At Monday Creations, we embrace creativity to enhance digital experiences for your customers. We are a creative agency focused on beautiful design, ease of use, and brand strategy. We create these experiences on mediums ranging from websites, digital marketing, brand imaging, and digital products.
Business Description:
BUSINESS MODEL OVERVIEW:
Let’s get down to business. Monday Creations offers a variety of creative services for small-medium sized service businesses. Our services include website creation, digital marketing, brand imaging, and digital product development. In short, we create websites, craft online brands, market brands online through mediums such as social media and SEO, create apps, kiosks, and many other digital devices. We also offer website hosting, website retainer fees, and educational videos for maintaining websites.
HOW ARE WE UNIQUE?
We were founded with the idea that we wanted to be a different kind of company. With this in mind, we took the steps to identify several key points of differentiation, all of which we will describe below.
Our first point of differentiation is what we deem ‘digital experiences’. There are hundreds of web design, branding, and marketing firms in Iowa. However, most of them are selling services to their clients. We take a different approach. We are selling ‘digital experiences’ for our client’s customers to experience firsthand. No matter what digital medium we approach, we make sure to keep the customer in mind, focusing on ease of use, clean design, and vital information.
HOW DO WE MAKE MONEY?:
We initially started our company with the idea that we wanted to help as many small businesses with their digital presence as possible. There was a definite shortage in this market. However, we quickly realized that this market doesn’t have the capital that we as a company required to stay afloat. So, we have shifted to a focus on small to medium sized service businesses that are lacking on the digital side of things. However, we have kept our heart with small ma and pa stores by finding one small business per month in which we offer a highly discounted rate for our services. We do this because we believe small businesses are crucial to community and economic development in many small towns and cities.
Building off that idea, we have really focused on our community. Throughout the process of starting our business, the community has always been there to support us in many ways. It is this support that has caused us to value the idea of giving back to the community. It has become a core principle for us at Monday Creations. We give back by being involved in the startup and small businesses community. We have planned several events such as Startup Weekend Cedar Falls and Cedar Valley Open Coffee, and have assisted with the Cedar Valley 1 Million Cups, BarCamp, and are in the beginning stages of creating a forum on creativity. All of these events are completely voluntary and are based around helping our community launch businesses. This is what we have done, but there are plans for much more in the future.
The last point of differentiation is the idea of keeping our clients brands in mind. Every day we see websites and social media created by an Iowa agency that aren’t done well, don’t communicate who the company is, and lack fundamental branding. We do just the opposite. We start out our partnership with clients by sitting down and interviewing them – making sure to record everything. We look into why they started the business, their personal and business values, and then dive into what the business does and how they are different. Ultimately, through this interview we search for the passion behind the business. We then head into our creative process in which we connect those value and passion with real world business objectives. It is this that causes us to effectively communicate a client’s brand, while still hitting business goals, through different digital mediums.
COMPETITION:
It is very hard to determine our competition at this point. Considering that we do business all around the Midwest, it is hard to nail down a main competitor. However, we can say that mid level digital marketing and branding agencies in the Midwest offer similar services to similar markets.
Reason for Entering:
Our reasons for applying for Dream Big Grow Here are simple. Our company has a dream to live, grow, work, and create jobs in Iowa. We believe that Iowa is the best state in the U.S. and we want to continue making it an amazing place to live and work. As stated in the video, it has been quite a journey for us. Starting 1 year ago was rough, and it took a long time to gain credibility. That means we were doing projects for almost no money. Well, that is finally catching up to us. While we do have a lot of work coming in to our business, we lack the financial means to purchase equipment and hire employees to keep up with the current demand. We need to purchase additional software, computers, and we’re looking to hire on 2 employees by June. The Dream Big Grow Here money would assist us in “catching up” from the start and give us a great opportunity toward establishing a long-lasting company in the Cedar Valley. Your consideration in the Dream Big Grow Here would be very much appreciated. The Monday Creations team thanks you for the opportunity!