Note: This article was written for and appeared in Trends.co (the Hustle)
Obscurity is the enemy. You need a brand to stand out. Andrew Gazdecki from MicroAcquire agrees:
It can be hard to stand out in a loud crowd. Let’s be honest, 2020 left us all over stimulated and a bit overwhelmed.
Competition doesn't make it easy. Research shows businesses today face more competitors (9.7 on average) than new companies did five years ago (2.6). AWS, Shopify, and no-code really lowered the barrier to entry around here, which shifted the risk from “can I build this?” to “will anyone care?”
Build a brand
Brand is the key to unlock a cult-like following. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re building one:
- Tell a story. Great brands tell a story. David Cancel wasn’t thinking about tech when he launched Drift. He was thinking about how Procter & Gamble sells soap because brand is the secret to defensibility. Drift’s brand narrative has been passed around every B2B marketing team and helped them nab $114m in funding. Just remember that the main character in the story is your customer, not your product.
- Stand for something. Brand is not throwing a product on pastel backgrounds with sans-serif font. You must stand for something meaningful. Think different (Apple). Go surfing (Patagonia), Arm the rebels (Shopify). These brands have manifestos that don’t accommodate indifference -- you’re either in or out.
- Show how. Finish this sentence: The best electric car is (blank). Most of us aren’t thinking about Nissan Leaf. Tesla offers a more compelling path to reduce oil dependence. Your dominant selling idea (DSI) needs to be important, believable, and memorable to your market. Own it.
- Pick a fight. Without conflict, there’s no story. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s contrarian views managed to build a $25m Basecamp business. Last year they picked a fight with Apple over fees during the launch of Hey, their new email product. Apple eventually approved the app… but not before the internet heard about Hey.
Small brands punch above their weight class
You don’t need an agency ad budget to build a great brand.
Justin Jackson turned Transistor into a leading podcast hosting brand while bootstrapping. He doesn’t shy away from strong opinions, calling BS on John Doerr’s assertion that, “Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.” Jackson believes ideas are not cheap, which is an excellent brand position for a podcasting tool that enables ideas to spread.
Transistor.fm leveraged its founders social media activity to bootstrap a podcasting brand
There’s also Sahil Lavingia, who recently shared why he doesn’t have meetings, deadlines, or full-time employees at Gumroad. When he failed to raise money in 2016, Lavingia had to layoff 26 people. A few contractors saved Gumroad while it slowly grew. Today’s team (still contractors) operates like their creator customers. The “no-meeting-go-create” brand angle works — Gumroad generates $11m in annual revenue.
Andrew Gazdecki summed it up well when he told us, “What I love about all of these companies is how active their founders are on social media, letting people get to know them personally as much as their company.”
Building a brand this way pays off. Gazdecki added, “Brand plays a huge part in selling for a higher amount as a founder… and for buyers, it gives the seller confidence you are in fact a serious buyer.”
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