Pod Insights Lenny's Podcast The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, First Round Capital) About this episode What makes a great brand? After working at Google and Square, Arielle Jackson has spent the past eight years consulting startups on how to create powerful messaging that works. In this jam-packed episode, she shares how to pick a winning name for your company, create a brand purpose that excites your team and customers, and position your company and its products for success. You don’t want to miss this one!
Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-art-of-building-legendary-brands
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Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:
• Flatfile: https://www.flatfile.com/lenny
• Unit: https://unit.co/lenny
• Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lenny
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Where to find Arielle Jackson:
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/hiiamarielle
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ariellerjackson/
• Maven: https://maven.com/arielle/startupbrandstrategy
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Where to find Lenny:
• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/
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Referenced:
• Positioning Your Startup Is Vital—Here’s How to Nail It: https://review.firstround.com/Positioning-Your-Startup-is-Vital-Heres-How-to-Do-It-Right
• Three Moves Every Startup Founder Must Make to Build a Brand That Matters: https://review.firstround.com/three-moves-every-startup-founder-must-make-to-build-a-brand-that-matters
• What I Learned from Developing Branding for Airbnb, Dropbox, and Thumbtack: https://review.firstround.com/what-i-learned-from-developing-branding-for-airbnb-dropbox-and-thumbtack
• Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: https://www.amazon.com/Positioning-Battle-Your-Al-Ries/dp/0071373586
• Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life: https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Curious-Science-Creating-Business/dp/006238841X
• The Vanishing Half: https://britbennett.com/the-vanishing-half
• The Mothers: https://britbennett.com/the-mothers
• Nik Sharma’s weekly newsletter: https://www.nik.co/subscribe
• How I Built This: https://www.npr.org/series/490248027/how-i-built-this
• In Depth: https://review.firstround.com/podcast
• Unseen Unknown: https://unseen-unknown.simplecast.com/
• Luca: https://movies.disney.com/luca
• Encanto: https://movies.disney.com/encanto
• Old Enough!: https://www.netflix.com/title/81506279
• The Sociology of Business with Ana Andjelic: https://andjelicaaa.substack.com
• David Ogilvy: https://www.oneclub.org/hall-of-fame/-bio/david-ogilvy
• Rory Sutherland: https://twitter.com/rorysutherland
• Seth Godin: https://seths.blog/
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In this episode, we cover:
[00:00] About our guest Arielle Jackson
[04:04] From making jewelry as a side hustle to launching products for Square: Arielle’s background
[12:32] What makes a good name for a product or a startup
[19:17] How to come up with a great name
[24:59] How to run a naming brainstorm for the best results
[31:09] Bad names and naming mistakes
[34:17] Arielle’s brand development framework and when founders should implement it
[36:02] How do you know when brand development is completed?
[41:17] How long should branding take?
[42:42] How to build a brand purpose that ignites excitement
[48:51] Specific tactics for building your brand purpose
[51:12] How to master your positioning
[55:22] Why it’s important to stay niche when you’re mastering your positioning
[59:15] The process of positioning and Arielle’s bar test
[1:02:38] How to build a brand personality using the five big brand descriptions
[1:07:39] Where to put brand and product positioning documents so they’ll actually get used
[1:09:14] How startups can get PR
[1:14:49] When should you hire a marketer?
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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquires about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected] .
Transcript 16,280 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 So over time, a word can come to mean something that is beyond what that actual word means. Like Disney means magic today, you know, Volvo means safety. Those names are not good. Like if I just put it in a spreadsheet or one of those lists, no one would pick it. So that's kind of what I mean, that like the name is just part of the overall marketing, the overall brand and a bad name with a really great company with great company strategy, great marketing is going to be great over time. And a good name is just going to help you, but I don't think a bad name is going to kill a good company.
0:41 Lenny Rachitsky? Ariel Jackson spent nine years at Google where she helped grow Gmail in its early days, taking it from just a side project to a product that is now used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. Then she went on to Square where she was one of the first marketers and helped launch and scale the growth of Square Reader. She's also worked with over 100 early-stage companies, helping them nail their brand and marketing efforts, including Patreon, Loom, Front, Eero, Maven, Sprig, just to name a few. These days, she teaches a super popular course on startup brand strategy, and she's a marketer in residence at First Round Capital. In our chat, we cover primarily three things. Naming strategies for your startup or your product.
1:26 Lenny Rachitsky? A framework for developing your brand that includes your purpose, your positioning and your personality. And also getting PR for your startup. I can't wait for you to listen to this conversation with Ariel. And so with that, I bring you Ariel Jackson. Hey, Ashley, Head of Marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?
1:49 Speaker 00 At least 40%.
1:50 Lenny Rachitsky? And how many of them screw that up? And what happens when they do?
1:53 Speaker 00 Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding.
2:02 Speaker 02 So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chock full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.
2:13 Lenny Rachitsky? I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both signup conversion and increasing long-term retention. Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important.
2:27 Speaker 02 Totally. It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify, and Zora are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile. It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.
2:44 Lenny Rachitsky? If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/leni.
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3:58 Lenny Rachitsky? Welcome to the podcast, Ariel.
4:00 Speaker 00 Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.
4:03 Lenny Rachitsky? It's absolutely my pleasure. I've read so much of your writing online. You've done a lot of writing, which I found really helpful. And so I'm really jazzed to be digging into all kinds of really good stuff. Before we get into some of the meat, just a couple of questions that I had in my mind. You've worked with so many amazing companies, Google, Square, Loom, Patreon, Franz, so many others. I'm like, I don't want to keep going. What's been either your favorite or most unusual project that you've worked on?
4:35 Speaker 00 Gosh, it's like asking me to choose like my favorite son. I'm like, gosh, I can't really like pick one.
4:40 Lenny Rachitsky? That'll be the next question.
4:41 Speaker 00 I would probably say that my favorite project, and this is because I get reminded of it like on a daily basis, was working at on the Square stand at Square. It was the first time I ever worked on hardware and our joint square was like 140 people. We had no marketing function. We had a couple of marketing people. We had no product managers and the hardware team was running the show on launching this new product that was supposed to get us upmarket into brick and mortar. And anyway, I was running like event marketing at the time and giving away a bunch of those readers that you stick into a phone for free and having a lot of like, you know, small merchants use us. I like volunteered to run the launch of this product like as a product marketer for the first time. It was just so fun, like going, doing everything from like positioning it,
5:24 Speaker 00 figuring out how we're going to talk about this beautiful new piece of hardware that would turn your iPad into a real point of sale. We had people fly around the country and get like cool coffee shops and brick and mortar businesses seeded it, seeding it so that they would all use it. We had, I think, 15 metro areas covered with like the coolest coffee shops and donut shops and everything at launch. And, you know, there was a lot of fake it till you make it. I was like negotiating a deal with Best Buy and the Apple Store. I'd never done anything like that before. Designing packaging was really awesome. There was just so much to it, like launching a physical product. And at the time, it was at like a pretty high price point for a company that had always had like one free product and helping that company go upmarket. And I remember I was
6:09 Speaker 00 Thirty something weeks pregnant when we launched.
6:12 Lenny Rachitsky? Oh, my God.
6:12 Speaker 00 We got all the Blue Bottle stores to use it and we had this launch event where Jack, our head of hardware, Jesse, unveiled this product at the Blue Bottle in Mint Plaza. I was like, super pregnant and super proud and I still, I still get kind of excited every time I pay on one of those, which is all the time.
6:30 Lenny Rachitsky? Super pregnant and super proud. I love it. And that product, that was like the POS stand, that like the iPad thing that you kind of swivel and sign.
6:39 Speaker 00 Yeah, and there's been new versions of it since, you know, there's a contactless version of it and there's one with an integrated screen that I think is Android-based, which is, you know, you don't have to have an iPad, but that product's still around. Like, I still pay on that original Square stand all the time. I drink a lot of coffee, like those independent coffee shops around LA, so they're all still using it.
6:59 Lenny Rachitsky? If you recall, what was kind of the, we're going to talk about positioning a bunch, but while we're on the topic, what was the positioning of that product while we're talking about it?
7:07 Speaker 00 Yeah, so at the time, Square was mostly used by like farmer's market vendors and event vendors. Like, I made jewelry in a past life and that's how I got to Square, was like being at one of those vendors. And the positioning was really that it was for brick and mortar businesses, particularly quick serve coffee, you know, donuts, sandwich shops, that kind of quick serve brick and mortars. And it was up against your ugly, old point of sale, you know, your cash register, effectively. That was our foil. And the benefit was turn your iPad into a point of sale.
7:48 Speaker 00 And the differentiator was about one unified experience that, you know, you can do, you can do everything you can on your cash register and more and you'd be proud to have it out on your counter.
8:00 Lenny Rachitsky? So you said that you were creating jewelry and that's how you got into Square to work on this product? I need to hear more about that.
8:08 Speaker 00 Yeah, sure. So I was working at Google before Square and I'd always had this hobby of making jewelry. And I used to sell it, my jewelry, in a few different like boutiques around San Francisco and LA. It was like a very small side hustle, but it was like my creative outlet. And I sold at craft fairs around like Hanukkah, Christmas time.
8:30 Speaker 00 So I used to sell and just take cash. And then I got a Square reader and I sold at a craft fair that year. And it was awesome. Like that Square reader, it helped people buy more. It helped me sort of look cool. It was just really great to accept credit cards. I'd never done it before. I used to take PayPal invoices and like be on my computer and like send someone an invoice and they'd get it. It was painful. All the reasons that people use Square, you know, I experienced it. And two people I knew from Google, Megan Quinn and Kyle Zink, had gone to Square from Google. And so after I had that experience, I think I sent them both an email just being like, this thing's fucking awesome. You know, I make jewelry. It was great.
9:15 Speaker 00 I sold, you know, I think it was like 50% more than I did last year because I accepted credit cards. And I can't remember which of them wrote back first, but they were like, come interview. And so that was basically how I ended up at Square.
9:27 Lenny Rachitsky? Wow. I bet that helped you a lot through the interview. Actual personal experience.
9:32 Speaker 00 Having been a merchant, I think it helped me understand the small merchant that initially we were marketing to.
9:38 Lenny Rachitsky? And so today you are marketing expert at, in residence at First Round Capital. I was going to ask, what, what does that mean? And what is it that you do day to day these days?
9:51 Speaker 00 Sure. So after I left Square, I went to a tiny startup that was seven people. They were funded by First Round and I helped them with everything that a tiny startup that's trying to grow needs.
10:04 Lenny Rachitsky? What startup was that?
10:06 Speaker 00 It was called Cover. They were acquired by Twitter. It was an Android app that could get you the right apps at the right time, based on where you were by changing the lock screen on your phone. And so that, that company and that experience of working at this tiny startup that was seven people, I really liked it. And then they got acquired by Twitter, but I had just left Square. So I decided not to join Twitter with the rest of the team. And instead I just decided I was going to help a bunch of other small startups. And I emailed a few friends who, you know, from past lives who had small startups was like, hey, I'm not going to Twitter with the rest of the team. You do need marketing help and every single person wrote back and said, yes. And that's basically how I started consulting. I guess it was about eight or nine years ago.
10:51 Speaker 00 At the same time, First Round had reached out and said, hey, who did you use for marketing comms for cover? And I got connected with Brett from First Round and he's like, would you help our companies? And we did a three month project for one day a week nine years ago. And I'm still there. I work half time at First Round. So I do everything I do for other companies, but for First Round companies on First Round's dime. So the way it works is if you're funded by First Round. And as part of your onboarding, we offer a lot of, you know, value add services and I'm one of them. And those services can be everything from, we have someone who's really good at, you know, compensation and HR stuff. And we have someone who will help you with pricing and I'll help you with marketing.
11:37 Speaker 00 And what that means when you're a seed stage startup is everything from naming to positioning, to developing a brand identity, a website and your initial launch and eventually hiring a marketer. So that's sort of the bread and butter. That's what I like working on anyway. So it's a good fit because we invest in a lot of seed stage companies at First Round. I get to help almost all of them.
11:58 Lenny Rachitsky? That's an excellent segue to what I wanted to get to next. What I want to do in our chat is cover three broad topics, things that I know are very near and dear to your heart. Naming for products and startups, your brand development framework and how to hire marketers. Does that sound good?
12:14 Speaker 00 Awesome. That's what I like to talk about. So yeah, let's do it.
12:18 Lenny Rachitsky? Let's do it. Surprise, surprise. Okay. So with naming, I've actually heard from a few founders that you were really helpful to them in naming their startups. Folks that have maybe been on this podcast that will go unnamed. So for founders trying to come up with a name for their company or their product, two questions, what makes a good name for a product or startup? And then just like, how do you come up with a great name?
12:44 Speaker 00 I love naming. I think I've named just over 30 companies at this point. And actually, when I mentioned how I got into consulting, when I emailed some friends and, you know, asked them if they needed marketing help, I think I'm allowed to talk about this one. So one of those companies was some friends from Google, Adrian and Carl. They had left Google, gone to Facebook and then started a company. It's now called CSO. It's an ed tech company. That was the first company I named post-Google, Square, all of that.
13:09 Lenny Rachitsky? It's an awesome name.
13:10 Speaker 00 It is an awesome name and I'll use it as an example. So CSO is a ed tech company. They had a really bad name before that and we did this whole naming process and ended with that name. And why I think that's a good name is when I say it's an ed, when I say CSO, you don't really know what it is. But when I tell you, oh, it's this ed tech company and it's an iPad app and it helps you, you know, the, the work that elementary school students do go between the teacher, the parents and the student. And you're like, oh, well, CSO makes sense for elementary school. It's something that goes back and forth. It has that sort of nostalgic feel and it makes sense that it's an ed tech company. And I personally tend to like those kinds of names that are suggestive or evocative,
13:54 Speaker 00 where when I tell you what the company does, you're like, oh, that makes sense. But it's not that what the name is tells you exactly what the company does. So that's an example, I think, of a, of a good name. Like, I don't know, during COVID and my son's school was closed, my older son's school was closed and they all used CSO. And I got to tell my son, you know, oh, that's my friend's company. And we named it, you know, back in the day. And he was like, oh, that's cool. That name makes sense. That's what, that's the reaction you want. It also has a little bit of emotion to it. It has some nostalgia. It's fun to say, it's short, it's memorable. I think all of those things make a good name. Another, another company that has a good name that you and I have both worked with is Maven.
14:39 Speaker 00 So they're a first round company. Goggan has talked about this publicly. We named that company together. Maven is a Yiddish word that means one who understands. And it means specifically one who understands because they've done something. They've acquired the skills or knowledge over time. And I just think that's such a cool name for a platform that allows, you know, ex-operators or current operators to teach their skills to other people through cohort-based classes. Like, you want to be a maven, instructors are mavens. It's short, it's easy to say. When I tell you what that company does, that name makes perfect sense. So I tend to like those kinds of names myself. But I also, I don't know, I like, I like other
15:21 Speaker 00 kinds of names for other kinds of products, too. I think it really comes down to what is your product, what is your company, what is the name trying to achieve, and really getting clear with those criteria. So we can talk about the criteria that always apply, the criteria you might add, and a process to get there.
15:37 Lenny Rachitsky? That sounds great. Yeah, I'm really curious about a process. If one exists, that'd be really cool. So another question in my mind is just like, some names are just like nonsense, words like Yahoo and, I don't know, Google, I guess. What's your take on, on that as a name, that approach?
15:51 Speaker 00 Yeah, so words like that, that are empty vessels, they really don't mean anything. They actually, if you think about the name Yahoo, it's actually like really silly. It's like yahoo, I always hear it like that, you know? Google has a meaning for people in the know with the one followed by as many zeros. It's like a big number, and it's a misspelling of that. So that one's a little less silly to me than Yahoo. My take on empty vessel names is they can be really memorable, and they can be evocative of the emotion, but you have to do a lot more work, marketing work over time to make it mean something. So if I say Yahoo today, like, we know it's that search engine we used before we all switched to Google, and we have, you know, the purple color in our head, and we think
16:34 Speaker 00 about what it meant at the time that we might have used it. But it took a lot of marketing dollars and a lot of time for that word to mean that. So they're, they're doable. I worked on a company, Eero, that has kind of what is almost an empty vessel name. Eero is for Eero Saranen, who was a designer.
16:55 Speaker 00 He did like these really beautiful buildings, architectural buildings, and then also some tables, like you can get a Saran and table at Design Within Reach. But that name, nobody knows that unless you're in the design community. And so that name is effectively an empty vessel. And they had to spend a lot and be consistent about making that name mean a Wi-Fi system.
17:17 Lenny Rachitsky? I want to get to the process, but another question is, why is it important for the name to kind of connect to the company and what they do? Is that just like, it feels nice to people? Or is there some kind of a bigger reason?
17:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, so it doesn't have to. And in examples like Iro and Yahoo, it doesn't. Even if you think about like Apple, it doesn't. Apple has nothing to do with Apple Computers. It's a word we all know. There's a lot of words where there's no meaning behind it. If there is a meaning behind your name, your name is doing a little bit more of your marketing work for you. So if your name is Internet Explorer, R.I.P., I know exactly what you do. If your name is Chrome and you're a designer on the web, you kind of might be like, oh, that makes sense. That's the area around the browsing window. If your name is Firefox, I have no idea what you did. You just took two words and put them together and made something up.
18:12 Speaker 00 And now you have to spend and you have to be consistent over time in making that word mean something for people. But all three of those browsers were successful at a time, and I don't think the name had anything to do with Internet Explorer's demise.
18:25 Lenny Rachitsky? Got it. So it's kind of like, ideally, you can find an easy mode. If that doesn't work, then you go hard mode, where you come up with your empty vessel name, and then you just have to do a lot of work.
18:33 Speaker 00 That's my personal preference.
18:35 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, cool. That makes sense.
18:36 Speaker 00 I mean, my personal preference is if you think about, there's descriptive names, the Internet Explorer, there's suggestive names like Chrome, then there's evocative names, which I would say like seesaw and Maven fit into there, where they're like in between suggestive and evocative. And then there's empty vessel names or fanciful names. There's a spectrum. And when you do your brainstorm, and we can talk about like this in the process, you want to think across all of them, but you might have in your naming brief, we want a suggestive name, or we want a descriptive name. You might go into it with that. And so, you know, there's times and places for all of those names across the spectrum. My personal bias is I tend to like suggestive names.
19:16 Lenny Rachitsky? Makes sense. Okay, let's get into it. What should, what should teams do when they're trying to name some?
19:22 Speaker 00 Yeah. So the first thing is to do your product positioning. I really believe that positioning dictates so much of your marketing and should always be the first thing you do. I had a, a student in my last class that I taught through Maven. I teach a class on brand strategy. And he was, I think, a second or third time founder who had never taken a class on brand strategy. He worked really hard. He was awesome. Anyway, in the, at the end of the class, you know, kind of do this closing thing and he goes, "I'll never write a line of code without doing positioning first." And that was like music to my ears, you know, that, that's like, I think positioning comes first. But in any case, um, you do that first and we'll talk about that in a little bit.
20:03 Speaker 00 And then you write a naming brief and it's really simple. It's like, what are you naming? Are you naming a company? Are you naming the product? Are you naming both? Usually if you're an early stage company, you're, you're naming both and they're going to have one name because you don't want people to have to remember two things. What do you want the name to communicate? So in that example of like Seesaw, we wanted it to communicate, you know, young childhood. In the example of ERO, we wanted it to communicate design, being design forward. It can be whatever you want it to communicate. What do you want to avoid? You know, we, we, we don't want it to sound like this competitor or we hate this word. Or it needs, you know, whatever you want to avoid. What are the names of competitive and related products?
20:47 Speaker 00 And then are there other considerations? Like I worked with a company, another first round company that was operating in China and one of the considerations was this has to be pronounceable for a native Chinese speaker. Like that's a very valid additional consideration. And then there are seven criteria for names that always apply, in my opinion. And you could add additional ones, like that Chinese speaking one would be an additional one. The seven are trademark, which is kind of obvious, like can you use this? Are you violating someone else's trademark? And the second step with trademark is do you need to proactively protect the name? Domain availability. So everyone gets hung up on getting a dot com, like Maven.com, GotMaven.com. It was a large, an arduous process that Goggan wrote about on Twitter.
21:33 Speaker 00 But these days, like you don't necessarily need the dot com. Square operated on Square up for a very, very long time. Lots of companies are operating on variants of a dot com. So, uh, domain availability, distinctiveness, is it memorable? Is it sound like someone else's name? That's, I think, one of the most important ones. Just is it different and distinctive? Is it timeless? So there's a lot of naming trends. Like, if you tell me optimally, I could tell you, like, what year was the company formed? When it ends in LY? If you tell me a word like Flickr, I can tell you what year it was because that was the naming trend to remove vowels.
22:16 Speaker 00 So I generally stay away from naming trends because I just, I, I want your company name not to sound dated in 10 or 20 years. The last one is, it's kind of related to that, what we talked about in the brief. What do you want the name to communicate? Which is, um, is the name reflective of your key messaging? Or does it somehow suggest an emotion or feeling that you're trying to convey? And then, sound and ease of pronunciation? Like, is it fun to say? Is it easy to say? Is, how is it to spell? We almost named a first round company a while ago, Lattice, which is now a different company that's doing quite well.
22:56 Speaker 00 But, uh, we didn't name it that because this was a company that was, like, B2B sales was going to be like their main channel. So there are going to be like people on the phone being like, hey, I'm calling from Lattice. And we went through this exercise and we're like, lettuce? It's not so easy to say and spell. So we actually didn't name the company that and went with something else. But, uh, there's a company now doing quite well.
23:16 Lenny Rachitsky? You think that was the right move?
23:17 Speaker 00 I don't know. I always say a good name is only going to help you, but a bad name won't hurt a good company. So I don't really feel.
23:25 Lenny Rachitsky? Interesting. Good to know. Yeah, keep going.
23:27 Speaker 00 And then the last one, the last one, uh, last two are appearance. So there are some names that just like lend themselves really nicely to visual design and, you know.
23:38 Speaker 00 They have to do with like how tall the letters are and is there symmetry? And like, if you give this to designers, making a logo just like so awesome and cool and fun. And then length. So a lot of people want, you know, they want a name like Square and Stripe and these one syllable names. But a two syllable or even a three syllable name can often be more memorable.
23:57 Lenny Rachitsky? Lenny's Newsletter.com.
24:00 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. Well, so you got the Lenny part with the two, uh, two syllables is generally like a nice sweet spot.
24:07 Lenny Rachitsky? Sweet. Have you put out a template or anything that folks can find to do this? Or should they kind of listen here and take notes?
24:15 Speaker 00 Yeah, there's an article on the first round review called positioning. Positioning your startup is vital. Here's how to nail it. And that all those criteria and like how to do naming is, is actually in that article.
24:27 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. We'll put that in, in our little show notes. And then as you go through this, is this like a binary thing? Or you kind of like rate each of these categories like one to five?
24:36 Speaker 00 Yeah. So the way I do it is I apply the criteria after we do the brainstorm. And then we do like red, yellow, green on each of those criteria, just to weed out ones that are not doing well on any of this. And then you add your own criteria. So the brain, the next step's the brainstorm. I was kind of going to go fast through this.
24:55 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, I was going to ask you about the brainstorm. I'm excited to hear this.
24:57 Speaker 00 Yeah. So the way, the way that I run the naming process is I like to first do positioning. And then I set up an hour with the founders and me, and ideally a couple of other people who are interested but disinterested. So like I'll bring a writer from the first round team. Or the founder has a friend who's a linguist, or the founder has a friend who speaks four languages. Like, we like those kind of people to be in, in it if possible. And it's generally like five to seven people in a brainstorm. And the idea is we spend one hour, I set it up beforehand and we try to come up with like hundreds and hundreds of bad ideas. And a couple decent ones that are worth exploring more. And the brainstorm is two parts. The first part is based on words in your positioning statement.
25:39 Speaker 00 So we take all the meaningful words out of your positioning statement is like the warm up. And we run synonyms, antonyms, free associations, other languages, whatever we can do off of those words. And so if your words in your positioning statement are related to what that you do, which they very well should be. That's a great way to just come up with like hundreds of words really quickly. And then the second step is a thematic brainstorm. So I picked between like seven and 10 themes. You can think of them like Jeopardy themes. So it's like, um, I don't know, like, uh, okay, so there was like an AI. Yeah, yeah, it was like an AI tool for strawberry picking. And, um, the themes would be like the history of strawberry farming or like botany 101. Like we'd things, things that are related.
26:23 Speaker 00 If you could do like last names of famous farmers, you know, that's the thing about like, how did Tesla get their name? They probably did like last names of people related to electricity, you know, and that's such a great name. But so like thematic brainstorm and then that's usually a little more fruitful. And we do the same thing, like free association, all that. I spend some time afterwards on Wikipedia and the internet and like actually finding words, words. Also love the library. Check out books sometimes and just like read books on the topic and just write down the interesting words that come up. And anyway, so then I give them back a shortlist. The shortlist is around 10 to 25 concepts that are ideas that are worth looking at further. And we from there narrow it down based on the criteria and the red, yellow, green.
27:07 Speaker 00 We come up with like three to five. Don't come up with one because you might not get it for trademark. And it's really sad when you get really attached to one and then you can't use it. So yeah, three to five top contenders and then you go through a trademark process, uh, domain and kind of go from there.
27:23 Lenny Rachitsky? That was amazing. If you're doing a s- a startup name versus a product, is the process any different or is it basically the same?
27:29 Speaker 00 No, same. The only difference is if you have a lot of equity in your company name, like Square is a good example, like Square had a lot of equity. Google is a perfect example. A lot of equity in the company name. You often don't want to name your products something really creative and different because you actually want the, the equity in the master brand to come through. So if you think about Square's names, I mean, they, they have other ones, like when they diverge from the Square brand, like cash or, you know, the, the, when they want something new or like Google, when they came out with Android and they wanted to diverge from the master brand. But think about all the products. It's like Square Register, Square Stand, Square App, you know, Google Maps.
28:12 Speaker 00 You know, they're like really boring and it's because of the equity is in the product, in the company name and the product name can actually be boring and descriptive.
28:20 Lenny Rachitsky? That makes sense. I want to come back to a point you made that a great name will help a startup and a bad name is not going to hurt you, or I forget the word you used. I love to hear that because that's, that's really interesting.
28:33 Speaker 00 Yeah. So if your company has a great name and the name is remarkable, like people will be like, oh, that's a great name, or it just makes sense. Like in the case of C-Sol, like that's a good name for that company. That good name is just going to help people talk about it. It's going to spread word of mouth. People are going to like to talk about the company. If you think about, there's a lot of companies with bad names that we use all the time, or even quite boring names that we now love. So if you think about like Disney, Walt Disney's last name, it didn't mean anything, but over time, that's such a good company and it got imbued with all this meaning and now it stands for magic and stands for so much. It was just the dude's last name, you know? So over time, a word can come to mean something
29:18 Speaker 00 that is beyond what that actual word means. Like Disney means magic today, you know? Volvo means safety. Those names are not good. Like if I just put it in a spreadsheet or one of those lists, no one would pick it. So that's kind of what I mean, that like the name is just part of the overall marketing, the overall brand, and a bad name with a really great company with great company strategy, great marketing is going to be great over time. And a good name is just going to help you, but I don't think a bad name is going to kill a good company.
29:51 Lenny Rachitsky? So interesting. So basically your goal is to help find a name that will help. Worst case, you're going to be okay if your product is awesome.
29:58 Speaker 00 I think so. Yeah. I mean, it, it also takes a little of the pressure off, to be honest. You know, like everyone wants to find that perfect name. If you actually think about, this happens a lot. Like you give someone a list of 10 names or 15 names and they're just cells in a spreadsheet these days. Like we're doing most of this virtually. You give people name like that and it's like you have to imagine what it could be. You think about Apple or Disney or Nike or Volvo or any Lego, any of these brands, you know, in a cell spreadsheet in plain aerial in 10 point, like they're just okay, like they're, you know, you have to grow them over time. He's here about like, um, I think Phil Knight with Nike,
30:42 Speaker 00 when he was given that name, like as a, as an option, he was like, it's okay. Yeah, I'll sleep on it. Such a great name, you know?
30:50 Lenny Rachitsky? This makes me think about my start it back in the day. It was called Local Mind. And we went through an exercise similar to this, not nearly as in-depth and well-run. But I remember our designer was the person that helped us nail the name. He's just like, oh, I could do so much with this name. Let's just see where this one can go. Is that something you find?
31:08 Speaker 00 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely been bad names. Like I helped a company rebrand recently that they had a bad name. Like it just looked dated. It didn't fit any of those. It wasn't distinctive. It wasn't timeless. It had one of those like naming trends. Those are not good. Like you want to avoid those. But if you come up with something that is like, pretty good and you can make up something beautiful out of it and it fits your company, it does some of the marketing work for you. And people like to say it and ideally it's memorable and it has some emotion to it. Like go, go for it.
31:39 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. One last question around naming. What's a, what's a common mistake that people make going through this process, coming up with a name?
31:46 Speaker 00 Yeah. A really funny one is if you have like a code name for your product or at first round, a lot of the companies we invest in, they, they, they raise their seed round with one name.
31:57 Speaker 00 They may or may not be attached to it. But then, you know, they work with me and I'm like, yeah, your name's not that good and here's why we should probably change it. Or they say, we can't use this name. We found out we have a trademark conflict. I really believe in using a code name that's so ridiculous that you won't ever launch a product like that. If you're just trying to incorporate and go really quick. So for example, a lot of people, they, you know, they need their name for their. Their corporation and so they are filing, you know, all the steps to creating a business. And they just like pick something, but then they end up getting attached to it. And then they want to actually like launch under that name. And it's like, well, that's not so great. Like, here's why I think you should change it. If you pick something so ridiculous that you would never launch, it's actually helpful
32:42 Speaker 00 because then you can go through a process and find it. A name that will do more of your work for you and you won't be attached to something crappy.
32:50 Lenny Rachitsky? Such a good point and idea. And by the way, so if you're a first round company, you get this naming service for free and all these other things we're going to talk about, just to be clear.
32:59 Speaker 00 Yes, that's right.
33:00 Lenny Rachitsky? Oh, my God. I could do a whole episode about how much I love first round, but I will say I'm a huge fan. I think I participated in every program that first round offers. The first round review is actually one of the first pieces of writing that kind of helped spur my now career. And so I'm really
33:15 Speaker 00 I remember that article was awesome.
33:17 Lenny Rachitsky? And I did two more after that, so much work, but yeah, that was a big deal. So I'm really appreciative to first round. So, and we could talk about first round a bit at the end, too.
33:26 Speaker 00 Sure, yeah. Everything we're talking about that you've asked me so far, I think that you're going to ask me about like positioning and hire your marketing person. And all of that is stuff we offer to first round companies. We offer my services as part of the investment. There are times when we might get stuck and we have to bring in like an outside person to help us with something, but for the most part, it's all included. And, you know, you'd pay a lot of money. The naming firm I like the best when I get stuck, it's called a hundred monkeys. They're awesome. A long time ago, I used to be like, oh yeah, it's about $25,000. And I recently got, couldn't take on an outsider first round project and referred it to them. It's $47,000 for a name.
34:04 Lenny Rachitsky? Wow.
34:05 Speaker 00 So, yeah, it's gotten expensive, but if you have the means, it's nice to get some outside help.
34:11 Lenny Rachitsky? Hashtag value add.
34:15 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, I want to transition to your brand development framework, which I read a bunch about, and I know you teach a course about this, which we could also chat a bit about. But first, I'm curious, just like practically, what is the, why is a brand useful? Why is it even something people should spend time investing in? Why does it matter?
34:33 Speaker 00 Okay, so a lot of founders may think that when we say your brand, we mean your logo and your font and your colors. And that is a visual expression of your brand, but it's not actually your brand. Your brand is who people think you are. And so why is it important for people to think what you want them to think? That really comes down to like people's understanding, and particularly your target audience's understanding of what your company and your product is. And I don't really think there's anything else more important than that if I was building a company. So your brand is who people think you are. And developing a brand strategy is what do you want to be? What do you want people to think you are?
35:17 Speaker 00 And what are you going to do to help shape that perception? So when I work on a company, there's a lot of steps to this, but I kind of have this nice little process. It's like right sized for early stage startups. And I like to start with why do you do what you do? Like just having a really clear understanding of that. That's your purpose. The second part is your product positioning. So meaning, how do you want people to understand your product? And what role it plays in their lives? And then the last part is your personality, which is how do you show up in the world? What are you like? If your brand was a person, would I want to hang out with them? Would someone else want to hang out with them?
36:02 Lenny Rachitsky? We're going to get into each of these three pieces. But before we get in there, as a founder, like, how do you know when you're done with your brand development? I know it's like a never ending, ongoing process, but like, like at the end of a process like this, is it like you figure out your purpose, positioning and personality? And then there's like logo and colors. When you think about just like, here's the brand package, what are all the little pieces of it? And then, and then we'll dive into these three elements.
36:28 Speaker 00 I think what you said is right. It's like you, you get those three components, your purpose, your positioning, your personality. You use that as an informant to your visual design and also to your tone of voice. So the way your copy sounds, the way you show up in written copy. And then ideally you have some sort of a lot. A lot of companies have what they call like a style guide or like a brand style guide. And it really only covers logo fonts, colors, like, don't put our logo in blue, don't tilt it on an angle. You know, here's what it looks like in white. Here's what it looks like in black. Here's the Fabicon. But they don't have that for like, Here's who we are. Here's, you know, here's 10 lines that could be ad copy for us. Here is why we do what we do.
37:14 Speaker 00 This is the personality of our brand. Here are five attributes. You know, we are playful, but not silly. That we can talk about that a little bit more, but like, I think all of that belongs in the style guide, not just logo font colors, which is really just a visual articulation that feeds into your brand. I was, I'm a big Volvo fan. I'm on my fourth Volvo right now. So I'm like super brand loyal. And I always use them as an example because if you can picture the Volvo logo in your head right now, it kind of looks like the male symbol, you know, like it's like a circle with an arrow coming off the side. There's nothing about that logo that means all the things I like about Volvo, all the things that the Volvo brand has come to mean to me.
37:56 Speaker 00 And their colors, they're like black and white and a little blue. Like there's nothing more boring than their color palette. And so like, it's not the logo and the font, the colors of Volvo that has made them mean, they literally like own the word safety in cars right now. It's other stuff. And if you looked at their style guide, I actually looked at their style guide recently and it's just like, here's our black and our white and our blue, and here's our tertiary colors and here's our logo. It would not help you understand Volvo as a brand.
38:29 Lenny Rachitsky? I'm guessing some of that happened because they've evolved over the years and it's probably a very different initial brand. So it kind of tells me that it's more important to have a logo and a brand that can kind of represent many things. It isn't like so stuck in a certain positioning, maybe. Does that resonate at all?
38:44 Speaker 00 Yeah, their logo has to do with a very early history. They had, I like researched this because I was like nerd out on this stuff, you know? They had some early history as a ball bearings company. And so I guess that logo had some meaning then, but it wasn't so. Descriptive to being a ball bearing company that they were able to keep it as they evolved into a car company. But if you look at like their early writing, it's so cool. Like, it's so cool. Like, long, long time ago, they would talk about cars are driven by humans and our job as a car manufacturer is to protect the humans who drive the cars. Like, that was like fundamental formation of the company. They really knew why they existed. And then they did stuff like in, like, I think it was like the 1950s when everyone just wore lap bands in the car.
39:30 Speaker 00 And they came out with a three-point safety harness. And instead of, you know, patenting it and like licensing it, they gave that away for free for everyone because that would make like all the world's cars safer. And like those kinds of company decisions, that's what made Volvo stand for safety. It's not the logo.
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41:15 Lenny Rachitsky? the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. One question on my mind before we get into these three elements, last question, kind of setting context, is- If I'm like a non-founder or a PM, I'm just like, oh my God, a branding exercise is going to take months, going to suck up all these resources. I don't know what it's going to do for us. What are, what kind of timeframe do you recommend for early-stage companies to go through kind of a branding exercise and go through something like this? And maybe even later stage, just like what's, what's reasonable?
41:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, it depends on the stage of your company and how much you have already that you have to kind of like, it's hard for people to screw up what they already have. There's a lot of like sunk cost fallacy type stuff going on. If you're starting from nothing, I think you can do this in like three weeks. If you are starting, the naming process itself, because of trademark and domain can take a little longer. When I name companies, we usually, it usually takes about a month just for naming. But like, the whole brand strategy process, you could do if you're like a, you know, really early-stage company in a matter of weeks. And I think whatever time it takes you actually is going to save you so much time down the road. It's going to help you save time on company decision-making. It's going to help you save time writing your website. You're literally like your web copy
42:27 Speaker 00 almost writes yourself, writes itself if you get this all done right. So it's a small investment of time upfront that actually saves you a lot of time down the road is how I would like sell it to a skeptical PM.
42:39 Lenny Rachitsky? You've sold it. That's a, it sounds like very high ROI. Let's get into it.
42:43 Speaker 00 High ROI.
42:43 Lenny Rachitsky? So purpose is the first piece. What is that? And then what are some examples of really good executions of purpose that you've seen?
42:50 Speaker 00 Sure. So your purpose is why you do what you do. It makes people want to root for you. And it has a big role in aligning people to come want to work for you and to have employees all feel like they're part of something. I like to think of it as we exist to blank. And like, whatever that blank is, is your purpose. Do you want to hear about like examples? Or do you want to hear about like what makes a good purpose?
43:14 Lenny Rachitsky? Both would be most excellent.
43:16 Speaker 00 So a good purpose.
43:20 Speaker 00 It explains the change you want to see in the world irrespective of financial gain. So people often get hung up on like mission and vision and values and all this stuff. And like values are fine, they're like internal, I'm not going to talk about those today. But I don't care about mission and vision. I just want one thing because people can only remember one thing. And it's your purpose and it's why you do what you do. And when you articulate this really well, it helps you make company decisions. It exists on a 10 year or so frame. So everything we're talking about with product positioning is pretty malleable. It exists on like an 18 month frame. If you're a early stage company, so it can evolve. Whereas your purpose is pretty much going to stay the same for like 10 years. It's that North Star.
44:03 Speaker 00 And it helps align people in the company and it helps the public want you to win. So a good one, like I worked at Google, you know, right out of grad school. And Google's purpose is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And Google, I thought every company had a purpose that everyone at the company knew. Like, I just thought that was my first job, real job, you know? It turns out that's not true. And Google's actually been amazing at this. Like if you, I had a person in my last cohort who had recently left Google when they were like, I don't know, 80 or 100,000 people. He said, everyone still can say that. Like, that's amazing. But I joined, it was like 1,400 people. And by the time of your first day, you already knew that.
44:48 Speaker 00 Like, it was part of your hiring process. It was part of your onboarding. It was in your like offer letter. It was, it was everywhere. And I just thought that was like really cool and a good purpose. One that is kind of related to financial gain, but I still think is cool is Stripes, which is to increase the GDP of the internet. And that's like really well said and cool and just like gets you thinking about the internet as a country. And I don't know, it's like really. If you're an internet person, it makes you want to root for them.
45:21 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah.
45:21 Speaker 00 Nike's is awesome. Nike's is, I wrote Nike's down because I don't remember it. To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world. And if you have a body, you are an athlete. Like, it's not just about LeBron. It's about me and like, how was my Peloton ride this morning too? So those are some famous companies. I can tell you a little bit about some that I've worked on that I think are pretty cool, that are like companies you may not have heard of yet, just because sometimes we get hung up in like thinking Stripe and Nike and Google are awesome names because of all the meaning we have behind them. And I want to talk about some companies you may not have heard of, because you can have a good purpose and not be Stripe and Nike and Google.
46:01 Lenny Rachitsky? Yeah, that'd be awesome. And by the way, is the purpose, should it be like a sentence? Is that the general?
46:06 Speaker 00 Yes. Yeah. So you, I want you to, you can introduce yourself at a conference, like you're the keynote speaker at a conference, and I want you to introduce yourself and I want you to go, "Hi, I'm Lenny. I'm the founder of the company X, and we exist to blah," and say it, and like have that feel natural.
46:21 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome.
46:21 Speaker 00 And it should make people want to hear what else you have to say. And the other thing it should be able to do is be the header for your about page. So, meaning, "We exist to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," but you would just take out the "we exist" and say the verb, start there. That could be the header for your about page. So, one company I worked on, first round company, they're called Logic Loop, and it's an operations automation company. You can think of it almost like, you know, stuff like a no-code, low-code platform to automate a lot of the operations data-based work that people have to do. And we did this whole brainstorm, and I really like their purpose, that you can look at
47:03 Speaker 00 their about page, it will be right there. It's to make operations data work harder than operations people. And if you ever have worked in operations, or have friends who have, like, they work really, really hard, and it can be kind of thankless. So it gets anyone in that field to root for you. Like, your data should be working harder than your operations people.
47:20 Lenny Rachitsky? Disclaimer, I'm an investor in Logic Loop, and I love that you worked with them.
47:24 Speaker 00 Cool. Awesome. And then another one that I worked on of another first round company, they're called Wolf. They're informed by the UC model where there's a bunch of individual schools that all exist by themselves, but they get something from being part of a larger organization. And what they do is they provide accreditation through being part of the larger Wolf, but you know, a larger Wolf University, but every individual college can still operate as their own independent college. And so their purpose is to increase access to world-class higher education and ensure that it is globally recognized and transferable. So this idea of, you know, you should be able to take a class from the best instructor online and then go
48:07 Speaker 00 travel to Australia and take a class there and then go to China and take a class there and get the best education that the world can offer. Another one that I worked on a while ago is Alt. So Alt, I think they've recently gone through a little bit of like a rebranding, but theirs was to increase the transparency and liquidity of alternative assets. And in their case, the, the, the product positioning was really about like making sports cards as easy to invest in as stocks. So the idea of alternative assets in this case are not like private equity and hedge funds and real estate, but alternatives to alternatives like sports cards and Pokemon cards and art.
48:45 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. Those are so many awesome examples. That's going to be useful for people to wrap their head around what a purpose might be. Execution wise, do you just kind of open up a Google Doc and just start writing out ideas and brainstorm a little bit and just kind of keep refining with your team?
48:58 Speaker 00 I actually stole this exercise or borrowed it from Ogilvy that I actually think adds some structure to that. If you do it that way and it works for you, that's awesome. But if you want to go and go through a process to get there, what I like to do is list all of the cultural tensions that are happening in the world that are relevant to your business first. And so for Alt, that would be things like there's an increase in interest in alternatives. People are nostalgic, people who are now in their 30s are nostalgic for things that happened in the 90s. There is at the time really low interest rates and people are not getting any sort of like edge off of investing in the things that their parents
49:41 Speaker 00 used to invest in. So those would be like examples of cultural tensions. Cultural tensions are zeitgeists. They're things that you're Audience might be thinking of, there are things that they may be even subconscious to them, their current events. So you make a long list of all of those. Then you make a long list of all the ways that you might describe your brand's best self. And this is related to your product positioning, but let's say you haven't done it yet. So just think of it as your brand's best self. How would we want someone to describe us? When everything works perfectly and our product really delivers, what does it deliver? And again, like bullets, just ways that you would talk about that. And then you pick one from each side.
50:22 Speaker 00 That's really the best articulation of what's happening in the world, what your product delivers. And with that context, now you're primed with that context in mind. Now you do the brainstorm of we exist to, let me finish this sentence. And even before you get there, sometimes it's helpful to do, the world would be a better place if. So for my company, the world would be a better place if, and finish that sentence and then go into the we exist to.
50:49 Lenny Rachitsky? Well, I'm so happy I asked that question. By the way, is there also a place we can point people to that are doing, want to do this exercise? Is there another first round review post or I know you have a course on this too.
50:59 Speaker 00 Yeah, there's another first round review article. It's called, um, three, three moves every startup founder should make something like that.
51:07 Lenny Rachitsky? Great. I will find it. I'll add it.
51:09 Speaker 00 Yeah. Okay. Awesome.
51:10 Lenny Rachitsky? Amazing. Okay. Let's move on to the next part, which is around positioning, which is a big deal. First, just like what is positioning? And then I'd love to know just like, what tells you, you may have a positioning problem. That's something you should really focus on.
51:23 Speaker 00 Okay. So positioning is the space that you occupy in your target customer's mind. And everything you can do to influence how they would describe your product.
51:36 Speaker 00 You know, you have a positioning product, problem. If I ask 10 of your customers or 10 of your employees, what the company does or what the product does. And I get multiple answers. And unfortunately, that's the case for most companies. It's okay if the answers are like tiny slight variance on the same thing. But I have actually done this with some later stage companies or got my first step is often I go in and I interview 10 people. And the 10 people are, you know, everyone from execs to like people who talk to customers, to a few customers. And when you get 10 people saying 10 wildly different things, you have a positioning problem. Other ways you might know that if you have a positioning problem is if you can't explain what you do to me in like a sentence,
52:22 Speaker 00 that that's you have a positioning problem.
52:25 Lenny Rachitsky? That's a high bar.
52:26 Speaker 00 Yeah, it is. And I used to, when I first started consulting, I would spend the first meeting with a founder, just like totally cold, hey, tell me about your company. And they would take 30 minutes to tell me about their company. And at the end of 30 minutes, I would pretty much get it, but it always took the first 30 minutes. So now, when I engage with a new company, I have them fill out this little worksheet beforehand. And one of the questions is like, what do you do? And they have to write, you know, in a box that's kind of like paragraph length.
52:55 Lenny Rachitsky? Clever.
52:55 Speaker 00 And then we go, I go in and I ask questions about that. And ultimately, we get it to sentence length.
53:00 Lenny Rachitsky? Amazing. Okay, how do you go about figuring out your positioning? Big question.
53:05 Speaker 00 Yeah, so I start with your audience, who who's this for? And we really think about like, what's the broadest set of customers or users that you might have? And narrow in from there to a target audience, which is who are you outwardly going to try to acquire for the next 18 months? You can think of it like concentric circles. The biggest circle is like your TAM. As you get smaller, there's like five parts to it. So the biggest circle is circle one, circle two, circle three, circle four is your target audience. All of the circles have to be contained within the bigger circle. And then the dot in the middle is your model persona. So this is actually like a person with a name and an age and a location and a job and,
53:49 Speaker 00 you know, feelings and priorities and interests and all of that. And so we talk about the model user and the target audience. The target audience again is who will you outwardly try to acquire for the next 18 months? If you're an early stage company? It's very possible that you're going to acquire people outside of that circle, like in the next circle or even the bigger circle, but they're not who you're actively going out to try to acquire.
54:15 Lenny Rachitsky? Can I ask a couple of questions on the person?
54:17 Speaker 00 Yeah.
54:18 Lenny Rachitsky? I'm doing some writing and research into this stuff. How specific do you suggest people get with this person right at the middle? Like, I love that it's like an actual person. I guess not a real person, but a very descriptive.
54:28 Speaker 00 Can be a real person or like an amalgamation of not real people. So with the target audience, I like to think of it as someone, something you could name. So with ERO, it was tech savvy dads, right? It's a category of people. And then the model persona, like that individual user who represents a tech savvy dad, for them was this guy who had teenage kids, lived in suburban St. Louis, had a 2,800 square foot house that was made of brick, worked at home on Fridays, his kids were into gaming. He was the VP of Sales at a company that was like tech adjacent, but not tech. He was more of like a tech enthusiast than a actual like software engineer. We knew a lot about him, like I could tell you a lot about him.
55:13 Speaker 00 It's kind of robust, but tech savvy dads was the way to represent him and all other people like him. That would be their target audience.
55:22 Lenny Rachitsky? A lot of founders have trouble recognizing that going very focused and niche is a good idea versus like, man, why am I, I'm just gonna have these 10 people in the world that really want what I want? What have you found to be the reason it's very powerful and important to start really focused?
55:37 Speaker 00 Yeah, so when you are an early stage company, the worst thing you can do is try to be everything to everyone because you don't have enough runway and even like you just don't have enough of anything to do that successfully.
55:52 Speaker 00 The best thing you can do is find an audience that is big enough that if you dominate dominated, if you got you significant market share among that audience, you'd be a giant business. And tech savvy dads is a pretty big audience. Also, that's just who you're outbound going to try to acquire for the 18 months, next 18 months. It does, I'm a tech savvy mom or not, I live with a tech savvy dad. I have an era system, you know? It doesn't mean everyone you'll ever acquire must be in that audience. It means that is who we're focused on acquiring.
56:23 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. I took us off course around the positioning process. We, I think we, we kind of went off course with concentric circles model. So I'll keep it back to you to keep going.
56:34 Speaker 00 Okay. Okay. So the way that you, that I like to run positioning exercise is to start with, who is this for? And then what is the problem that they have? Like, there's some problem usually that these people have. They may not even be aware it's a problem, or they may not be experiencing the problem as particularly troubling, but there's something going on for these people. And then how do they address that problem today? So they do something, you know, they're, they're buying something, they're have a workaround, they're doing something today. And that something might not be another startup or your direct competitor. It might be the old way of doing things, but they're doing something. So we go through like, who is it for? What's their
57:13 Speaker 00 problem? How do they address it? And then what do you make? How does it work? And what would you want a happy user of your product or service to tell another? And that's kind of like, if you answer all of those questions, it ultimately leads into this like classic for statement, which is not something I invented. It's something that's been around for like 40 or 50 years. And I learned it when I was 22. And I think it's one of the most powerful tools in marketing. It can feel like Mad Libs if you just approach it cold. But if you've gone through that work of defining, who is it? And what's their problem? All it is, is a distillation of that. So that statement is
57:55 Speaker 00 like for target audience who there's a statement of need or opportunity. And then you say like, our product name is a category that has a benefit. Unlike the old thing they were doing, our product works this other way.
58:10 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. And we'll link to the post that actually has that. So people don't have to write this all down. That last piece you mentioned, I hadn't heard before, the idea of what will they tell other people or how will they describe it to other people? Is that right?
58:21 Speaker 00 Yeah. So I believe that great benefits, if you've defined your benefit really, really well, will actually be the thing that will be the H1 on your homepage and will be the thing that you want someone to tell someone else. Like, think about Square Stand and turn your iPad into a point of sale. Right? Turn your iPad into a point of sale. Like, yeah, if I went to a small business owner and they were having drinks with a friend who was also a small business owner, what would I want them to say about the Square Stand? Oh yeah, I just got the Square Stand. It's this really cool new register that turns my iPad into a point of sale. That's pretty much exactly what I want them to say.
59:00 Speaker 00 And so if you can write that line, that is your ideal benefit, like what you want people to say, and it's something that your target audience would actually say, that's great.
59:12 Lenny Rachitsky? Interesting. I love that. That makes a lot of sense. For people trying to go through this exercise, you always have such a good answer as to like how actually the process of coming up with, say, your positioning in this case, um, is it, again, you pull up a doc and start writing things? Or is there something even more structured?
59:28 Speaker 00 Yeah, there's something more structured. I have kind of like a worksheet that goes through all those things we just talked about. So it's like, you know, who is it for? What are they doing today? You know, all those questions we just talked about. It's more like a structured brainstorm. There's an exercise I really love that I've called the bar test that is helping you get everything you've written into human language, because one of the really big pitfalls I see, especially for B2B companies, but really for everyone, is they write in a way that people don't talk. So the document, when I get the first draft back from founders, often has things like leverages and empowers and like all these, nobody talks like that.
1:00:09 Speaker 00 And so getting this into like, turns your iPad into a point of sale, blankets your home and fast, reliable wifi, records your screen and cam at the same time, like really basic stuff that describes your product in a way that someone would actually say, like, that's the type of language that I think people want to use. So the bar test is, you first of all, you've defined your target. Now you pretend to be someone in your target, having drinks with someone else in your target at a bar. And you have to be able to say, hey, I just started using product name.
1:00:43 Speaker 00 It's this really great category that benefit. And the other person goes, hmm, tell me more, or that's cool. What do you mean? Or some other, you know, similar prompt. And then you have to say your differentiator. You actually have to say it out loud.
1:00:59 Speaker 00 And if you run through that test and it's actually stuff people would say out loud, then you've done a pretty good job and you can start using that copy publicly.
1:01:07 Lenny Rachitsky? That is very cool. I have not heard this bar test before and I like that it might happen at an actual bar. Is that also something people can find online or is that, is that they write it down right now?
1:01:18 Speaker 00 Oh, I don't, I don't know if that's online.
1:01:20 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, cool. This is it. Exclusive.
1:01:22 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's in my course and we talk a lot about that. We go through the exercise like a, um, a real role play in the course, but yeah, take some notes.
1:01:31 Lenny Rachitsky? I like that a lot.
1:01:32 Speaker 00 Thanks.
1:01:33 Lenny Rachitsky? Your point reminded me of an email I just pulled up that I got from ADP. Your point about just like, you want to make sure your branding is something that feels like something you'd say to a person. So it's like ADP, which is a security, you know, service for like alarms. I got this email like, summer's on with fun or our free secure app and more. And then it's like, make summer safer and more fun at home or away. Like ADP, you're not going to make, make it more fun. What are you, what are you talking about?
1:02:01 Speaker 00 See, that's an example of trying too hard. Like they tried too hard to make it sound colloquial and fun. Like they're a security system. It should be more like, secure your home while you're away. Like,
1:02:12 Lenny Rachitsky? Right.
1:02:12 Speaker 00 feel safe when you're on your summer trip. Like stuff like that.
1:02:16 Lenny Rachitsky? They even included a GIF of a, this like TikToker being like, ADP is my MVP.
1:02:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, this is kind of relates to brand personality where like the brand personality for ADP, I mean, I don't know, it's, it's pretty not fun. And so for them, when they put on fun hat, it seems awkward and forced.
1:02:36 Lenny Rachitsky? That's exactly the feeling I got. And so yeah, personality, that's our next topic. It's not something I, you think about when you think about brand and marketing and plans. And, and so I'm really curious to hear why I think that's important and then how to figure out your own personality for your brand.
1:02:51 Speaker 00 So I think personality is one of those inputs that will help define your visual design and it will definitely help define your written copy. And it really comes from this idea of brands are like people and. If you start thinking of your brand more like a person, it's quite obvious that it needs a personality because all people have personalities. And these days, especially when brands show up in places where people show up, like TikTok and Instagram, like your brand certainly needs a personality or else you end up like ADP trying to be fun for the summer, which just feels really often weird. So personality is one of those things that it's actually the easiest part. I think it's like the fastest part. It often ends up like an hour and you can get it done.
1:03:37 Speaker 00 But I have some frameworks I like to use that really just get at like, are you Mountain Dew or are you Rolex? Or are you somewhere in between? And when you think about brands that have a lot of equity, they really do have a personality. Like I, I often talk about like Mountain Dew marketing as that marketing that's like trying really hard to be like cool and rugged and edgy and fast and like kind of teen. And Rolex is very like, you know, you know, Grey Poupon like, you know, like, ew, do you roll down your window? And do you have any Grey Poupon? Like it's fancy and sophisticated and a little bit like aspirational and maybe even a little British and like all those two things are really, really, really different, right? And there's a lot in the middle and not everyone's going to be a Mountain Dew
1:04:21 Speaker 00 or Rolex, but where on, where are you? And so you can just like write it down. I think a lot of these answers come back to like, if you're good with just opening a blank Google Doc and like writing down who you are, by all means, go for it. And if that feels daunting and hard for you, like use a framework. And the framework that I like to use has two parts. The first part is based on some academic research by Jennifer Aker. And it basically analyzed the top brands in the world and figured out that all brands can be segmented into five dimensions of brand personality and that really strong brand spike in two of the five. So the five dimensions that she found were sincerity. So this is like, is it down to earth and honest?
1:05:07 Speaker 00 Excitement, it's spirited. This is that Mountain Dew thing. Competence, reliable and intelligent. Sophisticated sophistication, which is charming and upper class. And rugged, outdoorsy and tough. So sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication and ruggedness. And going back to those two brands we just discussed, Mountain Dew is rugged and exciting. Rolex is sophisticated and competent. And you can do this with like any brand who admire or just think about brands you like and kind of deduce them to their two of those five. So that's the first step. Which two of those five are you going to spike in? And it turns out a lot of tech companies end up spiking in sincerity and competence. Just usually does happen that way.
1:05:53 Speaker 00 Amazon is sincere and competent. Google is sincere and competent. Apple is not, Apple has a little more of that like sophistication to it. But in any case, like if you just did that, we would end in a world where everyone's sincere and competent. And or maybe sophisticated and competent. It's like really boring world. So the next step after you do that is to define five attributes. Like five brand personalities, thinking about those two dimensions. I like to think about this as a star, like a five point star. And brands need tension to be interesting. So if you tell me like, we're helpful, we're nice, we're approachable. We're competent and we're reliable.
1:06:36 Speaker 00 Like you basically haven't told me anything because you just use three words to say one thing and two words to say another thing. Whereas if you tell me, you know, oh, well, we're really savvy, but we're also really approachable. Like, that's kind of cool because people who are expert are always approachable. You know, they have to have a little tension. And then you want to write them as statements that say like, we are X, but not Y, where Y is taking X too far. So in the example, like Google is playful, but not silly.
1:07:09 Speaker 00 So they would say, we are playful, but not silly. Or maybe Mountain Dew would say,
1:07:16 Speaker 00 we are daring, but not stupid. So like taking that attribute a little too far. And so, yeah, then you end up with these five statements that are like, we are X, but not Y. And those are really useful in informing how you write. And maybe even like what your visual design would look like. And certainly what like your illustration style, photography style, ad copy will be like.
1:07:39 Lenny Rachitsky? Once you've gone through that exercise and in maybe all the other, the other two pieces, where do you put this? This is just like in a doc that's like, here's our brand overview. Here's our personality. Here's our positioning. Here's our purpose. And, and then you refer back to that whenever you're designing and putting together strategies. Is that how it works?
1:08:00 Speaker 00 I mean, yeah, you could do it that way. That's definitely one way of doing it. That's a good start. I think that one other place where it shows up, like we talked about that visual style guide that everyone has that they give to like an agency or copywriter who's writing on their behalf. I think these should all be inputs into that doc that you end up sharing. I think it should go into any like onboarding you do for new employees so that they understand who the company is, any partners that you're marketing with, co-branding, all of that. Like it should really be, think of it as like your little brand bible about who you are. And also it should be revisited when you're doing, let's say, a new product or to make sure, does this need to be updated or does this new product need to fit into who we are?
1:08:40 Lenny Rachitsky? What do you call this document slash place?
1:08:43 Speaker 00 When I take all those three components and then add a bunch of other stuff, I call it a creative brief, which is the thing you would hand to an agency or writer who's writing on your behalf. It would include some other things too, that we didn't talk about, like creative inspiration, direction. So picking, you know, visual clips and written clips and all these things that you like and that you don't like. So you can show both positive examples and counter examples to the thing you're looking for.
1:09:09 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. Thank you for all of that. There's just, there's so much juice there. I think people are gonna have to listen to this a couple of times to get all the learnings. Before I let you go, there's two other areas I wanted to dive into, but I'll keep them brief because I know we're going long. One is about getting PR. And just like a question I wanted to ask you while I had you. Founders and even their companies are always just like, man, they're always like, how do I get PR? How do I get press for my product? Even though it's sometimes a waste of time. Do you have just any tactical advice for startups hoping to get some PR?
1:09:43 Speaker 00 You mean initial, like initial coverage around a launch or ongoing?
1:09:47 Lenny Rachitsky? Let's say early on, yeah.
1:09:49 Speaker 00 Sure. So the first one is to get your story straight. So, so many times I have founders come to me and they're like, hey, we need help with this announcement. And like, cool, what's the announcement? And back to the 30 minutes until I understand what the company is. So if you can't describe it to me in a sentence, your reporter is certainly not going to understand in a sentence, and they won't be able to describe it to their audience in a sentence. And so really getting your story straight, all the stuff we talked about specifically around product positioning is so key. Almost always when someone comes to me and says, I'm ready to announce, we go back to positioning first. Also make sure that your website is ready for like the traffic you're going to drive to it, that you're not driving traffic to a name that you're going to later scrap. Like, are you really ready for this?
1:10:34 Speaker 00 So all those, go back to all the other things we discussed first. And then having realistic expectations about the outlets that will cover you and the time it will take to get them. So a lot of people will be like, I'm, I'm launching next week. And it's like, well, cool that you're doing that, but no reporter is going to cover you next week. It just doesn't work like that anymore. Five years ago, eight years ago, founders could really dictate the date of a launch announcement. They could brief three to five outlets under embargo, which means like you all can't tell our secret news until we tell you at this time you can publish. And at that time, three of the five would all file a story and write. And it just doesn't work like that anymore. These days for early stage startups, we're almost always running the launch announcement as an exclusive,
1:11:17 Speaker 00 which means you give the news to a single outlet and they're the only ones who get to write about it. You can obviously still do all your own owned and operated stuff, your blog, your social, your investors, your friends, family. But they're the only like news outlet who gets to write about it. So having expectation that like this is probably going to be an exclusive. It's harder than ever to succeed to secure funding for a seed stage company. And funding in and of itself is like not that interesting anymore. There's so many bad companies getting funding. There's so many, there's like so many good companies getting funding too. It's just like more than ever. The number of reporters and the number of outlets that are covering it is just less than it used to be.
1:11:59 Speaker 00 So really just thinking about like, well, who writes about this space? Do they write about companies at my stage? That's another really big one is, hey, we want the New York Times. It's like, cool, no one's at the New York Times has ever covered a seed stage startup. Unless it's like crazy for the last five years. Who, who do you think is going to write about you? But there are still outlets that do, you know?
1:12:25 Speaker 00 The other one is don't do a straight funding announcement. Like a lot of founders raise money and they're like, cool, it's announced. It's like, no, well, use that funding announcement as a news hook to cut, to tell a larger story. The larger story might be your products available. You have reference customers, you have momentum. You have some great partnership that you're announcing. There's something else going on, not just your funding. And using your funding as part of that initial launch is great, but what else are you announcing? The last thing is really about making what you do interesting and relevant. So that it's not just interesting and relevant to you and like the three other people who work there at the time, but interesting to all the readers of whatever outlet you're trying to target.
1:13:08 Speaker 00 And so an example of that is I worked on this company, Vitable Health. And the founder, Joseph, he created a product for hourly workers that their employer would buy and it costs like $50 per person per month. And what it does is it provides urgent care and primary care. So these hourly workers who make too much to qualify for Medicaid and too little to pay their health insurance premiums. And so primary and urgent care for hourly workers. And we tied it into this idea of the great resignation and small businesses not being able to hire hourly workers, which was like a big trend, you know, end of, end of 2021. And the company operates in Philadelphia and Delaware.
1:13:52 Speaker 00 We were actually able to get him like the Sunday after Christmas Philadelphia Inquirer story. But it was all about making this daycare and this restaurant in Philadelphia into heroes because they offered this cool benefit to their hourly workers. And so the headline was perfect for them, but it wasn't, it wasn't like, here's vitable and here's what they announced and here's, it was like, hey, look at this cool new thing that local businesses are doing to attract hourly workers. And so think about your, your company and a way to make it interesting and relevant. And, and don't sleep on local press. Like if you have a local business or a local story or local customers. This was a huge thing at Square. Like we turned all of our customers into heroes and went after local press.
1:14:34 Speaker 00 Most PR firms that service, you know, the tech community aren't experts in local press. But if you have a way to make some connections with some local press, like they are the ones hungry for these stories more than, um, you know, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
1:14:50 Lenny Rachitsky? What a good tip and most likely they're much more open to writing about you versus New York Times or your Wall Street Journal. Cool. Okay. So I want to ask you one question about hiring marketing real quick. And I'll keep it short just because I know we're going to run out of time. When should a startup hire a full-time marketing person in your experience?
1:15:08 Speaker 00 When you have a lot of problems that you're trying to solve that would be better solved by someone who knew what they're doing. Or when you have a bunch of freelancers and agencies that are becoming too hard to manage for, by yourself.
1:15:21 Lenny Rachitsky? When do you find that usually ends up being like, is there a kind of a heuristic?
1:15:25 Speaker 00 Yeah. Ballpark. Like I, I see, it kind of depends if you're a marketing driven business or a sales driven business. So if you're a sales driven business and you don't have a repeatable sales motion, like it's not yet time to hire a marketer. Get that repeatable sales motion and marketing's job is to bring you more marketing qualified leads. So that, that's one. So that kind of depends. If you're a marketing driven business, it generally seems to me like it happens around 10 people, like the founders doing most of this themselves. They're not doing the best job usually, or they've hired some, you know, an agency here, a freelancer there to kind of cobble some stuff together. And they now realize like, okay, if I had a person who would be able to do all of
1:16:08 Speaker 00 this and manage these agencies and freelancers, this would be a lot better. It also is like, do you have a one point in time project? Like, do you need to do positioning? Do you need a website? Do you need a name? Do you need to run a test of Google Ads? Like, those things are all discreet. When it becomes like, this is ongoing work that needs to happen over time, it's better to think about hiring a marketer and really like, what kind of marketer do you need? Do you need a product marketer, a performance marketer, a comms person, a creative person? Ideally, everyone wants all of that, but I kind of like that idea of like, a T-shaped marketer who's really deep on one of those functions, but like, knows enough to be dangerous across all of them.
1:16:48 Lenny Rachitsky? I think we're gonna need another episode just about that one topic. I have so many questions I want to ask, but I need to let you go. Okay, that'll be V2. Before we do that, we've gotten to the very exciting lightning round, where I'm just gonna ask you quick questions and you just give me a quick answer and we'll knock through them all. Does that sound good?
1:17:06 Speaker 00 Sounds great.
1:17:06 Lenny Rachitsky? What are two or three books that you recommend most to other people?
1:17:09 Speaker 00 In marketing land, definitely the book called Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind. It's from 1980. It's still my favorite marketing book. Another recent marketing book is Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. It's like, my favorite area of reading is like, behavioral science, psychology meets business, and that's straight in there. For fiction, I just read The Vanishing Half by Britt Benet. It was like, awesome. I then read her other book called The Mothers, but I think The Vanishing Half's better.
1:17:36 Lenny Rachitsky? Awesome. I will check that out. What's a favorite podcast or even newsletter on marketing?
1:17:41 Speaker 00 I love Nik Sharma's weekly newsletter. He's a growth marketer. He started his career, I think, at Hint Water, so he does a lot of like, CPG type DTC. He has a great marketing newsletter that comes out every Sunday night, on podcasts.
1:17:59 Speaker 00 I love how I built this. I know that's already really popular, but I love that one. It's not really marketing, but just like general business. The first round podcast in depth is pretty great. Lenny's podcast I've been listening to is awesome. And then my friend Jasmine from the Concept Bureau has a marketing podcast called Unseen Unknown. And it's kind of about like culture and branding and how these things, society and trends. It's not like straight marketing. It's kind of more of like the culture and sociology that informs marketing.
1:18:30 Lenny Rachitsky? Wow, that is a lot of good stuff. What's a recent movie or TV show that you've loved?
1:18:35 Speaker 00 This is more embarrassing. Like, how many movies have you seen in the last year? Just curious.
1:18:41 Lenny Rachitsky? Me? Like a lot, unlike, you know, streaming services. Way too many also, if that's where you're going. Or have you seen none?
1:18:48 Speaker 00 Well, I've seen like maybe four and they're probably all on Disney Plus.
1:18:53 Lenny Rachitsky? You're winning. That's excellent.
1:18:54 Speaker 00 I would say, like, I really like some of those Disney Pixar movies. Luca, Encanto, those are all really great. I mostly only watch movies with my kids, but I'm pretty excited. I had a celebrity crush on Anthony Bourdain and I'm excited to watch his new documentary if I ever get around to it. And TV shows, I'm like equally bad.
1:19:15 Lenny Rachitsky? Okay, great.
1:19:16 Speaker 00 There's this little Netflix show called Old Enough. It's a Japanese show with subtitles about sending toddlers on errands in Japan. They like go by themselves. It's 10 minutes. They're awesome. My whole family watched them together. It's really cute.
1:19:29 Lenny Rachitsky? Old Enough. I'm gonna check that out. Okay, two more questions. Favorite interview question when hiring a marketing person?
1:19:35 Speaker 00 It's probably tell me a project you're proud of. Tell me about a project you're proud of. I was just really open ended and get to hear a lot about a lot of things that way. And then maybe runner up is like, tell me about a campaign you recently come across that you were not involved with that you thought was cool.
1:19:54 Lenny Rachitsky? Love that. Okay, final question. Who else in the industry do you most respect as a thought leader?
1:20:01 Speaker 00 In the marketing industry.
1:20:02 Lenny Rachitsky? The marketing industry, yeah, sure.
1:20:04 Speaker 00 I guess like old school thought leaders, David Ogilvy, Rory Sutherland, Seth Godin. New school thought leaders, we mentioned Nik Sharma. There's a woman named, I'm probably going to butcher her name, Anna Angelic. She has a newsletter that I didn't mention before. It's called the sociology of business. That's really good. She's a CMO, Chief Brand Officer type. She kind of turned around Banana Republic recently, which was cool. Emily Hayward from Red Antler. I also really like Ross, I don't know this guy, but Ross Simmons from Foundation, which is a content marketing agency. I'm not like a content marketing expert, but he really is. And I think he puts out some good content.
1:20:47 Lenny Rachitsky? Man, these show notes are going to be a long, long list of great stuff. Ariel, thank you so much for being here. There's just so much jam packed knowledge, I think. I don't know if people were prepared when they started listening to this. And so, congrats on making it through. And there's, I hope you're probably going to go back and listen again and again. And so, again, Ariel, thank you so much for doing this. Two last questions. Where can folks find you online if they want to reach out or ask questions? And how can listeners be useful to you?
1:21:14 Speaker 00 Sure, I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn. Twitter, I'm hi, I am Ariel. And if you're interested in this stuff, but feeling overwhelmed, I will plug my Maven course. I teach a course on startup brand strategy that covers everything we talked about in this, in this hour, I guess it's more than an hour now. And kind of with a little more handholding and feedback. So it's a crash course on all this stuff, the four founders, that takes two weeks and you go through all of this. And that next cohort of that, I think we're on cohort four, will be this fall. So you can apply for that course at maven.com/arel/startupbrandstrategy.
1:21:57 Lenny Rachitsky? Amazing. And I guess that's how listeners can be useful to you. So.
1:22:00 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly.
1:22:01 Lenny Rachitsky? All right, well, great. All right, well, thank you again. Thank you again. And good luck.
1:22:06 Speaker 00 Thanks so much, Lenny. It was fun.
1:22:09 Lenny Rachitsky? Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
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