Case 2: Content for saas community

From bland to bright: Building Community

Case Profile

Turning bland into bright
Not just another website; a vibrant community

Back in August 2020, RevGarage's initial concept had been to have sales leadership share their knowledge with the community of sales, marketing, and RevOps teams, giving straight answers to tough questions without BS or fluff.

After about 2 months of operations, it was clear that the concept didn't work as planned. RevGarage was too bland. It did not stand out from the rest of the similar platforms, and the audience was not impressed.

RevGarage's founder Julia and I set out to change that and turn RevGarage into a sensation.

Challenges

Competitors with loyal following
Limited financial and human resources

The main challenge was to turn just another website that was a "community" in just a name into a vibrant place where SaaS crowd would actually go to and hang, daily.

Julia and I also wanted to stay true to the original philosophy of the brand, and keep it BS-free, honest, and useful for the audience.

We were constructed by limited resources and faced additional difficulties with very serious competitors.

Content Strategy and Solutions

Brand personality
MVP prototype
Three stages of content strategy

The revamp had these stages: rebrand, create content strategy, execute.

I was responsible for:

- new branding for RevGarage, including positioning, personality, and tone of voice

-prototypes and wireframes of the new website, including UX, logic, structure, and actual copy

- concept for the new content types, like live events, newsletters, and product. These three would become the milestones on RevGarage's roadmap.

Phase 1: Live Events

Concept of a boxing match
Competitive and exclusive
Live streaming as a new format

Cold Call Knockout is a livestreamed event in which sales leaders fight for the title of the best cold caller, performing cold calls live as audience watches.

I was responsible for creating the concept of the live competition, prototyping, wireframing, and copywriting.

The idea was to make the events feel like top-tier boxing matches. The sales leaders would be like A-class boxers, fighting for the Champion belt.

This played well with the competitive nature of our persona, and also added a layer of exclusivity and dangerous chic to the RevGarage's image.

- Number of RevGarage's members grew 400%

- page views reached 20,000, with a 500% increase

- 8,000 total views on YouTube

Phase 2: Email Newsletter

The next phase was to create highly-engaging useful crowd-sourced content, that would make RevGarage a go-to place for the sales, marketing, sales ops and revops folks.

I was responsible for the whole content setup and production of the weekly newsletter.

I came up with the name Sales Canon for the newsletter to highlight the fact that what RevGarage does is a canon, it's a go-to place. Once a seller is featured in the newsletter, they and their method becomes canon.

Each newsletter features 3 sales methods of any category, and an editorial foreword with a unique sales meme that I and the team create for each theme weekly.

Phase 3: Method hunt

For the third and final phase of the strategy, we have developed a concept of Method Hunt, which packs crowd-sourced content as a SaaS product.

Think of Method Hunt as of Product Hunt for sales methodologies.

I was responsible for prototyping, ideation, and wireframing. At the moment when this case had been created, Phase 3 was still under development.

Results

Team

Julia Nimchiski | Founder

String Nguen | Marketing Strategy and Ops

Anton Nikulin | UX/UI Designer

Artem Hordiichyuk | Web Developer

Community can be as successful and vibrant as we want it to be as long as we dare to break the rules.

RevGarage is an example of how content can play the main role in building and scaling community, as long as you have a idea and courage to act upon it.