Back2024: The Year of Products at Echobind
I’m excited to officially announce the start of something new for Echobind. We’re building and launching products!
A long time coming
At some point, every agency (and for that matter every developer, designer, and product person) considers building their own products. Most of us have a side project graveyard full of half-baked ideas as proof.
I’ve talked about products at Echobind for years, and in 2024 we’re committing to it.
Why?
Many reasons. As Echobind the company, we gain:
- new sources for potential leads
- additional credibility by showing what we’re capable of
- opportunity to diversify revenue
- a chance to own and continuously iterate on something
As Echobind the team, we:
- learn through building. We’ve built and shipped many products on behalf of our clients. Labs—our official entity name for working on these products—will be our space to continuously build, explore, and refine our own ideas.
- get an opportunity to wear different hats. Our engineers can work on product. Our designers can work on marketing. Our strategy team can do sales. It’s a great way to expand our individual skill sets. As a bonus, we gain a better understanding for what our coworkers go through on client projects!
- have a place to experiment with cutting-edge technology, like the Vision Pro (more on that soon!)
Because the consulting side of Echobind covers salaries and expenses, Labs can focus entirely on product validation, execution, and generating revenue. That significantly reduces our risk, and provides an easier path to profitability.
Speaking of profitability, we are treating Labs as a separate entity from Echobind. It’s all the same crew, but different revenue and expenses.
2024 Roadmap
- Get Organized. In February, we established the PROduct Validation and Evaluation (PROVE) team. PROVE exists to ensure all of our ideas keep moving, and is a cross-discipline group of product managers, designers, and developers. Anyone on the team can join the Friday PROVE huddle. During the huddle, we give overall Labs updates and product pitches. We talk about our approach and framework. It’s off to a great start.
- Set Goals. We will launch two products per quarter. That’s aggressive, but it’s also attainable. There’s no time to waste, which forces us to focus. There’s only one caveat: if any product gains significant traction, we may pause launches temporarily to direct energy appropriately. That would be a good problem to have.
- Market, Analyze, and Grow. Product marketing is an area we don’t often get to focus on at Echobind. We will now. All products and marketing sites will leverage Posthog at launch, and we’ll use that data to drive product decisions.
- Review and Decide. Each quarter we will review the performance of all products and decide on next steps. We will look for strong indicators of interest (or lack thereof), evaluate the effort we’ve put in, and read conversations with potential customers to understand how products are being used.
So with that, it’s time to unveil what we’re working on in Q1!
Product Launch #1: Kind Kiosk
Kind Kiosk is a standalone, customizable kiosk used to increase donations. With just a few taps, donors can give via card, Apple Pay, or Google Pay. In an age of QR codes and countless online donation pages, we’re focused on the in-person experience. Those magical moments at an event or physical space where donors are most likely to give.
The donor experience can be customized to match your brand. The designation for donations, copy, and “quick donate” buttons are all configurable.
We’ve been working on Kind Kiosk with limited bandwidth for a while now. With the formation of Echobind Labs, we’re excited to say it will officially launch at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Portland, OR on March 13th.
The Nonprofit Technology Conference is the official launch for Kind Kiosk.
Imagine a fundraising dinner, basketball game, museum, zoo, or animal shelter. How about a kiosk in the office that allows employees to give to a different charity each month? There are so many exciting possibilities. We can’t wait to see how it’s used.
The admin dashboard. Understand how each kiosk performs, and get a snapshot of your donations.
Kind Kiosk has been a really fun product to build. It’s not a typical SaaS. It uses hardware. We’re taking a fully-managed “white glove” approach. Though the overall process feels familiar, there’s quite a bit that feels new. On a personal note, I’m really proud of this one.
If you’re interested in learning more, visit kindkiosk.com or book an intro call with us!
Our launch stickers and a test run of branded packing tape. Packing up and shipping the kiosk hardware should be an interesting endeavor!
Product Launch #2: Wayfound
Our second product for Q1 is Wayfound. We’ve used every roadmapping software available, but we always find ourselves defaulting to using Google Sheets. It’s easy.
The problem with Sheets is that it’s not a great deliverable. We want to wow our clients at every step. So we set out to create something that’s almost as easy to use as Sheets, and looks beautiful in a proposal or as a final deliverable.
The Wayfound waitlist page. Yes the logo looks a little bit like React. We don’t care at this stage.
We’ve also tried using Shortcut and Linear to generate a roadmap. As great as those tools are, they don’t work well for us in proposals or early deliverables, especially when on-the-fly edits are needed. Once a project is in the design or build phases and has tickets to work against, they work much better.
Check out Wayfound (https://wayfound.app) to learn more and join the waitlist. If your team might use a product like this, we’d love to hear from you.
Closing out Q1
We have four weeks to finish the MVP for Wayfound. Q2 is just around the corner. The PROVE team has heard multiple product pitches, and we have more on the way each week. Look for a Q1 Labs recap post at the end of the month and more about our plans for Q2.
We’re excited to keep shipping!
Chris Ball is Echobind’s CTO and CoFounder; connect with him on LinkedIn any time.
