Vamos Digital

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the founder of a very new startup. We are primarily working on building a communication tool that can scale up to be a business application. We are about two months away from getting the product launched in the market. Initially, our primary customers will be enterprises in the small to medium category. We have been testing our product with potential customers.

What challenge were you trying to address with Vamos Digital?

With communication tools today or even social media tools, the brand needs to communicate a lot in a very organic way. Often there’s no marketing budget. We don’t want to design our marketing in a way that costs a lot of money. Much of our brand communication is implicit—it’s around product design.

I needed help defining our brand strategy, which won’t include spending a lot of money educating people. We haven’t launched our website yet and are still in the beta phase. So as we beta test products with our customers, we have to fine-tune the product, which reflects on brand positioning.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Vamos Digital helped us with brand strategy and site design. The site will be a work in progress over the next couple of months. At the moment, the primary work has been around brand strategy, which doesn’t include using too many tools. That part will probably kick in once we go live and are trying to reach our customers digitally. It’s primarily a thought leadership approach.

As far as design is concerned, they use tools like Adobe and Adobe Illustrator. I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the response that I’ve gotten up front.

After this first brand strategy engagement and once the website is up and running, I’m hoping to have them manage our SEO and the digital marketing piece. It’s going to be more of a commission-based model, depending on spending. We’re expecting Vamos to be with us through this entire journey. We’re constantly changing, and they have to change accordingly.

They’re also providing all of our identity designs as well as our greeting cards, letterheads, and newsletters. We’ve engaged them for a lot of elements over a seven-month period.

What is the team dynamic?

We’re working primarily with Pooja, who is the founder of Vamos, as well as another employee.

How did you come to work with Vamos Digital?

Pooja had previously founded a public relations firm. I got to know her through this firm, but the idea to go with Vamos came primarily from seeing them deliver a fair bit of branding work for some of my contacts.

We were looking for a vendor that was agile and open to change. In evaluating vendor responses, most of them seemed to operate from a school perspective—very closely tied to time and money. I sensed that a lot them were looking for a fixed scope of work. Vamos Digital was much more open to the concept of having to work from scratch and rework if needed.

The second driver was that Vamos is a new brand, and they seemed more willing to partner from a success, rather than a school perspective. We needed to have a company on the line to make sure we succeeded rather than setting it up as a fixed project. These reasons informed our decision to go with Vamos.

How much have you invested with them?

$15,000-$25,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together from March 2017 until July 2017.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The brand strategy took us a good 8–12 weeks, as we engaged a lot of people. We wanted to gain insight through collecting formal survey responses so we could kind of relegate some of our hypotheses. Our first successful achievement together was designing and redesigning our feedback forms to get the information we needed as a foundation for our brand strategy.

The second piece that Vamos contributed to our brand strategy was engaging many of our stakeholders:  investors, a few employees, and our founders themselves. They have done a very good job of communicating with each individual. They are putting something together without us having to worry very much about it. We were already aware that each stakeholder had their own worldviews and goals for the startup. Vamos has done well so far at integrating all the information they gathered and finding common ground. These achievements have gotten us to where we are right now.

How did Vamos Digital perform from a project management standpoint?

We‘re satisfied with the project management. Things are done in a fairly agile, ad-hoc way. We were surprised that they were able to keep up with the nature of our work—it isn’t really something you come up with a plan for in advance. It’s constantly shifting. We’re really happy that the Vamos team has been able to keep up with us and work according to our priorities.

Are there any areas they could improve?

Pooja goes above and beyond every time, and I don’t know if I could do that. But I see it as a good thing. It helps me, and I factor it in when I look at future projects I want to work with her on. There have been times when she’s really worked hard to make sure that the team is able to keep up. She has been very kind and treated us as a partner.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the co-founder of the company and we do online marketing and sales of financial products.

What challenge were you trying to address with Vamos Digital?

We wanted to get more customers, so we went with Vamos Digital to get more leads for our financial product.

What was the scope of their involvement?

We had a website that wasn’t very good, so Vamos Digital helped us with a new plan on WordPress including the logo and website design, however, we hired another company for the development.

We were new to this online business so they helped us set up Google AdWords and various social media outlets, including Facebook. They handled the whole configuration and execution, as we didn’t have anything set up before this.

Vamos Digital provided all the content for social media and search engine optimization as well. Pooja, the founder, gave a lot of insight into social media and digital marketing because it was all new for us.

What is the team dynamic?

Pooja was the main person we interacted with, but there was another person in charge of Google AdWords. For the design and content, I think she had two or three people involved.

How did you come to work with Vamos Digital?

We researched some other companies, but we liked Vamos Digital’s work the most.

How much have you invested with them?

We started working with them in May or June 2015, and the project was completed in November 2016.

What is the status of this engagement?

We spent between 10,000,000 and 12,000,000 Rupees [U.S. $155,811–$186,973].

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

While I cannot share concrete evidence and numbers because our reports are confidential, I am satisfied with the work they have provided. We are happy with the new website and logo, and our social media engagement has been positive.

How did Vamos Digital perform from a project management standpoint?

Their responsiveness was good; I don’t think they had many clients at the time. There were no delays and we communicated through email and phone.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I don’t have anyone to compare them to. What we saw of their work was better than other companies and their timing was good.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can’t think of anything.