One sweltering Aussie day early in 2020, right before the pandemic face-palmed the world I sat down with my business partner Mark to talk about what our year might look like. We run a brand studio called Ply and that's been our life for the past 3,000+ days. This year was going to be different though because we'd committed to finally getting our shit together and building a product that would help agencies like ours. And if nobody else wanted it, well at least we'd use it 😂.
Before I go on, I'd like to say hey 👋. I'm Dave. One half of the co-founder duo behind Outlign. Nice to meet you and thanks for reading past the first paragraph.
Outlign is the by-product of time mis-spent in agency-land and has a sizey back story that crisscrosses corporate landscapes, failed startups and more misfires than I'd like to admit in attempting to build products, while running a busy studio.
I've penned this story for a couple of reasons;
If you want to jump ship from what you are currently doing, there's a cautionary tale and some helpful tips along the way.
You'll find a long-form read on what Outlign is and get our take on the future of working with clients in a better way through stronger project and process management.
The story of two work buddies
Re-re-rewind, let's start at the beginning — circa 2005. Mark was leaving his job for a EuroTrip-style adventure and his role as a retail buyer became vacant. I happened to fill that vacancy. Within a week before departing, Mark had to impart all of his knowledge over to me, and then with that he was gone. Time went by, Mark travelled and had a good time. I worked and hated corporate life. And then Mark returned to the fold. We figured out we were into a lot of the same stuff and we bonded over business talk.
That's baby face Mark in the front row. Dave channelling Al Pacino in black, back row.
That water cooler talk would end up turning into action down the track. We didn't realise it then but looking back at all those mini chats, hanging together, and putting shit on the higher-ups was a way to assess each other and build trust, which would be the backbone of our longstanding partnership. This trust would follow us as we decided to leave corporate land and pursue our own startup.
Wiping out on the e-com wave
At the very start of the ecommerce boom in Australia, we came up with a very ambitious plan for an online premium footwear store. We spent our days building the site, managing the customer experience, raising capital and everything else in between. After two years of hard work behind the scenes we launched — we lasted about five months and then the money ran out. It was heartbreaking to see our dream thrown on the startup garbage heap.
All smiles in Shanghai, even though we just missed our last chance for investment. We closed 4 weeks later.
We faced an unpalatable choice. Go crawling back to our old jobs or work for some other soulless corporation with too much money and no heart. We shook ourselves out of this and promised each other a punch in the face would be in order if either of us were tempted by this path. So we embarked on the hidden third option — getting back on the horse. The easiest transition to running our own thing, without the need for investors was a creative agency. And the work didn't take long to drum up, within a week of opening we had our first paying client.
Building a product is harder than it looks
The idea behind Ply, our design studio was this: Land enough client work to fuel a product build.
We struggled for years for two reasons;
Finding and keeping clients is a full-on pursuit
We didn't really have a solid product idea
So we tried a product build...which led to a dead end. Then another product build, and another. This pattern continued a few times over the span of about four years.
Trying hard to keep clients happy and build products at Ply. Doing neither that successfully.
Growing is a positive word designed to mask over just how fucking hard it is to deal with the fact you keep misfiring. Winston Churchill had a pretty good take on all this;
"Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."
The reality of building a product and running an agency started to stare us down pretty hard. With mortgages and families to look after, the prospects of living like a startup founder (cue trite stories of eating only instant noodles, working 23hrs a day, not seeing sunshine for a year) were frankly, not that appealing. So here's what we did instead;
We did the maths to figure out how little money we needed to stay afloat in the agency
Commitment to spending 40% of our week on our product, which we time tracked down to the last minute to keep ourselves on target / accountable
Our team templated as much stuff in the agency as we could to make processes repeatable and fast (and more profitable)
Ply reduced its headcount down to the smallest team we could get away with (4 people)
We decided we needed founder-led code for our product rather than using employees or contractors, so Mark went back on the tools to head up the development of Skivvy
And it worked. Well at least it got our idea into the MVP line.
The idea was staring us right in the face
They say the best products are built through experience, and that totally rang true for us. After plenty of time at the coal face in agency-land, we'd picked up on some common hiccups when managing creative projects;
Clients not 'getting' our process
Them not seeing the value in where our time is spent and how we contribute to their bigger picture.
Confused comms on how many revisions they get or shitty feedback that's un-actionable.
I'm sure you know the pitfalls...
As you do, we tried a bunch of project management tools on the market, like Asana and Basecamp which were excellent for managing our team — but nothing really hit that sweet spot for our clients or for our process. While these tools were great for our needs, our clients were not stoked with them. When we did ask clients about what could be better, the one consistent bit of feedback was that our project management platforms were clunky to use or difficult to get your head around.
It dawned one day that our best product idea was staring us right in the face.
What would make life easier for clients when participating in a project?
How could we put the agency process on show for the client, not just the outputs?
What could the future of project management and client communication look like with better tools?
Our first third fifth best rodeo
We had a few years of tough learnings under our belt and that shaped how we went about the early stages of figuring out if there was a problem worth solving. Unlike other products we had tried to build, this time around we paid more attention to the validation phase to make sure we were not pissing into the wind (it's an Aussie expression for time wasting).
We kicked off with design prototyping and interviewed clients and agencies with one question in mind; Did they see a need for a client-focused communication tool or were we cray cray?
An early prototype we whipped up in the studio to test the idea with some clients & other studios.
Through this process we noticed that a lot of leading agencies see their process as a differentiator; but failed to communicate this properly to clients. Because our prototypes brought process front and centre instead of just to-dos, they could start to see how their clients could visualise their unique process.
Off the back of these interviews we knuckled down. Planning and testing and planning and testing. One takeaway from our previously failed product builds was to constantly be resurfacing your work with the end user and refining along the way. So we kept the feedback loop open internally and with our network to continually shift Skivvy in the right direction.
We wanted to create a tool that:
Provided clarity, simplicity and focus to clients
Showed project experience visually
Avoids a lot of the little pitfalls of working with clients like getting explicit approval
Communicates agency value in a whole new way
Creates better project outcomes through things like structured feedback
Builds loyalty and stronger relationships
Hey, do you reckon we could call this Skivvy?
The unwanted, COVID period proved to be our most fruitful for building. Sure, we delved into baking and crafts like everyone else, but a bunch of spare time appeared. No more driving to meet clients or to the office, and less time chasing work helped create a situation where we could spend more time honing the product.
One day Ant, our long time designer and partner at Ply, was working on an early version of the product and turned to me and said; "Hey, we should call this thing Skivvy... be cool hey, skivvy's are cool, you know like Steve Jobs." And it made me laugh. I thought it was funny, but not a good name for our product. 3 minutes later I changed my mind. I messaged Mark and he liked it too. Skivvy was born. 6 Months later we changed it to Outlign.
This is how Ant and I communicate, through a jungle of plants. "Hey should we call this thing Skivvy?" "Nahhh."
We want to change the world, one project at a time
Okay that title may seem a bit dramatic. But amidst the interviews, product builds, marketing and planning for launch; our core goal was to reshape client-agency relationships and put an emphasis on good process.
We found that the creative agency space had reached a point where clients were used to using project management tools they didn't like. Or the agency had stopped trying and reverted to email comms instead (ew.). Ultimately, there was a real disconnect between each side, despite the fact that these two groups had the same end goals: a good relationship with each other and a valuable, positive project outcome.
As we hurtled closer to launch day, the design and features of Outlign started to cement and we rallied most of our time around a handful of features we thought would make the difference.
The first and arguably most important change is showing the agency process visually so that it makes it easy for clients to see the path ahead and importantly, signpost the project progress. One of our other goals for this screen was to remove the amount of information the user needs to look at, so we stripped as much unnecessary info out as we could.
The main idea for Outlign 1.0 was creating projects that highlighted the phases in our agency's process. Then, inside each Outlign phase is a set of steps that the agency will go through to deliver a great outcome on each phase. Part of our thinking around this idea was to break larger chunks of work down into smaller, actionable items. What we came away with is a threaded process of steps which are essentially to-dos but with more structure and context within the bigger picture. The completion of one step opens up the next;
Inside each step, we encourage agencies to bring what's involved to the fore — educating their clients on their process. Agencies can use video or templated content which can be saved on Outlign.
The reason why we are keen to see more agencies using video (like Loom for example) is to create a more human project management experience and see more of the people behind the work — something that's often lost beyond the first in-person meeting.
There's also some pretty standard stuff built in such as files, messages and managing people on the project which is pretty essential to making things run smoothly;
We've got a bunch of ideas on how to make Outlign better and a backlog a mile long of small tweaks and changes. If you've got any ideas on how to improve our product, we're keen to to talk to you and you can contribute ideas here: hello@outlign.co.
In building Outlign, we also noticed that the creative project management community was...well non-existent. Our designers and developers had their online forums, notice boards and learning platforms. But the account and project managers, creative strategists, agency GMs and OMs of the world didn't have a network. In came AMPM, Outlign's other half. A place online for creative agency peeps to share in key learnings, stories or relatable memes.
We don't know how much impact Outlign will have but we hope it will drive better work and more helpful interactions with clients, and that clients will love the product as much as the agency.
Thanks for getting to the bottom of this post and please stay in contact with us even if you are not using the product just yet. If you want to jump on our mailing list to see Outlign product updates and stay looped into our progress, throw your details in here https://www.outlign.co/