Fostering founder brand as a competitive advantage with Dave Gerhardt
Fostering founder brand as a competitive advantage with Dave Gerhardt
Dave Gerhardt (00:03):
A key ingredient, though, was, whether it was like David at Drift or Ben at Privy, it wasn't like pulling teeth to get them to do these things. They believed in the value of them, and they weren't looking back at me two months later being like, "What's the ROI on this? Show me the pipeline." They believed in doing it this way, and were ready to make the long term investment.
Peep Laja (00:24):
I'm Peep Laja. I don't do fluff. I don't do filler. I don't do emojis. What I do is study winners in B2B SaaS, because I want know how much is strategy, how much is luck, and how did it win. This week, one of the top B2B marketing minds, Dave Gerhardt. Dave is the former VP of marketing at Drift, former CMO at Privy, and is now building his own B2B marketing education business. This is a special episode on how to use the founder story as a competitive advantage. Dave has a new book out called Founder Brand, and has thought a lot about this stuff. This episode, Dave shares why having a visible founder with a strong story can generate early growth and differentiate you from your competition. We talk strategy for cultivating an engaged audience on social media. Let's get into it. We're in an era where most competitors in most markets look very similar to each other, both product and marketing-wise. How can a visible founder make a difference here?
Dave Gerhardt (01:24):
Social media is still the biggest opportunity for startups. I think it's just been missed. People have approached it wrong. I feel silly telling you, "Yeah, you should be active on social media." But the reason it can be such an advantage for a founder is because you're able to reach your dream customers online, directly, from anywhere in the world, without spending a dollar, and get feedback on ideas and things that are interesting. It's just such a cheat code for not only getting initial customers, but just getting your finger on the pulse of what's happening in your world. I think so many founders have just been like, "Social media has been an afterthought," or it's ghost-written and managed by the PR team. What that means is they just tweet out webinar links and Boston Business Journal Awards, versus what people actually want to hear today is thought leadership from experts in their industry.
Dave Gerhardt (02:17):
We are driven by expertise. If you sell to marketers, you sell to finance, the opportunity is to build up a direct relationship with those people online. The way that you do that is not by promoting yourself, it's by adding value and being a thought leader. The way that you be a thought leader is putting out relevant, interesting content about your niche every single day, every single week. It's just not a promotional channel, it should be a conversational channel. That's what a lot of founders get wrong with it.
Peep Laja (02:52):
Nepotism is not a thing of a distant, dark past. All the best jobs and deals are given to friends and family. It's how the world still works, for the most part. Cultivate your nepotism opportunities. Engage with people on social daily. Comment under stuff. Do the hard work of relationship building. It's going to take a long ass time. But you're going to be around five years from now, too. The world runs on relationships and reputation, and your personal brand is your key to most everything you want.
Dave Gerhardt (03:22):
Where David and Elias, the Drift founders came from, was a sales and marketing background. They built a product at HubSpot. They had a marketing automation company, Performable, before that. They spent over a decade in sales and marketing. What they set out to do was to build a marketing automation platform that was built on chat and messaging. The focus was specifically on sales and marketing, because that was where they came from. We saw that and we were like, "Oh, wow, this actually lines up perfectly from a content standpoint. That was our company strategy. This lines up perfectly from a content standpoint, because we're going to go hard on telling the story." Drift is built for sales and marketing. Intercom is a great product, kudos to them. They built an amazing business. But they're building for product people. Look at the stuff they write about. Look at their content. Look at the integrations that we're building.
Dave Gerhardt (04:09):
It's not just fluff, by the way. It's not just marketing messaging. You have to deliver on that in the roadmap. What that meant was, the Drift product team at this stage was amazing and just cranking out new stuff. Everything that they put out, it'd be every week they were putting something out, it had to be backed up by that, "Built for sales and marketing." While Intercom may build some product management SaaS app integration that product managers will love, we need to be putting out things that have a direct use case for sales and marketing. The way you show that to the market is by constantly delivering on that. I don't think I've ever told this story out loud before, but this is why it's so hard to give marketing advice online sometimes, even though I do, and take a very definitive take, and people get really mad about it or whatever. But there's so much nuance, because we had all these secret ingredients.
Dave Gerhardt (04:57):
One of the key ingredients to the Drift strategy was the fact that we could you use, when we're literally sitting at a whiteboard and just thinking, "What ammo do we have as a company to tell our story?" Well, David and Elias came from HubSpot. Everybody in this world's going to know HubSpot. He was a chief product officer there. Elias was a VP of engineering. Their company got acquired by HubSpot. They rebuilt the whole product. We can tell this decade of experience in sales and marketing story. "Okay, let's go use that to advantage." What's cool about this is, this is why people say, "Your story is your strategy." This is a perfect example of that. Because that story, the VP of product was aligned on that story. The things that product was built on was aligned to that story. The things we were doing in marketing were aligned to that story.
Dave Gerhardt (05:39):
This is why it's not about the little tactic, it's about fundamentally sitting down as a leadership team, or the founders, or whatever stage the company you're at, and being able to articulate your strategy beyond features and integrations you're going to build. This was such a simple way of framing the company and framing what we needed to go do. I've never been a part of a team at that stage that was so aligned and cranking. That was a big reason that we grew so fast.
Peep Laja (06:03):
Many dismiss strategic messaging, brand storytelling, and positioning as marketing fluff. What these companies fail to realize is that the story is the strategy. Your brand and your story can act as a rally cry to your audiences. You probably don't have enough money to compete and win on innovation. But anyone can win on brand. A study by Adweek found that the ability to craft a brand narrative is the most important characteristic of a challenger brand. As narrative strategist Andy Raskin explains, your story is the promise to your customers that your product brings to life. They're buying your story before they ever use your product.
Andy Raskin (06:38):
I used to think that the story was like wrapping paper for the product. You build this product, and then we're going to create this story that's going to make it look good on the shelf. Through lots of experiences, I came to this almost flipped view, which is that, actually, the story is the main thing we're building. The product is a prop for making the story come true. When I work with teams, something I hear over and over is that the story wasn't just for selling, although of course that's often the first impetus. But it becomes this strategic North Star that guides the product team on what we're even building. That's why I really believe this thing that the story is the strategy.
Peep Laja (07:37):
You were a CMO at Privy. How did you approach founder brand there? What kind of impact did it have?
Dave Gerhardt (07:45):
When I went to Privy, I had the opposite playbook from Drift. When I went to Drift, it was starting at zero. But the founder was well known, David. When I went to Privy, they had half a million people using their app. They were one of the top apps in the Shopify app store. But not a lot of people in that world knew Ben. The opposite scenario was, well, here, we already have distribution. We have plenty of people we can reach out to, and email, and talk to about this. There, it was more like, "We need to get this guy a microphone." I wish I had some crazy, sexy playbook that we did. But the ingredients there were, they already have distribution, they already have half a million people using the app, they already have however much website traffic. He's been in this space for 10 years, just been very quiet about it. One of the reasons that I went there was because he's like, "I want to turn the volume. I want to go do this thing, and I think you can help me."
Dave Gerhardt (08:44):
The very first thing that we did was launch this, we called it eCommerce Marketing School. It's a perfect example of creating the show for your dream customers, where there's a lot of podcasts and information about eCommerce and the Shopify ecosystem and marketing, but there's not somebody who was the leader for small businesses. Because teaching small businesses how to do marketing is very different than B2B. It is very SMB. This is like somebody who just had an Etsy store and might now migrate to Shopify, and you're teaching them how to do email marketing. We created a show that was, "We're going to bring 101, 102 level marketing information about how to run your Shopify store."
Dave Gerhardt (09:28):
I hosted it at first to get it out the door. But Ben actually was like, "I'm really hungry. I want to do this." We made the decision after a couple months to do... He did a daily podcast for six months, and it was 10 to 12 minute episodes. He had a list of, "Today I'm going to talk about one or two very tactical lessons." Over the course of a year, now we built up over a hundred episodes of very tactical eCommerce marketing lessons. That gave him ammo. That's what he can post on LinkedIn about. That's what he can post on Twitter about. He wants to go speak at an event. He's now done a hundred mini speaking opportunities.
Dave Gerhardt (10:05):
There, it was just putting the pieces together. Again, the key ingredient, though, was he wanted to do that. In either of these cases, whether it was David at Drift or Ben at privy, it wasn't like pulling teeth to get them to do these things. They believed in the value of them, and they weren't looking back at me two months later being like, "What's the ROI on this? Show me the pipeline." They believed in doing it this way, and were ready to make the long term investment.
Peep Laja (10:34):
When I studied CXL more than 10 years ago, there was question of whether it should be about me or the company. I decided to go all in with putting myself in the forefront. In hindsight, it was totally the right move. It's just easier to connect with a real human, rather than an entity. When you're a small business doing what countless other small businesses are doing, your person is what's different about your business. If I like you and respect you, I'm going to hire your company. Using a human to differentiate, to give a reason to choose you over others, is not just for small businesses. Look at Google, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla. They all have a specific individual or two that we know of and might have positive feelings towards. The opposite of a personal brand is indifference, or no brand at all. Who are the names behind Nissan or Chevrolet? No clue.
Peep Laja (11:21):
Hence, I'm less likely to buy either. Building and using your personal brand just works. Build it and use it. Where do you start with personal brand building? Be visible. Be consistent. Have strong, authentic opinions. Ship regular content in whatever form, the more, the better, as long as you can maintain a level of quality. You can 100% use social daily. Are you reluctant to put yourself out there? View your articles, interviews, and social posts as an act of generosity, not an imposition. You're building a reciprocal relationship with your audience. As Rand Fishkin, co-founder and CEO of Sparktoro points out, personal brands built on education work because people value people who are helpful to them.
Rand Fishkin (12:03):
For me, obviously, personal brand building came about through content marketing. But we can see many other folks, especially in this age of influencer marketing, where it's less content driven and more personality driven. I don't think people are particularly actually interested in Rand Fishkin. They're interested in, what does he write and say? How can he help my business? How can his content help me to be a better marketer? If I have any personal brand cache, that is because of the educational work that I've done to help other people. That's very different from, "Oh, I like Rand because his face is funny and he's on YouTube," or, "He's on TikTok every day," or whatever it is. Those are very different kinds of personal branding. I think in the software as a service world, and in the marketing world, it is extremely helpful to be helpful and kind to other people. Education is a great way to do that. As a result, personal branding tends to work pretty well.
Peep Laja (13:06):
You said nobody asked you to show the pipeline. Yet, we do need to talk about the ROI, or how would we measure this, or how do we justify that there's opportunity cost? Could invest the time in something else.
Dave Gerhardt (13:23):
You get more inbound, period, if it's working. Here's an example. In the early days of Drift, we didn't think about how to measure it. I'm sure if we had done the show for a year, two years, and never thought about measuring it, we would've been asked to. But very early on, people would show up on our website and get a demo from sales, and the sales rep would go in Slack and be like, "I got a demo today," and the demo source would be Seeking Wisdom Fan. We were like, "Okay." We would screenshot that and send it around. The company is like 12 people. It happened so early at that small level that it just became baked in it. Then the next week, we get another message like that.
Dave Gerhardt (14:04):
The next week, I get a LinkedIn message from some CMO that I've never talked to who says that they're huge fans of the Drift podcast. This is literally how it happened. Then, one of our investors sends us a tweet that one of their portfolio companies talked about it, and how they're listening. It just became everywhere. We had no perfect spreadsheet to quantify it, but it was a gut feeling thing that, "Holy cow. At least once a week, people are doing it." Then, we had an office in Boston at the time in this Copley Mall, and David and I would be walking to go get a coffee. One day, these two people yell out, "Seeking Wisdom." Obviously Boston can be a small place. But we started joking. We'd say, "How will we ever measure if a podcast is working?" It became this joke.
Dave Gerhardt (14:48):
Everyone in the company over a couple years would then share screenshots of somebody who said something nice about Seeking Wisdom or whatever. We would then share it in the company Slack with a joke. The tagline would be, "How will we ever measure our podcast?" It became this thing inside the company where everybody was feeling it at this qualitative level that it never became like, "Should we really measure doing this?" Because it's so hard. The measurement would've led us in the wrong direction anyway. But we felt it at that level, to the level where the CFO was like, "Whatever you guys are doing, just keep doing it." There is a story with some of the numbers and some of these channels. I think I'm in management meetings, and I'm showing numbers and spreadsheets and charts, but I'm also showing screenshots of podcast reviews, and screenshots of things people are saying about Drift and the podcast on Twitter. Because I think you need to reinforce those things, and the attribution puzzle is much more complex than what you usually see.
Peep Laja (15:45):
There are some examples of public visible founders that then did something stupid. The GoDaddy founder shooting the elephant, the Basecamp saga. What would you say to the argument, it's a single point of failure is a public founder then gets drunk and says something stupid?
Dave Gerhardt (16:06):
There's risk in anything. To me, it's an investment strategy. It is a channel that, you know there's risk. Everybody in this world is into Bitcoin right now, and you're buying it. You know that the whole thing could go to zero, and you're still doing it anyway. You might make a lot of money on it, or you might not. I think, yeah, there are those examples of the founders who do something or say something at a time. Especially today in 2022, it is easier than ever to wake up the next morning and be like, "Oh my goodness. I just alienated half of my customer base. I've pissed off half of my customer base."
Peep Laja (16:40):
Don't fire people on Zoom.
Dave Gerhardt (16:41):
Yeah, no kidding. Is that story even real? In what planet does that happen? I think it's a risk. But I think eight out of 10 times, it's worth it. I also think you can try to be too safe, and then you end up saying nothing. I don't mean go shoot elephants and post your pictures with them. But part of what makes the founder brand stuff work is it's not just you tweeting out links and articles and stuff about your company. It's about you. Here's an example. I love the fact that you post videos of you doing pull ups. Some people probably hate that, but I like that. I think that gives another piece of you that I can feel like I get to understand on social media. There's trade offs.
Peep Laja (17:25):
Yeah. Similarly, you posting pics with your kids and whatever. I even sneak it in strategically to humanize myself, because it's so easy to hate on a visible person that you don't know.
Dave Gerhardt (17:42):
100%. That's why I'm like, "I'm going to do more podcasts again." Because some lady told me the other day, "You are much nicer and funnier than I ever would've imagined."
Peep Laja (17:55):
Of course, as with anything, there are strategic trade offs to be made when it comes to personal brand of strategy. Putting yourself out there can humanize you, make you more likable. But it also makes you vulnerable to certain risks. Things to think about. Your star employee leaves, brings your brand to the next company. Now what? Will your personalities get canceled for some stupid thing they did? You should plan for these scenarios. But the overall upside is much stronger than the downside. If you find yourself attracting negative criticism online, there are valuable lessons to be learned here, too. Take it from someone who is no stranger to online hate, entrepreneur and internet personality, Gary V.
Gary V. (18:36):
First, it's accountability. Hey, maybe I didn't do a good job explaining something on a podcast, and it turned that person off. Hey, maybe we didn't edit an Instagram clip well enough, and the context was lost. Even though I write the copy always to set up the video, maybe they didn't read the copy. For me, first, I focus on pointing my thumb at myself. What have I done to make people misunderstand? When everybody tries to say that I talk about overworking yourself, and hustle porn, I'm like, "Man, I didn't do a good enough job in my early career to talk about, this was contextual to the time." The economy collapsed. People were out of jobs. People were hurting. The internet was exploding. It was a huge opportunity. Even though I talked about being happy, and doing it for $50,000 a year if it makes you happy, for some reason, maybe I let that word "hustle" get too attached to me.
Gary V. (19:31):
I still love hustle. It's called work ethic. But that doesn't mean I'm talking about burnout, or suicide, or unhappiness. There's a reason that people that have more consumption of my content feel better about it, because they've been able to see it contextualize, versus somebody seeing three viral videos ever and deciding that's who I am. What goes through my mind is, they're right, because they're a human being and that's their opinion. I've got to do a better job clarifying. I didn't talk about the fact in the first 10 years of my career that my dad owned Wine Library and I didn't.
Peep Laja (20:04):
You mentioned that the founder should post daily, every single day. Is it really like advertising reach repetition? Can I do it weekly? Is more better?
Dave Gerhardt (20:15):
Yeah. I think more is better. But more is not better for the content reach in the early days. More is better actually for you, because you need as many reps on this as you can get. If you post once a week, at the end of the month, you're going to say to me, "Dave, I posted once a week and I got nothing." Well, right. Because the whole magic in social media is the feedback loop. In order to get more feedback, and feedback, I mean likes, comments, retweets. Those are the signals on social.
Dave Gerhardt (20:45):
If you post four times in a month versus if you post 40 times in a month, that's 40 more times that you're putting your messages out there. Social media can just be this amazing way. Once you have a little bit of an audience, you probably feel this now, but I feel very good about 99% of the content that I am going to invest in, because I feel like I've already tested that idea in one form or another, whether it was a tweet or a LinkedIn post. The majority of the way that I write my newsletter now is I take topics that I put out that people really reacted to, and then will write them more in depth for the newsletter.
Dave Gerhardt (21:17):
When I say every day, does it have to be seven out of seven days? No. But if you do it five out of seven days of the week, that would be pretty good. Because that's five times a week you are getting a chance to test content. Social media is just, if you do it right, it can be a feed of your ideal customers. I want to be putting as many messages out in front of those people as I can to get more feedback. Over time, as you start to find your voice, as you start to find what content people like, the goal is not just to pump out meaningless stuff every day. But I think you need to do it in order to find your voice, probably at least for the first year or so.
Dave Gerhardt (21:52):
I also just think it's all relative. If you say, "I'm going to post every day," but you only post four out of seven days, did you fail? Hell no. That's great. But if you say, "I'm going to post once a week," you probably will actually only post three out of four weeks in a month, and you only posted three times. It's also just a little bit of a psychological exercise, too.
Peep Laja (22:13):
You've decided you want to nourish your social, and committed to posting once a day. Now what? When you don't have decades of experience to share yet, it can be hard to know what to talk about, and how to go about it. Here's my advice. One, be consistent. You want to be posting every single day on Twitter, multiple times a day. Choose your networks. Where are the people you want to influence? Then you want to be consistent. Obviously, if you're consistently boring, then that doesn't help your cost. Number two, be interesting. If you want to be consistently interesting, which is of course a high bar, try and add value to the conversation about your domain. It helps if you, three, stick to the category.
Peep Laja (22:51):
This makes it easy for people to put you in a box as someone knowledgeable about a certain subject. Four, share personal stories and lessons. You've been around. You've learned some things. What are the top things you've learned about? Say hiring, or motivation. Personal stories and personal lessons learned are the most impactful social media content. People really love that stuff. People love stories rather than platitudes. Work hard, success will come. My advice, speak from experience and put yourself out there. Then be consistent with interesting content. I see people who have the repetition down. I see them on Twitter, on LinkedIn, and whatever. Yet what they're posting is meh. Nobody has every post as a greatest hit.
Dave Gerhardt (23:36):
You can see when people are on the treadmill and just pumping out blah stuff. I think it's very easy to make an adjustment on that, because if there's no comments, and engagement, and reactions, the audience dictates that. You know it. One out of every 10 things you put out, you check your phone three hours later, and you're like, "Whoa, okay. People really were interested in that." I think you should let engagement rule. Even I say post every day on LinkedIn. But I think sometimes I post things and I get very little reach, because it's not interesting.
Dave Gerhardt (24:09):
I could probably be more efficient in posting. Here's a hot take for you. You have to have something interesting to say. If you just post every day, but you post a nonsense, or just fluff, or no strong opinions, or something people don't care about, that's not the goal. The goal is not post every day and you will magically have something. You could only post once a week. But when you post once a week, you have the most controversial, insane solution. If you have that level of content, then great. But I think it's somewhere in the middle where most people fall.
Peep Laja (24:49):
My observation is also that the smaller reach you have, like your audience, your followers, and so on, the better your content needs to be. Gary V. can tweet out, "Have a great Friday," and it's got a million retweets.
Dave Gerhardt (25:04):
Yeah, for sure. That shows the mark of an engaged audience, that that guy could just post anything and he is going to get hundreds of thousands of comments, because he has 2 million followers on LinkedIn. But yeah, you don't, and so you've got to win it. I think overall, the way to win with building your brand as a founder is not to tweet six times a week. It's to have something meaningful and interesting to say. The reason why I think social media is a great channel is because if you're a founder, that means you started a company, which means you're crazy in some capacity, or you have some burning, deep problem, or there's some related thread that puts you in a position to be very marketable. As the founder, you started this company because you're trying to solve this problem, or whatever you're doing.
Dave Gerhardt (25:51):
You're always talking to partners and candidates and investors. You are the deepest in this market that anybody could be. All I'm saying is, then, basically just hit the on button and just start talking about some of that stuff publicly. That's the dream scenario. But if you're not interesting, and you're not doing something interesting, and you don't have interesting takes and perspectives on it, then yes, the advice is not, "Post every day on social media and you will grow your business." I would first, before you go and think about getting on social media, go for a bunch of long walks, and think about, what are two or three beliefs that you have? What are two or three things that you've seen or done differently? Ideally, these are related to your company and your product. But they can also be company values level things, too. You need a hook. You need probably two or three strong hooks in order to be effective on social.
Peep Laja (26:53):
What is Dave's advice for winning through visibility and personal brand? One, commit to consistently sharing your unique experience and insights on social media.
Dave Gerhardt (27:02):
It's the same thing that happens in our personal lives can happen in B2B. If you sell to marketers, you sell to finance, the opportunity is to build up a direct relationship with those people online. The way that you do that is not by promoting yourself, it's by adding value and being a thought leader. The way that you be a thought leader is putting out relevant, interesting content about your niche every single day, every single week.
Peep Laja (27:28):
Two, let your story inform every aspect of your business.
Dave Gerhardt (27:32):
This is why people say your story is your strategy. This is a perfect example of that. Because that story, the VP of product was aligned on that story, and so the things that product was built on was aligned to that story. The things we were doing in marketing were aligned to that story. I've never been a part of a team at that stage that was so aligned and cranking. That was a big reason that we grew so fast.
Peep Laja (27:51):
Three, content coming from a marketing team is great. But putting a face to your founder is even better.
Dave Gerhardt (27:57):
It's so damn hard to start a business. You have to be crazy to start a business. You must have some deep burning passion, or insight, or expertise, or whatever that led you to start this. You're the one that's in these conversations every day with investors, advisors, customers. You're talking to people in the market. You're having the most interesting conversations. I think the opportunity is for people to hear from you. We don't want to buy from nameless companies. We like to buy from brands where we actually know someone.
Peep Laja (28:25):
One final takeaway from Dave.
Dave Gerhardt (28:27):
Social media is still the biggest opportunity for startups. You're able to reach your dream customers directly from anywhere in the world, without spending a dollar, and get feedback on ideas and things that are interesting. It's just such a cheat code for not only getting initial customers, but just getting your finger on the pulse of what's happening in your world.
Peep Laja (28:48):
That's how you win. I'm Peep Laja. For more tips on how to win, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks for listening.
