Todd Hammington on ‘making beautiful change’ for businesses with Chameleon Creator

Mānawatia a Matariki everyone!

I hope everyone is settling in for a well deserved long weekend and for those still hustling, I salute you.

As promised, here’s a bonus shot of Caffeine content to sip on as you relax in the form of a conversation with one of the coolest founders out there - Chameleon Creator’s Todd Hammington.

Have a great weekend, look after each other and I’ll see you Monday.

- Finn and Caffeine Team

When Todd Hammington realised his design team was spending nine weeks building every new e-learning module from scratch, he didn’t set out to found a SaaS company, he just wanted his evenings back.

Simply wanting to solve a lot of pain for himself and his team at a learning and development agency, he whipped up a framework which could ingest brand and design and output responsive e-learning fast.

Overnight jobs which could drag on for two months took a single week, and the metaphorical lightbulb lit up. Now that internal hack has morphed into Chameleon Creator, a 13-person, fully bootstrapped startup clearing more than a million dollars in annual recurring revenue.

Its client list stretches from ANZ Bank to TikTok, yet the product DNA hasn’t changed: making it ridiculously easy for non-technical people to build on-brand, interactive learning fast. And all guided under the North Star creating beautiful change within a business.

I had the pleasure of catching up with Todd for a conversation covering Chameleon's journey, from its unexpected origin to its rapid growth and unique approach to client acquisition and AI integration.

It was fascinating to hear how they’ve democratized learning design, what sets them apart from competitors, and the lessons other founders can learn from their bootstrapped success.

What’s the founding story for Chameleon?

Rewinding the clock back, I was the head of design at a learning and development agency. There were just no tools that allowed us to create learning design that we were proud of. So we'd actually build it bespoke every time, and that became quite a resource challenge. So I actually built a framework for our development team called Chameleon that we could ingest brand and design and create digital responsive e-learning on this sort of framework. So basically, long story short, we built it to solve a huge amount of pain for ourselves. And we went from a typical project taking eight to nine weeks, and we could do it in one week using this tool. The projects we were delivering, we were building content for what became our customers, really, because they'd see the output and go, 'Wow, we wanna edit this content ourselves, or we wanna use this product.' And that's when we decided to sort of spin out as our own business, and we had revenue from day one as well.

Simply put, what problem does Chameleon solve for businesses?

One of our first customers was ANZ Bank, and they actually had a big problem around their existing tools being so difficult to use. They were limited by the specialists within the organization. So we came in, and they found our tool extremely easy to use. They were creating designs they were really proud of, so they democratized that across hundreds of people to create content. It's almost like scaling what we've done for these larger organizations that completely democratize their learning design and content creation within their organization. Our North Star's always been creating 'beautiful change' within a business. Businesses haven't been able to do that because they've been hamstrung by tools so much. So we have now empowered a lot of people to create beautiful change within their organization, and that's been our North Star since day one.

What sets Chameleon apart from other learning design tools?

Our customers were so used to really bloated tools. It was really difficult for them to even create great learning in the first place. Where they use our tool, and it was really easy to use, like, anybody could use it. So that was a big one for us, is that ease of use because we understood we wanted multiple resources to use this tool, not just developers or really experienced learning providers. So that ease of use was definitely a huge part of our growth because more people used it.

The adoption was really big from day one. The content they were creating was better quality because they weren't under that time pressure they used to be under. And our customers, the learning design community, is quite tight, and they were huge champions for our product. And the fact that they could build their own brand identity into their learning for the first time was quite a paradigm shift for the learning community because they were constantly hamstrung by the design tools that those other products had. As Chris from Specsavers said, 'Our only limitation now is our imagination with Chameleon.' And that was, like, for me as a designer, that was a real sweet spot. There's that fun balance of not giving them every feature in the world, but putting some really good guide rails in place and allowing them to be creative within that space."

How does Chameleon's analytics feature enhance the learning process?

We've just released analytics, and that is a world first. It's the first really affordable analytics engine as well, where in the past, particularly in the L&D market, everything's so expensive. We have so much interesting data that comes out of the design tool, we can now scrape on an analytics engine where they can kind of harness that design process with real data and insights for the first time. So, and that can get really interesting user analytics for the first time without going through a huge third-party technical process.

They can unpack things like, 'Okay, where are a lot of people dropping off within this content?' Or, 'If they're answering the question as right or wrong, when they get it wrong, which one are they typing?' In learning, there's a lot of moving parts compared to a standard website. What makes it important for a business is, yes, you do get analytics, and you can refine your design based on that. But typically, L&D was looked at like a cost center. It's hard to explain the return on investment. That analytics can now provide them with a really good report on return on investment for the first time. You're starting to get a two-way communication with your team.

Can you elaborate on your customer acquisition strategy, particularly regarding large clients like TikTok?

We like there're some really cool events in our community, and one of them is the L&D Tech Fest. In Australia, it attracts a lot of international business there. So it's kind of the place where companies go to look at where innovation is happening in the L&D space. And, yeah, TikTok and Acciona, who we picked up from the same event, for them, it was like they've got an audience that's young, innovative, and that just perfectly aligned to that.

Our sales process got pretty hot afterwards, which is awesome. It's a bit a lot on on-site stands for us as we could just literally bring up content, design it, and then brand it on the spot. We'd put in their colors from their website, show them what learning would look like within one or two minutes in their brand. And, yeah, it's a pretty powerful way for us to actually show how rapidly you can create content in our tool. It's showing the value quickly and getting in front of someone. We will basically build their brand into our products within the first meeting to show how fast and easy it is, but also they can put themselves into the shoes that we're now presenting in because they're seeing their brand come alive in front of them. So that speed to impact is huge.

How do you approach the integration of AI into Chameleon?

One of the big mistakes our competitors have made is by just jumping on the AI bandwagon and saying, 'We're just gonna bolt on AI to fill a hole and change, and it's gonna solve all the world's problems.' For us, it's quite like, 'Okay, we've got our own ways of using AI to build code, to use, and to think about things as a team.' We simply use tools to increase what works and build our own human DNA on top of that. We think it needs to solve a big problem. It needs to add value. We're thinking about it as increasing the floor and pushing people off a blank canvas as quickly as possible with it, but then adding their own DNA on top of that design.

A good example is if there's a big retailer that has a warehouse out in the middle of Western Australia and they're building health and safety for their forklifts, there's no AI model that's gonna have compliance content for them that's ready to go that's specific to the business. We wanna avoid that kinda, like, 'do everything with AI and then try and re-engineer it to something that works.' We've actually kind of built a little bit of a product with it to go, 'Okay, how do we take the good stuff that people do in our tool, keep that, but use the AI to kind of get them there faster?'

So if they open up a project, how do we kinda put some good guide rails in place, like what type of learning do you wanna build? And who's your audience? And that's where AI can come in to kind of help create a plan for your content. It's that plan, that middle part that we're actually quite excited about because that's the thing that can build 80% of what you wanna complete, and you spend time on the stuff you truly enjoy doing after that. And that's when you can build on that institutional knowledge, that DNA within the business on top of that kind of canvas that you've created."

What is your advice for other founders, especially those in the tech or edtech space?

I would focus on cultivating the few, like, really get to understand your customers and what problems they have. And don't boil the ocean from day one. You don't have to stick to that kind of fundraise, grow at all costs, churn and burn. You can actually kinda take a more sophisticated approach to growing a business.