Building Airahome.comReflections on launching airahome.com
August 2022 to November 2023 (1 year, 3 months)
How to build a web and acquisition flow from scratch for a secret startup that didn’t really know what they were about to sell or how. But the ultimate goal was (and still is) clear: to lower the carbon footprint of Europe one home at a time.
Do you want to work for a secret startup?
I got a call from someone trying to gather a group of people to build some kind of platform for selling heat pumps. My profile was interesting due to my current assignment at the energy provider Fortum. The person couldn’t tell me many details, the company didn’t even have a name yet. I said yes, sounds like a fun ride.
How to save Europe by heat pumps
When I stepped into the office on my first day, we were a team of five crammed up in a small room on the third floor of a co-working space close to the central station in Stockholm.
Tasked with the mission to lower the carbon footprint of Europe we got started. The strategy was to replace the gas boilers heating the majority of European homes with electricity-powered air-to-water heat pumps.
This would be achieved in a way that hadn’t been done before. We set out to own the entire process, from the customer purchasing a heat pump to having it installed and operating in their home for the next 15 to 20 years.
Big challenge #1Guessing what the customers need
In our tiny office space we started asking ourselves the important questions.
How do you create a customer journey without any customers?
Honestly this was a completely new situation for me. With no existing users to interview and really no competitors doing the same thing we had to do what you sometimes need in order to get going: just guess.
So, what we did was to outline a journey to identify areas of high uncertainty (=high risk) and simply start from there.
How do you validate a made up customer journey?
Through market research, lurking on heat pump forums, interviewing friends and family and studying companies in similar spaces we could update and add more details to the journey as we learned more.
Most times this is not enough but without a brand, a product and any users to learn from we agreed that this was a special occasion.
Guessing is high risk behaviour. Making informed guesses based on our best assumptions, given the situation might be just a tiny bit better but this way of working was truly a challenge for me. We needed to move forward at high speed with no real clarity about when or even which country we would launch in first. At times it felt like running in complete darkness.
To cope with a situation like this the team is key. Together we could sometimes look at the situation, shake our collective head and accept that there will be time for “correct” ways of working, it’s just not happening at the moment.
Reflections
Big challenge #2Designing without a brand
Everything becomes so much more difficult without a voice. For almost the first year, Aira had no logo, no typeface, no tone of voice, no imagery, not even a name. In the beginning it felt like a true blessing, a rare opportunity, to be given a completely clean slate like this. But after this experience I cannot articulate enough how important is is to have the brand as a foundation.
Just start with the brand then?
Sounds simple enough. In this case the task of creating the brand was outsourced to an agency specialised in branding. And they were working on roughly the same timeline as me and my team.
This meant we had to build a whole sales site (for multiple different markets), a CMS for imaginary future content editors while at the same time trying to keep Figma somewhat structured.
How to not table flip and walk away
First step, accept the conditions. Second step, let “generic” and “scalable” be the theme.
I decided to tackle this situation by creating very, very generic blocks of content that could build up a web page in modules. Sticking to allowing a header, body, optional CTA and optional image and provide a few variations including those elements. By some it was labelled as “boring” but it did scale and all information needed had its place.
Applying the brand
We did have quite a few feedback sessions with the agency working on the brand to get a rough idea of what it would become. However, there was little time for experimentation or for building solid components and styles on our end.
The end product once we launched was very much good enough. It contained all information we wanted to have there, but not much more. My absolute biggest challenge was the hero section on Home, especially since we did not have any own images that really matched the defined brand and at the same time met expectations from the business side (we are a heat pump company after all, and people expect to see heat pumps).
Reflections
I have reached a new level of admiration towards people succeeding in branding, and especially in branding across physical and digital touch points.
What sparked most discussions, conflicts and bad tempers was without question the hero section. I believe what contributed most to that was the unclear purpose of it and the total lack of images that could match what we expected. At times I could feel a heavy overweight of opinions from business and marketing. More time was spent in dealing with the situation and trying to get clarity in the expectations rather than focussing on actual concept work.
Achievements
On a team level
Creating a full customer journey from online quote to installation of a new heating system in the customer’s home. Touch points with basically all parts of Aira as a company.
Launched airahome.com sales webs in three different markets (Italy, UK and Germany)
Launched airahome.com to showcase our factory in Poland as well as a global company website for investors and press
On a personal level
Keeping together the project from a design point of view. Everything from flows in Miro to concepts in Figma to implementation together with developers in the CMS.
Created the first embryo of Aira’s brand adapted for digital platforms, with guidelines and the basis of a Design System.
Setting up the information architecture for the different market websites (different content for each) as well as building the foundation for content management in Strapi (CMS).