How working with Bondi Sands as our first client shaped the future of our business

Developing a new product – or a new business – should always start with listening to your target market so you can identify their pain points and work to solve them. Frntlne was built off the back of my own experience at a retail outlet, ready to spend hundreds of dollars on a DIY home maintenance product, only to be faced with several in-store staff who didn’t have the knowledge or confidence to speak about the products they were selling. They were happy for me to take my money elsewhere – and even suggested I should go to their competitor.

While frustrated at the experience, I saw a great opportunity to improve the way retailers and consumer brands deliver their product training and do it in a way that could upskill their staff members and provide a winning outcome for all involved. 

It was at this stage I realised there were three main stakeholders in any retail interaction: the retailer and its team members, the product supplier or brand, and the customer. I consulted with all of them to identify their problems and pinpoint how product education was lacking in retail roles, which shaped the model we ended up using for frntlne.

One of the people I asked was Shaun Wilson, the CEO and co-founder of self-tanning skincare brand Bondi Sands – which recently sold to Japanese beauty giant Kao for $450 million – and became our first client. I had known Shaun for several years and his retail knowledge provided a great sounding board in those early years of the business. 

Your first customer 

You can learn a lot from your first customer if you both understand the dynamic. For us, we both understood the issue – that retailers didn’t have the time or knowledge to train their team members on specific products at scale – and from identifying those pain points I could ask the right questions that were instrumental in better defining our product. 

Do your research by asking specific questions that get to the heart of the problem. Shaun was incredibly generous in giving me details about his experiences with stores, and this level of insight helped me shape the frntlne model. I also researched other forms and methods of education and training, for example, in-person retail education (old-school, time-consuming), and other forms of digital e-learning (low completion rate, time-consuming), which gave me ideas of what might work. It also showed me what had already gone before so we could avoid prior mistakes. 

Maintain a value-first mindset: how can you create more value for clients? Work towards a win-win for every partnership. Putting your clients at the centre allows you to differentiate yourself because if you understand what they need, you can anticipate problems and come ready with solutions, which helps you stay ahead of the competition.

Making mistakes

Every early-stage product will have hiccups and we were no different when we started. We built our minimum viable product and pressed ‘go’, sending the training course out to select retailers and staff. One minute later the whole system crashed. Fortunately, the main thing we learnt from our pilot was that people wanted to learn, they wanted to be rewarded for it, and they wanted an environment where it was fun and easy to do it. (And Bondi Sands was very forgiving about the crash.) It made for a good test because we could then remedy the problems before they became large-scale.

What you do after you make a mistake sets the course for your future relationship with a client. For us, we once again diagnosed the problem, listened to the client, and used that feedback to make the product better. In fact, it can often be the most crucial advice you’ll hear – our initial feedback from Bondi Sands still shapes the business today. Once a client sees how you include their feedback in future versions, it solidifies that you’re willing to provide value and strengthens your partnership. 

And here’s a side tip for new entrepreneurs: do not strive for perfection before you get started. It’ll never be ‘perfect’, and you’ll be adjusting things forever. Aim for value for the customer and recognise quickly when something isn’t working and make sure to do your best to fix it. I can’t tell you how terrible our first platform looked – we are now on our fourth iteration and thankfully it’s our best yet.

Once we ironed out all the system kinks, the results with Bondi Sands in Australia exceeded our expectations and set us up for an ongoing partnership, one we’re excited to continue building out as they expand their product offering.

And after seeing the success of the platform during the initial rollout with them, the opportunity to roll it out with a wide selection of brands became clear. Following that experience, when we went to work with our next customer Mumm Champagne – a completely different product – we knew the model of ‘training equals knowledge, knowledge equals sales’ would work for them too. 

Mark John is the CEO and founder of frntlne.