Foundry originated from a problem I've experienced countless times over the years as a software architect and freelancer. Updating landing page after landing page, creating new ones that have similar look and feel and slightly altered text. Only to have to come back and edit every one of them whenever an asset changed or a testimonial needed to be removed.
It's not just landing pages. The real problem is personalization - or well, context matching perhaps? Whatever terminology we want to use, the goal is to tell the user "Hey, we know how you got here, here is some related information to keep you going on this journey." The ultimate goal is of course to sell or to get the lead to convert to the next stage in the lead funnel.
My goals were simple:
Make something that is easy to use, fast setup, and very limited hands-on attention needed
This is the antithesis of the current landscape. I refined the process a lot but ended up at a place where I think you get elements picked out and an experiment running in less time than it takes to brew a cup of coffee. Setting up a personalization fork is as easy as I could make it. Two steps from element to adding query string params and you're good to go.
It needs to get better at what it's doing and be an active part of your stack
This one is big when I thought about the current landscape and the staleness rut you can get in. Maintaining landing pages or even DTRs is tricky and not optimization friendly. We always create 3 options for your elements. Our bandit algorithm presents the best one the most and aggressively tests and gets rid of the losers. When it does, it gets presented with what is working for that element and what isn't, and it crafts new copy to test against the current winner. This way it never gets stale and your conversion rate is constantly optimizing.
It needs to be able to handle a lot of personalization without a development or design team
This one puts me out of a job, but I think this is a major pain point I've seen from my clients. "We need a brand new landing page for this ad we are wanting to run, how long until it's done?" Well, the answer is complicated and that's unfortunate for marketing teams. Foundry can personalize your site's pages to any audience without needing a developer or a designer. Add your new "fork" to an element, create the personalization rule, and tell the system what your ad copy is and you're done. You always approve copy variations before going live. You can edit them in place or reject them and tell the system why, and it gives you new variations based on your feedback.
The system was designed to be a hard pivot away from today's landscape. It may not be perfect, but we're going to keep working on it until it is - because the normal way of handling this problem just doesn't make sense anymore.
Thanks for reading.