Everyone knows brand building is an essential component of building a company. “That’s not on brand,” you hear people say. Or: “This is going to be great for our brand.”
There’s brand essence, brand style, brand ambassadors, brand story…. But, when it comes to defining what a brand is – let alone how you build one – things start to get a little murky.
Part of that stems from a confusion between two similar, related, yet distinct terms: branding and brand.
Your company’s “branding” refers to the collection of visual and verbal assets associated with your company. That includes things like your logo, color scheme, messaging platform. These are the cues that signal to customers that they’re interacting with your company.
Your...
Have you settled on a logo for your startup yet? That decision seems like a small one — a quick thing to simply check off the to-do list! — but it’s actually a pretty big undertaking. Startup logos, while often tiny, can make a huge impact on the success or failure of your company. That one tiny little image will be used everywhere — from iPhone tiles to your letterhead to packaging for physical products to swag. With that much real estate, a bad logo can do some serious damage.
But, how do you know what a bad startup logo looks like? Surely logo design is at least a little bit subjective! Perhaps, like the famous Supreme Court justice quote about pornography, you know it when you see it. However, even within the spectrum of subjectivity, t...
Sara Blakely, the founder of SPANX, joined social media 5 weeks ago (Instagram to be more exact) and at the MA Conference for Women in the span of 10 minutes, she gained 2K new followers.
Wait…what? Can I do this too!? Here’s my breakdown of how she did it through the influence of public speaking and tips on how you can move the crowd to build your tribe.
On Thursday, December 8th, I’ve had the honor to be one of the few males to attend and speak at the nation’s largest conference for women, the Massachusetts Conference for Women (Yes, it was fun if you were wondering and the wifey had no objections because it was a conference. Win-win!).
In front of a sold-out audience of 11,000, Sara Blakely was interviewed by Gayle King (Co-host of CBS ...
When I was just starting my startup career and had a little bit of success, I got the best advice ever from a friend of mine whose family had started a $50 billion company. He said:
"Never tell anyone how much money you have. Only two things will happen — they will either try to take it from you or size you up by it — either way, you lose."
I give that advice to every newly minted exited Founder I meet, and at this point, I've given that advice so many times I figured it was worth a detailed explanation. It actually doesn't matter how much you have (or don't have), the advice is just as valuable.
Like it or not, we are judged by our money. If we have it, people judge us because they don't have it, and if we don't have it, ...
Angel investors are typically high net worth individuals who invest very early into the formation of a new startup company, usually in exchange for convertible debt or equity. Angel investors serve as a critical bridge between the very early stages of a startup and financing they’ll get later on. That’s because angels are much more likely than other types of investors to take on high risk investments without much proof of return. In other words, they’re betting on you and your idea — not your metrics.
Angel investors tend to invest in companies that are in industries they know a lot about. So, for example, if an angel investor made a lot of money in the real estate industry, you can imagine they would be most comfor...
Although plenty of established corporations have begun to embrace niche areas of the green movement, they’re often slow to change. Consequently, achieving true sustainability can take a long time — but it doesn’t have to. Thanks to a new breed of disruptive entrepreneurs, the majority of vertical markets are tackling green initiatives and spurring widespread interest in smarter stewardship of natural resources.
This evolutionary process toward greener values, policies, and models hasn’t been lost on stakeholders. From the consumer to the employee to the potential new hire, people universally are increasing their expectations of brands when it comes to aligning with their environmental values. Investors know this innately; even larger ones a...
Startup Founders are not entitled to success, yet we sure act like it.
When we're sitting in a room full of Founders or pouring through social media, we're inclined to think everyone is "killing it" but us. We hear of these meteoric rises, huge funding rounds, and big exits and invariably wonder when all that goodness will happen to us.
What we form is an "entitlement to success." We believe that because we see so much of it happening elsewhere, by virtue of that, it's only a matter of time until it happens to us.
What we miss when creating that entitlement is just how flawed the foundation of that premise is and what a house of cards we create with our own expectations.
In the early days of our formation, when we'r...
You’ve probably seen stories of the ridiculous surge in stock prices when a company adds “blockchain” to its name, but have you heard of “cloud washing?” Essentially, cloud washing is a deceptive practice in which a vendor rebrands an old product or service that relies on the internet by associating it with the cloud.
Many service providers are simply moving their clients’ on-premise software to a data center and calling it a cloud solution. In reality, there’s much more to a true cloud solution than the location of the servers.
There are a number of warning signs that a phony cloud provider might be trying to fool you. To start with, a cloud-native provider will be eager to offer you a free trial. Typica...
Be sure to catch Part I of this discussion
“The customer is why you exist. Why your company chooses to exist. If you don’t put them on a pedestal, if you don’t remind yourself, your team, your operations why you’re a business, why you’re here, you’re destined for fail.”
–Joshua Davidson, Six Customer Service Principles To Abide By
New, new, new, new…. We tend to grow the most excited over new things and to obsess over them, so it’s no surprise that startups focus tremendous energy on new customers. So much so, that a vey important player in the destiny of companies gets overlooked: existing customers.
Unforgivable as that might be, the good news, according to Dr. Deborah Hecker, is that “respect, empathy, good listening, recognizing that ...
SEO. You’ve heard the acronym and you know that a lot of small businesses are seeing great growth from investing in it. But you don’t know how to do it, or what it can mean for your company.
SEO is an ongoing full-company initiative. It involves a very real investment.
But, you’re a small business or a startup. You have very limited resources, a short financial runway, and you’re trying to get something new off the ground. So what does SEO mean for you?
In the next 10 minutes you spend reading this article, my goal is to help you understand what SEO can mean for a small business like yours. We’ll cover: