B2B startups need to build a brand now more than ever
Top brand myths busted with examples from Notion, Deel, Maze, Twilio, and Stripe.
Hello, I’m Hema, and welcome to my newsletter First Impression. Each month, I write an in-depth post on positioning, brand, or GTM strategy for early-stage startups. Join startup founders, GTM leaders, and practitioners, and subscribe to get the newsletter in your inbox.
If you are reading this, then you, like me, are all too familiar with the current mantra of the startup world — efficient growth. Cut burn. Focus on revenue and profitability.
This makes good business sense in the best of times and certainly makes sense in this climate.
In such austere times, can anyone indulge in the luxury of brand building? Most founders don’t think of brand even when our world is frothing with cash. It’s all PLG, MQL, and CAC, isn’t it?
But I’m here to preach the counter-wisdom of startups investing in brand building during hard times because they can pay great dividends both in the near term and long term.
I can already feel many of you tuning out at the sound of the word brand. Hear me out. There are some epic myths about branding that I’m going to bust in this newsletter and share some terrific, low-cost, low-effort ways to build a brand.
First, let’s get a few basics out of the way, so we can all be on the same page.
What is a brand?
I like this definition the best because it’s both comprehensive and accurate.
Brand is simply set of intangibles—expectations, experiences, stories, and memories—that makes a customer choose you over an alternative.
It’s not your product or experience that sets you apart; it’s your brand (more on this in a minute).
A brand is simply a series of consistent decisions you make across your business that solidifies your positioning and demonstrates what you stand for. The word demonstrates is critical here. Your brand is your action (all that stuff happening at Twitter that stuff is impacting Twitter’s brand) and your inaction (Google being blindsided by ChatGPT and reacting to it belatedly). It’s all affecting your brand.
How is brand different from positioning?
Positioning is strategic. Positioning is how you meaningfully differentiate yourself in a category or a space. It’s cold, hard facts. It’s rational and data-driven.
On the other hand, brand is your emotional connection with your user. It’s how your users feel about you, and that is anything but rational. And guess what? We make decisions based on that emotional connection, even when the product you sell is a piece of software.
Positioning is a battle for the users mind and branding is a battle for the users heart. 🧠 ↔❤️. You need both to win!
Ok, I get it. You mean design, right? Brand design?
🛑 NO! 🙅🏽♀️ I do not mean brand design. Although, it’s a part of it.
Your brand is the sum total of your user’s experience when she comes in contact with your startup, and that includes everything - Product, Ux, Social media, emails, support experience, and your sales teams.
Branding is often a shorthand for the emotional expression of your brand strategy. Visual design and words, voice, and imagery, are part of it. It’s the stuff your designers and writers obsess about (in a good way).
This seems like a small detail, but it is pretty important. I’ve seen founders shove brand into the design team’s responsibilities, thereby absolving themselves and others in upholding the brand values—a big mistake.
Brand is everyone’s responsibility, and for a startup to truly embrace brand building, it must come from the founders first, not the design, product, growth, or marketing teams.
Now that we got all that pesky details out of the way let’s get to myth-busting, shall we?
Myth 1: Brand building is not for an early-stage startup
I can see the logic in this myth. After all, the first priority is PMF. Getting those early adopters, validating fit, and building a product that solves a meaningful, painful problem. 💯
But wait, who says building a brand interferes with the above priorities? Can you do both? Damn right, you can.
Let’s take the example of Notion.
Minimalistic aesthetic — Ivan Zhao understood the importance of designing beautiful software. So Zhao started small with a clean, approachable, and minimalistic aesthetic that was reflected in both the product and its brand. It looked different and stood out from others in the space, like Evernote or Asana, attracting people who resonated with its approach.
Below is their homepage in 2017 and their homepage now. Notice the consistency and commitment to a core aesthetic that hasn’t changed even when the product has evolved leaps and bounds.
Nurturing community — Early adopters are crucial for any early-stage startup. Zhao nurtured them by directly engaging with users on Twitter, responding to support requests, and seeking feedback. This resulted in a small group of really die-hard fans who were vocal about their love for the product. This early behavior by founders often sets the tone for how a brand behaves. Even today, when a feature is released and tagged to a request, they personally respond to the individual who made the request.
Content with personality —Notion invested in creating content that was not only informative and engaging but had a personality. Their social media presence is vibrant, friendly, and cheeky, with memes and posts that have character.
Camille Ricketts, Notion’s first head of marketing, said in her wonderful interview with OpenView .
“People who work inside companies have more power than ever before to choose tools they want to work with, and these buyers are going to respond to good storytelling and really wonderful design. We focus a lot of time and attention on this because something special is going on with the brand we have built, it comes from Ivan, and it feels very differentiated.”
Camille Ricketts, Ex-head of marketing, Notion
Myth 2: Brand is only for consumer products
With the consumerization of software, one would think this myth is completely busted. But sadly, many founders still believe that brands are for consumer/prosumer products and not needed for SaaS or PaaS products.
Brands like Gong, Deel, Brex, Figma, Typeform, and Gusto are all B2B products that have prioritized brand building as much as they have prioritized other aspects of the business.
Nowadays, teams have significant discretion in using the tools that make them more productive and effective in their jobs. This means investing in great design and customer support, excellent user experience, and all those little things like voice, tone, and personality that help a brand connect emotionally with its users.
“HR companies don’t tend to be the most creative or expressive. They’re rigid, complex, and very by the book. By being a newer brand, we have the chance to stand out and establish ourselves as the HR brand of the future. We’re a B2B company, but we have a consumer sensibility when it comes to branding.”
Alex Bouaziz, CEO and Co-founder, Deel
Myth 3: My audience is technical. They hate all fluffy brand stuff.
Technical audiences are more skeptical and sensitive to marketing spiels, true. But that doesn’t mean they don’t care about adopting products that solve complex challenges for them. The key to building a strong brand with a highly technical audience is:
Authenticity — Keep it real.
Transparency — Be radically transparent with pricing, documentation, know bugs, patches, etc.
Accountability — If you mess it up, own it. Then fix it fast.
Stripe, Twilio, Docker, and Datadog are pretty technical products with a massive user base that loves and evangelizes the product. So what are a few low-cost ways these companies built their brand in the early days?
Stripe — Stripe built its brand on simplicity and a laser-sharp focus on developer experience. This translated into a user-friendly API, extensive documentation, and resources.
Twilio — Twilio was a develop-centric company from day one. So they went out on the road to meet and train developers hands-on with their event series.
Docker — They invested in their open-source roots and built a community by contributing heavily to projects like Docker Engine, Compose, and Swarm.
Datadog — They established trust with developers by being radically transparent with pricing, acknowledging known issues with the product, and sharing updates when they fixed those problems.
“We’re very intentional about building our brand, and it’s centered around fulfilling our promise to developers: to be a reliable and easy-to-use platform that helps them build and grow their businesses.”
Patrick Collison, co-founder, and CEO of Stripe
Myth 4: I need a big budget to build a brand
Let’s go back to the definition of a brand that I used at the beginning of this post:
Brand is simply set of intangibles—expectations, experiences, stories, and memories—that makes a customer choose you over an alternative.
Investing in a brand does not mean having a billboard on 101, plastering the subway station and buses with your ads, or spending a ton of money on paid media.
Take Maze, for example. Maze started small by investing in good design and user experience for their product which, over time, they evolved and translated to their website and all marketing materials.
Here’s Jonathan Widawski on building Maze’s brand identity:
The magic of Maze isn’t in how fast you test—it's in how fast you can make decisions. How do we represent rapid decisions in our branding? Every decision a team has to make to build a product is a maze—one that's very hard to navigate. So the branding represented a playful maze, where each path illustrated interface elements and the balls were testers navigating the interface. —Jonathan Widawski, Co-founder and CEO, Maze.
Maze invested in great customer support and understood customer success’s role in helping retain good customers. They invested in a Customer Advocacy Board early and invited customers to join. They facilitated regular meetings, encouraged customer input, and fed it to product teams. All this doesn’t take a big budget, but they have a huge impact in building community and a passionate following.
Tips for starting small with brand building
Vision and Mission — Start by clarifying and honing in on your vision and mission. Your vision is WHY you exist, and your mission is HOW you will make your vision true.
Small, tactical touches — How can you infuse your mission throughout every function in the organization? Think tactically. Like how your sales reps write emails or how customer support teams answer a chat. What is your voice? Tone? Promise?
Tell stories — What stories make your brand unique? Is it how your founders met and started the business? Did a personal life experience lead them to their startup idea? What are you obsessed with and why?
Brand values — Take a moment to define your brand values. How do you want it to behave? What feeling do you want people to have when they interact with it? Brand values are not just a poster that sits on your office wall. They are meant to be lived by everyone, and it starts with the founders.
“Creating a brand can often feel really nebulous or sprawling and intimidating, but it doesn't have to be. It's worth a conversation about how you want to make people feel - about the product, yes - but also about themselves when they use the product. Then think through all the touch points you have with your audience, and how each one can reinforce those feelings.” —Camille Ricketts, Ex-head of marketing, Notion.
I’ll close this post by sharing an example of two very different approaches to establishing a brand:
Rippling ad in 2020 that took a direct shot at Gusto, its competitor.
Notions international brand campaign 2022.
As you can see, these two are very different brands with not only very different sensibilities but also very different values.
I, for one, find Rippling’s ad in poor taste. If I were their target audience (which I am, I use Gusto quite happily, I might add), I already have a brand impression about them, and it will influence my decisions. Rippling also puts Humility and Integrity as its core values. I’m not sure their ad aligns with those values.
Notion, on the other hand, is consistent with its minimalistic aesthetic. Its core value includes being kind, thoughtful, and open-minded. I think their ad aligns with their core values and what they set out to build as a brand.
Additional resources:
How to build a brand for technical products