Pivoting from a banking service to the #1 choice tax app for freelancers and their accountants, achieving 10x partner sign up growth

Here’s how we tackled the challenge together with the Coconut's founding team:

• We spoke to the target audience and asked them the right questions.
  These honest, transparent and wide-ranging conversations were designed to uncover the specific language that freelancers use to describe their relationship with taxes and HMRC. Turns out, the sentiment was not the best – most freelancers felt overwhelmed and confused when it came to filing their reports. Then we repeated this exercise with their accountants to understand how Coconut could support them best.
• We used the interviews to get to grips with freelancers’ current behaviours and frustrations so that Coconut could support them into better habits.
  Old-school Excel spreadsheets, shoe boxes full of receipts and over-reliance on memory are the norms for many self-employed professionals. Knowing these frustrations is crucial when framing a product as a new, behaviour-enhancing alternative.
• We developed a new narrative and messaging framework.
  Branding is storytelling. So our final step was to craft a compelling narrative that would drive our audience to positive change – the change being to use Coconut! Following the tried-and-tested B2B Storyline framework, we focused on key narrative elements to ensure the messaging resonated with the target audience of freelancers and the self-employed. Here’s a short summary of the critical story elements we identified:
  
  
  • What is the biggest change that is happening in their world today?
    For freelancers, success is the biggest change maker. The stakes get higher as you get more successful – placing greater demands on time, work/life balance and organisational systems.

• • How does that change impact their professional lives for better or worse?
    Things go wrong with clients when you drop the ball, and that’s what freelancers dread the most. It’s their personal reputation on the line.

• • Who or what is the Villain that is causing all of these problems?
    We identified the dual villains of ever-increasing busyness and an attachment to the old ways of doing things, even though Excel spreadsheets and manual systems were doing more harm than good. When speaking to freelancers, it soon became clear that our villains were creating a sense of inertia. We knew that Coconut would need to create both an inspiring vision of the future and the sense of safety that comes from a clear process and simple steps.

• • What is the Promised Land that every freelancer is aspiring to get to?
    Simply, our freelancers aspired to spend less time worrying about money and tax and more time on serving clients.

• • What superpowers do they need to get there?
    To bring freelancers to the Promised Land, Coconut would give them a tax app that “just works,” with fast-and-easy set up, simple bookkeeping, automated bank feeds, fast digital invoicing, click-of-a-button tax preparation and more. The superpowers remove worry and give the audience the confidence to crack on with their business goals.