Unleesh: Our white label approach post-COVID

Dita Wohlauer, Co-Founder and Partner at Unleesh

When we launched Unleesh in 2014, centralizing users on a single platform was where technology companies derived all their power. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, Salesforce, Zenefits and many others were sending a clear message to entrepreneurs: own the user.

There were two key outcomes of owning the user, which were exploited at varying degrees by the companies listed above and others like them: first, the ability to monetize the users data by selling it to third parties through ad revenue and, second, building a dependence on the central entity and its brand for everything social, communication, database and human resources.

Admittedly, when Unleesh was first launching, we liked the idea of inserting our brand into the relationships between our business customers and their end users (often referred to as fellows, interns, professionals, students, and participants). We were excited to create a central collaborative learning tool that would become the industry standard and that participants would come to rely on much like Slack became the tool you used at work but also for your online communities (with varying success, I might add).

But we were never comfortable with the idea of monetizing the end user through unsolicited ad revenue, so we never took that path. As a result, we relied entirely on revenue through our B2B relationships to cover the cost of user training, onboarding, learning and development.

We don’t regret any of those decisions, but something significant shifted during COVID.

We began to get requests from clients to offer a fully white label solution whereby the Unleesh brand would be hidden, and each customer would have their own platform for their learning community. This white label solution, in the context of the alarming amounts of privacy consumers have given up in the last decade, has led us to white label and segment databases for each client instance.

Today?clients are able to stand up an entirely new version of Unleesh fully designed and branded for their participants and, importantly, they are able to own the data around those participants separate and apart from Unleesh’s other client’s participant data. In essence, we have decentralized the data to protect the client and its participants in addition to creating a fully white labeled user experience.

We may never have gotten here without COVID. During COVID everyone increased their reliance on technology but also increased their discomfort with the data aggregators out there. It’s become more important to deliver branded experiences to participants and to protect them in every way imaginable.

At Unleesh, we are proud to be offering a high-end white label solution that not only improves security but also gives our clients new flexibility with the product. Want a mentoring 1:1 feature: we can do that! Want to add recruitment processes to your instance: we can do that! Want to rename Activities or Paths or Points on the system: we can do that!

The more we can provide the experience our clients need to better serve their participants—and stay out of the way—the better.

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