Honcho

Setting up shop with Honcho

Introduction

Honcho is a Sydney-based company that helps small businesses set up shop. When 400,000 people had started their business through the platform the founders tasked the design team to mature both the platform and brand to fit a wide range of services.

Working closely together, we created an immersive digital platform and an inspiring new brand to help customers to start a business and set up Honcho for their next stage of ambitious growth.

Responsibilities

Lead design • UX strategy • UX design • Visual design • Motion design

Challenge

A big challenge for customers in starting their business was having to set up services like registration, a website, insurance and invoicing before they could start.

Three key insights started to emerge. Firstly, it took customers a significant amount of time to set up the right services for their business. Secondly, people wanted to be able to set up all the services they needed in one go but did not want to pay a monthly subscription. Thirdly, the brand needed a new look and feel with an inspiring story and wide range of services to match.

Strategy

We defined our strategy around one core idea: ‘Be Your own Boss’. It speaks to Honcho’s ethos of putting control in the hands of the small business owner, making it as easy as possible to start a business and to become your own boss. This became the foundation for everything that followed.

Solution

The brand was given a complete overhaul to fit the new strategy. We created a flexible design system that could cover a wide array of services and added a visually distinctive color set to bring each service to life with impact and vibrancy.

Honcho needed to change the business model from a monthly subscription to a pay-per-service model. People made it clear that they wanted to choose what services to pay for. Based on the type of business that was started, the new platform would tailor a selection of recommended services.

Access to all the services were made available in one overview. Services like registration, insurance, domain, website, trademark, professional email, invoices and Google Ads were now directly accessible from just one page. As a guide for new customers we included a ‘get started’ tool that would explain in detail the differences between the services.

For each service we built a landing page explaining what the service was and added a two-step checkout process to make the flow as easy and fast as possible: from getting the business registered to accepting payments.

Results

The result was a compelling, differentiated experience that positively impacted conversion. With a new strategy, platform and identity in place, Honcho now had the right tools in place to successfully help new entrepreneurs to become their own boss.