We read your site first, then we ask
Getting started with ANVL used to be a six-step form. Now it is a conversation: ANVL reads your website, says what it took from it, and only asks about what the site cannot tell it — while your brand kit fills in as you answer.
The first thing ANVL needs from a new customer is their brand: colours, typefaces, logo, tone, who they talk to. Everything it makes afterwards is built from that. So the first few minutes decide a lot.
Until recently, those minutes were a form in six steps. Now they are a conversation.
What happens
You give ANVL your address. You can write it any way you like — we have a site, it's example.com is enough. ANVL reads the page and says out loud what it took: the typefaces, the colour roles, the logo. A line in the thread tells you when the reading is done and what came from it.
Then it asks only what the site could not answer, one question card at a time, each with suggested answers and room for your own words:
- Colours come as a palette taken from your site, with the question is that right? — a confirmation, not a blank.
- The feel of the brand is guessed from your own copy and confirmed in passing.
- Tone, audience, images and channels are asked about. The channel question starts with the channels your site already links to, and hashtags are suggested from your name, your town and your trade.
Where several answers apply — channels, audiences, what your images should show — you tick as many as fit and send them together. One answer can fill several parts of the kit at once.
At the top sits a small counter of how far the kit has come — 6 of 11. Tap it and you see every section of the brand kit: filled from the site, ticked off, or still to do. When everything a conversation can fill is filled, ANVL says so, sums up, and shows you the way to Home.
Measured against a real construction company's site: seven to ten turns to the end, with colours, tone, audience, image style and channels in the kit afterwards — checked in the database, not on the screen.
Why not just a better form
Because a form asks everything, and most of the answers are already on your website.
A form does not know what it is looking at. It asks for your primary colour even when the colour is on every page of your site, and it asks about tone with a row of adjectives nobody has ever described their own company with. You end up typing in what is already public, and guessing at the rest.
A conversation can do the reverse. Read first, take what is plainly there, and spend your attention only on what needs a person: whether the green on the site is really the green, who you are actually trying to reach, which channels matter. That is a shorter list, and a more interesting one.
It is also the right introduction. Everything else in ANVL — making a deck, a post, a newsletter — already starts as a conversation. Onboarding now runs on the same engine, with the same question cards, the same stop button, the same Try again when something fails, and the same bar and sheet on a phone. The first thing you do in ANVL is the thing you will keep doing.
What it will not do
It does not decide for you. ANVL will not set up the kit before you have answered; an early version could ask shall I set it up now? and then do it in the same breath, and that is gone. A question asked as a card is asked once — not again in the text above it.
It does not throw anything away. Skip, fill it in yourself leads to the form, with your address given and everything already read filled in. Nothing from the conversation is lost on the way, and a saved draft always wins.
It does not charge twice for the same page. A page read within the last day comes from the cache, without a new credit — for example when you move from the conversation to the form. And a link cannot start reading a new page unless you press for it.
It does not pretend a conversation can fill everything. Spacing, radii, shadows, the rules for your logo and your legal text are not things anyone answers well in a chat. They are under Brand kit, filled when you upload material there.
If you have brand guidelines as a document, you can also upload them in the conversation — a PDF or a Word file instead of, or as well as, a web address — and ANVL reads the identity from that.
If you are considering ANVL: this is the first thing you will see. Give it an address, answer a handful of questions that are actually about you, and you have a brand kit at the end — one you can read through and correct, with each section marked as taken from your site, answered by you, or still open.