Where Drill came from

Paragraph is a venture studio. They put capital and talent into ideas early and turn them into high growth businesses.

Several companies in their portfolio kept running into the same problem. Repeatable work was being held together with spreadsheets, email, Slack threads and status meetings, and it was costing them real time. The partners figured there was a product in it, and they called it Drill. That’s the easy part. The harder question is whether anyone outside those few companies would pay for it.

The question every new idea has to answer

Before Paragraph commits to building anything, the idea goes through what they call a painted door test. The question is always the same: is there a market here, and if there is, who’s in it?

Farm that work out to a consultancy and it runs four to six weeks. Competitor scans, white papers, data sources, audience definition, landing pages, ad creative, and the campaign to carry it all. Anyone who’s commissioned that kind of work knows what it costs, and that’s a lot to spend before you know whether the answer is yes.

One paragraph in

Here’s everything the team gave Viable to work with:

An online platform designed to automate everyday workflows and facilitate collaboration. It provides tools for task tracking, file sharing, and communication, enabling users to efficiently coordinate and execute projects across disciplines.

Fifty-eight words, and that’s it. No interviews, no research, no persona workshop. Viable came back with five audiences and a written definition for each one: Closing Agents, Manufacturing Managers, Operations Manager, Nonprofit Managers and Event Managers. The team didn’t add to the list, cut anything from it, or rewrite it. They took it to market as it was.

Building the painted door

Viable wrote a landing page and a set of ads for each audience, aimed at that audience instead of at a general visitor. The team tightened the copy, added a generic ad group on broad keywords to catch anyone the five named audiences missed, and turned it on.

The answer

The ads ran for eleven days. They pulled 5,895 impressions and 519 clicks, a click-through rate of 8.80 percent on cold search, for a product that didn’t exist yet. There wasn’t much to argue with. People were searching for this, and when they found it they stopped to read.

Paragraph had their answer in eleven days instead of six weeks, and the answer was yes.

Where Drill is now

Drill launched three and a half months after that decision, and it’s in market today. Through white-label integrations, roughly 2,000 people run their work through Drill’s automation inside another company’s product without ever seeing the name.