How qualitative customer intel gave Kickflip what it needed to confidently flip their positioning & GTM

"Is this even a real company?"

"There's a moment in the buying journey that most software companies never see," wrote Édouard Grondin-Fortin, Marketing Director at Kickflip. "It's not when a prospect clicks 'Start Free Trial.' It's the moment before that."

Kickflip didn't know that moment existed.

What they did know: they had a powerful product and customers who used it consistently. The goal was to get more trial users to pay and more paying customers to stay. But the team kept watching great-fit prospects walk away, and they couldn't say why.

So they went straight to the source.

"There are a lot of prospects who are a really good fit for our platform. To me, they're the ideal customers. But we don't close them, and I really want to know why."

Renaud Teasdale, Co-founder and CEO at Kickflip

Too simple, or too expensive

As part of a 6-week Growth Sprint, we interviewed 10 of Kickflip's happily paying customers, the ones using the product consistently.

Two Jobs-to-be-Done emerged:

1) Growth-Minded Brands saw customization as a lever for growth, but their order process couldn't keep up.

2) Simple Visualizers needed a less archaic way to show shoppers what they were actually buying.

Both represented happily paying customers but we recommended Kickflip prioritize Growth-Minded Brands. They saw customization as a growth engine and Kickflip as a long-term partner. Cut deep, not broad.

Before Kickflip, these customers' order process was held together with DMs, emails, and forms. Their real alternative was often paying to build and maintain their own custom solution.

These customers were looking for a partner that could keep up with their growth.

The anxiety nobody expected

During customer interviews, we also asked what almost stopped customers from choosing Kickflip.

One answer was hard to hear. Some customers weren't sure Kickflip was legit. They wondered if it was "just an app" with no dedicated team behind it.

As one Kickflip customer put it:

"If there's a way to build that trust, I think you can get a lot of people onboard really fast. Just having this call makes me be like, 'Oh my gosh, they're a real team really building this thing.'"

The product wasn't the problem. The presentation was.

Kickflip was a platform, built and supported by a full team of designers, developers, and customer success experts. But it was showing up as one more app in a crowded, noisy category. For the brands it was built for, the ones betting their growth on customization, that was a reason to hesitate.

"That's a hard thing to read when you know how much has gone into building this product. But if someone landing on our website couldn't see that, that's not their failure of perception. It's ours."

Édouard Grondin-Fortin, Marketing Director at Kickflip

As Édouard put it, the team had been a shoemaker wearing worn-out shoes. They'd put far more care into the product than into how they presented the company behind it.

From insight to a shared language

With a clear bet on Growth-Minded Brands, we turned customer insight into tools the team could use every day.

• A messaging guide built on three value pillars the team could lean into, plus messaging to answer each dealbreaker and anxiety head-on.
  
  

• A customer experience map with milestones and KPIs: the key moments customers hit on the way to value, and what to measure at each one.
  
  

• A prioritized list of next steps to act on across marketing, product, and onboarding.

The answer to the trust question was simple: show customers the real team working to develop and improve Kickflip with every release.

Credibility became a core part of the brand and positioning: a real team, building a serious platform, for brands that treat their ecom product customization as a growth strategy.

"Everything here is very clear to me, and it's clear because you came up with it by listening to our customers. This is what's important to them."

Jackie Richardson, Sales Director at Kickflip

A positioning that finally matches the product

Kickflip then relaunched with its new positioning. It shows up in the messaging and in a new visual identity.

And they were clear about where it came from. They even wrote about the process on their blog.

"We rebuilt the brand because our customers told us the old one was getting in the way of trust, and in business, trust is everything."

Édouard Grondin-Fortin, Marketing Director at Kickflip

The new positioning puts the people behind the product front and center. It speaks directly to the merchants the research described: brands that have outgrown DMs and Typeforms, can't do what they need with variant pickers, and can't justify a full custom build.

The results

The Kickflip team now knows who their best customers are, what brings them to their front door, and what could prevent them from signing up or experiencing the value. This understnding has become a foundation for every business and growth decision they make. It's shaping the product, the support experience, and how the company talks about what it does.

The takeaway

Kickflip's prospects had been asking a quiet question: is this company legit?

Most teams would never hear it. It doesn't show up in a dashboard. It shows up in a conversation with the right customers, asked the right way.

This work gave Kickflip an evidence-backed bet: Growth-Minded Brands. Their best customers showed them the gap between what the Kickflip product was and how to go to market as a powerful solution to a business-critical problem.