Bullseye Needed Platform-Wide Improvements
Bullseye’s instructional support platform was deteriorating. Seven years without a major refresh meant the platform was losing effectiveness. Also, clients were beginning to churn and have problems with their user experience. To make it worse, nobody knew how users were engaging with the platform. So the company was unable to make data-informed decisions and lacked crucial insight.
CEO Ryan Cristal knew he had to do something. So he began looking for a fractional CTO he could trust to overhaul and improve their product. This CTO would need to act as a technical cofounder and take responsibility for Bullseye’s success. Based on a referral from a friend, Ryan contacted Liberate Labs. When the Liberate Labs team did a product and strategy audit, they found that the architecture wasn’t scalable.
Because Bullseye never had a CTO, they didn’t know this was a problem until the audit. Additionally, the interface and data schema needed massive improvements. Further complicating the challenge, Ryan was being stretched thin while acting as CEO and CTO for his company. Despite having little tech background, Ryan had no other choice but to micromanage a team of engineers who wouldn’t take initiative or responsibility. Something had to improve, or Ryan would burn out and Bullseye would continue to lose customers and market share.
New Product Roadmap Upgrades Bullseye’s Teacher-Coaching Platform
With Bullseye fully onboarded, Liberate Labs began working on a new product roadmap. The Liberate Labs team wanted to deliver a roadmap that:
- Systematically updated Bullseye’s entire platform, front to back, top to bottom .This systematic approach would ensure the platform never went down for existing users.
- Gave them awareness of how users were engaging with their platform. Helping Bullseye make informed decisions that improved their product now and later
- Set them up with a foundation of scalable information architecture. Scaling was a clear goal for Bullseye, so Liberate Labs set them up for success by planning with scalability in mind.
- Reversed the then-increasing customer churn rate. This was important for keeping the platform viable and retaining market share
Beyond this (and due to past experience), Bullseye needed a CTO that took initiative and responsibility for their product success. They needed a CTO that embedded within the existing company and worked to bring it to the next level. That’s what the team at Liberate Labs brought, allowing Bullseye to focus on Operations, Sales, and growing their business.
Results: Improvements on All Fronts
Overall, the Bullseye product was improved rapidly and in many ways. High development velocity meant that Bullseye received quick iterations and a fully redesigned platform within 1 year.
The improvements to the product roadmap speak for themselves:
- Load time for key pages reduced by 50-70%
- Upgraded legacy technologies to modern standards
- Upcoming AI integrations will make the platform 1-of-1
- Improved user experience through intuitive UI and bug resolution
- Data visualization helped improve decision making and reduce churn
- The core functionality of the Bullseye platform was upgraded all around
- Addressed technical debt so the code was more streamlined and efficient
These all mattered to Bullseye (and specifically to CEO Ryan Cristal) because it meant that their platform was finally on the right trajectory. After 7 years of slow decline, they were set up for massive success in their industry. Furthermore, they could focus on service and customer satisfaction, rather than maintenancing their platform – not their most important work by any means.
Lastly, the intangible benefits were deeply appreciated by Bullseye:
- CEO Ryan was no longer worried about AI stealing market share
- Bullseye has a fractional CTO that they can rely on for the life of their business
- CEO Ryan was able to work on his business rather than in the development team
- The Liberate Labs team didn’t need to be micromanaged, giving time and energy back to Bullseye’s team
- Bullseye was able to stay viable as a business and grow in the right direction, rather than continuing to decline in important metrics
Does Bullseye’s experience sound like something your B2B SaaS company needs? Do you need a fractional CTO to take your product to the next level? Get your free strategy audit from Liberate Labs and see how much growth you have yet to unlock.
