Case Study: XL.Today
Short form
A rapid-validation platform that let marketing teams publish multi-channel product campaigns in minutes, track results through a full sales funnel, and iterate before the week was out. The software worked. It raised the business valuation and unlocked a funding round. Then it showed Redgum something the build couldn’t fix.
The challenge
The founder came to Redgum after an experience that is more common than it should be: a previous developer had sold him servers, infrastructure and a large upfront system. None of it solved the actual problem. Redgum reviewed what existed and started again.
The original problem was precise. As a professional buyer — someone who travels the world sourcing premium consumer goods for major retailers — he had no way to know if a product would sell before committing to it at a trade show. He wanted to run six or seven rapid validation tests during a two-week buying trip: photograph a product, write a short description, push it live across social channels, and have real market response in hand before flying home to sign the purchase order.
The first developer had given him capability he couldn’t use. Redgum built what he actually needed.
What we built
The build happened in deliberate stages, each one unlocking the next.
The first was a simple screen to capture product details and publish to a couple of social channels — a proof of concept, fast and contained. Something to validate the core workflow before adding complexity.
From there: digital asset management. Premium consumer goods companies control their imagery carefully, with approved assets and usage rights attached. We built a workflow to pull those assets in correctly, keeping the platform’s relationship with major product suppliers clean and compliant.
Then more channels — Facebook, Instagram, and as many others as the landscape offered. Then self-contained landing pages, so a campaign could run and be tested without needing a developer to build and deploy a separate site. Clean analytics came with each one.
Then a conversion tracking layer: a token model that could follow a customer’s journey all the way through to purchase on the client’s own website. Views, clicks, conversions — the full funnel visible in one place, without rebuilding the client’s storefront.
Then multi-variant campaign management: distributing across multiple platforms and properties simultaneously, running parallel tests rather than one post at a time.
Midway through the build, the market shifted the target. The original buyer use case — one person testing products on a buying trip — turned out to be a smaller opportunity than what was sitting beside it: marketing teams inside product companies, managing existing product lines on a permanent cycle. They had the same validation problem, at higher volume and without the seasonal buying constraint. That pivot reshaped the digital asset management system, introduced a more structured team workflow, and changed the scale of what the platform needed to be.
The outcome
The platform worked. XL.Today raised funds and grew their business valuation on the strength of the early launches. A proof of concept had become a real product with a real market.
What it couldn’t do was reach that market. The company’s internal sales function was limited, and while the digital asset management integration brought some network-based leads through its own ecosystem, it wasn’t enough. The customers who would have committed to a full subscription wanted more features first. The funding round that would have paid for those features didn’t close. Pre-COVID, the project was shelved.
Redgum’s role was the build. The go-to-market was someone else’s responsibility, and when that piece didn’t come together, software that had genuinely worked sat unused.
That gap — between a technically successful platform and a business that couldn’t reach the people who needed it — is one of the experiences that changed how Redgum works. Building the right thing is not enough if nobody is positioned to sell it. Redgum’s current model, which includes commercialisation support alongside the build, came in part from projects like this one.
The contrast with the first developer is still the sharpest part of the story. They sold infrastructure. We built a product. Both projects ended without a running business — but for entirely different reasons, and only one of them is fixable next time.