We talked about sales development with Janis Verzemnieks , the CEO of Corebook. This is a company that disrupts how the industry creates and uses brand guidelines.
1.How would you describe your company in an elevator pitch?
Brand integrity isn’t achieved alone. Corebook is an online brand guidelines platform to develop & maintain brand design integrity for the world’s most brilliant branding teams. Our mission is to ensure that by the year 2025 fixed-format PDF brand guidelines will have become a thing of the past. We call it a “Hashtag #Brand2025”.
2. What are you the best at?
We are confidently best at defining guiding principles. E.g., creating methodologies for customer interviews; being on a constant quest for industry insights; building User Persona archetypes; collecting customers’ feedback, and spending late nights to figure it our what they are actually saying. And above all, in order to validate Product-Market fit, think about our thinking and how to make it more accurate.
3. How did you find your first customers?
We created a beautifully crafted product landing page which got a web design award right after our product Beta launch. It created traffic and interest. The first paying client was impressed by our design craftsmanship and customer service. I was personally talking with every single user in the early days, which formed trust and confidence in the product although it was in the MVP version.
4. What are your customers saying about your product?
“Finally something that isn’t boring as f**k”
“The best products are those you can’t believe didn’t exist already.”
5. What are your proud achievements so far?
° Got accepted into 500 Startups and Fast Track Malmo startup accelerator programs and gained an invaluable network of mentors and like-minded entrepreneurs.
° Attracting influential clients as unicorn statuses startup brands GoPuff and Miro; world-leading brand agency networks like M&C Saatchi Group and McCann; onboarding Instagram and Unsplash logo designer Mackey Saturday as one of the early clients who eventually become our official adviser.
° Partnering up with our heroes. In our latest partnership with The Futur (a leading education platform for creative entrepreneurs with 1.86M subscribers on Youtube), In the first week alone, the campaign video hit 30K views on Youtube and we set a new sales record.
6. What is the next big thing in your industry?
Design is becoming more collaborative (cult-like tools such as Figma proves that beyond doubt), and I think the reason for this is because starting a company is easier and quicker than ever, so competition in every business category is tight and if you don’t have the best brand even if you are established company, you will lose in competition. So everyone wants to build a brand. And every design and consultancy agency wants to offer branding services.
We see an addressed need to build a collaborative branding platform connecting people who haven’t been connected before. Corebook will grow into a products ecosystem that will become an integral part of every branding team’s daily utility on how to give each other a better context around brand assets and guidelines and involve more people at the right time.
No one really is doing what we want to accomplish as a product-driven company — provide a free single-player mode that seamlessly leads to a multi-player experience by integrating into people’s existing workflow and inspiring them to create new habits on top of that.
7. What are your plans for next 6-12 months?
— Expand product core qualities.
— Find new investment partners for the seed round who are passionate about the Corebook vision and have an understanding of how brands are built.
— Attract new talents to the core team and foster a viable ground for them to do the best job in their career and be engaged with the future of the company by earning employee stock options shares.
— Reduce commercialization risks to confidently scale the company in the next year to become a go-to brand guidelines platform for leading branding teams.
— Strengthen relationships with our international board of advisers.
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