The brief

A B2B fintech serving mid-market finance teams was approaching its Series B. The product had matured significantly, but the brand — designed in a hurry at the seed stage — still felt like a 2020 SaaS startup. Enterprise prospects were comparing them to incumbents and the visual story wasn't holding up. The CEO put it directly: "Our brand is the reason we're losing the bake-offs."

The strategy

We spent two weeks on positioning before we touched a pixel. Talked to ten customers, five lost prospects, and the entire leadership team. The findings:

  • Customers loved the product but found the brand "unserious."
  • Lost prospects mentioned the website specifically as a credibility issue.
  • The leadership team's own description of the company was much more confident than the website's voice.

The brand brief that came out of this: look like the incumbent you're displacing, sound like the upstart you are.

The design work

The identity work covered logo refinement, a more disciplined colour palette (less blue, more restraint), a new editorial typeface for headlines paired with a clean grotesque for body, and a custom illustration system for explaining technical concepts.

The marketing site was built around five pages plus a journal. Every page had a clear hierarchy: a confident headline, a single supporting paragraph, and either a CTA or a product screenshot. We resisted the urge to add testimonial walls, integration logos, and the rest of the standard B2B clutter.

The build

Astro + Sanity for content, Cloudflare Pages for hosting. The whole site is under 80KB of JavaScript and scores 99 on Lighthouse. The content team publishes new pages without engineering involvement.

The outcome

  • Series B closed three months after relaunch — at the valuation the founders had targeted.
  • Inbound enterprise leads doubled in the first quarter.
  • The sales team reports that bake-offs they previously lost on brand alone are now competitive.
  • Brand recognition scores in the company's category research moved from "low" to "moderate" within two quarters.

The CEO described the outcome as "we finally look like we belong on the same shortlist as the incumbents." That's what the project was for.