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Telling the stories of startup founders and creators and their unique journey. Each episode features actionable tips, practical advice and inspirational insight.
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:20:21
Where do you start? You know. Can I ask that question? Because I think it's hard sometimes to figure out if you're just kind of getting going or you're at an early stage, do you start branding your business? You start out with the band, Jen. You know, once you think you've got this kind of a, you know, you've got, you know, sort of a working assumption around your market, your message and stuff.
00:00:20:22 - 00:00:43:00
Yeah. I developed this theory when I was working with you, Greg, and it was you start with demand generation, because demand generation activities will end up notifying your brand will end up becoming part of your brand. But you know frequently. Will your brand activities drive a lot of demand? Right. So you need to drive if you think you've got it.
00:00:43:01 - 00:01:07:01
What that means is you need to test whether other people understand it. And so you need to drive them into the business. And you need to see who's coming in and who's responding to those messages. And that's to me, I would refer to that as demand generation. If you start with big brand messaging that is not tied to a call to action, you won't know that anybody seeing that message and responding to it.
00:01:07:03 - 00:01:27:21
So I would start with demand generation. Now that's still a pretty big umbrella. So then within demand generation what do you do next? What do you do next. What do you do next? What you do next. And where I would start are the things that drive people in with relatively high level of frequency. Because then you can see those people are, like I said, and you can start understanding how they're responding to your messages.
00:01:28:01 - 00:01:52:04
Yeah. Yeah, I agree, I think you're right. Especially early stage, many, many years ago when I started doing this as an agency, I had an individual come to me and say, they're going to sponsor a NASCAR event. And they did. It's a startup. Yeah. And they're not here anymore. I think I'm surprised they didn't work one year or so with, like, a race sponsorship.
00:01:52:05 - 00:02:18:11
That's that was their entire budget. It's gone. I can only imagine what that cost. I they had so much visibility very quickly. And for one day. One day. Right. Yeah. When I was at CareerBuilder, we looked at a NASCAR sponsorship. Right. Yeah. I mean, why not? This is a consumer brand, essentially, like, get that name out and it's it's a long logos a little bit on the side of a car really nicely.
00:02:18:12 - 00:02:39:21
And we never did it because it was just too expensive. Like, did it make sense even as a relatively big company that could afford that sort of thing? Yeah. We looked at it and said, well, what what's the alternate use and cost money? And the alternate use of that money was more targeted. I swear I got more targeted dimensions for B2B marketing.
00:02:40:03 - 00:03:03:13
And it was like, okay, well, let's do that. Yeah. But it was all right. It's how you actually got your budget by saying, hey, we can do this NASCAR. No, no, no. Now do all this. And now I got my budget. I wanted. Totally. But yeah, I mean, it's boring as hell, right? Like, you know, it's way more fun to sponsor a NASCAR than it is, you know, to go do more blocking and tackling demand.
00:03:03:15 - 00:03:24:14
But you see it. And I think there's a shift right as you start to see the market, the venture capital markets are a lot softer now than they were. Companies are going to have to start doing a lot more with less fundamentals are going to be a lot more important. They're not going to you're not going to see, you know, as many companies really overfunded where boring is really going to be what's most important.
00:03:24:15 - 00:03:45:20
Right. Boring and narrowing and narrowing and narrowing a market. Not trying to go out to right this, you know, mass. Well, there's more than this one. The number. But a boring gets back to. Okay, then when you're ready to hire people and you want to hire people that are better than you at this, the people that are better than you as demand gen marketing and B2B branding and all of that.
00:03:45:20 - 00:04:02:13
Do not think that topic is boring. Like they they jump into it and you're like, I love spending my time on that. I love solving that problem. I can be a 32nd video that everybody thinks is so boring. But let me tell you what. The three people that watch this, they're going to call and say, like, that's that's the other lesson is like, where do you start?
00:04:02:14 - 00:04:19:06
Okay. Well, when you start hiring people for that, they've got to be the people who think that that's just the most exciting stuff in the world. You use the term like a jack of all trades dimension. What does that mean? Like, if I'm a founder, what's my job description look like for this person? Because what you're talking about, you're talking about more of a doer here than you are.
00:04:19:07 - 00:04:42:09
Yeah. So for sure, those big ten. Yeah. The word I used is action. Like you need someone who is willing to actively get their hands dirty in the business. Well, 100%. That's why I think a lot of early stage companies are loaded up with engineering talent because engineers are like, yeah, like it's all their problem. You're like very positive about my ability to solve that problem.
00:04:42:15 - 00:05:02:08
So that's I think number one. Number two, you've got to understand the typical marketing tech stack. So you really like you have to know how to use whatever CRM system you want to use. You have to know how to use that. You have to understand how to connect different pieces of technology with different pieces of technology, and how to do the research to figure that out.
00:05:02:11 - 00:05:22:18
Because there there aren't there aren't a lot of people who have those answers. You just kind of have to do them so that that technical angle, you got to want to be technical, like that and kind of get lost in there a little bit to really understand. The third thing I had is you've gotta have somebody who understands search, and that is SEO, that is paid advertising, that is search behavior.
00:05:22:19 - 00:05:50:13
That is everything that's encompassed on Google Analytics, like all of that stuff. I kind of put that all in that search category because that's where you're going to find all the information. And then someone who's analytical and I think that might go into the technology piece of it, but you got somebody who's analytical, who's able to say, I want to find the answer and then use that answer to bring my solution to like, yeah.