“If I were to do this all over again, I would hands down go with Circle Park. Their analytical approach, weekly updates, and direct communication made me feel as if they were an extension of our team.”
The Story
Shade needed a reliable growth function to increase downloads and user activity.
Shade is a private AI-powered file explorer for creatives. They build productivity platforms to supercharge creativity.
At its core, Shade is a visual indexing tool and search engine for videos, photos, audio, VFX, and 3D assets. Think of Shade as an all-knowing Finder replacement. They auto-tag, auto-describe, and auto-index the assets in your library so you know what you have and will never lose what you need.
Brandon Fan, CEO of Shade, first approached Circle Park when moving out of private beta to build and execute a repeatable growth strategy to acquire their first 10,000 users. He had built a preliminary creator program to produce content but needed help to measurably accelerate growth.
Furthermore, Shade hoped to diversify its customer profile across various visual creators - videographers, photographers, VFX artists, musicians, and animators.
The Circle Park team was brought on board to build repeatable growth across paid social and creator partnerships.
The Strategy
Circle Park accelerated creator partnerships and content development while building a repeatable growth system.
The team began with a complete audit of their existing creator program and partnership strategy. Existing partners did not reflect Shade’s ambition to build scalable growth, so Circle Park sunsetted the program and repositioned efforts for large-scale partnerships with aspirational creators and tutorial-based educators.
Simultaneously, the Circle Park team worked with their creative network to build a consistent flow of assets. The team custom-built briefs to highlight key messaging, user segmentation, and visual design. The core focus was to create multi-variant assets for rapid paid testing and scaling.
Lastly, all assets - from performance creative to paid partnerships - met in the ads manager. Circle Park architected performance metrics, including CTR, CPC, and CPA.
The Success
Circle Park’s growth system drove 4x user growth in 90 days.
During the partnership, Circle Park tested multiple partnerships, formats, content styles, and placements to evaluate what worked best for performance.
In the first 90 days of work, Shade saw a 4x increase in users, 506% increase in desktop user activity, and a 53.6% decrease in average CPA costs.
Circle Park continues to proudly scale Shade as their trusted growth partner.
