Building Brands for Startups with Steven Ebert

Transcript

[Music] for our last session of the day we're going to hear from Step Ebert founder of New Vision which is an independent consultancy for early stage branding Steph has worked with companies like American Express BlackRock Spotify Amazon and ESPN and some of his crypto clients include maker Dow Avalanche party spark protocol and our very own a16z crypto please welcome Stephen great to see you all um I'm excited to chat today I think we're going to have a good time yeah I'm Stephen I am a brand strategist my background is working primarily with scaled sort of Blue Chip clients in the web TW space but the past

few years I've been focused more on early stage companies especially in crypto figuring out how to tell Story how to position yourselves in a market how to go to market all that good stuff my company's called New Vision really new vision sort of focus is taking a lot of the practices of developing brand strategy that work really well at scale when you're a big company and learning how to apply those things to early stage companies who are at who are at different stages working towards different Milestones today we're going to talk about early stage brand narrative which is really exciting I think brand narrative is one of those topics that can be a little confusing it can be a little intimidating especially if you're super technical and so we're going to try to break it down keep it really simple and then we'll have some

time after this obviously for Q&A but also to do a little workshopy stuff if folks want to want to dig in so I I tend to always start talks with this question and I'm curious to hear how you respond uh we'll start here what is a brand anyone feel free to just shout it out and I'll repeat it yeah someone's impression of a project that's right what else any other thoughts personality of a personality of a company great cool tons of different ways to answer this right it's more an art than a science there's one definition I really like that I think is is really really helpful at understanding sort of how you can approach developing a brand a brand is the collection of beliefs that people have about your company so

breaking that down a little bit collection of beliefs is it cool is it useful is it exciting is it trustworthy is it fun to use is it a good value does it work when we talk about people that's your users for sure customers but also it's partners and investors anyone you intend to hire the market sort of at large and then when we say your company it's your for sure but it's also your team and it's what you bring to the world right like yeah your company is is who you are and how you exist in the world and how you relate yourself to ideas that people have about crypto about what you're building about the specific Niche that you're in and so when we talk about the idea of brand building what we're really talking about is the practice of trying to proactively

shape the beliefs that people have about us when you put anything out into the world people are bound to have an opinion about it and so when we talk about brand building what we're trying to do is shape and sort of uh build the Contours of how people think about our business to put it another way a brand is the way that you tell your story right like from your website to your Twitter page to a Blog you may have to an investor deck to any kind of external communication you have to figure out how you're going to talk about it right you have to figure out all the different pieces of language you want to use and where you should use them and which are more important in which contexts that is your story but the challenge is that like a lot of found aren't very good at

this you guys are uh obviously here because like you have a really like you know technical background or you have a a very pointed uh perspective on like what you want to build and why but being able to make that really exciting and compelling to users to investors to the world is like a different skill set right and so it's it's not just about you know how do I find product Market fit how do I scale my business there are all of these milestones and all these different types of people that you have to interact with and you have to figure out how you're going to talk about your business you know your ability to to tell your story it sort of directly impacts your ability to to raise Capital to hire to retain talent to acquire users think about all these different audiences right like investors we'll

start there investors are used to telling stories themselves right like an investment thesis is a story that's how they're able to raise money from LPS their ability to like believe in you and believe that you're going to deliver some type of return is based on your ability to tell a really compelling effective story right when you think about you know potential ties you may have when people are looking for for where they they want to work they're thinking about what's a place where I can like deliver something cool to the world what's something that's going to feel rewarding what's going to help me advance my career all of these different considerations their interest in doing that with your company is dependent on how you tell your story once you've hired them and once you have employees they're not Founders necessarily right

like you may pull in a couple people up to a co-founder title but for the most part you have people with a very different set of calculus about why they stay at a company about why they care your ability to keep people excited and motivated and Mission aligned in the midst of a really stressful challenging uh job to be done of like building a business that's depending on how you choose to tell the story of your company to them and then obviously like your users your customers right like they need to know why they should care at all they need to know why your thing is something that they want to use and so all of these all of these sort of objectives raising money hiring people keep people and onboarding users and growing the business are all functions of Storytelling and uh at the risk of

being uh a bit provocative like until you have Revenue like what you have is a story that's all you've got and so it may not be perfect it may not be uh like the the the easiest thing to build but figuring out how to how you tell your story is like a critical critical opportunity especially right at this juncture where you are right now and so we're going to talk today about what it takes takes to craft a really good story um there's this guy Ben Horowitz you may be familiar with him he has this whole perspective on uh what makes a good CEO it's two sides right like you have to be able to to build the business you have to know how to build you also have to know how to sell and the building side I would imagine you all have like some

sense uh directionally of like how to do that the selling side can be like a totally different animal and eventually you will have to build a sales force and you will have to figure out how to like brand your company Market your company build a funnel but for now today the thing you need to worry about is how you tell your story that is the first step of being able to do all of the other things you need to do on the cell side of the business and so three steps we I've sort of boiled this down to like the most simple principles I can we'll go through each one three steps to building a really great Brand Story learn Define craft and so we'll go through each one some considerations for each and what you should be thinking and doing at each stage so when we talk

about learning what we really mean is like having a foundational understanding of what you're trying to do what your customers are looking for and how you can show up to solve their problem so there are some initial things that you have to learn you probably know if you're at this point in CSX you probably have a good sense of several of these things I would encourage you to like think through answering all of these questions like on a piece of paper write it down the doing the process of going through the process of actually answering the questions like a practical form is literally valuable the first thing you should be thinking about what problem are you really trying to solve right you should be specific here and this is like a functional problem not an emotional problem what is a problem that exists in the world your company is is

set up to address second who is the customer and again this is a really good opportunity to be specific you need to think about is uh is there a big enough like total addressable Market here how frequently are they encountering this problem how painful is the problem to experience third how do they feel about the problem this is something that a lot of people skip but it's really important as you actually start to craft messaging what are people's feelings related to this and you can't just say they feel bad that's like a shortcut you need to be able to answer really really specifically what you mean by bad are they apathetic are they exhausted are they confused are they worn down like what specifically what emotions are they feeling when they're encountering this problem however frequently they do what Solutions already exist these could be

competitors that are doing some probably shittier version of what you want to do or it could be an an existing behavior that users are are going through or taking to solve this problem that they're encountering and then lastly like where do those other Solutions come up short is it other folks are too expensive it's too complex to use it takes too long it's like a sketchy company like what are what are the reasons why other Solutions in the market aren't working you again you probably have a sense of what these things are but writing it out allows you to move into the next step which is like defining so we've like learned all this stuff we know about our customer we know about the market now we have to like Define ourselves our business the company in relation ship to that problem and so there are a different set of

things you need to think about here we've defined what the customer needs now we have to answer like how specifically do does my product does our company solve that problem we know that they're encountering this friction it's not enough to say that yeah and we solve that friction how do we solve it what is the solution that we're delivering to the market why is it better number two why is it better than what already exists this is both functionally and emotionally right like functionally what is better about the thing that we're doing and emotionally what is it delivering to people and we'll unpack why the emotional component is important in just a moment and then third why are you as a founder or as a founding team the right person people to solve this do you have like uh like expertise on this

specific subject matter do you have a bunch of experience uh do you have just like grit and tenacity this is like the moment I think Ariana talked about this like don't be afraid to like respectfully Flex on this like slide in your pitch deck it's okay to be good at something like lead with that so why are you the founder the right person to solve this problem I think Frameworks are interesting uh when it comes to Brand strategy because they get used a lot and a lot of people like me will get up on a stage and be like this is the only framework you need it's going to solve all your problems that's like mostly but I will give you a framework today that is just used to organize your thinking and to get all your thoughts sort of in a concise package so that you can then start to

build your story uh four this is a four-step framework it's going to look confusing at first do not panic we're going to go through it for blank who blank my company blank that allows them to blank so what does that mean for blank to find the audience in the first blank who are we building for number two who blank what is the problem that they're encountering what are we trying to solve right and you're just going back to all the stuff you have in your like your learnings right in that first phase and filling in this framework so for this audience who encounter this problem my company and put your name in those brackets those what is the solution we're delivering and then what is the benefit that that delivers to them so to give you like uh a really simple example we'll just use

me right as someone who like works with a lot of companies sort of in similar positions to where you are how would I answer this question about what I do well for early stage Founders who what problem do they have well they have Technical and operational expertise but they often lack like marketing Savvy right they don't know how to tell that in story form they don't know how to show up in market so what does New Vision do well we offer Tactical advice and a streamlined process for taking a brand to Market that allows them to quickly and affordably reach their next major funding hiring or growth milstone super simple super desri descriptive very very functional piece of language uh the problem is that you can't put this anywhere right like I can't put this on my website and be like there's the business hire me right like I have

to turn this into a story but these are all of the ingredients we need to then be able to translate that into a really compelling Set uh like a system of messaging and ideas that we're then going to deliver into a market and that's what this third phas is about craft right so we've learned all this we've defined ourselves in relationship to that and now we have to sort of craft how we deliver that story in Market to consumers or to our various audiences and so there are some questions your Brand Story should answer as going to live on your website it's going to live on your Twitter it's going to live in any kind of investor deck or any external Communications you should be covering off on these points first what is like the big idea you want to

lead with what is like the evocative exciting thing that sets the stage for all of your product marketing that's like the first question right second how does your product pay off that big idea practically again it's a functional explanation of the solutions that you deliver third why does your product matter right now what does it lad up to what's the bigger more exciting more important thing that you're working towards that people can get excited about and then what specific audiences uh do you need to TA this story to and what do they need to hear so think about you know when you're building out all of your Communications you have a set of messages you need to be able to deliver to your investors right like there's specific stuff you need to say to them that's different than the stuff you need

to say to users which may be different than the stuff you need to say to Partners but then also within each of those things sometimes you have to have versions within each of those things so think about like uh if you have two sides of a Marketplace in your company and you need to talk to the supply side and the demand side or you have technical users and non-technical users or you have people who are already in crypto and people who aren't in crypto yet thinking through the specific audiences and the way you need to show up for each of them super important and then lastly tone of voice how does your Audi how do each of these audiences need to be spoken to and how do you show up in like a meaningful compelling way that allows you to like Foster a community and grow everything that Ted was talking

about and so if you look at these things they map pretty closely to like some functional deliverables that you can work with someone to develop right you can develop product positioning you can say this is what we do and this is why we're better than all of our competitors you have product messaging these are the solutions we deliver to Market this is our vision this is why we're doing this this is what we're working towards audience messaging and for you investor this is how I'm going to tell you the story and for you user this is how I'm going to tell you the story and so on and so on and then subtle adjustments to your tone of voice for each of these people um to to make sure this isn't too like philosophical I the sense that everyone is tracking but we'll go through an example just to sort of like

make things Crystal Clear um let's just take bass right and we can sort of reverse engineer what this process might look like um all this stuff is like pulled from their Public Communication so I don't have any inside baseball here like this is just what they say so these are those questions from the learn section right what are we trying to solve well we're trying to create an environment where a bunch of useful crypto daps can emerge and on board the next billion users to crypto okay sick that's a that's a pretty a significant problem to solve great uh who is the customer well it's developers who want to build on chain okay that makes sense how do they feel about the problem well they're super confused right there are all of these different environments maybe they want to build something on chain but they're like I don't know

where to go like I could do it on salana I could do it on ethereum I could do it sort of anywhere it's really overwhelming to figure out which uh set of set of tools you want to build with and which environments you want to build for there are all of these options that already exist and so where do they come up short well often the application infra itself is is not Crypton native right it lets people access crypto but it's not enabled by crypto so this is bass's whole sort of premise is that we can make everything native to crypto that'll make these daps super powerful and we can onboard the next billion users with these super powerful daps amazing so what does that look like to then move in move it from uh from learning to definition well go through the framework for developers who want to

build on chain but are overwhelmed by the possibilities of how to build a in- class Crypton native product base is a builder friendly ethereum L2 that offers security stability uh excuse security stability and scaleability to power onchain apps great super clear how does that show up in their story well look at their website right this is the homepage what's in the bottom right corner bottom left corner basis for everyone right cool that's a positioning now coinbase can get away with a positioning sort of this vague because they're coinbase you probably can't so you uh will need to like tool your language here to be a bit more EXP explanatory and tactical but lead with your positioning what are you doing why is it exciting what do they have next we are bringing the world on chain to increase economic freedom

amazing that's a mission how do we know that well if you look at coinbase's mission statement it says kind of the same thing they're connecting the dots between the two right when you start to look at their messaging what do they say built for billions worldwide reach open and trusted transactions below 1 cent all of that is product messaging and it's all benefit focused it's all focused on what you get as a result of using their product so if you follow sort of this three-step process you begin to have all of the tools you need to start to craft this language and this message I have a few sort of like stray thoughts that don't neatly fit into any of these sections of the presentation I'm going to run through those and then we'll open it up for a few questions um so a few last things for you to keep in

mind first um brand amplifies value but a a good brand can't save a shitty product what do I mean what do I mean by that the thing that's going to make you successful is having a really good product not a really good brand a really good brand takes the value of your product and amplifies it it's like an exponent right but the problem is like if the product itself is a zero it doesn't matter what exponent you raise it to it's still going to suck right so like a good brand can't make up for a shitty product you have to build a great product first and then use your brand to amplify why that thing is so good so don't don't get mistaken that you can build a sick brand and just focus on that and let the product stuff sit by the wayside or deprioritize it there are

a couple of examples of people doing that but they're much more the outlier than the rule second is to follow the process go through the process of like answering these questions on a piece of paper it's okay to like answer them stupid first and then try to answer them smart like you just got to get ideas down on paper and it will probably sound dumb and like overly simple at first but that's okay start stupid and then you can move into try to make it sharp and compelling and pointed for a customer or whatever audience you're writing for third the more saturated or competitive the market that you sort of are operating in the more differentiated you need to be so understanding what competitors are doing and understanding how different you have to be is mostly a function of like how many people are in

that category fourth uh narratives need fit right just like a product like product may have to take a bunch of shapes and forms for you to find the exact right thing narratives are kind of similar and so you should be treating your narrative as like an iterative thing that evolves over time if you were you know as you're building your company as you're building a product hopefully you were talking to a lot of users right and in those conversations you will naturally get feedback on how you tell your story sometimes someone will you know sort of stick their neck out and be like hey that doesn't make sense to me most of the time you will just see people's eyes sort of start to glaze over and if you see a pattern of everyone's eyes glaze over at the same place you know there's a problem in the

story and that's a thing you can start to Tool and refine you should treat narrative as an iter iterative thing that can change and evolve over time this is especially true of your product messaging that can kind of change whenever your positioning language if you need to Pivot that's a good time to adjust it but think of your narrative as something that's always changing and always growing alongside your product don't get distracted by the current meta this happens a lot if um you're on the same sort of corner of Twitter than I am everyone has been talking about taste or I guess that was the past few weeks um don't don't get distracted like don't worry about what the current meta is uh we're not talking about that now but we were two weeks ago and that is like a function of how things evolve and all of

the people that sort of Chase the or you know kind of fast follow whatever is trending end up just looking sort of stuck in a very specific time box don't get distracted by the current meta build something good and find a unique ownable way to talk about it divorced from sort of whatever is happening online if you're building a consumer business visual identity is extra important that's a thing that you want to think through you want to spend time and money investing in we can talk a little bit more about how to partner with people how much you should be charging if that's interesting to folks um but on the whole extra important if you're a consumer business to be thinking about your visual brand doesn't mean it's not important if you're be to be but you have a little bit more flexibility if it's a consumer brand the yeah visual

identity has to kind of be hot when you work with a partner it's okay it's okay to work with Partners especially on that craft phase like you know it's like the classic like shape Rotator award cell thing like it's okay to bring on award cell if you need to just for a little bit and then you can get rid of them um but work with Partners when you need to especially on that third craft phase um at this stage you want to think about working with like small teams or Independents to start and then as you scale uh you can start to think about working with an agency in a more formal capacity that's not like a hard and fast rule but generally if you're paying an agency premium you want to get the full value of what the agency can offer and most of that is unlocked when you're

farther along if you work with an outside partner and they're working on deliverables for you ideally all everything they develop should pass the pale test this is specific for an early stage company anything they develop for you should be language if you're working specifically on on narrative it should be language that is public so you don't need internal language and internal Frameworks to Think Through To You Know organize how the founders think about the business you need to help developing public facing information so any language they develop should be public it should be applied it should not be this like philosophical woo woo like it needs to like answer these like functional questions very specifically what do we do why is it valuable why should people want to use us why are we better than competitors needs to be

applied not philosophical it should be iterative like if you hear someone say this will last you three to five years when they're talking about like your brand Identity or your brand strategy run you don't need that there's a good chance you might have to Pivot and you don't want to spend all this money on something that's supposed to last you this long duration if you're going to end up having to change what your company is talking about entirely uh it should be iterative and designed to evolve with you and then lastly your partnership should be long term you should be thinking about finding people who can sort of like slot into your Professional Services stack so in the same way you're going to have a lawyer that you hit up when you have a contract question or you have an accountant you hit up when you have a question about

taxes you need to have someone you can hit up it's sort of like an outside partner who can say like Hey we're thinking about you know launching this thing next week we have a product announcement can you look through these tweets so you should be looking and thinking about long-term relationships not just like little project Scopes and then lastly don't expect your brand to last forever that may be a little sad but that's okay it's not your company it's just the brand uh the brand is going to evolve over time you should be thinking about getting to your next Milestone which for most people in this room is probably your next round of funding so think through iterative small steps to get to the next Milestone don't think about like we're building a brand that's going to last forever that's sick and if you do you know go with God props

to you but for the most part you can just think about whatever the smartest next step is that is the presentation um I'd love to take any questions if you have them so we've started like beating to be and now building things that are more you know B Toc or available for for more people how do you how would you kind of help kind of contextualize how we can kind of convey that to a broader audience yeah I mean a a lot of what you're thinking through there are some things that are Universal regardless of if you have a B2B audience or a B Toc audience even when you're working with a B2B customer there's still like a human being right that is like experiencing friction or experiencing a pain point so a lot of the translation between like a

B2B piece of messaging and a b Toc piece of messaging is just really sort of nailing what is the consu what is the human pain that this person is experiencing or the problem they're experiencing and maybe instead of you know in a B2B context you might abstract that out and just say like companies face this or a lot of companies that are trying to build on chain have trouble with this type of tooling you can just speak more directly to like a human uh you can imagine like a human person and really just sort of like zooming in on whatever that exact pain point is that is like a decent place to start there are some like tactical differences that I'm we should uh chat after this and we can talk through but uh a lot of it comes down to like how well the types of

deliverables you're building the types of uh like documents You're Building to share with people like uh for a B2B audience you may have a lot of comms that live on your website versus If You're Building B Toc you may need to go more direct on social so sometimes it's just adapting the content to the right context and making some small tweaks in tone great thanks yeah for sure hi um I had a quick question I think you um near the end you mentioned um something along the lines of you know really we should be focused on getting to our next Milestone how do we begin to think about like sort of I don't know like almost like a MVB right like what's the minimum viable brand like what are the elements that we would need to get to the next Milestone yeah no that's great I a lot

of folks will come up and talk about minimum viable Brands specifically so like that's a good piece of language for you to have um I tend to think that the things on the strategy side that are like the fundamentals you need to nail a positioning so you need to be able to like a oneline description of who you are and what you're doing you need to nail your product messaging so like and those that can be formatted in different ways that can be your feature set that can be the solutions that you deliver that can be why your specific thing is valuable compared to competitors but you need to nail that product messaging and then ideally you would think about your specific audiences that you going to be speaking to whether that's an investor or a user or a partner um and building

out the specific supporting messages that they need so what are the additional details beyond the overall brand messages what specific details do each of these audiences need I think those three things are like core MVB um however there are you know some additional things and I can pull that slide back up as well this slide those things on in Orange I think are like a pretty good shortcut for you on uh things I would think about sweet and just as a quick followup question right let's say that you know um uh you're also you know a a b2c company right and obviously then you need to start thinking about like public facing visual stuff too right like I think that for maybe like a sort of a challenge that we

have right or kind of had right is like how far down the road do we need to go you know when do you start to feel comfortable with being like all right ship it like this is like good enough right um are there ways to test that early and especially for like smaller startups and things like that so I'm unfortunately going to be waiting into the taste discourse now um because I think that actually does matter in this context I think the most important thing you can do when you're hiring a design partner is hire someone whose taste you trust and you think is better than yours that is like the single best shortcut to being able to get to like a good creative outcome generally your creative partner will have a point of view on like what you need

I would say my point of view I think like you obviously need like some type of logo right you need to figure out a color palette and you need to figure out your type face again that is like the bare bare bare minimum I think if any design person heard me speaking they' tell me to off they you know 10 other things you need too but um those are like the the most fundamental things but in terms of like knowing when to stop um two ways to interpret that one do we have enough things that we need you can always build more so start small and scale have we gone far enough in terms of is this identity good enough are we happy with the quality work with someone whose taste is better than yours and that will sort of that should clear your standards and ideally meet theirs

as well in that same vein is there like um some way of measuring how much you should spend to get to MVB and how do you scale spend on brand and measure that against sort of um what you get in return for it yeah totally so this is this is sort of the like the touchy question of like how do I pick my partners because generally the scale of your partner is going to be the biggest determining factor of how much you're spending sometimes you will find that people who are like Elite and excellent are charging more than people who are average but for the most part you're going to see spend divided into like tranches right you're going to have a tranch of spend like an amount of money a general like amount of money you

will spend if you work with an independent partner like a freelancer versus if you work with a small agency is a big agency those tend to be the three tranches of spend at this stage for where you are unless you're a consumer company I would be almost certainly thinking about uh individual Partners like we want to be working with like smart people whose taste and intellect We Trust who we think are going to like make us stronger for identity I would expect at that scale to spend between like 20 and $30,000 on visual identity strategy somewhere between 10 and 15 if you move up to the small agent you can basically just like double or triple those numbers you tend to find that um people love round numbers and

you see a lot of like 50k and 75k in the small agency range and that's where it's like a guy who calls himself a company and like can like spin up a team as he needs to that is like where you start paying like small agency rates and that's like you know 50 to 75 and then big agency way too early for but that's when like you're paying 250k plus yeah I think that's it thanks so much [Music]