Studio Note #40: The Company Can’t Be Just a Product.
Success is rarely linear; it involves twists, setbacks, and detours that shape growth and resilience.
When we started Vendorfied, we started with an app.
That was the product. That was the idea. And for a long time, it was pretty easy to think of the product and the company as essentially the same thing.
There was much trial and error. A lot of demos, beta testers, meetings, networking and research. We pursued a couple of partnerships that we thought could accelerate things, but they never really developed the way we expected. In hindsight and despite the resources we used, that may have been for the best. Even if they had delivered exactly what we hoped, the product wasn't ready for the opportunity they could have created.
All of that eventually led us to a pretty unavoidable conclusion: if the Vendorfied App was going to become what we believed it could be, we couldn't keep modifying what we had. We needed to build it again.
And that wasn't going to happen overnight.
VNDR Studios emerged for a very practical reason. While we continued developing the business side of Vendorfied, we wanted to create something we could put into the market immediately. Branding and design were already things I knew how to do, so we built a studio around them.
Then the studio took on a life of its own.
It developed its own clients, its own body of work and increasingly, its own identity. What started as something adjacent to the larger Vendorfied plan became a business in its own right.
Something else was happening at the same time.
The more conversations we had around Vendorfied, the more we started seeing opportunities that had little to do with the original software.
Contractors need more ways to be found and understood. They need access to resources that help them grow. Their customers sometimes need access to capital to get projects moving. Businesses need branding, positioning and creative support. And yes, there is still a role for technology in making all of this work better.
Those aren't separate problems. They're different parts of the same ecosystem.
That realization has changed the way I think about Vendorfied.
The app we originally built wasn't a bad idea or something we're trying to move beyond. In a lot of ways, it gave us the vantage point to see everything else. It put us close enough to the businesses we wanted to serve that we started recognizing needs we couldn't see from the starting line.
Now Vendorfied is becoming something much larger than the product it was formed around.
There's Vendorfied Network, built to give good businesses a stronger presence and another way to be discovered. There's Vendorfied Capital, connecting contractors and their customers to financing opportunities that can help projects happen. There's VNDR Studios, which can serve Vendorfied’s target audience along with businesses across all industries. And soon, there will be a new version of the technology that started this whole thing.
For a while, I probably would have described those as different things we're doing.
I don't anymore.
They're different ways of solving problems for businesses across many industries.
I think there's a tendency when you start a company to become incredibly protective of the original idea. You spend so much time trying to make the thing work that changing your definition of the thing can feel like abandoning it.
But a product isn't a company, it is one way a company creates value.
Sometimes the best thing the first product can do is get you close enough to the problem that you finally understand the business you're actually building.
Forty Studio Notes in, that's where we are.
Vendorfied started with an app.
I'm considerably more excited about the company it's becoming.