No, I didn’t leave my job to start this company. I am building a company inside the company I work for. It has been 6 months since I joined this new job, and I am still here, the job is still here and I am not planning on leaving any soon, and hopefully they aren’t planning on getting rid of me any soon.
So what have we accomplished in the past 6 months? Tangibly not so much, but we are now very clear about what we are doing, how to do it, where to aim and have been making slow progress.
So what do I exactly do at this job? Well, I do a lot of things which collectively do not fall into one single position.
I write content, I solve petty issues, I strategize, I design, I execute, I do data entry, data analysis, client interaction, I take interviews and idk what not. I do everything except legal, finance and development.
Slow progress can be attributed to me being alone both in strategy and execution, and then me also working on the content part for the parent company.
Frankly, I have written more content in the past 6 months than I have written even in college.
This company (aureatelabs.com) hired me to build a new vertical inside the company for Conversion Optimization, and slowly we realized we weren’t well positioned to bring in clients who could afford conversion optimization, least to say, it is a very costly service that demands absolute trust and immense patience from clients.
Also we realized we didn’t have the team to execute the projects if we could bring in the clients, since we are fundamentally a development company.
Even if we could bring in the clients and build a team, we wouldn’t be able to make it work in the same company, the culture wouldn’t be able to support the kind of work we need to do for conversion optimization as it was designed to serve tech development.
So, there was no other way out other than starting a new company, with a new culture and new team.
Well, then we wouldn’t be able to encash the tag of “a decade of experience in e-commerce” which is primary to convince clients.
We again realized it was not something that we could start in a poof, it would be very slow even if we started.
All this while, working for a client inside the parent company I realized that they layer of Product Management was completely missing from D2C ecommerce, the only difference between Conversion Optimization and Product Management was that one was optimization and other was growth, optimization is more for mature companies but, growth is important for everyone.
The kind of work and people required to pull optimization and growth are the same, the only difference is the way of approaching problems, the stage of the problems, and tangible output.
Optimization is about improving 0.1 – 1%, growth is about making leaps, optimization is about solving the difficult problems, growth is about solving the lowest hanging fruits and then moving ahead with increased complexity, sometimes even ignoring the complex problems completely.
So we switched from optimization to growth, we fixated on building a product agency, yeah, an agency that builds and manages products, ambitious to say the least and the frontuser was born.
Frontuser is a new-age product agency for ambitious D2C brands, we solve high-impact user-facing problems with copy, design, data, tech and content.
The aim with frontuser is to help add a layer of Product Management to D2C brands since these companies find it difficult to build a product team of their own and end up dividing attention between their own products (ones sold on the website) and the website, which often stalls the growth.
Reducing just the load of Product management from them helps them focus more on their product, improve and optimise marketing, and not pivot to a tech company and rather stay true to their niche.
But don’t other companies ecommerce agencies do the same?
Kind of yes, development, consulting and design agencies do aid ecommerce companies, but there’s no agency that brings them all together in a united fashion and even if they do, they don’t have growth and analytics on their mind.
There’s a real gap, but a gap doesn’t necessarily mean need, but we are bullish on the exploding D2C market, and the real desperation of the D2C brands to grow rapidly.
So, yes this is what I have been doing for the past 6 months, and yes, I have been interviewing a lot.
And frontuser is hiring!!!
Check us out here, and share it with your friends if you think they might be interested.
Fin.
I am building a new company!!
