Tech Services Showcase - Development and Marketing
What's included in...platform design work - James Hanson, Layers Studio
James is from Layers Studio and talked about UX and Tech Design. Layers Studio create digital experiences your users or customers will love. James is founder of Layers Studio and it was founded as design agencies often have departments and silos where only certain ones talk to clients and would have wanted input. They found that when working together this made for better projects. Everyone should be involved in discovery such as designer, developer, marketer but could also have copy writers and others too.
User Experience is how people feel when they interact with your product, make sure when starting a project such as website, software or app that they gather as much info about a user with discovery without making assumptions such as doing as many user interviews as possible and want to prototype quickly to get feedback from those users. The longer you take before putting something out there the bigger impact issues may have so can do research and data with user interviews and workshops which can be a smooth process but sometimes can pitch an idea that you think would take half a day and takes much longer.
Outputs of discovery, where if trying to acquire services you want to put out information and the more obscure this is the more you will need to gather feedback, so if not being questioned on things you think are right then you need to make sure are talking to the right person. With UX you don't want to end up with the finished website, it doesn't need to be slick or have finished visuals. You may have user stories or user journeys and flows where can go through process to get comfortable with that might be quite complicated so need to work out how flow will work from customer or technical point of view. Then can have a tech spec with developers at discovery phase to understand what can and can't be done so are there steps to make sure to get where needed or to be considered such as third-party software or data.
Biggest challenge is when start a project will be asked how much it will cost which is difficult as don't know how big whatever it is, is, until then anything is an estimate. Workflows can scale from discovery stage and then can see what the whole picture is and then see what the MVP is or what is the literal minimal thing you need to achieve. Tech design is how the product functions and UX design is how users interact with the technology, and these must work together to create innovative, user-friendly products. There is scope on how you can improve stuff but there can be assumptions so sometimes need to think everything that people need to deal with not just what is on screen or in an app.
Need to make sure don't ignore the constraints and the best possible outcome needs to consider budget, timeline and expertise along with other constraints which could be for products that need a certain critical mass to be successful, with a client needed certain search criteria so would have many filters that initially would return no results so would not include those. To deliver a good UX you need a multi-skilled team with stages of discovery, design and development but can have sign off on those stages so there is no more scope to cover.
Common mistakes is skipping research and assuming what users want so do as much as you can, prioritising aesthetics over usability, can also have think of what users would be willing to do and most want to use mobile over desktop and don't over complicate things. Good starting points is to start with a UX audit of product, should talk to user regularly and check in with users to feedback for improvements from user perspective and keep iterating based on feedback and start as small as possible.
Ecosystem and community involve boutique agencies that can work on projects together, which have done already or what to do, they do the discovery and people from those other teams would be involved and can package things up and pass on to teams. They can keep communication channels open with who they work, here in the North East it is collaboration and partnerships where things are transparent about working with others. One of the things that holds smaller agencies back is where large companies won't accept a set of smaller agencies because they think this is worse than having one but want to have the best people working on a project from multiple agencies. You are better off getting agencies that specialise in the platforms or tech that you need.
Can do desktop and heuristic research so they will do user questionnaires but can get data from these for high level concepts but will get to a certain point about key flows and decisions to build out a quick prototype such as in Figma but for complex things it should be low fidelity as possible and see how people interact with a flow and get as much feedback as possible to get as many confirmations as possible. Can give users a set task, where either assign a persona that fits or make up one for them do something, people show more than they can tell so if can get something they can interact with can get better feedback and opinions.
What's included in tech build work and bringing tech products to market - Mark Renney, Wubbleyou
Wubbleyou build tech products for fast growing businesses for things they are good at into a tech product with their knowledge and capability and have a mission is to create £100,000,000 across all their clients. All the reasons for not using a tech partner, such as if a non-technical founder with an idea - how do prove your idea is a successful idea. Common traps including raising loads of money to build a tech product and when launch no one wants to use it or struggling to rais money and spend months or years doing this and spend time chasing investment instead of building a product, so could spend that time getting something working to prove an idea and generate revenue.
You need to first define your audience, who will buy your product and what deep core problem will you solve that keeps them awake at night, your competitor is your target audience not doing anything. People buy on emotion and then rationalise such as people buy perfume because they want to be more confident. You want to prove demand before making supply, people want what a company has and then can build that into a tech product, if there is a way to do it manually then this is great, test something you can't to or build yet but get customers who are ready to buy it. For your first MVP, it needs to be the fastest and cheapest product.
You can then validate your idea to see if it is a big enough problem for people to act and make sure to understand if people will pay to solve the problem they have, you can have a problem that people won't pay for to solve, do people want to use it and would they pay for it? Sell first and build later and if you can build something really cheap that people will pay for then this is fundamental proof people will pay and you can build something better.
What is the minimum an MVP must do to solve a problem, how many customers would you need to be successful and how many need to pay. Don't focus on the solution but on the problem, you want to solve, every time you want to build a feature make sure this solves a problem, and it is important enough to pay for and if it isn't then either drop it or backlog it. Build a MVP for less than £2,000 or maximum £10,000 and can use Glideapps, Softr. Replit, WordPress or Excel where they have had companies come with solutions validated using this to then be scaled up with an application. You need to know the limits but if you are hitting these and it is slowing you down but are generating revenue then can then work out how to take this product to market.
What does the success of a product look like and how do you create a product roadmap oriented around this, they have a discovery journey, product development and long-term partnership. They want to get into cycle of building things, you define what problems to solve and what problems to solve and every three weeks deliver a product to use and when it is acceptable it could go into production. For Wubbleyou, in terms of North East and agencies it is not just about grabbing people's cash but for them it is they need businesses to be able to build tech faster and have a lack of people or skill to do this so have sponsored tech scholarships and also do other cool things such as giving away tickets to events and will be publishing statements about what they will be working on.
People worry about future proofing about what they are doing, if you don't know what you are doing this for so need to understand this, so if you build something simple and cheap then you can refine this more quickly and easily. If you spend thousands on something that gets no traction, then you won't get any more but if spend a few thousand and prove it then that will be easier.
How do you know if an issue is a deep enough problem, there will be a lot of design thinking around this and if have an idea for a product you want to build then need to think about what problem you are solving and then go as deep as possible, a lot of selling is just empathising.
Can have a situation where people are using something that people don't like so can build a product that is better than what everyone else is using, but to begin with do the smallest incremental improvement.
What's included in app development work - Dylan McKee, Nebula Labs
Dylan is a founder of Nebula Labs who develop their own projects such as Virtual Memory Box and also work for others. What does app mean, we are moving towards a hybrid era, before where would people find you would be the app store for their device such as iPad and iPhone but recently more APIs are available for use from the web instead so barriers have dropped getting onto the device but the routes to doing this have widened massively so can have a lot of different routes to go down or decisions to be made.
You might want to build an app but might not be the one you want initially, you might not need to develop something natively as need to think about the fidelity of what you need as can get away with doing something on the web and there is a lot of advantage of being discovered that way, so for app you don't probably need a native app. There are benefits to doing a native app but in a lot of cases you can do for web and don't have to develop for multiple platforms. User testing for multiple platforms can be hard compared to developing on the web in a single codebase without needing to worry about app stores so can tighten down cycles and time frames.
Cases when you want to go native so something that interacts with device such as Bluetooth for things like Medtech or using low-level payment integration so need to use native route to be able to access functionality, so think about options carefully and don't just go for the shiniest solution first but can go down web app first then native route later to add what functionality you may be missing so during discovery this is need to be the thing you need to think about, what is the route for discovery and how are users going to get your application. Prototyping tools like Lovable can be used for using testing and research can be a good approach and tool.
Consumers don't use app stores any more to discover new applications and being the top app on the store doesn't matter as people aren't using it as a discovery channel but is where the content comes from, it was like a shiny shop window where people could get apps but now you can get things in the browser so marketing has moved to the web. If doing something close to hardware, then native applications are needed.
Google Play store and Apple App Store took a percentage of any purchases of application and for subscriptions but there are also other options for payment providers in applications which can have lower fees but before payments were guaranteed to be with Apple or Google, so if doing your own payments you need to deal with this and you need to keep your reputation and be responsible on a customer service angle.
What is the fundamental functionality you need and focus on core functionality first, look at the business model and think about how things behave and understand things better. Clients will figure out how to do things manually and then once this is painful to deliver can scale this up, how do you do something with the minimal time and effort for a given situation.
Discovery process needs to be used to look at costing and effort and then look at business model to cover what is needed and dial down scope if needed to become affordable and can do a Moscow validation to see what you must have and do an MVP validation.
What's included in outsourcing digital marketing - Ellen Hedley, Vida Creative
Ellen runs Vida which is a creative agency and talked about why outsourcing can be tricky and how to make the best of it and red flags to look out for. Ellen set up Vida in 2016 and later moved to Newcastle and have been going for eight years with eight people working for them. They specialise in tech and B2B marketing and work with business that are preparing to grow and more.
Outsourcing marketing can be trick as tech is often complex and is hard to brief someone if not clear on your own message, so need to be clear on this. Outsourced marketers aren't miracle workers and need strong input to create strong output and without clear goals outsource activity often leads to fluff and nor results, which may be not asking right questions or getting right answers.
Outsourcing prep is clear positioning, simple confident messaging and choosing the right marketing partner. With clear positioning, you should be able to answer who your solution is for, what problem does it solve and why should they care, and message should be specific to audience, rooted in pain points and be confident and distinct to really explain the pain point and how you are solving it.
Choosing the right marketing partner is important, do they understand your sector, they should challenge and guide you to understand the space you are working in and an agency doesn't need to be an expert then see if they have a good discovery process. Do they ask smart questions so are working in a partnership they should challenge and make you think about things in a different way and do they connect strategy to action, care about results where should have honest conversations and clear KPIs you can both work towards to be clear on what you want to achieve and do they click with your team, you need to be able to get along with them.
Should we just use AI instead? AI tools are useful, but will produce pretty generic output, they won't build strategy without input, won't know audiences paint points, won't match brand tone and drive decisions or accountability but AI tools can help with first drafts. Repurposing content and scaling output from strong input. If you outsource are brining strategy and experience with accountability but AI can speed rollout once done thinking.
Looking for marketing support then watch out for overcomplicating things and not letting you understand what they will help you with, strategic input or discovery process is important and need to be willing to put the time in for this. If they focus on adverts before messaging, then don't do this as don't spend money on something you don't know will work and you don't need to be on every channel but this links in with discovery stage so be where your customers are. You need to review your current positioning, is it clear and specific? Decide on the key business goals you want to focus on and build a one-page brief with audience, problem, offer and tone.
How difficult is it to talk about tone, so you can write about words you think about a brand to build a tone of voice guide and can have a comprehensive guide with specific examples of messaging so when working with agency can have loads of examples of messaging. You want your marketing to stand out and doing something is better than doing nothing, so for example if you're saying what you are doing on LinkedIn then people will look at this and maybe follow this up compared to people not being able to find anything about you or what you do.
What's included in marketing reporting - Rojin Yarahmadi, Polybox
PolyBox is automated reporting in minutes with AI-assisted marketing reports that free your time so you can focus on supporting clients. If working with agencies they will provide reporting for you but because there are hundreds and hundreds of channels which takes time to put together reports so from advertising to A/B testing, they do automated reporting and AI-insights. They worked with an agency to automate their processes and that is how the company started, one thing that happened was the market was massive in the UK and was worth £35,000,000,000 with over 28,000 agencies with more than 60% of the market being medium sized agencies that really want to make a difference and take things to the next level. What agencies do in the UK is the best practice in the world, for example in the US they don't even know what A/B testing is.
They found in their first year of PolyBox which was there are 10,000 digital agencies in the UK all offering the same services and needed to understand what they needed to do. These agencies are doing the same thing such as PPC, SEO and Meta Ads and clients struggle to tell the difference between agencies and want to know how to spend money effectively on marketing along with agencies spending more time competing than standing out. Untapped markets include MedTech, EdTech, GreenTech, Gaming, FinTech and B2B SaaS which can't just be generalised and can then save time on reporting and then spend time doing something else and often agencies didn't want to free this time as they didn't know what else to spend time doing. Untapped platforms could be YouTube Spotify, Discord apps or LinkedIn Ads, Unity Ads, Reddit Ads and Appsflyer for in-app advertising to then be able to run ads on these and then understand how to report on these, so wanted to focus on top-ten connectors and then look at connectors that aren't out there. Spotify ads that can be unskippable or ran during podcasts but then need to be able to understand the reporting on this.
When a B2B what is a conversion so need to know if a lead is qualified or valuable so can't just measure sign-ups as many of these can be spam and then be able to track these or connect with HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Stripe and Xero along with over seven hundred connectors, you can do the same thing for ads but just run those on different platforms and hours of work can be spend on just reporting or don't know how to do blended reporting. They looked at reporting hours and found 57% of account managers that time spend on reporting tasks had increased an 88% of account managers are spending more time on reporting. Return on Investment can be £8,000 per client of savings on time between 25-60 hours but formatting reports isn't strategy but its overhead.
AI, misconception is that if put bad data in you get bad data out. AI isn't there to replace you and most agencies fear AI but should fear bad data and ChatGPT won't fix reports, but AI is only as smart as your stack and blended clean data is the gateway to real AI insight and AI doesn't work on isolated metrics, it needs the full story.
Fireside Chat & Case Study: My Development Project - James Hanson, Layers Studio & Chris Dawson, One Utility Bill hosted by Karl Murray
James is founder of Layers Studio and Chris is founder of One Utility Bill which bundles bills into one bill and have over 200 staff and this year are on track to do £18,000,000 in revenue. James worked with Chris on a project who were looking at redoing the website, one reason was technical one to rebuild in HubSpot CMS to maximise the package with them to make use of as many features as possible and improve the user experience on the website.
Chris realised he wanted to make a change was when didn't want to go on the website and wasn't same as a few years ago and weren't seeing the performance they needed with Fuse Bills for students and traction was falling year on year. Chris met and knew James and people who worked with him and invited them to tender where discovery was a full year, this process was really good where met relevant people in different departments and business development partners to get an idea of what people were trying to achieve and made sure as a team were aligning with goals and to do what was needed to achieve those goals.
For design and execution, it does the job from a creative and design approach to make the offering more sexy, bill paying seems boring but if you think about the problem which was bundling bills together to make it easier to understand this, the pain points for their user base and it is not about paying bills but around one utility bill and what you are designing for and designing something that works for those people and make something that makes sense.
Was there anything Chris was not comfortable with was more imagery and less text but nothing ever felt risky, they want through a process of what customers need and their opinion is irrelevant but is about what the customers want or need instead, there were discussions about what was important and to make sure things were aligning on a business perspective.
Any surprises during the process for James was the project got better but One Utility Bill were seasoned professionals, but it can sometimes in other cases cause difficulties so need to be sensible and realistic about what you want to do. There were new things being implemented by HubSpot so for Fuse Bill could take advantage of those new features, but a positive surprise was how good the marketing and content team at One Utility Bill was they could design pages and copy together, and the message and content could be created to help users understand things as quickly as possible. Chris said they learned a lot from the first project for the two website builds which made the second process much better and what worked well was you don't know what you don't know but this wasn't an issue so agreed a period afterwards and build in time as the scope would change to build in the capacity to make these changes and be able to adapt to those.
What was the benefit at project end for Fuse Bills was it wasn't successful to begin with, so one of the efforts was the content dropped in late on changed how the website was displayed where call to actions moved down below the fold but this could be quickly changed and within a month of completion it was outperforming the previous website, they had the time and space already booked in to iterate on ideas. James mentioned that project on One Utility Bill helped improve conversion rates and there were iterations that worked better than expected and iterations improved things and now have six times more usage than before but are also to do more marketing and been able to convert more leads to customers.
Advice for founders from James wanting to work with agencies is what worked the best with One Utility Bill, is having regardless the size of the business was having people with certain responsibilities that were listened to and things could be worked out first and not worrying what it would look like first and you can make something that works really bad but looks really nice. Chris mentioned should be picky about who you work with to have a long-term relationship where they had two websites and that ongoing partnership and a good relationship helped things go smoother and good planning helps make sure have time later when needed. Agencies need to be earning new clients so agreeing retained time means that agency can be really focused on their work and delivery really good results.