Founder  ┃  Product  ┃  Creative Direction  ┃  Marketing  ┃  Fundraising

Work

NewGlue

Lexus - DarkRide

Summary

I founded NewGlue in 2017. As a design enthusiast and a strong believer in the power of brands, I was driven by an idea to democratize professional branding by allowing any business, no matter their financial conditions, to afford a brand that matched their dreams and aspiration. As an online Design- and MarTech platform, NewGlue helped new/small businesses all over the world with professionally designed content through a groundbreaking automated process and Smart Design tools. In 2022, NewGlue was acquired by the Scandinavian stock-listed company Eniro.

Approach

In terms of quality, NewGlue was a global market leader of online branding services. Unlike any competitor, including Canva and Shopify, the brands we generated on our platform were top quality and only sold once. By using unsold vector icons, designed by professional designers, we could create unique and fully “trademarkable” logos.

By using detailed “design data” machine learning, we could create top-quality brands in minutes with perfectly assembled color palettes, font selections and top quality logos. Additionally, the system automatically generated a “Brand hub” for users with extensive brand assets and on-brand marketing materials, including stationery, social media posts and even a website.

Results

NewGlue attracted a community of 700 professional designers (and tens of thousands of additional applications). Designers uploaded over 100k logo icons which were used in our system to automatically design logos, and over 1000 small businesses from across the world subscribed to our platform on a monthly basis.

We raised around $3m USD from prominent tech investors including Luminar Ventures, Provider Investment and UK VC Truesight.

NewGlue was awarded in Venture Cup and StartUp Grind in Silicon Valley and is an alumni of the prestigious SSE Business Lab (Stockholm School of Economics) that has also housed startups like Klarna and Voi.

In 2022, NewGlue was acquired by Nordic stock-listed company Eniro.

Product demo

We set out to build an interactive user experience that was smooth, educational - and just tons of fun. Anyone could create an amazing brand in minutes and feel like Leonardo Da Vinci.

Logo Builder

To begin, users built their own logo via a smooth and user-friendly design experience that would boost their creativity and sense of self completion. In the first step, users were asked a series of simple and fun questions about their company and brand. Based on that brief, the system presented a few suggested logo icons. Once the icons was chosen, the tool would automatically create several logos with different formats, and quality fonts and color variations.

Brand Hub

To manage their brand, customers were given access to their personal Brand Hub on NewGlue - an advanced Digital Assets Management platform with structured brand assets (including free photos sourced from online, picked by our system to match the customer's brand) - and automatically branded marketing templates for print and social media. The Hub also included a pre-made website, in which the customer could build upon in our simple web builder tool. Additionally, customers could order hundreds of auto-branded merchandise with immediate shipping.

Marketing

With ‘deep pocket’ competitors like Canva, we had to rely on other strategies than just regular paid advertising, retargeting and content marketing to reach our target audience of new business owners and drive conversions on site.

SEO

Ranking for competitive keywords like “logo” were nearly impossible for our startup. Instead we took an e-commerce approach and aimed for more product specific search terms like “sun logos” or “C logos”, and creating hundreds of landing pages for each individual keyword. Fewer monthly searches, but highly effective. Each page had a direct entry point into the logo builder flow where users had to sign up to finish their logo. We quickly ranked on page 1 or 2 on Google for several keywords.

Ambassador/Affiliate programs

With 700+ professional designers using our platform, we built additional landing pages for each designer working as their “store fronts”. Using an affiliate strategy, designers were given a bonus if a customer came in via their store, which led to designers actively pushing the store links on Facebook, Instagram and on their own portfolio sites. To further embrace the community feeling, designers were even given a bonus if a customer came in via their store but ended up buying another designer’s icon on NewGlue. This program was highly appreciated by our designers and created a deep loyalty to the brand.

Email nurturing programs

Branding is normally not a product that people buy on the first visit. Therefor we had to build extensive email nurturing sequences with repeating reminders, notifying users that other people were now interested in the same logo icon (i.e. only sold once). Additionally, we sent emails with recommendations of other, automatically designed, logo suggestions - as well as notifications when new, similar logo icons were uploaded to the platform.