Today's podcast is brought to you by Employment Hero. To be honest, if we had had this when we were starting TDA, I know we would have just saved so much time. It's the Smarter way to hire. With over one point five million candidates ready to go hire smarter, all in one place with Employment Hero already and this is the Daily This is the Daily OS.
Oh now it makes sense.
Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Sunday, the fifth of October.
I'm Zara Sidler, I'm Sam Kazlowski.
On the last episode of Building TDA, we answered your burning questions about starting your own business, scaling that business, growing a team, and everything in between. So today we're going to take it back a step and just focus on a singular topic. I must say it's the one aspect of our business that we get the most questions about, and that is font Gate. Now, Sam, if people luckily aren't familiar with fond gate, I wish I was you. What is it? Talk to me about it?
Well? I think it can best be described as this moment in tdo's history where we tried to glow up and fail and it didn't go as well as we'd hoped it's worth mentioning from the outset that as part of a rebrand, and we'll get to the Y and the SEC. There were probably twenty elements that we changed across all different platforms. Instagram, newsletters, our pod aren't changed. Everything changed, and there was one point of the twenty that people really took issue with, and that was the
font hence the font Gate title. But I think that's important just to set the scene from the top that it wasn't its total failure.
Over now, I don't need to make excuses.
And this is therapy. I don't know I have to pay for it.
It's free therapy. But it was just to really explain we're talking here, TDA launched a rebrand. For anyone not in marketing or comms, that basically just means that we tried to change the way we showed up visually. So that was changing the colors, changing that, as you said, the tile on our podcast.
The tagline, the things that weren't visual only but actually about how we framed the company. And the reason why we wanted to do that was because you and I hadn't done anything to the visuals or of the branding since we started in March of twenty seventeen, I came up. I used a random color generator online to come up remember colors. And so we were at this moment where we were going, Okay, these colors are being seen by millions of people every week and no one's actually thought
about why they're there or including us. Yeah. So the basis of it was to try and mature as a company. And what happened, So we went through a really long process. We got experts in so long who knew what they were doing and put a lot of thought and energy into thinking through you know, not just the visuals that we were giving them to start with, but how other brands show up all around the world in media and not in media as well.
And when you say it took so long, what was actually happening that took so long? Like, can you talk our listeners through? I guess what that process actually entailed. I've never been through it before.
Neither, And so everyone was learning from scratch and lets the number one I think the main part of the process was that a number of concepts were presented to us and it was concepts A, B or C. And we ended up going with D and so there was this process of saying we like this bit, we don't like this bit, and then there was also a technical
element overlaid onto it. So you know, the idea that for journalists to turn around the story really quickly about breaking news, it can't be complicated graphically.
All of our journalists put their own work into camera.
We don't have a single graphics professional in the company who is who's dedicated to making things look good on a grid.
If anyone knew that, you're not allowed to say that out loud.
But that's also the cool thing about canvas and the cool thing about like this new era of more accessible technology that anyone can use. You don't need to be able to code, you don't need to be able to think through the crazy photoshop elements that take years of almost like a university degree to master in saying that there's clearly a skills gap that can come up if you don't clearly.
So every time I present Sam with a design or something, I without fail will always get it's a good start.
It's a great starts are on, it's a really let.
Me take it and change it entirely and give it back to you so you can pretend it was your own work every time.
Yeah, and that's part where all you know, whenever I give you a power, whenever I give you a paragraph of text, you say, it's a great start as well. So that's why we're the perfect team exactly. So we went through all of those iterations ye, and then it was about making sure that it worked with the workflows. And then we put it out there, and.
We were nervous.
We were really nervous, and that's when the reactions began almost instantly.
Yet we should have been nervous. It turns out those nerves were well placed.
So the summarize basically what happened next. There were tens of thousands of comments about the font specifically.
So we're talking Instagram. Were very well known for our Instagram tiles. Everyone knows the colors. Apparently everyone knows the font. Didn't know that until this time we put out I think it was a story about Ted.
Cruz, former Republican nominee for president.
Yep. And turns out no one cared about Ted Cruz, no one cared about the Republican primaries. Everyone cared about the font that that news was delivered in.
And the flavor of the comments was really interesting because there was a strong sense of I don't like the font. But more than that, there was this sense of why didn't you ask Usa and why did you play with something that we love if it's not broke or that's not broken. And that's when we really started to interrogate our own process. We hadn't done enough, if any, market
research into what people liked. I mean, you and I are famous for flipping things around in a WhatsApp group with family and friends and kind of saying, what do you guys think of this, and getting, you know, see what our mums think. But for something of this size, it was clear to us and I don't think we'll ever make that mistake again. It needed probably a sample of a thousand or two thousand to really get a
sense of how people would receive it. But what was also interesting was how many brands and how many you know, politicians were getting involved in the commentary.
We see you just enter Alan.
We were becoming a meme essentially, and I think it wasn't just about the font. It was this snowball effect of it became a funny thing.
It was a moment.
It was a moment.
Yeah, it was a moment that we absolutely if it was another brand would have got it involved in exactly.
And I think and when you read all of the kind of marketing best practice guides out there, it's all about jumping on those moments and being relevant. And there's some brands that have really built the following off responding to those moments so well. Yeah, so totally understand why that was happening.
Didn't feel fun at the time, though.
No, and these were massive companies, I mean, Uber left a comment I remember at one point two state premiers. It was a serious kind of sense that people were no longer coming to us just for the news stories, but like a.
Brand universe almost they were coming to us for an experience and we had failed them or they claimed failed them on that experience.
And what I found interesting at the time was that ownership element. And you and I spoke a lot about that. Talk me through how you feel I'm asking the question, Sorry, no, please finish your question. How did you feel about this sense of like, why didn't you ask us because it's our brand as well?
Yeah, that was a funny one. We've never had that before. I was torn. I think, as we've said, social media democratizes information and access to information. That's an amazing thing to have, and we have built a business off that, So I want people to feel entitled to that information and entitled to partake in that conversation. However, we are a private company who make decisions about what is in the best needs of that company, and not everything is
a joint ownership project. So it was Yeah, it was an interesting one for us, but I think what was more interesting was the conversations that then happened behind the scenes. So do you remember what the conversations in the office work, because they will never leave my mind.
So there were kind of two camps in camp. One was this idea of we need to push through and people don't like change, and this has had thought and development and guidance behind it. Yep, we need to withstand the storm and this is a moment. As we've just said, which camp were you in? I was in that camp. I was in the camp of we need to be able to withstand whatever social media pressure comes our way and people will find the next thing and keep going.
The other side of the office was saying we need to be holding true our company values, which is being respondent and listening to our audience and feeling as though we're not out of touch with what people are saying with the common man, with the common man, and if they're saying conclusively that this needs to change, then that's what should happen. And we're at a bit of a
stalemate with that. What was starting to bring me over to your side, which was that we should flip side were comments around accessibility and some of those elements which went beyond just taste, but it was people saying, this is hard to read on mobile, or when you put more text on it. If it's a headline that needed a couple more words in it, then that's harder to read. And then we were having discussions editorially like how do we make this shorter so that it's easier to read?
And at what point are you starting to sacrifice the quality of the reporting that you're doing because of this graphic constraint. That started to drag me over a little bit because it wasn't just about attitude then, it was about ensuring that we're an accessible product.
And so, I mean, spoiler, we did change our font back.
But why and how we changed it was interesting.
It was it's really smart by us. It was really in retrospect, so we changed it back because we needed people's attention on a very important topic and that was that at that point. So this was months after we had first.
Rebranded, about two months.
Yeah, we had kept that font the same, and then one day we put up a post with our old font and it said, Hi, we hear you. The old font is back for our front covers. Now let's get on with the new And we posted that because we needed to tell people about Meta threatening to take news off its platform. We're not going to do a whole podcast episode about that. We have sat behind this microphone
many a time and explained that. But what it did was used a brand moment and a moment for us to really capture the attention of our audience and to do what we do best, which is share accessible information. And from that day forth we went back to the old font.
And in some ways, I remember that day feeling a lot like a bit of a defeat, because.
Funny, I remember it feeling like a relief.
Yeah, And that's I think probably back to those two original positions, because I mean, you're right in that as a company we needed to try and pick a direction and go for it, and if we responded to other moments, whether there was frustration or a lack of engagement, like we've launched newsletters, for example, that have had a slow first week and an incredible second week, and if we cut it in week one wouldn't have been there for week two, and now it's in week one hundred. So
I'm always wary of that. But it was totally the right call and everyone was on board at the time, which was really amazing. And I do think that we're stuck with the font Like I think that the fact that font gate happened, we.
Call it font gate because there were many articles about it, many articles about tda's fond gate and this, and that it was law.
Like to give you a sense listening, to give you a sense listening of how this has taken the life of its own. There's now parts of graphic design and branding short courses that say what we can learn about branding from tda's font gate. So it's kind of got the life of its own now. So I do think it'll be hard for us to change ever again, even if the font was something that people liked and you font because.
We're resistant to change more generally.
Though, Yeah, and I think brands all struggle with that, and especially brands that have such a kind of a sense of co ownership and a sense of comment sections being important and all of that kind of value that we try and provide. But it's a beauty and it's maybe a little bit of a constraint.
Looking back, Now, what's the key lesson you've learned from this? And I guess what's a key lesson that you would tell someone who is building brand about what this taught you about how important brand actually is.
I think visual brandy actually, I think I come back to audience testing. I think audience testing was underestimated because it felt difficult to execute, Like it felt hard to be able to actually get data that we could then rely on to make decisions, because nothing.
To say that people that some people would have come back and said that it was okay or with that fun and then we rolled it out and you.
Know, totally it wouldn't have necessarily taken away all the risk, but at least then we would have had a sense of these are the views that are out there, and these are the different ways that people will respond. I know that sounds that we didn't do it. But the reality of running a business and a small business is that you can't take super long with everything otherwise nothing happens.
And we were getting frustrated with the length of the process because we were having conversations about whether an a should have a flick at the end of it or not. And there was a sense and I drove And this is a big weakness of mine, is that I move fast and break stuff. And I drove that progress hard and broke it. It was broken. So I think that's a big lesson took away from that. What about you.
I yeah, look, I'd agree with that. One feels actually quite embarrassing to admit on Mike. The only other thing that I'd say is that it's almost like a silver lining, finding the silver lining that this was objectively a super shitty moment for the business. We just spent a lit lot of money paying people to do this rebrand, we'd launched it. We had like mimosas in the office. We
were really excited. No one else was. But I think what we learned from that experience was you can still make something a moment, as we saw all the other brands doing. For us, they made it a moment, and then when we decided to go back to that old font, we made a moment out of that too, And I think that there is always a silver lining. There is always something that you can do that will build and better establish your brand and might not be the obvious choice.
We didn't expect that it was going to be people hating our font, but we made it a moment and people still to this day talk about it.
And at the end of the day, trying to start a business and building a business is about being nimble, and I think that that was probably no more not quite broken as that, but being nimble and adapting to how things roll out.
There you go. Wise lessons for your Sunday more Sam, thank you for joining me on this lovely Sunday. Of course we'll be back tomorrow with a deep dive, but until then, have a great day.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Caalcuttin woman from Gadigol Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadigol people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present.
Look, we got pretty lucky with our first hire, Tara, who's our head of commercial now. She actually messaged us and wouldn't take no for an answer.
Well, she messaged you relentlessly. You met her for a coffee that I forgot about, that you forgot about, but you told her on the spot that she had a job.
She just had the vibe of she could help.
And then she met me for a coffee. She thought the job was sealed done and I thought it was an interview, and there was a it of mismatch. But hey, it worked out.
It did work out. And it isn't always that easy to find your first hires.
No, Sliding into DMS is not a perfect science.
No, and it can kind of go unanswered six times before they respond. But that's where employment Hero comes in. So they've got over one point five million ready to hire candidates in their marketplace.
Hey, that makes a lot more sense.
It's just more efficient. And the best bit is that it's all there, So you've got hiring, onboarding, and managing all in the one platform. Businesses have already made thousands of hires with zero cost and zero weight.
That sounds like something we should have done back in twenty twenty one. But hey, you can't rewrite history, but you can be smarter in future. Hire smarter, all in one place with employment Hero