How do you grow a start-up?

Focus. That is the one goal chased by Revicoat to reach that other goal: growth. The start-up was founded at the beginning of the pandemic. Plenty of time then! Budget was a challenge, but it does not need to get in the way of setting up a growth engine. This is something that Revicoat’s co-founder Bart-Jan Ligtenstein knows all too well: “It is now just a matter of fine tuning.”

“If you want to renovate property cleverly, Revicoat offers foils for restyling your interior and exterior”, explains our growth marketeer and co-founder Diederik Gerbranda. “They are not afraid to choose a niche-product and that is a huge bonus for marketing (and sales).” When the founders asked us for help with marketing their start-up, we were able to work with all aspects of marketing. A neat message, suitable branding, website, a clear dashboard and a growth engine, assisting Revicoat to grow.

Your own marketing dashboard

Bart-Jan has an affinity with marketing, but he also enjoys outsourcing this major task to us: “As an entrepreneur you are very busy. Marketing is just one of the tasks. On top of that, you do not have all the knowledge. With the machine you implemented fully, you are sure that all the marketing boxes are ticked. We really appreciated that.”

Just like we do with all our customers, we also started with Control for Revicoat: mapping everything and setting up the first funnel. “You receive a dashboard and a to-do list, stating: this is what we do, this is what you do - we need this many blogs and that many whitepapers. This list gives us the sense that we are on the right track. We meet and speak during our bi-weekly Huddles, to make sure that nothing is postponed”, Bart-Jan explains.

Start-up budget requires the start-up mentality

In an ideal world, all those blogs and whitepapers are written by copywriters. But Revicoat did not have a budget for that during their first year. Of course, we can only work with the resources at hand. According to marketing research, a blog is better than no blog, so Bart-Jan picked up the pen and Diederik the role of reviewer.

“Of course, it would have been nice to have more budget in the initial phase, but as a start-up you simply cannot do everything at the same time. As long as you have enough time to work at the growth engine with SUM Digital”, Bart-Jan emphasizes. “You need a lot of stamina; you will not get there in a month. It might take half a year or a year, but then you have solidified an extremely strong basis.”

Hit the ground running

“Revicoat offers an unknown product. To set up a working growth engine, we put several funnels in place, related to what people already know or want '', Diederik explains. Bart-Jan: “Our database with leads is full now and we can start fine tuning: which of these leads is the ideal customer and how can we speed things up based on this strategy?”

As advised by us, Revicoat invests a lot in SEO and content marketing. This results in leads that are 50% professional and 50% private. The first group yields too little and they cost too much. We will work on that in the time to come. Diederik: “We will explore ways to attract more leads from, for example, the construction sector. And we have set up LinkedHelper. With that, the Revicoat team can easily connect with construction companies.”