The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, First Round Capital)

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 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 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 bloom front euro 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 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 flat file how many b2b sas companies would you estimate need to import csv files from their customers at least 40 and how many of them screw that up and what happens when they do well based on our data about a third of people will

consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding 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 i am zero percent surprised to hear that i've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both sign-up conversion and increasing long-term retention getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important totally it's incredible to see how our customers like square spotify and zora are able to grow their businesses on top of flat file it's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster if you'd like to learn more or get started check out flat file and flat file dot file.com lenny this episode is brought to you by unit

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sandbox that's unit dot co slash lenny welcome to the podcast ariel thanks so much for having me it's great to be here 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 the meat just a couple questions that i had in my mind you've worked with so many amazing companies uh google square loom patreon front so many others i'm like i don't want to keep going uh what's been um either your favorite or or most unusual project that you've worked on gosh it's like asking me to choose like my favorite son i'm like gosh i can't really like pick one that'll be the next question i would probably say that my favorite project and this is because they 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 my joint square was like 140 people we had no marketing function we had a couple marketing people we had no

product managers and the hardware team was running the show and launching this new product that was supposed to get us up market 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 figuring out how we're gonna 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 seating 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 um you know there was a lot of fake it till you make it i was like negotiating a deal with best buy in the apple store had 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 up market i remember i was 30 something weeks pregnant when we launched we got all the blue bottle stores to use it and we had this launch event for jack and 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 i still i still get kind of excited every time i pay on one of those which is all the time super pregnant and super proud and that product that was like the pos stand that like the ipad thing that you kind of swivel and sign yeah and there's

been new versions of it since you know there's a a contactless version of it and um 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 if you recall what was kind of 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 yeah so at the time square was mostly used by like farmers market vendors and um event vendors like i made jewelry in a past life and that's how i got to square was like being one of those vendors um and uh the 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 however that was our foil and the benefit was turn your ipad into a point of sale and the differentiator was about one unified experience that you know your you can do you can do everything you can on your cash register and more and it you'd be proud to have it out on your counter so you said that you were creating jewelry and that's how you got into square to work on this product uh i need to hear more about that yeah sure so um 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 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 start to 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 was painful all the reasons that people use square you know i experienced it and um two people i knew from google megan quinn and kyle's dink 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 awesome you know i make jewelry it was great 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 wow i i bet that

helped you a lot through the interview actual personal experience having been a a merchant i think it helped me understand the the small merchant that initially we were marketing to and so today you are marketing expert at in residence at firster on capital i was going to ask what what does that mean and what is it that you do day to day these days 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 what startup was that 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 just left

square so i decided not to join twitter with the rest of the team and instead i just decided i was gonna 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 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 rounds time 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 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 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 awesome it's what i like to talk about so yeah let's do it let's do it surprise surprise um 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 i love naming i think i've named just over 30 companies at this point um 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 seesaw it's an edtech company that was the first company i named post google square all of that it's an awesome name um it is awesome name and i'll use it as an example so seesaw is a edtech 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 seesaw you don't really know what it is but when i tell you oh it says ad 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 seesaw 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 edtech company and i personally tend to like those kinds of names that are suggestive or evocative 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 um so that's an example i think of a good name like i don't know um during covid and my son's school was closed with my older son's school was closed and they all used csa 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 um another another company that has a good name that you and i have both worked with is maven so they're a first round company goggin 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 the 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 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 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 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 um 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 motion 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 use before we all switch to google and we have you know the purple color in our head and we think 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 be in that so they're they're doable i worked on a company eero that has kind of what is almost an empty vessel name um eero is for eero saarinen who is a designer um he's he did like these really beautiful

buildings architectural buildings and then also some tables like you can get a sarin 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 have to you know spend a lot and and be consistent about making that they mean a wi-fi system 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 or is there some kind of a bigger reason yeah so it doesn't have to and an example is like eero 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 your name is doing a little bit more of your marketing work for you

so if your name is internet explorer rip 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 and now you have to spend and you have to be consistent over time and 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 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 that's my personal preference okay cool that makes sense i mean my personal preference is if you think about their descriptive names the

internet explorer their suggestive names like chrome then there's evocative names which i would say like csa and maven fit into there where they're not they're like in between suggestive and evogative and then there's empty vessel names or fanciful names there's a spectrum and when you do your brainstorm 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 there's times and places for all of those names across the spectrum my personal bias is i tend to like suggested names

makes sense okay let's get into it how what should what your teams do when they're trying to name some 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 student in my last class that i taught through maven i teach a class on brand strategy and he was a i think second or third time founder who had never taken a class on brand strategy he worked really hard he was awesome anyway in 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 any case um you do that first and we'll talk about that in a little bit 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 gonna 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 era we wanted it to communicate design being designed forward it can be whatever you want it to communicate what do you want to avoid you know 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 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 com like maven.com.maven.com it was a lot an arduous process that gogan wrote about on twitter 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 com so uh domain main 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 optimizely 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 so i generally stay away from naming trends because i just 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 but we didn't name it that because this was

a company that was like b2b sales was gonna be like their main channel so they're gonna 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 there's a company now doing quite well do you think that's the right move 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 interesting good to know yeah yeah and then the last one the last one last two are appearance so there are some names that just like lend themselves really nicely to visual design and you know 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 lenny's newsletter document yeah yeah well so you got the lenny part with the two uh two syllables is generally like a nice sweet spot 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 yeah there's an article on the first round review called positioning positioning your startup is vital here's how to nail it and all those um criteria and like how to do naming is is actually in that article 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 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 those and then you add your own criteria so the brain the next steps the brainstorm uh i'm gonna go fast through this yeah i was gonna ask you about the brainstorm i'm excited to hear that 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 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 so we take all the meaningful words out of your positioning statement this 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 and 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 ten 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 if you could do like last names of famous farmers you know that's think 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 weird words i 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 short list the short list 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 in the red yellow green 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 that was amazing if you're doing a startup name versus a product is the process any different or is it basically

the same no same the only difference is if you have a lot of equity in your company name like square's 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 equity in the master brand to come through so if you think about squares names i mean they they have other ones like when they diverge from the square brand like cash or you know 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 you know they're they're like really boring and it's because the equity is in the product in the company name and the product name can actually be boring and descriptive

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 is not going to hurt you or i forget the word you use i'd love to hear that because that's that's really interesting 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 just makes sense like in the case of seesaw like that's a good name for that company that good name is just gonna help people talk about it it's gonna spread word of mouth people are gonna 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 was just the

jew's last name you know 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 um a good name is just going to help you but i don't think a bad name is going to kill a good company so interesting it's basically your goal is to help find a name that will help uh worst case you're going to be okay if your product is awesome 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 other lego any of these brands you know in a cell spreadsheet in plain aerial in ten point like they're just okay like they're you know you have to grow them over time you just hear about like um i think phil nate with with nike when he was given that name like as a as an option he was like that's okay you know i'll sleep on it such a great name you know this makes me uh think about my starter back in the day it was called local mind and we went through an exercise similar to this not nearly as in depth and and well run but i remember a 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 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 and ideally it's memorable and it has some emotion to it like go go for it 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 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 they may or may not be attached to it

but then you know they work with me and i'm like you know 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 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 such a good point an 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 gonna talk about just to be clear yes that's right 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've 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 i remember that article it was awesome 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 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 i the naming firm i like the best uh when i get stuck it's called 100 monkeys they're awesome a long time ago i used to be like oh yeah it's about twenty five thousand dollars and i recently got couldn't take on an outsider first round project and referred it to them it's forty seven thousand dollars for a name whoa so yeah it's gotten expensive but if you have the means it's nice to get some outside help value add 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 why does it matter 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 um 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 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 that'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 do 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

we're going to get into each of these three pieces but before we get in there as a 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 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 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 your 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 favicon 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 this is the personality of our brand here are five attributes you know we are playful but not silly look that we can talk about that a little bit more but like i think all of that belongs in the style by not just logo font colors which is really just a visual articulation that 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 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 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 fawn 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 that 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 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 that isn't like so stuck in a certain positioning maybe does that resonate at all yeah their logo has to do with a very early history they had i like researched this because i wasn't nerd out on this stuff you know um 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 so they really knew why they existed and they did stuff like in like i think it was like the 1950s when everyone just wore lap bands in the car and they came out with the 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 very interesting this episode is brought to you by athletic greens i've been hearing about edgy want on basically every podcast that i listen to like tim ferriss and lex friedman so i finally gave it a shot earlier this year and it has quickly become a core part of my morning routine especially on days that i need to go deep on writing or record a podcast like this here's three things that i love about ag-1 one with a small scoop that dissolves in water you're absorbing 75 vitamins minerals probiotics and adaptogens i kind of like to think of it as a little safety net for my nutrition in case i've missed something in my diet

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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 gonna take months gonna suck up all these resources i don't know what it's gonna do for us what are what kind of time frame 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 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 scrap 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 domains 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 almost writes yourself it writes itself if you get this all done right so it's a small investment of time up front that actually saves you a lot of time down the road is how i would like sell it to a skeptical pm you've sold it that's a sounds like very high roi let's

get into it 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 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 too 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 both would be most excellent so a good purpose 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 gonna 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 an 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 and it helps align people in the company and it helps the public want you to win so um a good one like i i worked at google you know right out of grad school and google's purpose was 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 1400 people and by the time of your first day you already knew that 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 um one that is kind of related to financial gain but i still think it's cool is stripes which is to increase the gdp of the internet and that's like really well sad and cool and just like gets you thinking about the internet as a country and i don't know it's like really um if you're an internet person it makes you want to root for them um yeah nikes is awesome nikes is uh i wrote nikes 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 you know lebron it's about me and like how was my peloton ride this morning too so those are some famous companies i could 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 and like thinking stripe and nike and google are awesome names because of all the meaning we have behind them and i 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 yeah that'd be awesome and and by the way is the purpose should it be like a sentence is that the general yes guideline yeah great so you i want you to be you can introduce yourself at a conference like you're the keynote speaker at a conference and i want you

to introduce yourself and when you go hi i'm lenny i'm the founder of companyx and we exist to blah and say it and like have that feel natural awesome 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 too 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 um 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 they you can look at 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 that's disclaimer i'm an investor in logic loop and i love that you worked with them 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 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 all 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 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 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 i actually stole this exercise or borrowed it from ovolvie 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 nostal 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 used to invest in so those would be like examples of cultural tensions um

cultural tensions are zeitgeists they're things that your audience might be thinking of they're 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 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 too 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 too well i'm so happy i asked that question uh 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 interview post or i know you have a course on this too yeah yeah there's another first round review article it's called um three three moves every startup founder should make something like that great i will find it i'll add it yeah okay awesome 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 left it just like what tells you you may have a positioning problem that's something you should really focus on okay so positioning is the space that you occupy in your target customer's mind and everything you can do to influence how they describe your product um 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 uh if you can't explain what you do to me in like a sentence that's you have a positioning problem that's a high bar 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 link clever and then we go i go in and i ask questions about that and ultimately we get it to sentence length amazing okay how do you go about figuring out your

positioning big question yeah so um i start with your audience uh who poses four 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 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 can ask a couple questions on the person yeah i'm doing some writing and research into this stuff how 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 can be a real person or like an amalgamation of not real people so with the target audience i 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 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 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 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 the best thing you can do is find an audience that is big enough that if you dominate dominated if you got your significant market share among that audience you would be a giant business and tech savvy dads is a pretty big audience also that's just who your outbound going to try to acquire for the 18 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 are focused on acquiring awesome uh i took us off course around the positioning process we i think we end we kind of went off course with the concentric circle model so i'll give it back to you yeah 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 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 four 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 what's their problem all it is is a distillation of that so that statement is 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 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 would they describe it to other people is that right 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's also a small business owner what would i want them to say about the square stand oh yeah i just got the square standard 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 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 interesting i love that that makes a lot of sense

for people trying to go through this exercise you always have such good answers to like how actually the process of coming up with say your position in this case um is it again you pull up a dock and start writing things or is there something even more structured 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 and so getting this into like turns your ipad into a point of sale blankets your home and fast reliable wi-fi 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 have to find 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 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 just say it out loud 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 that is very cool i have not heard this bar test before and i like that it might happen at actual bar is that also something people can find aligners that is that they write it down right now ooh i don't i don't know if that's online okay cool this is it exclusive yeah that 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 it takes some notes like that a lot thanks your point reminded me of an email i just pulled up that i got from adp you're pointed by 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 gonna make make it more fun what are you talking about see that's an example of trying too hard right 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 right feel safe when you're on your summer trip like stuff like that they even included a gif of a that's like tick-tock or being like adp is my mvp yeah this 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 that's exactly the feeling i got and so yeah

personality that's our next topic it's not something 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 than how to figure out your own personality for your brand 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 tick-tock 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 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 it's very like you know you know gray poupon like you know like oh dude 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 or rolex but where on where are you

and so you can just like write it down okay 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 excitement it's spirited this is a mountain dew thing competence reliable and intelligent sophisticated sophistication which is a 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 you 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 gonna spike in and it turns out a lot of tech companies end up spiking in sincerity and competence just usually does happen that way 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 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 so they would say we are playful but not silly or maybe mountain dew would say um we are daring but not stupid so like taking that attribute a little too far and so yeah 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

once you've gone through that exercise and in maybe all the other the other two pieces where do you put this is just like in a dock 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 just putting together strategies that works 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 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 what do you call this document slash place 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 a 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 awesome thank you for all of that there's just there's so much juice there i think people are going to

listen to this a couple 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 bigger companies are just like man they're always like how do i get pr to 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 you mean initial like initial coverage around a launch or going to say early on yeah 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 i'm 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 um also make sure that your website is ready for like the traffic you're gonna drive to it that you're not driving traffic to a name that you're gonna later scrap like are you really ready for this 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 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 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 and 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 succe 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 so really just thinking about like who writes about this space do they write about companies at my stage that's another really big one is uh hey we want the new york times it's like cool the ones 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 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 we'll 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 then 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 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 fifty dollars per person per month and what it does is it provides urgent care and primary care to 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 the company operates in philadelphia and delaware 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 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 in a way to make it interesting and relevant and don't sleep on local preps like if you have a

local business or a local store or local customers this was a huge thing at square like we turned all of our customers into heroes and went after local press 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 in the

wall street journal what a good tip and most likely they're much more open to writing about you versus new york times or 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 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 when do you find that usually ends up being like is there kind of a heuristic yeah ballpark like 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 it they now realize like okay if i had a person who would be able to do all of this it would manage these agencies and freelancers this would be a lot better it also is like or 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 discrete 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 i think we're going to need another episode just about that one topic that 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 going to ask you quick questions and you just give me a quick answer and we'll knock through them all does that sound good sounds great what are two or three books that you recommend most to other people 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 brit benet it was like awesome i then read her other book called the mothers but i think the vanishing half's better awesome i will check that out what's a favorite podcast or even newsletter on marketing i love nick sharma's weekly newsletter he's a growth marketer he started his career i think at hintwater so he does a lot of like cpg um type dtc uh he has a great marketing newsletter that comes out every sunday night um on podcasts 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 um jasmine from the concept bureau has a marketing podcast called unseen unknown and it's kind of about like culture and and branding and how these things in society and trends it's not like street marketing it's kind of more of like the culture and sociology that informs marketing wow that is a lot of good stuff what's a recent movie or tv show that you've loved this is more embarrassing like how many movies have you seen in the last year just curious uh me uh like a lot unlike you know streaming services way too many also if that's what you're where you're going or have you seen that well i've seen like maybe four and they're probably all on disney plus you're winning so that's excellent i would say um like i really like some of those disney pixar movies luca and kanto those were all really great i mostly watched 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 um tv shows i'm like equally bad okay 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 the 10 minutes they're awesome my whole family watched them together it's really cute old enough i'm gonna check that out okay two more questions favorite interview question when hiring a marketing person 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 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 i love that okay final question who else in the industry do you most respect as a thought leader

in the marketing industry marketing industry yeah sure i guess like old school thought leaders um david ogilvy rory sutherland seth godin uh new school thought leaders we mentioned nick 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 um 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 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 sure um i'm on twitter and linkedin twitter i'm hi i am rel 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 or this is more than an hour now and kind of with a little more hand holding 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 dot com slash rel

startup brand strategy amazing and i guess that's how listeners can be useful to you so yeah excellent exactly all right well great all right well thank you again thank you again and to us thanks so much lenny it was fun thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on apple podcast 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