Lenny DistilledFeaturing: Arielle Jackson (Marketing Expert in Residence, First Round Capital)
10 quotes · 7 insights
Watch Full Episode"This" and "it" refer to the brand strategy process Jackson described, which includes defining company purpose, positioning, and messaging elements.
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. Literally your web copy almost writes itself, if you get this all done right.
I'll never write a line of code without doing positioning first.
You have a positioning 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.
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. You just don't have enough of anything to do that successfully.
Don't do a straight funding announcement. A lot of founders raise money and they're like, cool, let's announce. It's like, no, we'll use that funding announcement as a news hook to tell a larger story.
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?
I like to think of 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.
A good name is only going to help you, but a bad name won't hurt a good company.
Over time, a word can come to mean something that is beyond what that actual word means. Like Disney means magic today. Volvo means safety. Those names are not good. If I just put it in a spreadsheet or one of those lists, no one would pick it.
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. You just don't have enough of anything to do that successfully.