The phone rang for what seemed like the 50th time that day.
On the other end was yet another disgruntled senior citizen wanting to know where their modem was. If there was a single moment where it all became too much … this was probably it.
This was a turning point for our business and actually, this was the least of all the reasons we decided to rebrand, but an important one all the same.
TLDR – we’re rebranding to Flyte. But there’s an embarrassing story behind it and it’s one worth sticking around to read.
We started Optimum Feedback because we understood the challenges faced by small and medium businesses in attracting new customers in an ever-changing digital landscape. Having spent time building businesses, especially ones that dealt with ‘offline’ customers, creating software products and working in digital marketing for SMEs, we were uniquely placed to solve the pain that many business owners experience on a daily basis:
How do I acquire more new customers at a cost that makes sense to the business?
Grassroots marketing, social media, and even traditional SEO will always play a huge role in attracting more customers, but in the last few years, the landscape has changed for most small businesses. More and more searches are now coming from location-aware devices like phones or tablets.
When you search for a plumber, mortgage broker or lawyer, you’ll most likely see the results nearest to you first.
At the same time, reviews became the defacto way for most people to decide on the businesses they were about to use. Think about the last time you spent more than $50 without checking some form of online review first?
Reviews seemed like a good place to start.
Getting more reviews seemed to be one of the biggest marketing pains for the companies we worked with. And for companies with a less than 4-star average, that pain was probably even more severe.
We chose a name and brand to describe what we did at the time – helping people get optimum feedback from their customers. It was simple, easy to spell and descriptive. We were never doing backflips about it, but it was good enough to get started and indulge our obsession around building the product. And at the time, anything else felt like a distraction.
We spent months obsessing over building a product that solved a very specific problem and it paid off. We acquired users who stuck around and worked with us to continually improve the product.
Over time, those clients shaped nearly all of our future direction.
Some people advocate doing a Steve Jobs and going with your grand vision instead of listening to customers because “something something ask a user what they want something something faster horses”.
We think this is a good strategy for building bleeding edge products, but it’s not who we are. We believe in solving current problems through technology and that’s shaped by the problems experienced by our users.
They told us their pain points around customer acquisition and we used this to set a new product road map for 2020. Our new direction will see us solving more parts of the customer acquisition puzzle. We’ll be rolling out new features to give our users a huge edge over their competition, at a fraction of the cost of hiring someone to do it for them.
While reviews and feedback are always going to be a core part of our product, it’s no longer the only thing we do and so our old name (Optimum Feedback) became less relevant. We decided to rebrand, and our new name will be Flyte. We hope you’ll love our shiny new logo as much as we do.
But as one of our values is radical transparency, I couldn’t end this post without talking about the other reason why we decided to rebrand.
The other Optimum
It turns out there’s an internet provider called Optimum Internet – and they’re pretty huge.
Unfortunately, we didn’t know this when we started the business (we get to play the ‘being in England’ card 🤷🏾♂️).
The problem is, they seem to have a less than stellar reputation for coming through for their customers.
Reading their reviews, it seems they’re incredibly difficult to get hold of.
Unfortunately for us, we were the opposite – our phone number (used to) be on every page of our site. It also turns out we ranked incredibly well for “Optimum Internet Reviews”; exactly the term most of their disgruntled customers seemed to enter when looking to complain. I’d love to pat our content lead on the back for his awesome SEO skills but …
So can you see where this is heading? Oh, I sure wish we did.
Customers who either couldn’t read / didn’t understand / just wanted someone to complain to decided we were Optimum Internet, and vented their frustration with us. Over and Over and Over again.
After over a year of abuse from people riddled with internet problems, we decided perhaps it was time to give in. And that’s the other reason for our rebrand. Thank you Optimum Internet for the world’s most effective cease and desist.
So, moving forward
Over the next few months we’ll be rolling out all of our new updates and we’ll let you know here as it happens.
If there’s something you think we’re missing, let us know. We can’t build you a faster horse but anything around acquiring new customers is likely to be something we’re able to do.
p.s. And yes we know. The irony of a company that deals with reputation management, having problems with another company’s reputation is not lost on us 🤦🏾