How DemandMaven Helped Rindle Reposition Their Product

For an immediate 30% lift in MRR and 6.7x in growth.
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“I needed somebody who could help us do things, execute things, and actually work towards a whole marketing effort, not just strategy. Asia is more of a partner, a team member, and we’re working toward the same thing”
Brian Faust

CEO & Co-founder, Rindle

Highlights

  • 6.7x MRR throughout engagement
  • 30% lift in MRR after re-positioning
  • Tripled the total trial volume from 2018 to 2019
  • Increased website conversion rate by 120%
  • Launched new automation features

Services Provided

  • Go-to-market strategy
  • Positioning and messaging
  • Demand generation services
  • Website, landing page, and email copywriting
  • Customer research & interviews
  • Product marketing

The Company

Infinitely better than project management

Brian Faust is the CEO & Co-founder of Rindle — a workflow management platform for busy managers who need all of their processes and tasks in a clean, simple view. Rindle works with SMBs and enterprise companies all over the world on managing their workflows with automation and features that actually help teams save time.

Imagine the top project management tools in the world and just simply make them more effective for managing processes and actually easy to use. That’s Rindle.

The Challenge

No time to be a marketer

This technically wasn’t Brian’s first rodeo. Before Rindle existed as it did today, Rindle was a different platform. Brian and his co-founder Tom pivoted the product after identifying a more lucrative market opportunity to build a workflow management platform with automation capabilities (but still staying true to ease and simplicity). 
With a completely revamped-Rindle, Brian needed to take his pivoted product to market, but his options were limited. Freelancers were historically too inconsistent, and hiring a full-time marketer simply wasn’t in the budget. 

“I knew the hands on work needed to get done if we’re doing any marketing efforts. I feel like hiring freelancers is inconsistent and unstable. It’s really hard to assemble a really solid freelancer team that’s going to drive your marketing efforts. They can definitely execute things, but they kind of lack strategy side at that point I think. Hiring employees, we just weren’t ready for it at the time, so the fact that a partner like DemandMaven could come in and be steady and concrete, and think about strategy and execution on the regular as opposed to somebody who might flake out was important to us. 

It made us feel like, okay, we’re making a good investment, we’re making a sound investment instead of trying to cobble together a team or do it ourselves.”

Plus, Brian and his CTO needed to focus on expanding the product after releasing the initial MVP. He, like many founders, didn’t have the time (or runway) to learn marketing on his own.

“I’ve done my fair share of research, reading, and podcast-listening to get thoughts of what you should do in marketing and when. But again, not having the marketing experience is daunting to think about. It’s like, “Okay now you have to think about all these five pieces that are all working together and you have no experience with doing it, and you should just figure it out.”


I think for me, it was always a question of how long will this take? It was like, well I could spend my time learning marketing and becoming really good at it, but that would be my probably 100% focus for a long period of time to really be good at it. So I just felt like that wasn’t the best use of my time overall.

Brian needed a partner who could help him build Rindle’s marketing foundation, execute marketing priorities, keep a pulse on growth efforts, and define new growth projects.

“I don’t have a marketing background per se. I’ve worked at a creative agency and things like that, so I’ve been in touch with some marketing, but I don’t do it. It’s not easy for me to say, “Oh, I’ll just run with the marketing on my own.” I need to get some talented people, skilled people who can do it for me or along with me.”

And not just execute tasks off a list, but actually help the business grow. Finding a marketing consultant with a background building a revenue-generating marketing engine for a SaaS business was a critical requirement for Rindle.

The Solution

A hands-on growth partner

Rindle came in with the typical scenarios of so many of our clients: they had a product they really believed in, but the way the product sat in the market and how people thought about it wasn’t working. The SaaS industry knows this as a “positioning problem”.

Rindle was originally positioned as a task and project management tool — which is one of the most competitive and inundated markets on the planet. It was pretty clear that Rindle would need help setting itself apart from the rest of the market and position itself as a real competitor in the space.

On top of that, Rindle’s original model was also a point of friction for the rest of the market. In order to reduce too many unqualified users from joining the product, Rindle originally required a credit card when starting a free trial. That combined with a few missing features and a less-than-ideal onboarding experience left the business funnel with extremely high churn rates, a faulty activation rate, and low month-over-month free trial sign-ups overall.

So we walked through the DemandMaven growth process:

1. Focus

First, we interviewed some of Rindle’s best-paying customers. These were customers who were generated either through sales efforts or inbound. Uncoincidentally, they also happened to be the most responsive and active in the Rindle platform.

By interviewing the first batch of paying customers, we discovered that the pain Rindle solved for their customers had less to do with pure “project management” and more do with workflow challenges and automation.

While the customer segments varied across many markets and industries, it became clear that we should focus on prospects who wanted to solve management problems across the entire spectrum of the business’s work and also automate as much of the heavy-lifting as possible.

2. Align

The next step was to re-align the entire go-to-market function to cater more to “workflow automation” as part of our new positioning.

Our re-positioning efforts included:

  1. Completely re-writing the website’s messaging to focus more on value propositions related to workflow automation,
  2. Producing new content related to workflow management and automation, and
  3. Writing an open ebook about project automation to help generate organic traffic from prospects searching for ways to automate their projects and processes, and contribute to both bottom-of-the-funnel activity and top-of-the-funnel awareness

Plus, we needed to remove some friction for new prospects who were considering other competitors in the project management space (of which there were easily hundreds).

This included removing the credit card required to start a free trial, and smoothing the onboarding process as much as possible. DemandMaven also helped Rindle implement an email sequence that booked demos with the founders for any free trialers who wanted a complete overview of the platform.

3. Experiment

Finally, every great growth process allows room for testing new ideas. After focusing and aligning product messaging, Rindle needed help with testing new channels and segments as the customer base expanded with new free trials and paying customers.

DemandMaven started with market segments that appeared to respond well to Brian’s sales efforts and then later tested different market segments with adjusted messaging.

DemandMaven also designed and launched messaging tests for the website, campaign tests, and ad copy tests.

Overall, DemandMaven was the hands-on, strategic growth partner that Rindle needed, consistently brought new growth ideas to the table, and focused on generating both short-term and long-term results.

“The fact that a partner like DemandMaven could come in and be steady and concrete, and think about strategy and execution on the regular as opposed to somebody who might flake out was important to us.”

The Result

A new way to be

By working with DemandMaven, Brian was able to check off many boxes regarding business and his go-to-market needs. First, he was free to focus on building the product to compete as effectively as possible in their crowded market. Being dialed into customer feedback, support, and the overall sales process was critical for Brian and his team, and the ability to bring on a partner to own marketing saved his time and ability to focus.

Plus, DemandMaven proved to be a consistent, reliable partner — providing Brian with the confidence he needed to move forward on other high-priority internal projects.

Second, Rindle had a lot of ground to cover in terms of generating the first customers, identifying the best-paying customers, and positioning the product in an extremely crowded market. DemandMaven’s help repositioning the Rindle product resulted in an immediate 30% increase in monthly free trials.

Third, Brian needed results. Together, Rindle and DemandMaven grew the business by 6.7x throughout their relationship. Churn dropped from 30%+ to a very healthy 3.4%, and monthly free trial volume 3.5x within the year.

“We certainly have a more stable marketing presence overall. Between the positioning, more consistent messaging, and strategy behind what we were doing. All those efforts did bring us forward.

Finally, Rindle had a website that consistently converted customers with its new positioning, updated messaging, and content that drove both top-of-the-funnel awareness and bottom-of-the-funnel product consideration. Rindle’s website conversion rate into free trial also lifted 120% through DemandMaven’s work.

Today, Rindle is now focused on refining their sales strategy to help land some whale, enterprise customers. They are also still 100% dedicated to providing better solutions for managing the work, and the DemandMaven team honestly couldn’t be more proud of them.

“…DemandMaven got us thinking about the strategy of focusing on automation and targeting for SEO for the longterm… The whole revamp of the website, the introduction of the automation ebook I think were all really good things for us.”
Brian Faust

CEO & Co-founder, Rindle

Ready to get started?

This sh*t ain’t easy, but that’s exactly why we built DemandMaven. We’ll help you find your absolute best growth opportunities based on the “jobs” your customers are hiring the product for. Then, we’ll show you exactly what needs to happen to achieve your goals.