SPI 825: Behind the Scenes of a Major Rebrand & Lessons Learned After a Hard Fail

SPI 825: Behind the Scenes of a Major Rebrand & Lessons Learned after a Hard Fail

Nathan Barry: We’re building the operating system for creators who mean business. Meaning that this is actually the core foundation of my creator business. Everything else funnels through this. The dashboard is customizable. It actually brings in data from the other platforms that I use. It’s very, very extensible, right? Like, we run very different businesses from each other. You know, you can’t build an all-in-one platform when all looks different for each creator. And I think most of all in the brand, we want to keep creators at the center of it.

Pat Flynn: So this year marks the 10 year anniversary of something really special. That is, the number of years I’ve advised this company, whose founder I brought on today, who just made a radical change in their business. We’ve had him on before, but Nathan Berry has just done something that is, I don’t know if it’s ever been done before.

And what that is is a second rebrand after a misfire. So Nathan and his company ConvertKit, which started around the 2012, 2014 era. I came on early as an advisor. I’ve seen them grown up and I’ve seen them like a kid grows up, make a lot of mistakes. And one of those mistakes was back in the 2017, 2018 era. They rebranded to a word, Seva, and a month later they took it back.

And we’re going to talk about that. But most of all, the rebrand that just happened from ConvertKit to now just Kit. Kit.com. Three letter domain, pretty wild. And we’re not going to talk about how they did the rebrand, there’s a lot of that that is documented in a documentary on their YouTube channel, but we’re also going to have Charli, the creative director, Charli Prangley , later this month to talk more about the nuances of a rebrand and what you can do if you are ever rebranding and mistakes that were made before that were not made this time and those kinds of things.

I wanted to bring Nathan on, the CEO of Kit, to talk about the plan. Why the rebrand? What does it actually mean? What brought it on? And what does the future of Kit look like? And I know a lot of you who listen to the show are interested in what this is and, you know, are users of Kit. It’s still going to take me a little bit of a while to get used to just calling it kit because ConvertKit was ingrained in my brain for over 10 years now.

But this is a fascinating conversation. We get into the insights of Nathan versus competitors versus just feelings of wanting to make sure we get it right this time. All those sorts of things and more and a lot of lessons learned no matter what size your business is. So let’s dive into the rebrand of ConvertKit to Kit with Nathan Barry, CEO and founder of Kit.

Here we go.

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he’s just one year away from having two teenagers in the house. Pat Flynn!

Pat Flynn: Nathan, welcome back to SPI, man. Thanks for being here, dude.

Nathan Barry: Hey, thanks for having me.

Pat Flynn: This is a big month for Kit, which I will still have to remember to say, because I’m so used to saying ConvertKit because well, actually, I’ll have you reveal the big news in case people don’t know what has recently happened with ConvertKit.

Nathan Barry: When this comes out, we will have just made the switch from ConvertKit to Kit. You know, changing the name of a company 11 years in is kind of a big deal, so we’ll see how everything goes. It’s smooth so far, knock on wood, but yeah, it’s pretty exciting.

Pat Flynn: So when you think of a rebrand in the way you just described it, like, what does that mean to you? I mean, it’s more than just a logo change. What is what does a rebrand really mean to you?

Nathan Barry: Oh, it’s so many things. First, this is a little bit easier as a rebrand because we’re like going from ConvertKit to Kit, right? We’re shortening it rather than going for something entirely different.

Pat Flynn: Right. Which you’ve done before. And we’ll talk about that, I’m sure.

Nathan Barry: Yeah, we can we can get into that. So, you know, going into the rebrand, probably the biggest thing is what does it mean, as a company, what should people expect? Like, it wouldn’t make any sense if there wasn’t a story related to the product that we sell as it relates to the new name.

So like earlier this year, we launched our app store and that is really how we think about, you know, what Kit is, right? Cause everyone’s creator business is different in some way. You know, your business, my business, someone else’s, they all have a little bit of a different angle. And so the way we talk about it is like, Hey, you can build your kit the way that’s the right fit for your business.

By bringing in the right automations, you know, bringing these other apps to round it out. And so that’d be the first thing is the, the story overall of the name. Does it make sense? Logo brand style, all that’s really important. And then ultimately it comes down to the perception of like, how do people refer to the brand?

Like you, you always say like, this is the way we want to be perceived, but you know, you got to actually base it on how people. truly perceive you.

Pat Flynn: There was a reason to make the switch. What was the reason for you and for ConvertKit to move to Kit? What was the perception and what do we want the perception to be?

Nathan Barry: Yeah, so I think the perception was that we’re software that’s really good at helping people convert visitors to customers, which is a great perception to have. We want to keep all of that, but then level it up from there. So we want to build a brand that’s really the operating system for creators who mean business.

So really focusing it on creators who are taking their craft seriously, their professionals are showing up in that way. And then it being a lot more than, you know, a bespoke tool. It’s like, Hey, this is actually the platform that is going to run your whole creator business and adapt and grow with you as you plug things into it.

And then, you know, I’m recording right now in Kit studios, which is the first of many locations that we’re launching around, you know, a physical space for creators to come in and create high quality content. Think of it like the Amex Centurion Lounge, you know, is to American Express as Kit Studios will be to Kit.

And so we needed a brand that like encompassed all of that. I think Kit does a good job.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, Kit Studios is a wild, imaginative solution for your customers. I mean, anybody can sign up if you are a ConvertKit user to book space. And currently there’s a space in Boise, Idaho. And you said that you’re rolling out more spaces.

Can you give any sort of hints as far as like what cities you’re looking at?

Nathan Barry: Yeah. So we’re still early cause we got to figure out what it actually takes to roll this out. But Boise is five studios in one building. So there’s individual recording studios, like what I’m in right now to talk to you, where I got you up on the teleprompter, shooting through the DSLR. And then so there’s two set up like that and there’s three for like sit down podcast style conversations. As far as locations, you know, we’re looking, I think New York is coming up pretty soon. That’s the one I’m looking at next. I think LA, Austin. Atlanta could be interesting.

We’ll get Boise and New York going and then then go from there.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I mean, this is, this is a whole nother venture. I mean, an arm of kit, if you will, which takes me back to an interesting question that I have, you know, when ConvertKit started, it was. And you and I got on board and I became an advisor.

I mean, this is 2014 era, early days. I remember specifically ConvertKit was such an amazing, innovative tool because it was like, we’re going to master email for creators and it wasn’t even creators back then it was bloggers. It was a very specific tool built that you had created for a very specific kind of user.

And that’s in contrast with what you just said as far as what Kit is and where it wants to go. And now you have these studios and it’s this entire platform. How do you respond to somebody who’s like, Well, I like the best of the tool that does the one thing. Why isn’t it still that? Why grow beyond that?

Nathan Barry: Yeah, I think the thing that’s unique is the focus on the type of user. Most business tools used by creators are actually general, small business tools or they’re they’re made for another industry and they’re borrowed into the creator space.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, that’s true.

Nathan Barry: And so what we look at is If our narrow lens is creators exactly, what can we do for creators that no one else can do?

And so that’s where you get into solving these problems. Like, none of our competitors are going to go and build studios for creators to come in and use, because they serve all of small business. But so that’s just one example of something that we can do because we only focus on creators. The other thing is I had a big intellectual dilemma for a long time around the all in one platform versus the narrow focus platform.

And so I said for years, like we’re building the narrow focus platform and the creators I would talk to would kind of say two things. One, they would say like, Hey, we want the narrow focus platform. It should do one thing really well. Don’t add in all this feature bloat where you’re just checking boxes, but you know, it doesn’t actually provide value.

And then they’d sort of separately or like after that and be like, yeah, but could you do this thing that’s really like an all in one creators were saying we want the best of both worlds. And I thought for a long time, like, it’s not possible. Like, these are two ends of the spectrum. You know, you can do a few things really, really well, or you can go abroad and do it all fairly poorly where you don’t serve any niche well.

And I just sat with that problem, honestly, for years. And then it was probably 2022. That I was thinking about and watching some other platforms and other industries, specifically WordPress and Shopify, like, wait a second, the core product is pretty focused in both those platforms, but it’s the ecosystem of what’s built on top of it.

It’s their app stores and plugins that really allow all this flexibility. And so I realized that no one in the email space was building an app store where people can actually customize and change the experience and, and use it differently. So that’s a huge opportunity for us. And we could actually have the best of both worlds where we could say, hey, the core platform is dialed in, we focused on this.

We’re not going off and building a course platform and a CRM for tracking individual sales leads and all of that. They would spread our, our team super thin, but we can build all these hooks and integrations where someone else can then go build a CRM that is made for specifically for coaches to track the sales that they, you know, like one on one leads.

I mean, that’s what we built and what we launched this year, and it’s still super early. We’ve got to build so many more endpoints and all that, but I think my favorite example is this app called Kit Board, which is a CRM for ConvertKit for Kit specifically. And what it does is you and I, for the most part, when we interact with our audience, sell products or all of that, it’s one to many, right? You don’t really need a custom field for someone’s spouse’s name. Someone’s all these things that like if we were doing direct sales, we might be keeping track of, and so ConvertKit is, and see, I’m going to like ConvertKit kit right here. So Kit is, is focused on that one to many.

You know, James Clear is sending an email out to a million people, right? That’s the way that we operate. And then you have CRMs over in the other space where it’s like, all right, we’re dealing with a 20 sales leads on, you know, I’ve got 50 leads for my design agency and I’m working through them and tracking status and logging details.

And usually those worlds don’t meet, but I keep finding examples where those worlds overlap. Like a coach I think it’s a great example. Someone might have a newsletter and a podcast as a coach and they’ve got 3000 people on that list. That they talked to one to many, but then, you know, you get a lead of someone who wants to sign up for coaching services that 500 or a thousand dollars a month.

Well, you talk to them one to one and you need to move status and track them and attract that sales opportunity. And so Matt Crandall, the developer behind kit board built this app entirely on top of Kit, where it uses all the same data, there’s no sinking, there’s none of that, and it is just this other view that lets you track the status of each sale and, and everything else, and then run automations and everything off of it, because, guess what? It’s all powered by Kit. And so it has Zapier built in, it has full automations, it has landing pages, it has everything else. And so that’s where we realized, like, wait a second, we truly can have the best of both worlds, like this narrow focus platform that then has targeted apps go for it. And Matt just came out with an update about a week or two ago, where he’s like, kit board now has, you know, let’s stop all these features.

And I’m watching it as, you know, the owner of Kit and being like, all these new amazing features just shipped for effectively Kit CRM. And no core kit team member spent any time on it, you know, but now it has like five new features. And so as a customer, the rate of development and improvement and like solutions for your business just gets so, so much faster.

Pat Flynn: Similar to an iPhone in the app store. Being the engine that kind of made the iPhone accessible and utility for everybody, just depending on who developed these tools. What’s in it for Matt? I mean, he seems to be doing a lot for this and for Kit board. I mean, that is incredible. What’s his benefit?

Nathan Barry: Yeah.

So similar to the, you know, the app store for the iPhone, it’s, he’s able to sell and price the app how he wants. And so. He’s saying for, I think he has a basic plan for a hundred bucks a year, and then a more advanced plan for 200 a year where you can layer this on. And so, yeah, so it was a business model inside of Kit now through the, yeah, exactly.

And it’s just like, imagine the iPhone is a great example. Cause imagine if you use the iPhone, but you could only use apps that Apple made. We remember back to when the iPhone first came out and it was super cool, but like Apple had eight apps and you can only use the calculator for so long, you know, like it’s really like opening it up to the community.

And that was kind of crazy to me to see that like, Oh, the App Store, Shopify, all these other things exist. But no one in the email space was doing that.

Pat Flynn: That’s really amazing. Well, congrats on that. And you know, the innovation that I’m starting to see with kit now, I mean, it almost is like the name change is just the end result of a lot of the changes that have been happening in the new direction that you’re taking.

What spurred on this new direction? What caused this new innovation? I’m not just talking about the app store as well and not the rebrand and the name, but it seems like over the past year, year and a half, there’ve been a lot of and finally novel things. And I say finally because it had felt like for so long after the birth of ConvertKit that it kind of just I want to say was resting on its laurels for a while or complacent.

Tell me about that. What was it just it grew into something that was now slower to move on or were you scared of something or what was going on during that time period?

Nathan Barry: I think there’s a couple things. One is just growing pains as a company. You know, as you figure out what it takes to scale a platform.

And we’ll say a platform and a team, right, as you get past 50 employees, you know, sending billions of emails, that kind of thing, there’s these inflection points that you hit where it’s like, Oh, we just have to level up the infrastructure and all of that. And so from a customer perspective, it’s like, I don’t know, the product is the same as it was before.

And it’s like, Oh, but actually, before we could send a billion emails a month, and now we can send 5 billion a month, you know, and as a user with 10,000 subscribers, you’re like, I don’t know. It just works like it’s supposed to, but there’s a huge amount of that went behind the scenes to make that happen.

The other thing is we spent a long time probably, yeah, around like 2020, maybe 2019 to 2021. We’re focused really internally trying to figure out what does it look like to, to build and scale a team. I think I had a lot of lessons to learn, you know, as a leader of a team at that size. And then, yeah, between that and dealing with a lot of technical debt, like that took up all the attention of the company.

And then there’s sort of this round of, I guess, things that we’ve always believed in, but maybe more aggressively pursued. Like one thing is on the community side, I’ve always deeply believed that being a creator is a multiplayer activity, right? I think back to, I think you and I first met at New Media Marketing, New Media Expo, or Blog World,, whichever it was called then. Right, and then getting together for coffee. The next time I was in San Diego, right. I have dozens and dozens of stories of people that I met who I partnered with in some way they encouraged me or whatever else that like led to where I am today, both as a creator and you know, running Kit.

And I think every creator I talked to has tons of those stories. But what was kind of odd to me, so we’re all like for masterminds, go to meetups, go to conferences, you know, do not do this journey alone, and then we’re all using email software. That’s like, oh yeah, but you have to do this journey alone.

You know, when it comes to the software, this is a solo activity. But everything else about your creative journey is multiplayer. And so that’s another huge pivot where we realized like, wait a second, we’ve always believed this. Why is it not baked into the product? And so that was the launch of Creator Network where we’re saying, all right, we’re building a product that is collaborative by default.

If you and I were starting our newsletters, you know, and our creator businesses all over again, and we’ve got a few hundred subscribers each and we meet at a conference and we’re hit it off and we’re encouraging each other and we’re saying, Hey, let’s form a mastermind so that we can help each other grow.

Well, now we can actually just go in kit and recommend each other as well. So now every time someone subscribes to your list. It promotes mine and vice versa. And so you get this like collaborative experience and journey, and that’s just the first feature in Creator Network. We want to build all these other features of like, Hey, what if we could co market between our lists in our separate accounts, but we can share a segment across them or how could we help people match up with other creators?

So there’s all kinds of things, but it’s basically all these things that we’ve always believed, and now we’re just very hungrily building into the product.

Pat Flynn: What percentage was a result of. That understanding of, okay, we need a community here. We need to be able to help connect people together. And I know that you had for years, tried that and are still doing Crafting Commerce, which is the once a year event. So it’s very apparent that that was a part of your nature and the company’s nature to bring people together.

But now it’s kind of baked into the Creator Network inside of the software, which I think is really cool. What percentage of it is inspired by that kind of need and want for community versus tools like Substack and Beehive having something similar going on and people talking and kind of like seemingly innovating a little faster during that time.

How much did they play a role?

Nathan Barry: A pretty decent role. So there were two products at the time that came out basically at the exact same time. One is Sparkloop. They launched a product to help anyone on any platform do this recommendation functionality. And then Substack did the same thing. At basically the exact same time.

And so Sparkloops was cross platform and Substack’s was within their platform. And so that was that recommendation functionality. And so we got to sit back and watch that and go, okay, this is interesting. It’s starting to work. You know, we can watch it happen in the ecosystem. It matches this long term belief that we’ve had, but we didn’t necessarily know how to, to put it into practice.

What are the mechanics that we actually use? Like things that we explored is like, okay, do we need to have a Reddit style voting page or, you know, like Digg.com back in the day where things are voted up and down based on, you know, maybe someone’s like popular newsletter essay is ranked up there or something else or, or products, you know, how do we provide discovery for creators?

And really what we learned watching SparkLoop and Substack at the same time is like, Oh, it’s not about what discovery we can provide for creators. It’s about how we can connect them better. So they provide that for each other. And so that really kicked off the project of like, okay, how well is this working?

Oh, it seems to be working well. We should be doing this within our ecosystem. And then, you know, Substack’s doing it in a closed way, Sparkloop’s doing it in an open way, and so we’re like, that’s in line with our values. And so that’s where we put together the deal to acquire Sparkloop and bring them into the ecosystem.

And so now the cool thing with Creator Network is inside of Kit, you can use the Creator Network with any other Kit customer. But then SparkLoop allows you to use the paid functionality in it across any platform. And so we’re able to build a much bigger network because someone who’s a kit customer can benefit from all the other Kit customers who are in it and then also everyone else.

So for example, the Hustle is not a kit customer. They’re using like enterprise level newsletter software, but they are an active sponsor inside of the paid recommendation side of, of SparkLoop. And so that’s available to all the Kit customers. So it’s pretty fun to see it come together.

Pat Flynn: It has been really fun.

You know, I’ve been there since the beginning of the Creator Network. I was invited to the little beta sessions that were done to validate it and to break it and rebuild it with you. And that was done really, really well. I love how you included us in that process or a few of us, at least.

Nathan Barry: That feels forever ago.

And I realized that was just like less than 18 months ago.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Things are moving fast. Things are moving fast. And so what I always say, it’s like, okay, well. Is ConvertKit slash now Kit just trying to play catch up? And my answer to that, and I’d love your answer too, I think we’re at a point now where we’ve caught up and we’re now innovating faster.

And we have this incredible moat, which is the number of users on Kit that allows for this creator network to be the most powerful kind of email based network available to, to most creators, which I think is really special. And I’m so glad because for years, even during the sort of low period, if you want to call it that, there was still this equity being built up of users and people who have fallen in love with the brand.

And now it’s being like put to use and is of benefit to, to everybody else inside of it. It’s been really neat to see it all kind of unfold, albeit you know, a little slowly during those years, but I mean, man, you’ve caught up. Well done to you and the team.

Nathan Barry: It’s in the areas that you decide to focus on.

And then what happens in the market, right? Because something that we haven’t talked about and actually a much bigger company than Beehive or Substack is Flowdesk. And they came in and really built a company around like beautiful email design. And they did it by rendering the emails as images. So you could get great design.

It’s not as great for readability, but you know, it really demonstrated like, Oh, people really, really want that. And so when I think of like, I actually have this list that I keep on my computer of unforced errors. So like, you know, in baseball, there’s errors that you make that the other team you know, really set you up for, but then there’s the unforced errors where it’s like, yeah, you know, that was all, that was all, that was all you, you know?

And so one of the things that I have in this list of unforced errors is that I was late to figuring out that the creator industry creators really wanted, not just like pretty simple plain text emails. Like I was used to sending and, and a lot of copywriter focused, you know, they wanted like beautifully designed email templates. And we were pretty late to figuring that out and like changing that perspective.

And it was really Flowdesk coming in and, and like demonstrating, Hey, you can build a business to tens of millions a year in revenue. off of this core value prop. And so that took us a while to figure out how do we deliver like on beautiful emails without compromising like the readability and the accessibility, you know, so like you can’t put all this text and images.

Like it’s just, it’s not good for screen readers. It’s not, You know, all of this stuff, it’s not good for deliverability. And so like that took us longer first to come around to, we should do this. And then second, to figure out technically how to do it, you know, now to do it, I feel like we’ve leapfrogged in a bunch of ways because we not only have the tech and design built out, but then we also now have this email template marketplace, where all these great designers are building and selling templates.

So like our mutual friend, Caleb Wojcik, relaunched his newsletter. And I just saw that, you know, that he had sent it out. And he had used a new template that he had bought from another designer named Rafal, who sells it on the, you know, the Kit template marketplace.

And that was a fun moment. And a bunch of people emailed Caleb and was like, did you switch to Flowdesk? And I was like, nope, this is Kit. Like, you can get these world class designs and, and in so many of them, because they’re made kind of like the app store, right? It’s not, what can the kit team make for creators, it’s how can the Kit team make a platform and then what can creators make for creators, which turns out is a lot.

Pat Flynn: Oh yeah. That’s amazing. Let’s switch back to the rebrand itself and the move to Kit. This is not an easy thing to do. And you had one false start before. Yeah. What were the lessons you learned from the last time that you made sure to get it right this time?

What were those things and how did you address them? And if you wanted to tell the story a little bit, just to kind of set it up, you know.

Nathan Barry: Basically, we had talked about a lot back in 2017, 2018 of really looking for a name that was bigger than ConvertKit that could encompass, you know, this big vision.

Actually, it was when I saw your San Diego studio that you opened up, but then I thought, Oh, we need to enable this for more and more creators. And so that’s when like the first ideas for,

Pat Flynn: Oh, wow. I didn’t know that, you know, and now as kit studios, it was my fault.

Nathan Barry: Yeah, exactly. This is all Pat’s fault. But thinking about, you know, had these much bigger, bigger dreams and felt like we had outgrown ConvertKit as a name.

And so we went in the search for a new name and we ended up landing on Seva as a name, which in Hindi means service, in Sikh culture it means selfless service. And we rolled out that switch to the name. We went for a big flashy launch. We did the full cut like live at the conference, did the full cut over right then.

We pulled it off the exact same moment. And that had two immediate reactions that we expected. One was this is great. I didn’t actually like ConvertKit as a name because it felt too salesy, you know, I didn’t want to, I’m not converting my audience. I’m, I’m serving them, you know, I’m, well, I’m helping them.

And so I love where you’re headed. The next reaction was like, this is dumb. Like ConvertKit made sense as a name. What even is Seva? You know, you have all this brand equity built up. ConvertKit is clear, Seva is not. So we expected both of those reactions. But then there was a third reaction that we didn’t expect just from being naive, and that was, Hey, Seva is actually like a sacred word in Sikh culture.

In our religion, it’s the highest form of worship and like that word means a lot to us. And so that was the one where like, Oh, we did not understand what we were getting into. And so we ended up really having a lot of conversations, really listening to the Sikh community there and then making the decision to roll back.

And so we were Seva for all of 30 days and then have spent the last six years as ConvertKit.

Pat Flynn: I mean, that is we don’t have to dive into it. I think we’ve covered this before on the show, but I think so. That’s a little bit of a PR nightmare around that time. Yeah, it was rough. But you got through it.

And so I would imagine that when the idea for the rebrand to Kit came up, all these feelings and questions started to come back. How did you make sure and understand that you weren’t going to go down the same route? I mean obviously Kit is, I don’t know if it’s a religious or sacred term, but I mean it’s shorter than ConvertKit.

It’s part of the original name already. What inspired that name and what made you move forward with it?

Nathan Barry: Yeah, so I had at first thought like, Oh, I’ve used up all the chances to rebrand, you know, like you get some things you have one shot at in life. And if that doesn’t, you know, like let the idea go and move on.

But we always had this thought of like, well, there is actually one name that we could rebrand to that would fully encompass our vision, you know, and not be such a big deviation. That it like we could actually go to it and that’s, you know, going from ConvertKit to just Kit There’s a long track record of like The Facebook to Facebook. TransferWise to just Wise. Right, like a lot of people have made moves like that and had to go really well So we were like wondering if the domain ever becomes available, we didn’t want to become like TheKit.com like that was not, that was not going to work.

If we’re doing it, it had to be Kit.com. So we get into the domain story in a bit, but I think the first thing was like a natural transition of this is just a company growing up rather than something that’s a huge difference. Second was really soliciting a lot of feedback from customers beforehand.

Charli did a lot of calls with, you know, customers and creators to understand the reactions, what those would be, a lot of research there, and then the next thing is the rebranding public of launching it and saying, Hey, we’re going to do this. And then having a whole bunch of time in between then and when we actually did it, having a couple of months so that we could get through all the SEO implications and the technical, you know, there’s a lot.

And really, so we get help and feedback from the community. Right. So people can come in and say, Hey, I’ve actually done a giant domain migration before. Let me share the lessons learned. And so we, our SEO team and them get on a call and we’ve really learned from that. So those were some of the big things that were different of no longer the splashy moment and instead really going for like methodical execution.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. So far, the rollout’s been. Way better than the first time around number one. That’s true, too but no I mean I have to commend you and especially Charli who we’re gonna have on later in the month who wasn’t creative director in charge of, of a lot of the the the what’s behind the decisions that are made and she did a wonderful job so just as of yesterday if we’re recording this in August, but at the time this episode goes out, it should be the day prior yesterday that the brand officially switches over.

And so I know that the new look and the new feel and perspective is, is one of being bold, those kinds of things. What are your thoughts on the new direction of Kit and why those choices? What is the perception we’re trying to give off nowadays?

Nathan Barry: Yeah. So I think it’s that we’re building the operating system for creators who mean business.

Meaning that it should be not just a, a side part of your tech stack or like, Oh, this is how I reach my audience. But this is actually the core foundation of, of my creator business. Everything else funnels through this. So you’ll see things like the dashboard is customizable in a way that you can say, Hey, this is the dashboard for my creator business.

It actually brings in data from the other platforms that I use. If I sell on Teachable or Mighty Networks or something else, like that data flows right through into the dashboard and I can see it all in one place. It’s very, very extensible, right? Like, We run very different businesses from each other, you know, you can’t build an all in one platform when all looks different for each creator, right?

And so having that extensive functionality, and I think most of all in the brand, we want to keep creators at the center of it. Right. You’ll see that in all of our storytelling. Even the documentary we’re making about the rebrand is not just the story of our rebrand. It’s talking like we’re interviewing all these creators in the Kit ecosystem who have also rebranded and what they’ve learned and what they do differently and, and all of that along the way.

So those are the main things of like empowers your core business. It grows with you. It’s for creators who, who mean business, who are taking this seriously. And then creators are at the heart of it.

Pat Flynn: Where can one go and check out the documentary? It sounds interesting. And if anybody out there is doing a rebrand, this might be a great place to start to get some insight.

When we talk with Charli, we’re going to get some specifics as far as like, well, what questions should we ask our audience? How should we understand what the color choice should be or those kinds of things? So we’ll get into that with Charli and I’m sure that’s covered in the documentary as well, but where can people watch that?

Nathan Barry: It’ll all be at Kit.com.

Pat Flynn: Kit.com. Nice. As we finish up here, Nathan, it’s always great to have you on the show. You know, we’ve had you on when you were just an author before the software development came. We had you come on when you finally made that decision to go full time with ConvertKit before you were deciding whether or not you should keep doing the author thing.

And then, you know, of course, we’re all grateful that you chose this route, but here we are today now in the sort of new era or new phase of, of Kit. Five years from now. What does it look like for us who invest our time and money and efforts in our ecosystem, our business into building on Kit? What does that look like in, in five years for us?

Nathan Barry: Yeah. I mean, I think the first thing is that kit will still a hundred percent be around independently owned serving creators, right. I’ve like, we have, no desire whatsoever to sell or raise capital that requires us to go, you know, down some other investor first route. That’s the first thing. I think the second thing is it’s really coming together as a community, not just around we do similar things.

So maybe we’ll use the same tool in a similar way, but actually where each creator makes the product better because they’re on it, right? Like when a new creator joins creator network, it becomes a little bit better for everyone because there’s now more opportunity for matches and collaboration. So you get those network effects.

And then the same thing in you know, apps and everything else, right? You get these creators, whether they’re designers or developers who are like, I wish that kit had this thing. And then they go, so I made it and now it is, you know, either I’m selling it or it’s something that I’m giving away for free.

And basically this idea that it’s our platform collectively and we can all make it better because that’s what creators do, right? Creators, we have this lens and this viewpoint on the world of like, of being inherent optimists. Where we believe that the future will be better than the present because we’re going to make it.

So it’s not, Oh, someone else will solve these problems or make the, you know, deal with that. It’s like, no, no, I am going to play an active role in shaping the future. So I think it’s this commitment that we all have at Kit. And then that, you know, kit customers have to each other of like, Hey, we’re paving the way for the whole next generation of creators, and we do it in the tutorials that you share, the podcast episodes, the shared automations.

Next year we’ll launch a landing page marketplace where designers can build and share and sell landing pages. And it’s just, it makes it like we’re just knocking down as many barriers as possible so that you can create a thriving business.

Pat Flynn: I love it. And then Kid Studios, more locations, San Diego. I’m waiting for the San Diego option.

Nathan Barry: We’re gonna have to figure out what the collaboration is on the San Diego location because that’d be pretty fun. I got to figure out how we bring in the local community. You know, like you don’t want to do a Kickstarter for locations. necessarily, but you want like the community in that city to be like, this is ours. We collectively brought this to life. That’s something that you and I’ll have to brainstorm some more.

Pat Flynn: You’re getting me way too excited right now. We could go on and on about that. Let’s chat about that offline for sure. And, you know, we’ll look back at this episode one day with the start of this idea.

But thank you, Nathan. This has been incredible. Congrats to you and the team on the rebrand. SmartPassiveIncome.com/kit, that is our affiliate link. You also have the new plan as well for the newsletter plan. What is that exactly? How many free subscribers could a person gather as they start to build their business on Kit?

Nathan Barry: Yeah, so it’s 10,000. As people saw all the price increases across the industry and they saw us do a rebrand, then they’re like, well, you got to pay for that somehow. So I guess the prices are going up. And I was like, no, actually, they’re going the other way.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, we’re going the opposite way. Incredible.

Well, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have been an advisor this entire time. And still, and to see it grow up and to see where it’s at now, I’m very proud to be a part of the kit team and just super stoked for you and what you’ve built and where it’s going. Congrats, man. Any final words before we part?

Nathan Barry: No, I just say thank you so much for your help and support along the way. Like your expertise and care and passion, like your fingerprints are all over this company over the last, oh man, eight years. It’s been a long time. Thank you, man. Anyway, the company would not at all be what it is now without you and the SPI community.

Pat Flynn: I appreciate you, man. Thanks for that, Nathan. And best of luck. We’ll talk soon.

All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Nathan Barry. A lot of great insights and I, gosh, the Kit Studios. Like I want this ASAP locally to be now. There’s a lot that goes into that obviously, but man, I would do whatever it takes to make that happen here in San Diego and maybe around a location near you one day.

But Nathan, congrats to you and the team. Head over to SmartPassiveIncome.com/kit. You can check out their newsletter plan if you aren’t signed up already, or if you haven’t even been there in a while, go and check it out. Kit.com it’s pretty epic what they’ve done and the stance that they’re trying to make the position that they’re making, what they’re trying to say with the rebrand and how they made these choices again, we’re going to have Charli Prangley on the creative director from Kit later on in the month, more toward the end.

So make sure you subscribe now. So you don’t miss that. Plus we have a lot of amazing conversations that we’re going to happen or have happened here on the show between now and then, but we’ll be talking about more decisions that are made, why certain font choices, all these kinds of things down to the little nuances and the questions that you can ask your audience when you are doing a rebrand to make sure you’re headed in the right direction.

And again, don’t make the mistakes that Kit did once back in the day. They get a second try and that’s pretty unusual. So congrats.

And thank you for listening all the way through. I appreciate you. I hope you enjoyed this insider view on Kit and what they’ve been up to. And I look forward to serving you in the next episode.

Till then, keep on keeping on, keep rocking it. Cheers, y’all.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!