Looka lays off staff as failed rebrand from Logojoy cut revenue in half

As someone in an SEO&#x2F;digital marketing role, I find it hard to believe that a domain name change alone would have led to an 80% drop in traffic. As long as the logojoy.com pages were set up for a 301 redirect to the new domain (which they appears to be), there would be a small hit to SEO, but nowhere near 80%.<p>For example, a major Google Analytics&#x2F;Tag Manager consultancy called Lunametrics was acquired by Bounteous in 2018. The GA-related articles originally written on lunametrics.com are still ranking towards the top of search results, even though they are now under the Bounteous.com domain.<p>What I did notice on the Looka site was that there was no mention at all that the site has rebranded. Not even a &quot;Logojoy is now Looka!&quot; type banner on the top of the homepage with an explanatory blog post. A lot of SEO traffic comes through content marketing, where somebody clicks on an article link that&#x27;s relevant to their query. I wonder if they removed or archived any of the blog posts or articles that were bringing in traffic.

The founder of logojoy once said in an interview that he could have stayed as a single founder company.<p>I think logojoy was pulling in &gt; $350,000 per month at the time.<p>If he’d sat on that as a single founder he’d be rolling in cash.<p>Imagine sitting on $350,000 a month for 3 years.... you’d never need to work again.<p>Instead, venture capital, offices, 40 staff, rebranding failure staff cuts, logojoy gone.

&gt; Looka has also raised around $7 million in funding, with a $900,000 seed round and $6 million Series A in November 2018.<p>That seems like excessive funding for what this company is. A neat little tool he could have solely owned and kept majority of the profits. Really curious to why this webapp required so many employees to run. Rebrand was obviously a disaster LogoJoy was a great name that didn&#x27;t require a total rebrand just for wanting to include additional assets, I&#x27;m not even sure what Looka is.

Here is a deal. Change offer name back to LogoJoy, keep Looka as a company. Then build it from that.<p>Once it is established and substantial, one can always do a smooth logojoy.com -&gt; looka.com&#x2F;logojoy tansition. For example, the transition to looka.com&#x2F;logojoy can only be applied when a customer is logged in.<p>Once they have registered customers, they can pitch them other offerings from looka.com domain like looka.com&#x2F;brandjoy etc.<p>Such incremental approach would open a smoother path to success.<p>P.S. As a quick remedy, they should change looka.com&#x2F;logo-maker&#x2F; to looka.com&#x2F;logojoy right now. Then, they should pitch the visitors with the right message: &quot;Make a logo with Looka&quot; should be changed to &quot;Make a logo with LogoJoy&quot; or &quot;Make a logo with Looka LogoJoy&quot;. Karma is real, once one has it they should not deny it.

Not sure I&#x27;d trust these people with my branding...<p>Logojoy is a better name, likely is easier to google, definitely easier to remember and connect to their product. Also, it&#x27;s hard to get traction as a startup, re-branding that early is suicide...

This was really interesting to read, since I&#x27;m about to rebrand my own startup. The stakes are a lot lower in my case, but hopefully it doesn&#x27;t turn out like this.<p>I&#x27;m going to rename FormAPI [1] to DocSpring.com [2]. I&#x27;m also launching a new website, and you can see a preview on my staging servers [3]. The main reason for the rebrand is that FormAPI wasn&#x27;t a very good name. The service is an API for filling out PDF forms, but FormAPI doesn&#x27;t communicate that clearly. People would often spell it incorrectly, and I got tired of explaining it to people.<p>I also wanted to move to a decent .com domain. &quot;FormAPI.io&quot; feels like a small side project, and my theory is that &quot;DocSpring.com&quot; will feel a bit more trustworthy. (I&#x27;m still a solo founder with a small company, but I recently raised a small round from Earnest Capital [4], and I&#x27;m still around after 2 years [5]!)<p>I think I&#x27;ll be launching the new site tomorrow, so wish me luck! And please let me know if you have any feedback about the new site (or in general.)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;formapi.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;formapi.io</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docspring.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docspring.com</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;staging.docspring.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;staging.docspring.com</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;earnestcapital.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;earnestcapital.com</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15427891" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15427891</a>

How is &#x27;LogoJoy&#x27; not a better branding in every way? 3 sylbles, 2 letter abv, has joy in the frikkin name. Has the rare aspect of actully describing what they do to boot! What does the new one even mean? Another misspelled word? Harder to search? I want to know the politics that drove the change, because I feel the data must be sparse. Any marketing&#x2F;branding pros care to chime in and set my ignorance alight?

&quot;The CEO explained that with the rebrand the company expected and was ready to see a 20 to 30 percent drop in organic traffic due to the domain switch. “That was sort of the standard [of] what to expect, 20 to 30 percent. And expected to recover in three to six months,” Whitfield told BetaKit.&quot;<p>It sounds like the CEO in question had taken SEO advice, which is reassuring. And the 20-30% drop and 6 (to 12) month recovery period is typical.<p>However, the people involved in the project likely vastly underestimated the value of having a &#x27;partial match domain name&#x27; e.g. the very fact that it had the keyword &quot;logo&quot; in its domain name likely helped it rank for lots of commercially valuable logo-related keywords and phrases.

These sorts of stories remind me that Berkshire Hathaway is still named after a failed textile business (and according to Buffet, the worst investing mistake he ever made).<p>Rebranding is overrated.

1. Logojoy is, in every way, a superior brand. (Q: Who designed your awesome logo? A: Luka.)<p>2. They should never had combined a brand change with a big change in what they offer as a business. Now they don&#x27;t even really know what is broken.<p>3. All this was likely compounded by a technical assumption that was incorrect, e.g. some content likely disappeared or backlinks were broken.

Reminds me of the rebrand ConvertKit did to &quot;Seva&quot;, which they quickly realized was an enormous mistake and unrebranded.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;growthlab.com&#x2F;convertkit-founder-nathan-barry-on-undoing-a-rebrand&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;growthlab.com&#x2F;convertkit-founder-nathan-barry-on-und...</a>

Changed the brand, expanded their product offerings that clearly had associated cost while expecting a loss in revenue and also rented a large new set of offices at the same time.<p>Regardless of what he was pitched from an SEO standpoint, mashing together all that risk into one giant clusterfuck shows amateurish leadership.

I guess it&#x27;s interesting in that a branding startup failed to rebrand itself successfully.<p>It&#x27;s clear that &quot;Looka&quot; is less clear about what it is than &quot;LogoJoy&quot;.<p>I also think it may say something about startup branding in general. Brands based upon actual words may do better than trying to make people understand what &quot;Looka&quot; is.

May this serve as a reminder to anyone being offered a non-sensical funding round for their one-person business (&quot;really take this to the next level&quot;,&quot;1 + 1 = 3&quot;, &quot;you will own a piece of a much larger pie!&quot;) - maybe consider keeping 100% of your pie.

Perhaps the right play was to start calling the company Looka, but leave up Logojoy as one of the company’s products.<p>Certainly some SSO woes would have been much less painful than an SEO apocalypse.

Well getting these types of articles is one way to rebuild their SEO! I&#x27;m not suggesting they&#x27;d do this on purpose -- that would be crazy -- but it might be a clever way to make some lemonade out of lemons. That is, sell the story of how they screwed up in hopes of generating some new organic backlinks.

<i>Dawson Whitfield, CEO and co-founder of Looka, told BetaKit that it was this decision to rebrand and move into new verticals that led Looka to financial difficulties and layoffs. “Rebrand, they said. It’ll be great, they said,” Whitfield lamented.</i><p>This guy is the CEO. What is he talking about with all this “they said” stuff? He’s the one responsible for this rebranding decision. But he is acting like it was forced on him, or like it is the fault of some advisor.<p>As the CEO you have to take responsibility. The problem isn’t that “they said” to rebrand. The problem is that <i>you decided</i> to rebrand. Be honest with yourself so that hopefully you don’t make a decision this bad again.

Feels like rebrand is like The Big Rewrite. Potentially lethal.

&gt; “[In] the logo market … at least a billion dollars of logos are sold every year. If you look at just 99 designs and Fiverr, they sell about $150 million of logos per year. So it’s still a very sizable market,” said Whitfield.<p>That one is pretty mind-blowing. I&#x27;m not sure where he got this number from, but assuming it&#x27;s accurate and that Fiverr accounts for roughly half of it, that would make it a sizeable chunk of their total GMV:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;Archives&#x2F;edgar&#x2F;data&#x2F;1762301&#x2F;000104746919003139&#x2F;a2238508zf-1.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;Archives&#x2F;edgar&#x2F;data&#x2F;1762301&#x2F;000104746919...</a><p>&quot;Our GMV for the years ended December 31, 2018 and 2017 was $293.5 million and $213.0 million, respectively.&quot;

That’s the kind of pain you’re in for when you’re overly reliant on a single channel.

&gt;&gt;<i>Canadian design startup loses 80% organic traffic after rebrand</i><p>Canadian design startup gains lost traffic and then some after story is picked by a lot of websites.<p>Brilliant! Money (and or time) well spent to pitch this story.

Why not just keep both? Keep the domain name. Call the product LogoJoy. Brand it LogoJoy, a Looka company. Or LogoJoy, by Looka. Just changing names seems monumentally risky, in my opinion.

Has anyone here tried or used the app? Looka seems to requires users to log in to try out a demo. I have a feeling the rebrand isn&#x27;t the real issue here.

Why would a domain change cause any drop though? Surely they kept the old domain and redirected people to the new one?

&gt; “Rebrand, they said. It’ll be great, they said,” Whitfield lamented. CEO and co-founder<p>Loved Logojoy and Whitfield when they launched. Should probably take more responsibility than a `they` though.

&gt; Looka, the Toronto-based startup that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to design logos<p>Kinda funny that they failed at their own rebranding.

In my country looka is slang for snot&#x2F;mucus.

I guess that they switched from a great name (logoJoy) to Looka because they have more than logos now. However, it sucks as a name, even though what their new name is, is not an issue traffic wise.<p>Maybe they should have used some of the VC money to buy a real good name? So many people underestimate the power of a great domain name, and it&#x27;s a huge mistake.

change it back