I’ll let you in on a secret: the quiz builder you’ve learned to love over the last months didn’t start out as brandquiz. And it’s not (only) a quiz builder anymore.
Humble Beginnings
In its first incarnation, we called it WunderBlox. I know, weird, right? 😅 But back then it made sense. You see, we were going to build an editor that would enable you to create pretty much any interactive content by drag and dropping appropriate content blox (wink) onto a canvas and then customizing them. We’d purchased the .com domain and even had a logo ready. Not kidding.
But then we started working on the actual product and had our first reality check ⚡. Due to constraints related to time, budget, team size and pretty much everything else we had to do what most startups in our phase should do: prioritize & focus.
A (More Successful) Second Attempt
Our digital agency background had imbued us with a knack for content customization and over the course of the last years we had been increasingly tasked with building custom quizzes by well-known brands like Universal Pictures. So in early 2018 we thought we had found our smallest viable problem to solve and we set out to develop a versatile quiz builder with the kind of design chops we hadn’t found elsewhere.
That’s how brandquiz was born. And while with the new brand at hand we strived for solving the initial quiz use case to the best of our ability, we inadvertently opened up new avenues for the platform to grow within the realm of user interaction and customer engagement.
Over the last 12 months we went through the traditional twists and turns of an early stage product, got a bunch of dedicated customers across several continents using our platform and found both 😍 and 😡 in the process.
The Reckoning
Regardless of the sentiment, something we amassed across the board was valuable product feedback. And we took it to heart, sifting through hundreds of conversations, filtering out the features that would have the biggest impact on our user base and then implementing them.
Almost 6,000 commits over 29 releases changed the scope and direction of our product from a mere quiz builder to an up-and-coming user engagement & customer experience platform. Basically what we intended to do with WunderBlox in the beginning. 😅
And while that was clear to us and to some of our most involved users, it soon became evident, however, that our name, our brand, brandquiz wouldn’t allow us to communicate this broadly. At a base level, we heard from customers who were surprised to find out that we offered far more than simple quiz building tools.
We had to face the facts: our brand confused our customers because there was a gap between what the brand suggested and what the product offered, creating a lot of friction for us in explaining our product value to new customers and inherently hindering our business goals. We had to let go.
So today we’re announcing the (second) rebranding of our platform to 🥁
With involve.me we’re reimagining what modern user engagement & customer experience should look like.
The platform will bundle all necessary tools for creating personalized interactions at every step of the customer journey into one powerful & versatile app.
involve.me users can create and integrate interactive content for any point in their funnel, from lead acquisition and qualification, through activation and conversion up to measuring customer satisfaction. All while enriching customer profiles with the gathered data. Hence the higher value prop name: involve.me
We now know that in the fast-paced world of startups good ideas have become a dime a dozen as the technology and skills needed to build those ideas have become cheaper and more accessible.
So now, more than ever, branding is crucial for establishing an identity within a crowded SaaS marketplace. involve.me is our concerted bet on that.
Wind Of Change
“Ok, I see. So what will be different? 🤔” — Thought you’d never ask!
If you’re an existing customer, nothing will change for you. We’ll start rolling out the new branding in the platform over the next few weeks and make it accessible through the new URL. But even then, all old and existing URLs will redirect to newly generated ones and work seamlessly.
At the same time we’ll launch the new website & positioning at involve.me.
All existing live projects, custom domains you’ve set up and content you’re currently editing will work uninterrupted without the need for you to lift a finger.
We’ll keep the product accessible through the brandquiz website for some time to come and will systematically transition to the new branding over the following weeks.
The product will retain the UI and features you’re accustomed to and will only get better after the renaming.
Going Forward
Thus far 13,000 registered users have created a total of 25,000 projects 🤟
So what comes next? Well, as the new name suggests, we’ll put your projects’ users at the ❤️ of the product, prioritizing features that will help increase customer involvement. This overhaul also allows us to imminently address platform infrastructure improvements such as optimizing project loading times (we hear you 😉).
Our planned roadmap
Check out the newly updated roadmap here.
Finally, to live up to our new brand name we’d like to involve you more in the process of shaping the bright future of involve.me.
So as a first step, we’d be extremely grateful if you could give us your honest feedback in the survey below.
Epilog
For us, this (and hopefully final 😄) renaming is just about being true to who we are and what the value of the products we’re building is, while doing a better job at telling that story.
Part of who we are is about passionately helping businesses to be successful by better knowing, engaging with and involving their customers in interactions with their brand & offering, and our renaming will help us do just that — by being much clearer about how our product can be helpful, which will then help us reach a wider audience.
