The team behind it
The people who make HopBack, and use it on every project. Yes, those are the carrots.
HopBack is made by White Rabbit, a design agency in Los Angeles and Auckland. We built it for our own clients first. Then other agencies asked for it.
We have run White Rabbit for years. Brand, print, packaging, websites, video. Every one of those projects ends the same way: we send the work, and we wait for feedback.
For most of that time the feedback came back in email. Screenshots pasted into Word documents. A voice note. A reply to the wrong thread. A request to "make it pop". Then a quiet week, then a call to reconstruct what round two actually was, then a client who approved on the phone and did not remember doing so.
We tried the tools. Several. Each did part of the job. None did the parts we cared about: rounds that matched our quotes, a sign-off we could point to, and clients who would actually open the thing without being sent a login. The one we settled on then more than doubled its price overnight. So we built our own.
HopBack started as a tool for our clients: paste a URL or upload a design, send a link, let the client click on the thing they mean and type. Every comment sits on the element it is about. Rounds carry unresolved comments forward. Approval records a name and a time and locks the feedback.
We used it on every White Rabbit project for a year before we let anyone else near it. Our clients liked it. Other agencies saw it and asked. So here it is.
Everything in HopBack exists because a real client asked for it, or because we needed it on a Friday afternoon.
White Rabbit has always been a rabbit. It is on our door, our T-shirts and our email signatures, drawn by our own illustrators. The name goes back further than the agency: our founder's first pet was a white rabbit. (People ask whether it is Alice in Wonderland, or the Matrix. It is the rabbit. Though there is an episode of Lost called "White Rabbit", and we will not pretend that did not help.)
When we built a feedback tool, the name arrived on its own: you send the work out, and the feedback hops back.
The pins had to be carrots. A carrot pin is a small, friendly thing to drop on a page, and it is hard to be intimidated by one. Clients who would never "log a ticket" will happily drop a carrot on a headline. That is the whole design philosophy in one object: make the review feel like the easiest part of the project, because for the client it should be.
And there is confetti when a review is approved. Because getting to approved is a good moment, and who doesn't like confetti.
White Rabbit works from Los Angeles and Auckland, which means HopBack has someone awake in most of the world's working hours.
The people who make HopBack, and use it on every project. Yes, those are the carrots.