Yofi

Yofi started in a basement. Jordan Shamir was doing his MBA at the University of Michigan when he launched the company with his sister Alex and co-founder Andrew. They rebranded twice (Botnot, then Willow, then Yofi), tried Squarespace, Wix, Webflow on their own, and even hand-coded a version. Six or seven attempts at a website, and none of them landed.

The product was real. The clients were serious: UPS, eBay, Road Beauty. But the front door didn't match. The team cared about the walk more than the talk, but when enterprise buyers hit the homepage, the talk was all they saw. First impressions were costing them deals they should have been winning.

Jordan first met the Huck Finch team at a startup pitch night in Ann Arbor. He was spamming every local community he could find, and Huck Finch was co-sponsoring an event in the basement of an apartment building. That was the seed, planted long before Yofi needed an agency.

When the company grew past side-project stage and started selling into enterprise, the team ran a competitive process. They talked to several partners. What separated Huck Finch was care: the onboarding document, the design iteration, the questionnaires, the mind mapping. It wasn't just a website intake. It was a genuine inquiry into what the company was.

The engagement started as a website project, but the discovery work went deeper. Huck Finch's onboarding process forced the Yofi team to articulate things they'd been feeling but hadn't named: their narrative, their voice, the words that actually resonated.

That clarity didn't stay on the website. It bled into sales decks, into how they positioned against billion-dollar incumbents, into what they said in the room. The website became the artifact of a larger strategic conversation, not the other way around.

Critically, Huck Finch preserved the team's voice. Yofi is inquisitive, a little jokey, a little less serious. The work had to feel professional without flattening the personality. That's the line most agencies miss: they deliver polish and kill the soul.

Jordan said it plainly: look good, play good. Once the external presence matched the internal confidence, the team felt different walking into rooms. Not because the substance changed, but because the cover finally matched the book.

For an early-stage company selling against public incumbents, that matters more than founders want to admit. The homepage is the cover. The landing page is the first impression. And enterprise buyers absolutely judge it.

Yofi was acquired. The website wasn't the reason, but it was part of the story: a company that showed up at the level it believed, that could stand next to billion-dollar logos on a prospect's shortlist and look like it belonged there.

Jordan's advice to founders in the same position is just to do it, and to stop delaying. Yofi waited too long and it cost them. The website isn't vanity. It's the minimum viable professionalism that lets enterprise buyers take you seriously before the first call.