Why every startup founder needs to build a strong personal brand
In this post-product decade, the founder's personal brand is a marketing channel
In one of my earlier essays, I had talked about something Camille Ricketts (First Round Review, Notion) had said.
I had quoted her from a podcast, where she had talked about Notion’s first principles in marketing, and they were powerful in their simplicity: Just two things, storytelling and distribution.
Telling a great story about your company isn’t easy, but it’s very doable if you know what you are doing and what you are setting out to achieve.
It’s the other part, the distribution, that is a challenge in this, the post-product decade, and this essay is an attempt to try to break down one part of it.
A couple of weeks ago, Balaji Srinivasan, the prominent investor and entrepreneur, tweeted this:
He was talking about the role of a founding influencer from the point of view of a community. His point being that this role could help incubate and kickstart a great product, and it resonated, as you can see.
But it is the second line of the tweet I want to draw attention to: “the community derisks the process of market discovery.”
The emphasis on market discovery is mine.
Because what is market discovery if not distribution. A product is distributed when more people discover it, and if an influencer can help do that, especially in the high-risk early stages of a startup, they are worth their weight in gold.
As Stratechery’s Ben Thompson put it in a February essay, “..in a world of abundance being able to aggregate demand is more valuable than being able to create supply; it may offend our analog sensibilities that 90 million email addresses are more valuable than real-world factories, but such is the transformative nature of the Internet.”
But here’s a corollary that derives from that point.
Why do engineer or marketer or product founders need influencers if they can be one themselves, if they can build that audience they need themselves?
They can, except that acquiring an organic audience isn’t easy and takes a lot of time - which is exactly why it is so valuable.
But can marketing help?
Sanjeev, friend and former colleague, asked exactly this on Twitter in July, and it got me thinking.
It’s a terrific thread in its entirety, and delves deep, asking one particular question.
If marketing can help amplify personal brands as extensions of the organisation’s, can this be a viable channel for branding and distribution.
By now, you know that I think the answer is yes.
Let’s go back to the first principles that we started with: storytelling and distribution.
If startups need to take a distribution-first approach, who should be the person telling the stories? The person who knows all of them and can tell them the best - the founder. The marketer can facilitate this, of course. Founder-CEOs have little time, but because they are the keepers of the faith, it is through them that the stories will get the credibility and reach they need.
This is what Asia Matos Orangio, founder of DemandMaven, a marketing and growth consultancy is saying here.
Why does she say ‘even if you suck at it’?
Because credibility is a byproduct of authenticity. And if founders are authentic, even if they suck at it, they will tell a better story, and if they keeps telling better stories, they will build themselves an audience.
And the founders who start off with an audience already have an advantage other founders don’t.
It’ll be criminal to not build and wield that advantage.
Further reading
Welcome to the post product decade - The CMO Journal.
How to build a super cool startup - The SaaSBooMi blog.
Email addresses and razor blades - Stratechery by Ben Thompson.