when you’re overly reliant on a single channel.
- erikig 7y ago
  Channel diversity is severely underrated.
windsurfer 7y ago
Has anyone here tried or used the app? Looka seems to requires users to log in to try out a demo. I have a feeling the rebrand isn't the real issue here.
- giarc 7y ago
  Could be competition. Namecheap recently launched a 100% free version of these "AI logo makers" for which there are a ton out there.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 7y ago
  I tried the logo creator, went through all the steps, and as soon as they had generated logos for me and I started scrolling, a non-closable overlay asked me to sign in or register. I didn’t even have a chance to look at the generated logos! So I closed the tab.
  - asdkhadsj 7y ago
    Same, just did this the other day. I also went there from Logojoy and was immensely confused on wtf Looka was, and how I got there. Also, I just noticed Logojoy is left alone, but my spell check auto corrects Looka to Looks lol. Oy.
  - Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
    I got a brief look. They were uniformly terrible.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
onetimemanytime 7y ago
I guess that they switched from a great name (logoJoy) to Looka because they have more than logos now. However, it sucks as a name, even though what their new name is, is not an issue traffic wise. Maybe they should have used some of the VC money to buy a real good name? So many people underestimate the power of a great domain name, and it's a huge mistake.
rchaud 7y ago
As someone in an SEO/digital marketing role, I find it hard to believe that a domain name change alone would have led to an 80% drop in traffic. As long as the logojoy.com pages were set up for a 301 redirect to the new domain (which they appears to be), there would be a small hit to SEO, but nowhere near 80%. For example, a major Google Analytics/Tag Manager consultancy called Lunametrics was acquired by Bounteous in 2018. The GA-related articles originally written on lunametrics.com are still ranking towards the top of search results, even though they are now under the Bounteous.com domain. What I did notice on the Looka site was that there was no mention at all that the site has rebranded. Not even a "Logojoy is now Looka!" type banner on the top of the homepage with an explanatory blog post. A lot of SEO traffic comes through content marketing, where somebody clicks on an article link that's relevant to their query. I wonder if they removed or archived any of the blog posts or articles that were bringing in traffic.
- sct202 7y ago
  I switched over a website in a not competitive area to a new domain over the summer and search referrals dipped like 50% and recovered just this month. I'd imagine in something more competitive like logo/brand design they could get hit a lot worse.
- aakilfernandes 7y ago
  My guess is the keyword "logo" in their brand name was a big part of their SEO ranking
- adrr 7y ago
  Doesn't the google webmaster site have a migration tool to move a site to a different URL??
  - rchaud 7y ago
    They do: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9370220?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9370220?hl=en You as the site owner would still need to set up the redirects and DNS changes, but the tool basically tells Google to emphasize indexing the new site over the old one.
butler14 7y ago
"The CEO explained that with the rebrand the company expected and was ready to see a 20 to 30 percent drop in organic traffic due to the domain switch. “That was sort of the standard [of] what to expect, 20 to 30 percent. And expected to recover in three to six months,” Whitfield told BetaKit." It sounds like the CEO in question had taken SEO advice, which is reassuring. And the 20-30% drop and 6 (to 12) month recovery period is typical. However, the people involved in the project likely vastly underestimated the value of having a 'partial match domain name' e.g. the very fact that it had the keyword "logo" in its domain name likely helped it rank for lots of commercially valuable logo-related keywords and phrases.
Jamwinner 7y ago
How is 'LogoJoy' not a better branding in every way? 3 sylbles, 2 letter abv, has joy in the frikkin name. Has the rare aspect of actully describing what they do to boot! What does the new one even mean? Another misspelled word? Harder to search? I want to know the politics that drove the change, because I feel the data must be sparse. Any marketing/branding pros care to chime in and set my ignorance alight?
- zyang 7y ago
  They want to expand beyond just logo designs.
  - brobdingnagians 7y ago
    Seems like it would work to just have LogoJoy as a product with its own page, and expand to Looka as the company name with additional products. Does anyone with experience know if that is done in the industry/would work?
    - ativzzz 7y ago
      It seems Automaticc did something like this. Wordpress was founded in 2003, and the company Automaticc in 2005, meaning they probably spun Wordpress out as the product. Now, the parent company owns a bunch of different products. Obviously speculation on my end.
    - runako 7y ago
      Google re-organized with a new parent company (Alphabet) to do other stuff. They didn't change the Google name, so most users are blissfully unaware of the change.
    - closetohome 7y ago
      I work in ecommerce/design/branding, and with very very few exceptions, mindshare and domain authority are always worth more than whatever ephemeral benefits you'll get from rebranding.
  - 7y ago
weego 7y ago
Changed the brand, expanded their product offerings that clearly had associated cost while expecting a loss in revenue and also rented a large new set of offices at the same time. Regardless of what he was pitched from an SEO standpoint, mashing together all that risk into one giant clusterfuck shows amateurish leadership.
- whalesalad 7y ago
  Totally. You can’t blame the marketing firm for this... at the end of the day you need to be strong enough to say no. If you’re grasping at straws for growth and really think this is what’s gonna do it for you – you’re living in the land of make believe. Big wake up call for sure.
technotarek 7y ago
Well getting these types of articles is one way to rebuild their SEO! I'm not suggesting they'd do this on purpose -- that would be crazy -- but it might be a clever way to make some lemonade out of lemons. That is, sell the story of how they screwed up in hopes of generating some new organic backlinks.
- rchaud 7y ago
  A backlink is a backlink. Unless of course the Betakit site puts in a nofollow on external links.
- chrisfrantz 7y ago
  Bingo. That’s how to spin it.
reilly3000 7y ago
Perhaps the right play was to start calling the company Looka, but leave up Logojoy as one of the company’s products. Certainly some SSO woes would have been much less painful than an SEO apocalypse.
SnowingXIV 7y ago
> Looka has also raised around $7 million in funding, with a $900,000 seed round and $6 million Series A in November 2018. That seems like excessive funding for what this company is. A neat little tool he could have solely owned and kept majority of the profits. Really curious to why this webapp required so many employees to run. Rebrand was obviously a disaster LogoJoy was a great name that didn't require a total rebrand just for wanting to include additional assets, I'm not even sure what Looka is.
- parliament32 7y ago
  Turns out they didn't need that many employees to run after all, since they seems to be doing fine cutting from 40 to 8... Sounds a lot like someone trying to create a big business out of a little tool.
- milkanic 7y ago
  3 years ago he was a 1 man shop doing 70k/month revenue. https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/creating-an-ai-powered-logo-creator-and-earning-70k-mo-4ebecd547f https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/creating-an-ai-powere...
  - giarc 7y ago
    Seems like they should have used their own capital to grow rather than take outside money. I'm sure with the influx of investor money, they were pressured to hire staff. Inflated themselves and felt they needed to get "professional" with a new brand. He was likely throwing off a ton of money at $70k/month as a sole owner, why not just hire a few people at a time?
- corodra 7y ago
  You beat me to this. There's a lot here that doesn't make sense. Supposed 5mil entrepreneurs used it. I assume that's paying customers because why count looky-loos that don't buy a logo as a customer? $20 is the cheapest logo plan. That's $100mil. They're having trouble because? Plus I mean, their "AI" technology is supposed to eliminate the need of employees anyways... so... what's the problem? Unless... gasp... they're full of shit and it's not AI, just a randomly generated template system with a large library of symbols that are keyworded extensively since the entire process requires you to actually pick within narrow parameters? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills sometimes.
arbuge 7y ago
> “[In] the logo market … at least a billion dollars of logos are sold every year. If you look at just 99 designs and Fiverr, they sell about $150 million of logos per year. So it’s still a very sizable market,” said Whitfield. That one is pretty mind-blowing. I'm not sure where he got this number from, but assuming it's accurate and that Fiverr accounts for roughly half of it, that would make it a sizeable chunk of their total GMV: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1762301/000104746919003139/a2238508zf-1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1762301/000104746919... "Our GMV for the years ended December 31, 2018 and 2017 was $293.5 million and $213.0 million, respectively."
moltar 7y ago
Feels like rebrand is like The Big Rewrite. Potentially lethal.
stickfigure 7y ago
These sorts of stories remind me that Berkshire Hathaway is still named after a failed textile business (and according to Buffet, the worst investing mistake he ever made). Rebranding is overrated.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Yup. Get big enough and people think of your name as a familiar proper noun, like a person's name. I don't know what "Aaron" means and it doesn't matter.
  - perl4ever 7y ago
    It may be unclear which is cause and which is effect, but I think of cars. Honda has been selling the Civic for ~47 years and Toyota the Corolla for ~53. Even Hyundai, which has not always had the best reputation, has had the Elantra for almost 30 years. American manufacturers keep switching the names of their small cars and it looks like they may be giving up on them entirely.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      Ford had a good thing going with the Taurus branding (my parents bought three of them over the years), but then for some inexplicable reason they killed it off and went with the 500 or whatever. My parents no longer drive Fords; their default choice was taken from them. For some reason it's only the muscle car brands that get any respect from their manufacturers in the US; you won't see the Mustang, Charger, Challenger, or Corvette being renamed any time soon.
      - perl4ever 7y ago
        They brought the Taurus back, though. The period with the 500 in production and no Tauruses being built was like six months.
        CydeWeys 7y ago
garganzol 7y ago
Here is a deal. Change offer name back to LogoJoy, keep Looka as a company. Then build it from that. Once it is established and substantial, one can always do a smooth logojoy.com -> looka.com/logojoy tansition. For example, the transition to looka.com/logojoy can only be applied when a customer is logged in. Once they have registered customers, they can pitch them other offerings from looka.com domain like looka.com/brandjoy etc. Such incremental approach would open a smoother path to success. P.S. As a quick remedy, they should change looka.com/logo-maker/ to looka.com/logojoy right now. Then, they should pitch the visitors with the right message: "Make a logo with Looka" should be changed to "Make a logo with LogoJoy" or "Make a logo with Looka LogoJoy". Karma is real, once one has it they should not deny it.
- whoisjuan 7y ago
  The name is not the issue at all (or the domain name for that matter). They were highly dependent on organic traffic. They probably had a semi-large range of content marketing articles on logo design, branding design, design for new businesses, etc. Those articles were driving traffic, creating soft conversions (people who create logos but don't necessarily pay for the export version)... Then they probably had a funnel to slowly move those passive customers into active paying customers. Probably a lot of those doing one time purchases. They also have a subscription model but I suspect their recurring revenue coming from these is poor. They were probably making their money from one-time purchases the same way an e-commerce website earns money. Enter the rename. That by itself is not a complex issue. Domain changes happen every day and Google correctly re-indexes your content under the new domain as long as your 301 redirect is set correctly. But when you do that AND also broaden your content to include new areas, you're at the mercy of how Google's algorithm is going to reclassify your content. Since they created a broader offering, they lost specificity and Google hates that. So all their content marketing went to hell and their main revenue funnel started declining. If you do this to an e-commerce website you will see the same results. It's like if you are a store that sells bed sheets only and one day you decide that you also want to sell kitchen items (slightly related but not the same category). If you do that, you lose all the relevance in bed-sheets SERPs that you dominated and it's kind of hard to come back from that. If your business depends on Google, this can happen to you even if you don't rebrand. A simple algorithm change can damage your rankings. TL/DR: Their fundamental error was renaming AND making their offering broader(vaguer) at the same time.
axaxs 7y ago
Why not just keep both? Keep the domain name. Call the product LogoJoy. Brand it LogoJoy, a Looka company. Or LogoJoy, by Looka. Just changing names seems monumentally risky, in my opinion.
deleted 7y ago
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bb88 7y ago
I guess it's interesting in that a branding startup failed to rebrand itself successfully. It's clear that "Looka" is less clear about what it is than "LogoJoy". I also think it may say something about startup branding in general. Brands based upon actual words may do better than trying to make people understand what "Looka" is.
kresten 7y ago
The founder of logojoy once said in an interview that he could have stayed as a single founder company. I think logojoy was pulling in > $350,000 per month at the time. If he’d sat on that as a single founder he’d be rolling in cash. Imagine sitting on $350,000 a month for 3 years.... you’d never need to work again. Instead, venture capital, offices, 40 staff, rebranding failure staff cuts, logojoy gone.
- conanbatt 7y ago
  350k of profit or revenue? It's not the same thing. In profits, that's typically a 50 million company.
  - kresten 7y ago
    Revenue. As a single founder company, I’d think that would be mostly profit, say 90%? That leaves about $400,000 per annum to pay for an ec2 instance and salary if working from the kitch table. Imagine having a company 90% profitable and burning it up on the dream of venture capital backed growth.
    - fhbdukfrh 7y ago
      No way. They paid for all the actual work and took a cut. He wasn't a single founder doing all the actual Service work
      - austhrow743 7y ago
        What service work?
    - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
      Eh, if he had to pay for a lot of the traffic that generated sales, I wouldn't be surprised if it was closer to 50%. But still, this was almost certainly $100k+ profit per month.
    - alaskamiller 7y ago
onetimemanytime 7y ago
>>Canadian design startup loses 80% organic traffic after rebrand Canadian design startup gains lost traffic and then some after story is picked by a lot of websites. Brilliant! Money (and or time) well spent to pitch this story.
subpixel 7y ago
1. Logojoy is, in every way, a superior brand. (Q: Who designed your awesome logo? A: Luka.) 2. They should never had combined a brand change with a big change in what they offer as a business. Now they don't even really know what is broken. 3. All this was likely compounded by a technical assumption that was incorrect, e.g. some content likely disappeared or backlinks were broken.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  A: "I live on the second floor." b^)
paxys 7y ago
> Looka, the Toronto-based startup that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to design logos Kinda funny that they failed at their own rebranding.
- mv4 7y ago
  Overfitting.
mv4 7y ago
May this serve as a reminder to anyone being offered a non-sensical funding round for their one-person business ("really take this to the next level","1 + 1 = 3", "you will own a piece of a much larger pie!") - maybe consider keeping 100% of your pie.
hartator 7y ago
> “Rebrand, they said. It’ll be great, they said,” Whitfield lamented. CEO and co-founder Loved Logojoy and Whitfield when they launched. Should probably take more responsibility than a `they` though.
markdown 7y ago
In my country looka is slang for snot/mucus.
nathan_f77 7y ago
This was really interesting to read, since I'm about to rebrand my own startup. The stakes are a lot lower in my case, but hopefully it doesn't turn out like this. I'm going to rename FormAPI [1] to DocSpring.com [2]. I'm also launching a new website, and you can see a preview on my staging servers [3]. The main reason for the rebrand is that FormAPI wasn't a very good name. The service is an API for filling out PDF forms, but FormAPI doesn't communicate that clearly. People would often spell it incorrectly, and I got tired of explaining it to people. I also wanted to move to a decent .com domain. "FormAPI.io" feels like a small side project, and my theory is that "DocSpring.com" will feel a bit more trustworthy. (I'm still a solo founder with a small company, but I recently raised a small round from Earnest Capital [4], and I'm still around after 2 years [5]!) I think I'll be launching the new site tomorrow, so wish me luck! And please let me know if you have any feedback about the new site (or in general.) [1] https://formapi.io https://formapi.io [2] https://docspring.com https://docspring.com [3] https://staging.docspring.com https://staging.docspring.com [4] https://earnestcapital.com https://earnestcapital.com [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15427891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15427891
- imagin8or 7y ago
  I don't know if I'm just being dim because its not a weekday, but, what do it do? Is it for me to fill out forms on random sites, in which case how is it an API? Or is it for the people with the forms to make it quicker to fill them out (which makes sense, but doesn't match the one line of blurb on the site)? If it's for form filling, why is the word "doc" in the name, which I'd assume meant document rather than relating to form data or personal data. Looking on the staging page it makes more sense, it seems to be for the companies who have the forms rather than the people who have to fill them in. But does it take a pdf and generate an electronic form from it, or take filled-in forms and pull the data out of them? Or is it for companies who have data to use to fill in forms from that data? Just quite confused, tho maybe I wouldn't be if I was a company with forms.. or data..?
- Cenk 7y ago
  While I think the FormAPI name is perfect, I can see why DocSpring is better suited to more mainstream customers. There’s a tiny potential for confusion with FormSpring, but since they’re not around anymore I don’t think it matters. I like the new site, here’s my feedback: 1. I’d not set the main headline in all caps 2. The “Upload Template -> Set up fields“ thing on the old site is really good at explaining the the tool does - if I were you I’d put that on the new site too, and de-emphasize the screenshot. 3. The logo in the top left corner is slightly blurry, I’d use an SVG instead of a PNG. Apart from those tiny notes the new site is a big improvement!
lacker 7y ago
Dawson Whitfield, CEO and co-founder of Looka, told BetaKit that it was this decision to rebrand and move into new verticals that led Looka to financial difficulties and layoffs. “Rebrand, they said. It’ll be great, they said,” Whitfield lamented. This guy is the CEO. What is he talking about with all this “they said” stuff? He’s the one responsible for this rebranding decision. But he is acting like it was forced on him, or like it is the fault of some advisor. As the CEO you have to take responsibility. The problem isn’t that “they said” to rebrand. The problem is that you decided to rebrand. Be honest with yourself so that hopefully you don’t make a decision this bad again.
- mtnGoat 7y ago
  Probably the folks that gave him the 6 million he burned in less then a year.
  - rasz 7y ago
    People who give you $6m also give you a list of people you have to hire and keep pushing to spend that moneys fast as you can 'to grow'. They dont care if you spend it on useless shit, move fast and break things!

103 points by KFC_Manager 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Reminds me of the rebrand ConvertKit did to "Seva", which they quickly realized was an enormous mistake and unrebranded. https://growthlab.com/convertkit-founder-nathan-barry-on-undoing-a-rebrand/ https://growthlab.com/convertkit-founder-nathan-barry-on-und...

dreen 7y ago

Why would a domain change cause any drop though? Surely they kept the old domain and redirected people to the new one?

pkalinowski 7y ago
All backlinks around the internet still link to old domain. Additional redirect causes this, together with IMO ridiculous decision by Google to derank websites after domain migration
- yabadabadoes 7y ago
  I think Google is going with pleasing the user in this case. If I have a passing interest and finally come back years later, I have no interest in following rebranding history to figure out this isn't yet another cheap copy, if Google finds me 1 or 2 of the 3 sites I remember without irritating me or dropping me on sites I'm not sure about, they have a happy user that might be open to ads.

Mikeb85 7y ago

Not sure I'd trust these people with my branding... Logojoy is a better name, likely is easier to google, definitely easier to remember and connect to their product. Also, it's hard to get traction as a startup, re-branding that early is suicide...

rchaud 7y ago
Agreed. Startup names are so ridiculous anyway, what value was there in changing the name? Salesforce for example moved beyond a pure sales CRM ages ago, and the platform supports all kinds of applications, including healthcare and university application systems. They didn't need to change their name to do that.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
erikig 7y ago
Yep, if you can't handle your own rebrand, how am I supposed to trust your AI to do my brand?
rasz 7y ago
A name like Looka doesnt drop out of a hat. You pay $100k consulting fee and receive it in a very nice envelope with a 30 minute pitch about its origins, emotional impact, color and connotations!

ptah 7y ago

change it back

knorthfield 7y ago

That’s the kind of pain you’re in for when you’re overly reliant on a single channel.

erikig 7y ago
Channel diversity is severely underrated.

windsurfer 7y ago

Has anyone here tried or used the app? Looka seems to requires users to log in to try out a demo. I have a feeling the rebrand isn't the real issue here.

giarc 7y ago
Could be competition. Namecheap recently launched a 100% free version of these "AI logo makers" for which there are a ton out there.
tqkxzugoaupvwqr 7y ago
I tried the logo creator, went through all the steps, and as soon as they had generated logos for me and I started scrolling, a non-closable overlay asked me to sign in or register. I didn’t even have a chance to look at the generated logos! So I closed the tab.
- asdkhadsj 7y ago
  Same, just did this the other day. I also went there from Logojoy and was immensely confused on wtf Looka was, and how I got there. Also, I just noticed Logojoy is left alone, but my spell check auto corrects Looka to Looks lol. Oy.
- Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
  I got a brief look. They were uniformly terrible.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

onetimemanytime 7y ago

I guess that they switched from a great name (logoJoy) to Looka because they have more than logos now. However, it sucks as a name, even though what their new name is, is not an issue traffic wise. Maybe they should have used some of the VC money to buy a real good name? So many people underestimate the power of a great domain name, and it's a huge mistake.

rchaud 7y ago

As someone in an SEO/digital marketing role, I find it hard to believe that a domain name change alone would have led to an 80% drop in traffic. As long as the logojoy.com pages were set up for a 301 redirect to the new domain (which they appears to be), there would be a small hit to SEO, but nowhere near 80%. For example, a major Google Analytics/Tag Manager consultancy called Lunametrics was acquired by Bounteous in 2018. The GA-related articles originally written on lunametrics.com are still ranking towards the top of search results, even though they are now under the Bounteous.com domain. What I did notice on the Looka site was that there was no mention at all that the site has rebranded. Not even a "Logojoy is now Looka!" type banner on the top of the homepage with an explanatory blog post. A lot of SEO traffic comes through content marketing, where somebody clicks on an article link that's relevant to their query. I wonder if they removed or archived any of the blog posts or articles that were bringing in traffic.

sct202 7y ago
I switched over a website in a not competitive area to a new domain over the summer and search referrals dipped like 50% and recovered just this month. I'd imagine in something more competitive like logo/brand design they could get hit a lot worse.
aakilfernandes 7y ago
My guess is the keyword "logo" in their brand name was a big part of their SEO ranking
adrr 7y ago
Doesn't the google webmaster site have a migration tool to move a site to a different URL??
- rchaud 7y ago
  They do: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9370220?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9370220?hl=en You as the site owner would still need to set up the redirects and DNS changes, but the tool basically tells Google to emphasize indexing the new site over the old one.

butler14 7y ago

"The CEO explained that with the rebrand the company expected and was ready to see a 20 to 30 percent drop in organic traffic due to the domain switch. “That was sort of the standard [of] what to expect, 20 to 30 percent. And expected to recover in three to six months,” Whitfield told BetaKit." It sounds like the CEO in question had taken SEO advice, which is reassuring. And the 20-30% drop and 6 (to 12) month recovery period is typical. However, the people involved in the project likely vastly underestimated the value of having a 'partial match domain name' e.g. the very fact that it had the keyword "logo" in its domain name likely helped it rank for lots of commercially valuable logo-related keywords and phrases.

Jamwinner 7y ago

How is 'LogoJoy' not a better branding in every way? 3 sylbles, 2 letter abv, has joy in the frikkin name. Has the rare aspect of actully describing what they do to boot! What does the new one even mean? Another misspelled word? Harder to search? I want to know the politics that drove the change, because I feel the data must be sparse. Any marketing/branding pros care to chime in and set my ignorance alight?

zyang 7y ago
They want to expand beyond just logo designs.
- brobdingnagians 7y ago
  Seems like it would work to just have LogoJoy as a product with its own page, and expand to Looka as the company name with additional products. Does anyone with experience know if that is done in the industry/would work?
  - ativzzz 7y ago
    It seems Automaticc did something like this. Wordpress was founded in 2003, and the company Automaticc in 2005, meaning they probably spun Wordpress out as the product. Now, the parent company owns a bunch of different products. Obviously speculation on my end.
  - runako 7y ago
    Google re-organized with a new parent company (Alphabet) to do other stuff. They didn't change the Google name, so most users are blissfully unaware of the change.
  - closetohome 7y ago
    I work in ecommerce/design/branding, and with very very few exceptions, mindshare and domain authority are always worth more than whatever ephemeral benefits you'll get from rebranding.
- 7y ago

weego 7y ago

Changed the brand, expanded their product offerings that clearly had associated cost while expecting a loss in revenue and also rented a large new set of offices at the same time. Regardless of what he was pitched from an SEO standpoint, mashing together all that risk into one giant clusterfuck shows amateurish leadership.

whalesalad 7y ago
Totally. You can’t blame the marketing firm for this... at the end of the day you need to be strong enough to say no. If you’re grasping at straws for growth and really think this is what’s gonna do it for you – you’re living in the land of make believe. Big wake up call for sure.

technotarek 7y ago

Well getting these types of articles is one way to rebuild their SEO! I'm not suggesting they'd do this on purpose -- that would be crazy -- but it might be a clever way to make some lemonade out of lemons. That is, sell the story of how they screwed up in hopes of generating some new organic backlinks.

rchaud 7y ago
A backlink is a backlink. Unless of course the Betakit site puts in a nofollow on external links.
chrisfrantz 7y ago
Bingo. That’s how to spin it.

reilly3000 7y ago

Perhaps the right play was to start calling the company Looka, but leave up Logojoy as one of the company’s products. Certainly some SSO woes would have been much less painful than an SEO apocalypse.

SnowingXIV 7y ago

> Looka has also raised around $7 million in funding, with a $900,000 seed round and $6 million Series A in November 2018. That seems like excessive funding for what this company is. A neat little tool he could have solely owned and kept majority of the profits. Really curious to why this webapp required so many employees to run. Rebrand was obviously a disaster LogoJoy was a great name that didn't require a total rebrand just for wanting to include additional assets, I'm not even sure what Looka is.

parliament32 7y ago
Turns out they didn't need that many employees to run after all, since they seems to be doing fine cutting from 40 to 8... Sounds a lot like someone trying to create a big business out of a little tool.
milkanic 7y ago
3 years ago he was a 1 man shop doing 70k/month revenue. https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/creating-an-ai-powered-logo-creator-and-earning-70k-mo-4ebecd547f https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/creating-an-ai-powere...
- giarc 7y ago
  Seems like they should have used their own capital to grow rather than take outside money. I'm sure with the influx of investor money, they were pressured to hire staff. Inflated themselves and felt they needed to get "professional" with a new brand. He was likely throwing off a ton of money at $70k/month as a sole owner, why not just hire a few people at a time?
corodra 7y ago
You beat me to this. There's a lot here that doesn't make sense. Supposed 5mil entrepreneurs used it. I assume that's paying customers because why count looky-loos that don't buy a logo as a customer? $20 is the cheapest logo plan. That's $100mil. They're having trouble because? Plus I mean, their "AI" technology is supposed to eliminate the need of employees anyways... so... what's the problem? Unless... gasp... they're full of shit and it's not AI, just a randomly generated template system with a large library of symbols that are keyworded extensively since the entire process requires you to actually pick within narrow parameters? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills sometimes.

arbuge 7y ago

> “[In] the logo market … at least a billion dollars of logos are sold every year. If you look at just 99 designs and Fiverr, they sell about $150 million of logos per year. So it’s still a very sizable market,” said Whitfield. That one is pretty mind-blowing. I'm not sure where he got this number from, but assuming it's accurate and that Fiverr accounts for roughly half of it, that would make it a sizeable chunk of their total GMV: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1762301/000104746919003139/a2238508zf-1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1762301/000104746919... "Our GMV for the years ended December 31, 2018 and 2017 was $293.5 million and $213.0 million, respectively."

moltar 7y ago

Feels like rebrand is like The Big Rewrite. Potentially lethal.

stickfigure 7y ago

These sorts of stories remind me that Berkshire Hathaway is still named after a failed textile business (and according to Buffet, the worst investing mistake he ever made). Rebranding is overrated.

CydeWeys 7y ago
Yup. Get big enough and people think of your name as a familiar proper noun, like a person's name. I don't know what "Aaron" means and it doesn't matter.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  It may be unclear which is cause and which is effect, but I think of cars. Honda has been selling the Civic for ~47 years and Toyota the Corolla for ~53. Even Hyundai, which has not always had the best reputation, has had the Elantra for almost 30 years. American manufacturers keep switching the names of their small cars and it looks like they may be giving up on them entirely.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Ford had a good thing going with the Taurus branding (my parents bought three of them over the years), but then for some inexplicable reason they killed it off and went with the 500 or whatever. My parents no longer drive Fords; their default choice was taken from them. For some reason it's only the muscle car brands that get any respect from their manufacturers in the US; you won't see the Mustang, Charger, Challenger, or Corvette being renamed any time soon.
    - perl4ever 7y ago
      They brought the Taurus back, though. The period with the 500 in production and no Tauruses being built was like six months.
      - CydeWeys 7y ago

garganzol 7y ago

Here is a deal. Change offer name back to LogoJoy, keep Looka as a company. Then build it from that. Once it is established and substantial, one can always do a smooth logojoy.com -> looka.com/logojoy tansition. For example, the transition to looka.com/logojoy can only be applied when a customer is logged in. Once they have registered customers, they can pitch them other offerings from looka.com domain like looka.com/brandjoy etc. Such incremental approach would open a smoother path to success. P.S. As a quick remedy, they should change looka.com/logo-maker/ to looka.com/logojoy right now. Then, they should pitch the visitors with the right message: "Make a logo with Looka" should be changed to "Make a logo with LogoJoy" or "Make a logo with Looka LogoJoy". Karma is real, once one has it they should not deny it.

whoisjuan 7y ago
The name is not the issue at all (or the domain name for that matter). They were highly dependent on organic traffic. They probably had a semi-large range of content marketing articles on logo design, branding design, design for new businesses, etc. Those articles were driving traffic, creating soft conversions (people who create logos but don't necessarily pay for the export version)... Then they probably had a funnel to slowly move those passive customers into active paying customers. Probably a lot of those doing one time purchases. They also have a subscription model but I suspect their recurring revenue coming from these is poor. They were probably making their money from one-time purchases the same way an e-commerce website earns money. Enter the rename. That by itself is not a complex issue. Domain changes happen every day and Google correctly re-indexes your content under the new domain as long as your 301 redirect is set correctly. But when you do that AND also broaden your content to include new areas, you're at the mercy of how Google's algorithm is going to reclassify your content. Since they created a broader offering, they lost specificity and Google hates that. So all their content marketing went to hell and their main revenue funnel started declining. If you do this to an e-commerce website you will see the same results. It's like if you are a store that sells bed sheets only and one day you decide that you also want to sell kitchen items (slightly related but not the same category). If you do that, you lose all the relevance in bed-sheets SERPs that you dominated and it's kind of hard to come back from that. If your business depends on Google, this can happen to you even if you don't rebrand. A simple algorithm change can damage your rankings. TL/DR: Their fundamental error was renaming AND making their offering broader(vaguer) at the same time.

axaxs 7y ago

Why not just keep both? Keep the domain name. Call the product LogoJoy. Brand it LogoJoy, a Looka company. Or LogoJoy, by Looka. Just changing names seems monumentally risky, in my opinion.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

bb88 7y ago

I guess it's interesting in that a branding startup failed to rebrand itself successfully. It's clear that "Looka" is less clear about what it is than "LogoJoy". I also think it may say something about startup branding in general. Brands based upon actual words may do better than trying to make people understand what "Looka" is.

kresten 7y ago

The founder of logojoy once said in an interview that he could have stayed as a single founder company. I think logojoy was pulling in > $350,000 per month at the time. If he’d sat on that as a single founder he’d be rolling in cash. Imagine sitting on $350,000 a month for 3 years.... you’d never need to work again. Instead, venture capital, offices, 40 staff, rebranding failure staff cuts, logojoy gone.

conanbatt 7y ago
350k of profit or revenue? It's not the same thing. In profits, that's typically a 50 million company.
- kresten 7y ago
  Revenue. As a single founder company, I’d think that would be mostly profit, say 90%? That leaves about $400,000 per annum to pay for an ec2 instance and salary if working from the kitch table. Imagine having a company 90% profitable and burning it up on the dream of venture capital backed growth.
  - fhbdukfrh 7y ago
    No way. They paid for all the actual work and took a cut. He wasn't a single founder doing all the actual Service work
    - austhrow743 7y ago
      What service work?
  - onlyrealcuzzo 7y ago
    Eh, if he had to pay for a lot of the traffic that generated sales, I wouldn't be surprised if it was closer to 50%. But still, this was almost certainly $100k+ profit per month.
  - alaskamiller 7y ago

onetimemanytime 7y ago

>>Canadian design startup loses 80% organic traffic after rebrand Canadian design startup gains lost traffic and then some after story is picked by a lot of websites. Brilliant! Money (and or time) well spent to pitch this story.

subpixel 7y ago

1. Logojoy is, in every way, a superior brand. (Q: Who designed your awesome logo? A: Luka.) 2. They should never had combined a brand change with a big change in what they offer as a business. Now they don't even really know what is broken. 3. All this was likely compounded by a technical assumption that was incorrect, e.g. some content likely disappeared or backlinks were broken.

jessaustin 7y ago
A: "I live on the second floor." b^)

paxys 7y ago

> Looka, the Toronto-based startup that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to design logos Kinda funny that they failed at their own rebranding.

mv4 7y ago
Overfitting.

mv4 7y ago

May this serve as a reminder to anyone being offered a non-sensical funding round for their one-person business ("really take this to the next level","1 + 1 = 3", "you will own a piece of a much larger pie!") - maybe consider keeping 100% of your pie.

hartator 7y ago

> “Rebrand, they said. It’ll be great, they said,” Whitfield lamented. CEO and co-founder Loved Logojoy and Whitfield when they launched. Should probably take more responsibility than a `they` though.

markdown 7y ago

In my country looka is slang for snot/mucus.

nathan_f77 7y ago

This was really interesting to read, since I'm about to rebrand my own startup. The stakes are a lot lower in my case, but hopefully it doesn't turn out like this. I'm going to rename FormAPI [1] to DocSpring.com [2]. I'm also launching a new website, and you can see a preview on my staging servers [3]. The main reason for the rebrand is that FormAPI wasn't a very good name. The service is an API for filling out PDF forms, but FormAPI doesn't communicate that clearly. People would often spell it incorrectly, and I got tired of explaining it to people. I also wanted to move to a decent .com domain. "FormAPI.io" feels like a small side project, and my theory is that "DocSpring.com" will feel a bit more trustworthy. (I'm still a solo founder with a small company, but I recently raised a small round from Earnest Capital [4], and I'm still around after 2 years [5]!) I think I'll be launching the new site tomorrow, so wish me luck! And please let me know if you have any feedback about the new site (or in general.) [1] https://formapi.io https://formapi.io [2] https://docspring.com https://docspring.com [3] https://staging.docspring.com https://staging.docspring.com [4] https://earnestcapital.com https://earnestcapital.com [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15427891 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15427891

imagin8or 7y ago
I don't know if I'm just being dim because its not a weekday, but, what do it do? Is it for me to fill out forms on random sites, in which case how is it an API? Or is it for the people with the forms to make it quicker to fill them out (which makes sense, but doesn't match the one line of blurb on the site)? If it's for form filling, why is the word "doc" in the name, which I'd assume meant document rather than relating to form data or personal data. Looking on the staging page it makes more sense, it seems to be for the companies who have the forms rather than the people who have to fill them in. But does it take a pdf and generate an electronic form from it, or take filled-in forms and pull the data out of them? Or is it for companies who have data to use to fill in forms from that data? Just quite confused, tho maybe I wouldn't be if I was a company with forms.. or data..?
Cenk 7y ago
While I think the FormAPI name is perfect, I can see why DocSpring is better suited to more mainstream customers. There’s a tiny potential for confusion with FormSpring, but since they’re not around anymore I don’t think it matters. I like the new site, here’s my feedback: 1. I’d not set the main headline in all caps 2. The “Upload Template -> Set up fields“ thing on the old site is really good at explaining the the tool does - if I were you I’d put that on the new site too, and de-emphasize the screenshot. 3. The logo in the top left corner is slightly blurry, I’d use an SVG instead of a PNG. Apart from those tiny notes the new site is a big improvement!

lacker 7y ago

Dawson Whitfield, CEO and co-founder of Looka, told BetaKit that it was this decision to rebrand and move into new verticals that led Looka to financial difficulties and layoffs. “Rebrand, they said. It’ll be great, they said,” Whitfield lamented. This guy is the CEO. What is he talking about with all this “they said” stuff? He’s the one responsible for this rebranding decision. But he is acting like it was forced on him, or like it is the fault of some advisor. As the CEO you have to take responsibility. The problem isn’t that “they said” to rebrand. The problem is that you decided to rebrand. Be honest with yourself so that hopefully you don’t make a decision this bad again.

mtnGoat 7y ago
Probably the folks that gave him the 6 million he burned in less then a year.
- rasz 7y ago
  People who give you $6m also give you a list of people you have to hire and keep pushing to spend that moneys fast as you can 'to grow'. They dont care if you spend it on useless shit, move fast and break things!