SPI 833: Dos and Don’ts of a Successful Rebrand with Charli Prangley

SPI 833: Dos and Don’ts of a Successful Rebrand with Charli Prangley

Charli Prangley: While sincere and expert were a part of our brand as ConvertKit as well, we weren’t coming out as confident enough. And I think that that allowed for a lot of other players to enter the space. And we want to take our rightful place at the helm of the creator economy. And I think that there’s an element of boldness that you want in someone that you can trust, right? That strength and conviction. If someone has that, you’re more likely to trust what they’re saying, what they’re offering, because they’re coming out with it with that confidence. And so that’s why it’s important for us.

Pat Flynn: We chatted with Nathan Barry, founder of Kit formerly known as ConvertKit to talk about the business decisions that were made behind the rebrand and some of the plans that we could look forward to with the company and just an insider look at how that all went. Today is part two, not a conversation, however, with Nathan, but wish Charli Prangley, who is the creative director over there at Kit to talk more about the what to look out for if you are doing your own rebrand, what are some of the exercises that you can do to make sure, or at least give yourself the best chance that this is the right direction for you. So whether you are going through a rebrand right now, or you might be going through one in the future, or maybe you’re just very curious about the Kit rebrand and some of the lessons learned from the first time they did a rebrand and the mistakes they made there, well, this is a great conversation and Charli is just wonderful. She shares so much, not just in this episode, but she has a YouTube channel. She helps a lot of other designers who are working for themselves and it’s just a wealth of information. So here she is, Charli Prangley, creative director over at Kit.

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 both nervous and excited for the upcoming launch of his fourth book, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Charli, welcome to SPI. Thank you so much for being here.

Charli Prangley: Thanks so much for having me.

Pat Flynn: I’m really excited to chat and get sort of an insider look and perspective on the rebrand that Kit just did. Kit, formerly known as ConvertKit, as we’re now saying. Yes! Before it was ConvertKit, soon to be known as Kit.

Congratulations on the rebrand. We just had Nathan on the show to talk more about the business decisions around that, but I wanted to bring you on to talk about sort of the things to understand when you are doing a rebrand. What are, in your opinion, reasons why a person should think about doing a rebrand?

Charli Prangley: Yeah, there’s a few different things that could like kickstart a need for a rebrand. One might be if you’re making a change to either your audience or your product offering, and so you kind of need folks to see you in a different light, to have a new perception of you, or like slightly shift that perception, because that’s really what a brand is.

Maybe, though, in our case, it was more of a factor of an opportunity arising. We had an opportunity to purchase Kit.com and rebrand to Kit and live out this vision that we’ve had for a long time of wanting to change our name to something that wasn’t so technical, was easier to understand, and that really just opens us up to explain our product in, in a different way.

Cause we help creators do so much more than convert. So for us, it’s about the opportunity for others. It might be about making a change to an audience or a product, or maybe wanting to distance yourself from some negative brand image that has built up over the years. That could be another reason that folks rebrand.

Pat Flynn: I mean, that’s actually the reason why we now call it SPI and not smart passive income all the time because passive income, which was very, very. Much a desire back in the day started to take this tone of like, Oh, kind of scammy hustle culture. People who talk about the hustle culture, and it’s very income specific and income is a benefit and a thing that people do want and focus on.

But we wanted to be much more, especially as we built out the team and talked more about. Revenue, but you know, holy business models and life and how all those things come together. So that’s why it’s SPI now So we did an international business machine or Kentucky Fried Chicken, you know, IBM, KFC model over here and you know We’re always considering.

Okay. Well, what might be our next moves? What are some of the bigger mistakes that people who just kind of jump rebrand seem to make?

Charli Prangley: I think that a big mistake you can make is one, not doing your research. That was a mistake that we made when we attempted to rebrand ConvertKit many years ago, you were around for that.

I’m sure that many of your listeners were around for that too. We attempted to change our company name to Seva and we learned after the fact that it wasn’t just a word that means selfless service as its definition, it was actually like a really sacred term in some cultures in Hindu and Sikh culture.

And so if we had done more research, we would have learned that before rather than learning after when folks rightly pointed it out and we shifted back. And so that’s what we did this time with changing to Kit. You were actually one of the folks that I got on a call with and really dug in on what is the perception of the word Kit?

What does it mean to you? What comes to mind? And we talked about what it would feel like and what it would mean for us to change our business name to Kit. So yeah, doing research in advance highly recommend.

Pat Flynn: I appreciate that and the fact that you brought up Seva. I know it’s a pain point for those who worked at Kit during that time back when it was ConvertKit trying to switch to, again, Seva.

And it kind of just happened all of a sudden, so I’m very appreciative that there was a lot more thought being put into Kit, but not just like, okay, here’s the domain name. We want to switch to the domain name. Like you said, there’s, there’s meaning behind it. There’s a perception that you want. What were some of the exercises that you all did at Kit to ensure that it was a much better decision this time?

What questions were you asking? What were you searching for during that research period?

Charli Prangley: Yeah, we had some of our own concerns, I guess, about the name. We wondered like, okay, if we’re changing a name to Kit, are people going to think it’s like a done for you service where it’s like, you just sign up and you log in and like, it all happens for you because you do still need to be the one to put in the effort to set up our product the way that you want to use it.

We’re offering you all the tools. in your Kit to put together in the way you like, you know, we’re, we’re giving guidance on that, but ultimately it’s up to you as the business owner to decide what you want to do with it. So that was one of the questions I asked during this research was just the name Kit.

What does that signify to you? Does it feel like it’s describing a done for you, like plug and play type of tool or is it something that is going to be one that you asked that question to. I asked that question to creators. So I got on calls with a few creators, as many as I could get to get on a call with me.

And I walked them through a series of exercises with a bunch of sliders, where we had opposite ends of the scale. So, the done for you versus setting it up. Other things like professional versus beginner. Lots of different, like, personality sliders, descriptive sliders, and I had creators rank based on the name alone, where would they think Kit would sit.

And I also asked them about what they look for in a tool, you know, what is important to them as a creator when they’re deciding on a tool for their business. And we’ve used that as information that’s then informed our new design and creation of our brand identity as well to like aim for a certain perception that we want to build.

Pat Flynn: Nice. And then, you know, obviously brand design is not just logo and kind of the look and feel and the colors, although we will get into that a little bit. I know that’s a huge expertise of yours coming from the design world. And by the way, you’ll need to follow Charli on YouTube too. She has this incredible YouTube channel for designers, especially in how to work in that world and whatnot.

Where what’s your YouTube channel?

Charli Prangley: CharliMarieTV. It’s just my name with TV on the end.

Pat Flynn: CharliMarieTV. That’s right. That’s right. You and I connected in London a number of years back and did like a little smaller interview on my YouTube channel for a bit. But let’s dive a little bit deeper. So you know, in terms of branding, what else is it other than just the name and the logo?

You had mentioned it’s messaging and positioning. Tell me about how you and the team thought about that and kind of what exercises did you go through?

Charli Prangley: Yeah. So ultimately your brand is the perception that your audience or like anyone out in the world has of you. And so when you’re going about the process of crafting a brand or rebranding, you’re thinking about what perception do we want to build?

And then you’re making choices with your tone of voice, with your visual brand, all of the things related to it in an effort to build that perception. So I think it’s really important first to do that work, to think about the strategy of your brand, and what perception do you want to aim for at the end of the day.

We’re actually working with a branding agency on the rebrand to Kit and they led us through a really great process of defining a brand strategy of the belief we have as a company that we want to express, what our mission is, positioning, value proposition, tonal principles, all that sort of thing. There’s lots of different ways into it, but really just spending time thinking about What do we want people to know about us or feel about us when they interact with our company and with our brand as a starting point for all of your decisions?

Pat Flynn: I’m curious with the brand change and perhaps more redirection of things from where things were, how has the Team responded to that. And, you know, I know you’re one of the leaders on, on the team in the design space, but to get X number of people to all agree on something is kind of difficult, you know, and, and this is where if you are a solopreneur cool, you can just kind of make these decisions and go, but when you have a big team, you got to get buy in.

So how did, how did you do that? Or is there complete buy in, and if there’s not, what do you do, how do you respond to that?

Charli Prangley: Well, one, you mentioned they’re like getting everyone to agree. We’re not trying to design and like craft a new brand by consensus. And so that was something that we sort of made clear up front is like, this is the group of like stakeholders who are involved in the calls at the brand agency.

We’re the ones giving the feedback. We’re going to ask everyone on the team. We shared call recordings. We shared like the draft work along the way so that anyone who wanted to could have a look, give their feedback. And we could take that in as input to provide to the brand agency. But we just made it clear, this is a group of folks who will be making the decisions around this.

If you feel strongly, please speak up. We absolutely want to know, but it’s not like something where we had to get everybody to agree on blue as our brand color, for example, in order to choose it.

Pat Flynn: I think that’s very important to set those expectations, but also give people a chance to at least offer their voice and opinion.

I think that is absolutely vital. However, also saying, okay, we’ll take this all in, but here are the decision makers and we will do what we feel is best for the company. And this is where Matt on my team came up with this, or he didn’t come up with it, but he brought it to us. It’s this idea of, you know, it’s not agree to disagree where you can still feel like, Oh, Anger towards somebody for a decision they make rather disagree and commit.

So although you might not agree with the decision you as a member of the company or as a leader or a person who’s a stakeholder, you will do whatever you can, despite the disagreement, to commit to that agreement and support it instead of sabotage it, which sometimes happens, right?

Charli Prangley: And we’ve definitely had folks on the team who are in that situation of a disagreeing commit about getting on board with the rebrand.

And I know that there’s a lot of creators out there, you know, our customers as well, who are in a similar boat of, like, maybe not really understanding why we’re doing this. Feeling like Kit as a name is too generic. Like, what are we doing? We’re throwing away all this brand equity we’ve built over the last 11 years or whatever it’s been.

And for me, I’m just taking that in, understanding their concerns and knowing that that’s something that we have to address. But also it’s like, okay, I promise you, we’re going to prove it to you. We’re going to show you with all of the decisions we’re making. And this is a long term bet. It’s a long term play to do a rebrand.

We know we’re going to take a hit in the, like, immediate future, especially from an SEO perspective, for example, anytime you make a change to a domain, a big visual change to a website, you know, it changes up conversion rates and things like that. But we just believe so strongly in this as the, the future and a necessary thing for us to do for the future of our business.

And so it’s been like using every opportunity I can to tell that story to folks internally and externally to bring them along.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. And I love that you’ve been. And Nathan spoke to this, this, this idea of doing it in a more public kind of manner has been really interesting. I do want to dive into that, but I also want to ask you, since you just talked about it, you know, not everybody’s going to agree and the public can be very loud.

How do you mentally prepare for that and still move forward and still do your best?

Charli Prangley: I think that coming back to everything, every decision we make being rooted in strategy really helps with that as well. Because I know and feel very strongly that what’s behind our brand strategy of really believing in this idea of the creator economy as a value exchange, that it’s powered by genuine value creation and we want to be the brand that leans into the like more empathetic, emotional side of being a creator of like how much it means to foster deeper relationships with your audience. And that being a creator is about more than just earning money. I firmly believe in that, firmly believe in that choice for us to focus on as a business.

And so knowing that every decision we’ve made is rooted in that, that, that kind of helps. But also a lot of things to do with design especially are subjective. There’s going to be folks who hate the fact that we look a lot bolder than we did as ConvertKit. And that’s okay, like, if that’s your preference, but I hope that folks will understand and we’ll, we’ll show them that this is us now.

Yes, we’re bolder, but we’re very much still got that sincere, empathetic substance side to our brand that you saw us at ConvertKit.

Pat Flynn: So somebody coming to the brand for the first time, we’ll see that bold. It’s, it’s direct and you know, you can go to the homepage now if you want Kit.com and you know, three letter domain names are wild.

I can’t believe you guys got that, which is, which is crazy. But then, you know, that. Why bold? What’s the decision behind that? If it is indeed, okay, being more empathetic with creators, like, why go the bold route? What was the decision behind that?

Charli Prangley: Yeah, so there were three tonal principles that we ended up with for our brand.

They’re bold, sincere, and expert. And all three are important because they all sort of act as a balance to each other. So we’ve got sincere because we’ve got this genuine belief in creators, and it’s really important for us that comes across, how authentic that is, and that we’ve not entered the space because the creator economy is a hot area at the moment, and there’s like opportunity, like, we just believe in it, we are creators.

It’s, it’s natural for us. Expert, because we have deep experience working in the creator economy, right? And we see into the, all sorts of different types of creator businesses, and we know what it takes to be successful, and we want that to come across. And then bold, because while I think sincere and expert, were a part of our brand as ConvertKit as well, like those things were still true, we weren’t coming out as confident enough.

And I think that that allowed for a lot of other players to like enter the space. And we want to take our rightful place at the helm of the creator economy, you know, we so bold for us is about strength and confidence and having conviction in our opinions on what it takes to be a creator and to run a, create a business.

And I think that there’s an element of boldness that you want in someone that you can trust, right? That strength and conviction. If someone has that, you’re more likely to trust what they’re saying, what they’re offering, because they’re coming out with it with that confidence. And so that’s why it’s important for us.

Pat Flynn: I love that answer and I’m so grateful for that because I agree. I think for the longest time between, I don’t know, I want to say 2018 and 2023, ConvertKit was there doing its thing and it was no longer the bold because of novel features play, which, which is what it was when Nathan created it back in the day.

It was like, wow, no other email service provider does it like this. Therefore it is bold already in just inherently in what it does. And then now, like you said, all these other competitors have come on and they’re great too, but I love that y’all are like, no, no, no, no. This is our, like, not, we can’t share this with anybody, but we are the leaders here.

We have something that y’all don’t, we have the biggest creator network possible for you to connect with other creators. We have this app store that’s now available for you. And if you’re a developer, you can help add to this ecosystem. It definitely feels different.

Charli Prangley: We have the longest experience in this, yeah.

Pat Flynn: Yes. I mean, I’ve been here since the beginning, and I’m just so grateful to see this, and to hear the stories, and get the insider view and perspective is great. Speaking of stories, I mean, you are sharing this stuff publicly, which is big because I know a lot of people who do rebrands who almost kind of save it as like a surprise, and boom, here we are.

The new us, it’s like we were behind the curtains and boom, we’re just here. But you chose to go a more slow roll route and bring people in on the process. What, what are your thoughts on, or like, why did you choose to do that?

Charli Prangley: We chose to do it primarily because work in public has always been one of our company values.

It’s how our company started. It was like a web app challenge that Nathan ran on his blog back in the day, and he was creating ConvertKit and sharing the process along the way. So it felt like a really good way to lean into that value. We think that when you share your process of something, especially as it’s happening, other people can learn from it.

And we wanted to take this as an opportunity to help creators learn about what it takes to rebrand and to think about branding in a new light. Like, I hope that a lot of folks have learned about what brand strategy even is from watching our docuseries for example. But also, knowing that we had rebranded in the past and it didn’t go well, we rolled it back, this was another way for us to lean into not making that same mistake, right?

We knew that if we were rebranding in public, we could share things along the way and get creators feedback on it, so that we’d have a lot of creator input in the, the journey itself. So I know that I, I had created assigned NDAs for the original, like, calls I did when we’re thinking about becoming Kit, cause we didn’t want that to like get out there.

But since then I’ve been able to freely get on calls with creators and, you know, share visuals, share ideas of our strategy, tone of voice, et cetera. And get their feedback. We’ve been able to share things on social media or like getting input into color. Things like that, font, and that’s been really, really useful for us.

And I also hope that it’s helped creators to get more bought in on this change as well along the way, because instead of seeing it, this like drastic change, all of a sudden you’re getting like little taste and like getting used to the idea that it’s coming and also playing a role in defining it so that it ends up as something that resonates better at the end of the day.

Pat Flynn: It’s definitely been fun to follow along and almost feel like we’re a part of the process. I know I, in particular, as an advisor, am even more in the process, but even.

Charli Prangley: You’re literally part of the process, yeah.

Pat Flynn: For the public to feel like they’re a part of it as well is really smart and really great.

Where can people go see that docuseries in case they want to kind of dig deeper with you and Nathan there?

Charli Prangley: Yeah, that’s on our YouTube channel. So that’s YouTube.com/ConvertKit. There’s a series of episodes sharing a ton of behind the scenes. Like we’re sharing Zoom calls that we have with the agency, internal feedback discussions, and really trying to like pull the curtain back on that.

I’m also sharing some stuff on my own channel, just from my perspective as creative director leading through all this. Yeah, there’s, there’s a lot of stuff out there.

Pat Flynn: So as creative director, I’m sure there’s some tough decisions to make with these kinds of things because when you have these conversations, you’re getting 200 different people plus input and they’re all going to say they like a different color, for example.

Charli Prangley: That happened.

Pat Flynn: So where do you even go? Like, how do you even decide it was like, Oh, okay, more people said blue. So let’s go blue. But I know it’s not like that. What, what goes through your head as creative director for the input that comes your way and then the decisions you make. Either because or despite that.

Charli Prangley: Yeah, so really when sharing, and asking for feedback along the way, we’re not trying to design by committee or like reach consensus, but what we are doing is trying to get an idea of how creators perceive the choices that we might be making.

You know? And so that’s where it’s really useful to just understand what references they make for a certain color, how things feel to them. So we know, okay, if we make this choice, this is what we’re going to be working against. Or if we make this choice, this is what we’re missing out on by not making this other choice.

So that’s where that’s been really useful. Another great part about this has been working with the brand agency, because they can make their recommendations based on being the experts in branding of what we should choose. But it is ultimately up to us to make the final decisions at the end of the day on what we see as the best fit for the future of Kit, because we’re the ones who know what that looks like the best.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. You know, you’d mentioned choosing bold fonts and bold colors. What were some of the other decisions that you made that relate to the brand rechange and what was the underlying sort of reason for that? If you can share.

Charli Prangley: Yeah, sure. One thing we’re keeping is our photography of the fact that we always feature real creators.

So that’s been a part of the brand that isn’t changing. Cause I know folks have asked about that too. We’ve changed our colors to make them just a bit brighter. Because we found that with our previous color palette, when it came to things like paid ads, we were getting feedback from our ads team that like, um, we don’t really have like enough that can stand out on the feed.

And so we wanted to pick something that was bolder without being, you know, too brash or anything like that. We’re updating our tone of voice to prioritize clarity over being clever and to just be a lot more intentional with the words that we use, because we want to lean into that. expertise as part of our brand.

Pat Flynn: Do you have an example of that?

Charli Prangley: Yeah. Copy is something that has kind of been a, I don’t want to say an afterthought, but it’s not something that we’ve put a lot of intention behind iterating on and really like obsessing over every word before now. And so that is something that we’re doing going into this, knowing that we want to be really efficient with every word that you see on the page and that every word is there working to help you better understand the value that Kit can offer and what it’s going to do for you.

While bringing in some personality. And so our tone of voice principles now are clear and confident with a dash of charisma. Which I quite like. It’s nice. Easy to remember. Yeah.

Pat Flynn: Yes. You know, I remember when ConvertKit first started in the early 2010s, it was bloggers. It was about bloggers and it just, those were the words that were being used.

Email service provider for bloggers. And then that changed to creators. Is that still your primary focus? And if so, like what kind of creator? Because creators become this term that now, I mean, spans across, you know, everything from TikTok to, I mean, it’s, it’s so wide in general now. How are you and how is Kit helping a person who lands on the webpage understand that this is for them?

Charli Prangley: We did honestly consider Okay, do we need to use a different term other than creators? Like, does that still mean to the wider public what it means to us, or is there a different word we should use? Ultimately, we kept it, but we added on a bit of a refinement in that now we say Kit is for creators who mean business.

So we are specifically for the creators who want to turn what they’re doing with creating content, writing, whatever it is they do, to turn it into a business, a sustainable business that’s going to be profitable for them, that’s going to be valuable, where it’s going to give value, they’ll receive value in return.

So yeah, we’re really targeting creators who have that business mindset. And even if they’re not, like, business and marketing savvy, if that’s their goal of getting there, then they can get started on our newsletter plan, you know, free for up to 10, 000 subscribers. And they’ll learn along the way from the creators who are on our paid accounts.

And they’ll, they’ll get there eventually themselves too.

Pat Flynn: I like it. And of course, everybody can visit Kit.com. I’m sure things will change in your testing. Are you going to be doing any split testing?

Charli Prangley: We’ll be doing tons of testing. We want to test value propositions. We want to test designs. So honestly, our challenge is going to be just prioritizing what we want to test first so that we can make sure we’re getting good learnings out of that.

I mean, that’s something else that I’d love to share along the way.

Pat Flynn: How do you do that?

Charli Prangley: Oh, how do we do that? We. Do it based on what we believe has the biggest potential to have an impact, really.

Pat Flynn: Like a hypothesis, kind of thing?

Charli Prangley: Yeah, a hypothesis, or what do we want to learn first? Like, for example, with our value proposition, this is something like, yeah, it’s a headline on our website, but it also informs how our sales team speaks to prospects, how our marketing copy goes out across all these other channels.

You know, and so the faster we can get that learning, the faster that can start to have an impact on all these other areas of our business. So that sort of thing goes into the choice as well.

Pat Flynn: I like that. You know, this way you’re testing things with purpose instead of just kind of, Oh, this would be fun.

Charli Prangley: We’re not just throwing things against a wall where there’s a reason behind every test we run.

Pat Flynn: Now, when A rebrand happens I know there’s a lot of things to think about that have to get changed once that change happens, right? It’s not just the front page. There’s, there’s a lot. What are some of the things that a person may be doing this for the first time may miss or might not consider that also have to be a part of this change?

Or, I’m thinking like, you know, of course you got to change your social profiles once this happens. What all is under the sort of list of to do there for you?

Charli Prangley: So honestly, what is on the to do list to change is everything, technically. And so we’ve split it out into a need to have, a nice to have, and a this can come a lot later, like this is not going to prevent us from being seen as Kit.

And I’ve really encouraged the team to be very strict about what they put in the need to have versus nice to have, because we’re rebranding in public. It gives us this flexibility, I guess, to not go out with everything perfect and fully finished straight away. That’s actually, the opposite of what we should be doing.

And so what we’ve shipped is essentially, like, the first iteration of Kit. It’s the, the minimum of what we can do to, like, present ourselves as Kit. But all of the, like, really full embracing of this new brand, this new product philosophy, and what it means is still to come. Because that takes a lot more work to get right and a lot more testing to really lean into it.

We didn’t want to ship something, you know, half baked. But the fact that we’re rebranding in public means we can become Kit, call ourselves Kit sooner and start building brand equity around this new brand while we still work on those other things behind the scenes and, again, share the journey.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, and ever since this was announced at Craft and Commerce, everybody on the team seems to have switched their language from convert Kit to convert Kit soon to be Kit.

And that I know it took some training. And I know even Nathan, when I spoke to him, he’s had to even correct himself a couple of times because it’s just been a part of the sort of vocabulary for so long to say ConvertKit, and I know I’m going to still struggle with that a little bit, but, you know, Kit has become a normal name now that a lot of us are saying, and I think that over time, especially a year, two years from now, three years from now, we’ll be able to look back, and maybe we’ll have to have you come back on then to chat about what went well, what didn’t go well, and those kinds of things, and, you know, I’m still going to be A Kit fan forever because I love what you guys are doing there.

I’d love to know what the nice to haves and also the we’ll save that for laters are so that we can maybe help the audience understand, okay, maybe these aren’t as much of a priority as, as maybe we thought. So what are those things that are on the nice to have list?

Charli Prangley: I can speak to our website, I think would be a good example of this.

So the need to have is that we do want to make sure our colors and our fonts are updated across the board. And, you know, if you’re using any sort of website system with a template, that hopefully is easier to do because you sort of update it in one place and it rolls out across all the pages. The only page we’re doing a full redesign of is the homepage.

For launch, because we feel like that is the important place to spend our time to reintroduce ourselves to the world as Kit, tell our new brand story, explain our new product philosophy and positioning to folks. So, as you look across our site, you’ll probably see a lot of copy that is older, or maybe doesn’t reflect that new positioning.

And that’s because those pages are the ones with less traffic. And so we decided not to prioritize them for launch. And so that’s the thing. It’s like making trade offs and focusing your attention and efforts on the stuff that gets the most eyes and has the most potential for impact and being okay with the other things being in that, Oh, if we get time, sure, we’ll update this sort of category.

Because I think if you put your effort into the highest impact places rather than spreading it thin across a page that maybe only like 10 people see a month, you’re going to make those higher impact pages much stronger by putting all your effort and focus there.

Pat Flynn: That’s for all you perfectionists out there listening who want to make it all.

Charli Prangley: Trust me!

I have had to have so many conversations with our team about like, okay, is this a need to have? Or are we being a perfectionist about this right now? I think it really helps that I am no longer a perfectionist. I am very much in the camp of like, get it to 80 percent and cool, we’re done. We can move on to have impact in another thing.

So I’m trying to, you Instill that in some other folks at the moment.

Pat Flynn: How does it affect the tool itself? The backend and the experience for the users, not just like on the front end for people who are potential customers.

Charli Prangley: I’m really excited about what the new Kit brand means in terms of making our interface feel a lot more modern.

Cause I know that as feedback we’ve been getting for a while as ConvertKit, we would, we were hearing that folks wanted a tool that felt more modern for their business. Like they’re trying to. run a business that’s up with the times and they were feeling like we didn’t look like we were. The Kit brand really lends itself to that.

So I’m really excited about that. And the choices we’re making that are very much about simplicity in like paring back to give folks focus with our new product philosophy as well of being this Kit of tools to help you run your business. We’re investing in ways to expand on Kit features through our app store, to bring little widgets from your apps into your dashboard so that Kit can really be the hub of your business and this like operating system, this place you go when you’re like do and work on your creative business, you, you go to Kit.

And so I’m excited about the impact that that’s going to have for creators and saving them time and bringing out their business insights into a more centralized place.

Pat Flynn: You know, I’m so glad to hear that. I know a lot of, not a lot, but I was hearing some feedback from people when the brand name change was announced that like, Oh, You’re focusing on this brand name change.

There’s so many things that need to be focused on in the tool. Why not focus on the tool? So the fact that you’re kind of doing both simultaneously and kind of using the brand change to also change the experience for the user is, is really good. And so I appreciate that a lot. Maybe to finish up here, Charli, this has been a fascinating conversation.

Thank you again for your time today. For the person listening who is considering a rebrand but quite hasn’t nailed that new name yet, for example, and they don’t have access to a three letter domain name, what are some suggestions that you have for where a person can go to get inspiration for a brand change and perhaps a new name that then of course, downstream, everything is kind of based on that name.

So that is an important decision. Where should people go to kind of just get inspired when they’re, they know they need a change or that, you know, they want something different. What are some exercises or resources tips from you, the expert, on what you can do to kind of find that new direction.

Charli Prangley: What I would recommend, if you’re thinking about rebranding, is to go to your audience, honestly.

Speak to them. Ask them, what value am I providing you? What associations do you make with me? Get their feedback. Maybe some interesting words will come out of that. Because your name is something that can really help you build a certain type of perception, right? If you, you want to hear from your audience and then reflect back to them what the value is you offer through your name, then just going to them directly, I think is a great place to start. Maybe taking your short list of ideas and putting it in front of folks in your audience and understanding the perceptions that they might have based on certain different names, really just lean into exploring each one is what I would advise.

Pat Flynn: What would a great question be to ask if a person did have access to a person in their audience, whether in person on Zoom or in a DM? Even a DM would be an easy way to go about this. What, what is a good question to ask to help us understand the perception or what those values could be?

Charli Prangley: I think that you could start with one that I ran when we were exploring Kit as a name, which was just putting the name in front of someone in your audience and say, okay, based on the name alone, do you think a company with this name would offer?

What value would it provide? Yes. Start there and then you can go one layer deeper and this is what I did was say, okay, let’s say Kit was a name for a tool that helped you manage your audience, build your email list, send out newsletters. What then would this name imply to you? Like, how would this tool work?

What value would it offer? And see what perceptions come to mind.

Pat Flynn: That is a great place to start. Which means this is a great place to end so that people can go get started. Charli, this is amazing. Thank you. Everybody check out the new Kit. Kit.com. If you haven’t already, I know a lot of people listening are already familiar with it because they’re users and I’m a big time fan as well.

And I’ve always been a fan of yours, Charli. I love your YouTube channel. Where can people go to follow you there and anywhere else you want to drive people to let us know.

Charli Prangley: Sure. Thanks Pat. And likewise, always been a big fan of yours too. CharliMarie.com is my website and that’s where you can find links to all my social media, the YouTube channel, newsletter, blog content, all of that.

I also, inspired by you Pat, like to share income reports, which I know is something that you haven’t done recently. And so if anyone is craving for that, you can go check them out on my blog. There we go.

Pat Flynn: And from a designer’s perspective too, I imagine that’s super helpful for a lot of your audience of people who are in the industry with you.

That’s, that’s wonderful. Very cool. Thank you, Charli. I appreciate you and we’ll talk soon.

Charli Prangley: Thanks Pat.

Pat Flynn: All right. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Charli. You can find her again at CharliMarie.com. You could check out the docuseries with her and Nathan over on their YouTube channel.

And of course, if you want to give Kit a go, you can get into their newsletter plan, which is free up to 10,000 subscribers. All you have to do is go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/kit, just SmartPassiveIncome.com/kit. The show notes will be available at SmartPassiveIncome.com/session833, again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/session833, and that we can get all the links and everything. That link to Kit was an affiliate link just to be up front with you. Get a little kickback at no extra cost to you. But again, it’s free up to 10,000 subscribers if you’re just starting out on their newsletter plan, SmartPassiveIncome.com/kit. Thank you, Charli. I appreciate you. And thank you for listening all the way through. I look forward to serving you next week or even this Friday. If you catch the episode and also happy Halloween to everybody who celebrates. Cheers. Take care. I’ll see you in the next one. Peace.

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!