In his presentation at the Warm Gun Conference in San Francisco CA, Joshua Porter shared how start-ups can build effective brands. Here are my notes from his talk:
- Brands are not logos. A brand is your relationship to a product or service.
- What impacts a brand? Personal experience and recommendations have the strongest impact. A company's messaging has the least.
- A brand promise does not survive first use. We need to get people to use things as fast as possible so we can develop a brand.
- Minimum viable product: the basic service that you can use to create repeatable value. Branding is different pre-MVP. You need to find your repeatable value. Try to avoid the voice in your head that says, let's brand like a big company.
- All start-ups start by doing unscalable things. Build your brand through 1:1 direct relationships. People love direct connections.
- Post MVP: you want to scale what's working. Brand becomes a one to many relationship.
- Teach people to do things with your product that makes them want to do it more.
- Start with a question and help people get answers. This creates great content experiences.
- Segment out your leads based on the ones that spent the most time with your product. You will grow the amount of deals you close.
- Post MVP, strengthen your brand by educating people.