A Look Back on 2021
I’ll spare you the talk of what a hard year it was to continue pushing through a new COVID variant, year two of a pandemic life, and which boosters to get.
What I want to share is the year we had at Stagger and all of the people who had a part in it. Here are the top 5 things I love looking back on.
Money in the Bank
In 2020, I started to fundraise with a deck and an Invision prototype. Mostly what I heard from investors was that we were too early and to circle back when we have more “traction”. Angel investors who believed (and still do) in the business and what we’re building wrote us checks that let us to go heads down and evolve that Invision prototype into a working beta. By the end of 2020, we built a beta that showed investors we were serious about what we’re building and by February of 2021, we closed a round $1.5M to keep building.
Hired for Growth
With capital in the bank, it was in our plan to hire a Growth Marketer to help us launch Stagger to SMBs in a way that’s meaningful, impactful, and with power. Anybody trying to hire in the market over the last year knows how competitive it is to attract really good talent. I’m incredibly honored and grateful to have Erik Stabile join the Stagger Squad as our Growth Marketer.
Your Brand on Autopilot
One of our big features we announced inside of beta this year was our “Brand Scraper”. It’s a big pain point for SMB owners to hunt and gather their brand assets like logos, color palettes, and fonts all in one place when it comes time to designing creative for their social channels and websites. Onboarding on to Stagger takes care of that for you the second you sign up and saves you from digging in old files for everything. To top it off, we’ve started to suggest templates that match your business’ category and populate it with those very assets we grabbed for you in the beginning. Voila!
The Team Meets IRL
When Erik joined the team, it felt like the perfect time to have the team meet in person for the first time since we started in January of 2020. For our engineers, it was the first time they’ve been in the US. After touchdown in Austin, the team came together to participate in ideation workshops, planning and of course … tacos.
On the Horizon
We’re not stopping at brand scraping and template recommendations. Our goal is to build a product that helps SMB owners be smarter designer without having to be designers. What does that even mean? It means we have big things up our sleeves that we’ll reveal in our public launch in Q1.
This year proved to be a productive and inspiring year for the team. We couldn’t have done it without the work of the amazing team, our investors, the beta testers, our friends and family. As we close this year up and roll into our next one, we couldn’t be more excited to keep building Stagger – a product that will educate, grow, and inspire SMBs to create content they’re proud to put in front of their audience.
From the Stagger team - happy holidays!