Why Ultra Flexible but Scalable Product Offerings Work for Challenger Brands
My company Path Unbound, a boutique UI/UX design school, is a challenger brand in a saturated market with many big named schools. We experienced a long slump in revenue in the first couple of years in business because we couldn’t find our product positioning. We offered products similar to our big competitors and tried to beat them with lower price only to have the opposite effect. People start doubting if we are bad because we were so much cheaper.
Last year, we discovered the magic formula to growth for us as a small challenger brand without big budget for advertising. We started to repackage our big product offerings into smaller ones that are ultra flexible serving mini segments of user personas. We started to see results within weeks of launching our new offerings, attracting more customers than we’ve ever have. In this talk, I’ll how we structured our product offerings according to customer personas and how other small businesses that are challenger brands to big competitors can thrive doing the same.
Stella Guan is a world-traveling technology entrepreneur with a background as an award-winning multidisciplinary designer, educator, speaker, and content creator. After a decade working as a designer for Fortune 500 companies, she founded Path Unbound, a UI/UX design school providing comprehensive, instructor-led, 1:1 learning programs and portfolio coaching for aspiring and working designers. As a founder, she is specialized in no-code development in a bootstrapped model.
Building a side hustle or business is challenging! I'll share the roadmap to your first customer and then all the way to your first $10K. We'll cover everything from pricing, branding, sales and marketing.
Outlining the journey from freelancer to business owner and all the mistakes, problems, roadblocks and journey along the way. Intended as a way to normalize the conversation that business is a LONG journey full of bumps and problems. If you are persistent, resilient and open to critique, feedback and change, it is possible and SHOULD be pursued with the right mindset - the Entrepreneurial mindset.
Taking all about taking the first steps to building, overcoming that fear of starting, how to not overthink and just focusing on doing.
In June 2023, Adam Nathan called his co-founder with four words that would change everything: "We need to pivot."
After years struggling with his previous product, Adam transformed a failing business into Blaze—one of the fastest-growing AI tools on the planet, reaching $10M in revenue just 15 months after launch.
In this no-BS session, Adam reveals the exact playbook he used to achieve explosive growth with a team of just 25 people. You'll learn:
- Why markets matter more than products (and how Adam identified the perfect target audience everyone else overlooked)
- The three counterintuitive decisions that unlocked Blaze's hypergrowth
- How Adam used brand as the ultimate growth lever to stand out in a crowded market
- The exact influencer marketing strategy that generated 18.6M impressions for just $75,000
- Why Adam's "Customer Engagement Ladder" creates exponential growth without requiring additional resources
Stop wasting time on strategies that don't work. Learn from someone who's already made the mistakes, found the shortcuts, and built the systems you need to scale your side hustle into something extraordinary—without quitting your day job.
