The aftermath of rebranding Publer and doubling our prices

If there’s one thing that Publer was missing and kept our plans underpriced, was the branding.

Some background story

Publer started as a simple side project back in 2012 to help my brother Marsel Kalemi schedule posts and build an online presence on Facebook for his new small business.

Today, thanks to Facebook and Publer as a sidekick, his travel agency Kalemi Travel & Tours has become one of the biggest agencies in the country and their success has become our why.

Over the years, we have helped thousands of solopreneurs, freelancers, social media managers, small-to-medium enterprises, and big agencies expand their businesses. And along with our customers, we have grown too, but we never paid attention to the look.

An architect's?house is always crooked

As a bootstrapped project, all efforts and resources went into building the product that it is today.

Believe it or not, we didn’t even have an actual logo. What you had seen so far, was a superhero font you could easily download for free on the internet.

But with over?140,000* users ?on board (thank you!), it was time for an actual brand identity.

The Rebranding Process

We could have hired an agency to design the new logo and build the brand for us, but that wouldn’t be authentic. It wouldn’t be us.

So we rolled up our sleeves and started experimenting. Designers, developers, content writers, marketing, everybody was involved.

A colorful journey

We started making small and big changes in every path our superhero walked on. The ones most visible at first glance are for sure the color palette, our superhero, and the logo.

After many reconsiderations, we decided to add more options to our spectrum. We decided to leave bold green for other types of industries and to add some hues of blue for a fresher rebranding.

The color palette needed to expand. Up until before, everything gave a monochromic vibe. Now, while still preserving green as the primary color we have expanded the secondary color palette. This is also perceptible in illustrations where the opportunity to experiment is greater.

The Superhero

This brings us to the next important aspect that needed modernization. The SUPERHERO! With time his style was starting to fall behind and show signs of outdated lines. This superhero needed a special refresh.

The superhero goes towards a more amusing style and is more user-friendly. We have preserved some of the green colors here as well so that we can be easily identified, but have greatly improved his image at the same time.

P for Publer

The logo was a crucial element that unquestionably needed a makeover for this new era. We aimed to create a symbol that would fit well not only in the superhero outfit but also be well applied everywhere on the web, apps, social networks, etc.,

The chosen symbol is a stylized version of the letter P. Being that the letter “P” is not a symmetrical letter itself, as the letter A is, it had to be custom-designed to become more proportional and dynamic.

A new home

We completely redesigned and optimized the website , including our blog , and this is the result:

Doubling our prices

I know firsthand that raising prices is a must for businesses that are looking to improve their services, add new features or simply survive, but changing the billing terms & pricing in the middle of an active subscription, is a big NO for me.

I personally despise companies that do so and I would be a hypocrite if I followed the same path.

That is why our #1 policy is to never charge more or offer less than what you signed up for, and we mean it.

Grandfathering?plans

First things first, we notified all our users one month prior to the changes and we gave everyone a chance to lock the current pricing.

Once the new plans & pricing were rolled out, our customers had the chance to keep their current plan forever or switch to the new corresponding plan at no extra cost. No deadlines either.

While this means that we now have to maintain 5 different plans instead of 3, valuing the loyalty of our customers is far more important.

New plans & pricing

While the old names Argentum and Aurum looked cool on paper, they were difficult for customers to pronounce or remember.

Lesson learned: Simply go with common names such as Professional and Business.

I spent several weeks researching the market and calculating the value that we brought. In the end, the new plans ended up being twice as expensive.

The aftermath

Even though in our case rebranding seemed easy on paper, I was still very anxious, especially with doubling the prices.

Looking back, I couldn't be any prouder of the results. In the past 4 months, we gained 30,000 new users, we didn't lose any customers because of the changes and our revenue grew by 20%.

Thank you for being part of this incredible journey and I hope you enjoy the new look as much as we do. We believe it truly reflects what Publer has always been on social media and online communications: fun and friendly.

What you see today is the work of?everyone ?that hides behind Publer’s mask.

Coming next: A completely redesigned dashboard to provide the best user experience while managing your social media accounts.

If you would like to join our mission, we're still hiring !