218: Evelyn J. Starr — The Evolution of a Brand

it's just you. So you bring your personal values, you bring your personality, and all of these things color, the brand and people's mind, you know. My definition of a brand is that it's the expectation of what you get when you deal with any entity based on all your prior experiences and impressions of that entity. And so you know, how I feel about the Bootstrapped Founder is very much how I feel about our interactions, Arvid because that has built the brand in my mind.

It's what I expect next time I talk to you. I know oh, Arvid, he's friendly, he's really helpful. He's very interested in brand issues and also building in public, all of those things factor into what the Bootstrapped Founder is in my mind.

your brand and your niche along those lines. And so it's, like I said, it's good to keep an eye out to see what changes happen in the marketplace if they invade your space. If you see something they're doing you think, aha, I can do this better. You know, those ideas can come to you but you don't define yourself by your competitors.

And that's why I'm asking this question. Because if you have a brand and this might be a very limited perspective on brands that is similar to others, how do you give some kind of substantial difference through your marketing to the people in your field so they can see, okay, yeah, this is not just a slightly different product, but the people behind it, the mission, the vision behind it is different too? How do you do that?

surmounts a product. You know, maybe for permalink, it's to help Amazon publishing authors make sure their books don't get booted off, right? And so there may be other products or other things you devise in the future, I'm making this up. But most brands that are going to survive long term have a purpose that's not product related. It's a bigger world vision. And I'll give you a couple examples. Although these are not tech

examples, but well, actually, I can read you Google. Google's purpose is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, okay? So there's the word search is in there anywhere, right? There's no maps, there's, you know, and it's what made them it's what's guided them to develop a whole lot of products and then also to ditch a whole lot of products. And when I wrote my book, they had already killed off around 240 somewhat products that just

didn't adhere or fly. But that they thought might be a good idea based on that purpose. So you differentiate yourself by your purpose. You differentiate yourself by the values that you bring to your business, you know, how you go about doing your business and the values that you set for your business guide how you want your employees to behave on your behalf, if you're fortunate enough to grow your business to the point where you have employees at your niche also is

a differentiator. You know, going after exactly the same thing as another competitor, if you have a different method of doing it or some sort of improvement might be a good idea. But usually, it's better to find some space that very few or no one occupies and use that to differentiate yourself. So these are some of the brand components that help you stand out. And the one last thing I want to say and tell the conversation a little bit is that I want your listeners to

know that marketing is about relationship building. It's not just about differentiation, that's part of how you do it. But it's really what is your brand in relation to these people and they relate to other people, so it's gonna be the founder and your employees.

of personal brand and professional brand. That's kind of my distinction that I use, right? Personal brand is around the founder. Professional brand is around the purpose that you

just described. Those kinds of terms are what I use for this because a lot of founders in my space, who want to build relationships, who want to become part of a community and from within that community build products that people actually need and have a budget for and all that kind of stuff they struggle with, well, what is the core of what I'm supposed to be a brand about? Like is it me as the founder? Or is it the

product? And the mission that I have? What would you suggest for somebody who's a solopreneur, who doesn't have a team and doesn't really want to build a big company out of it but does want to build a business? What is the core of their brand? Is it the person or the business? Or both? How do they go about it?

right? As my brand as you start to see it, the name I came up with in 1999 in a hurry when someone asked me to interview for something when I decided to go out on my own, like ahhh, I gotta find something. But so, you know, I sat down and actually, I went through at one point, Simon's next, you know, determine your why. And I did that first. And then I determined my company's purpose. So my personal why and my company's purpose are not the same, but they dovetail you

know. My personal why is to help someone find the aha moment so they can move forward. Because I'm very analytical, and I'm very big picture. And I can usually help somebody who's stuck, find a way through that. But my business purpose is that I help business owners make confident marketing decisions. So that's a slice of the aha moment. So maybe that's a way to look at the personal brand and the professional brand a little bit. The other thing

plays into the same overlap of purposes, right? We have the full purpose as a person and the business is just one way of fulfilling that purpose and maybe being a parent is another purpose or being a woodworker in your spare time is the other version. It's nice to see that you found this big purpose and you have this specific purpose for your business, that is really cool. Sorry for interrupting but that's something that I find really cool.

then you have something to run all of your opportunities by. It becomes a litmus test and it becomes so much easier to make decisions. Someone approaches you for a partnership or if someone says, hey, can you add these three benefits to what you're building? You know and you want to think, hmm, should I bother? Or should I not? If you have your purpose, you have sort of a lens to look at that and say, yeah, this fits or no, it doesn't. It makes life so much easier in the long run.

you start selling things, you're already way too deep into it. So let's maybe talk about the niche now, at the beginning of this conversation as well because it's just a really extremely important thing for any founder to consider. What's too big? What's too small? That's one of the questions that I always get from founders that I try to help as well. Like, when I pick a

niche, can I go too deep? Or am I too broad? Do you have any kind of framework for this, how to pick a niche that is just right, the Goldilocks kind of niche?

particular problem, okay? And it can be pretty narrow. You just want to have some running room, so your brand can grow for several years, okay? You know, if there are five people in the world who need what you have, you're going to run out of that audience or pitching to that audience really fast. But you don't need hundreds and hundreds of 1000s of people. You just need the right people and enough of them so that your brand can continue to grow for a while and you can make a name for

yourself. And that is what's most important about a niche. And what people get wrong, is that the biggest fear founders have is that they're gonna go too narrow, they're gonna leave money on the table. If they're gonna say no to somebody, they're purposely limiting their business. And that feels very scary. You know, I call it in my book that my book, Teenage Wastebrand talks about how there are sort of adolescence symptoms to brands and I call it suffering from FOMO fear of

missing out, right? If I don't serve that person, you know, I have this major, I'm missing the party kind of feeling. But what's really the case is that when you target some specific audience, whether it's by an attitude or a group of people you're serving, you make a name for yourself in that arena. You have to have something and this goes back to differentiation, right? You know, permalink is one of the only services I know, I think the only service I know that does what it does. And so

that was amazing to me, that was exactly what I needed. I saw it on Jane Friedman's newsletter and I was like, yeah, I'm there. So that was speaking directly to me and my problem. And I don't know how many authors are worried about their books getting kicked off of Amazon because the link goes bad. But I think there are probably enough of them that your business is

growing because it's a big problem. So I would encourage your listeners to choose an audience narrow enough that when someone sees the brand and sees what it's about, they say, ah that's exactly what I needed or oh, yes, they're talking to me. You can't be that specific if you're trying to target everybody.

look for reviews, look for statistics. And really what I'm looking for in that case, especially I think I'll probably a lot of your listeners are going after something that either hasn't existed before or is fairly new. So you don't have to have buttoned down numbers to justify what you're doing. You just have to ascertain that there's enough interest and enough of a market there that you could build your brand for a

few several years, right? That's all you're looking for, you know, so you don't need to know specifically how many there are. You just need to know that there are enough.

bootstrap founder can find themselves in, right? Because you know that there's budget because people are already paying for these other things. You know that there is interest because otherwise they wouldn't even have attempted to build the thing that they now are being paid for those businesses. And you know, that there's a misalignment between the products that exist, the solutions and the problems that people still have. That is great. So yeah, I love that kind

of research. Like it's kind of free build competitive analysis that is happening there. That makes a lot of sense. Are there any other ways of figuring out this information?

evolutionary. And sometimes you have to get into it to find where you need to go. So let me give you an example. A lot of people know Airbnb, right? That company, what a lot of people might not know is they started with a niche that was too small. They were targeting cities, areas that had conferences, where the conference attendance exceeded the hotel capacity. Okay, very specific. So like the national conventions in the US,

right? The Democratic National Convention, the Republican National Convention, may be South by Southwest two really huge conferences, where there was going to be a greater need for accommodations than the supply the hotels had. And so those were the situations they were serving. And there weren't enough of them to keep the company afloat. But in the meantime, people were pinging them saying, hey, I had a great time staying in Austin at this, you know, I'm gonna go to

vacation in Austin. Do you have another location? And initially, they were declining those and then a bell went off, you know, maybe it doesn't have to be just for conferences. And so they adjusted and widened their niche in the process of building their brand. And that's how they came to grow so large.

expanded their niche. That's also something interesting because we already talked about picking too smaller niche but let's maybe talk about picking too big a niche because Airbnb is essentially trying to take all of the hotel market and all the vacation home markets and you know, all these markets at the same time. And obviously, if you have like billions in funding, that's fine. But if you have your savings, you know,

you're a couple of months of life savings. That's probably not a good idea to invest that into trying to revolutionize the hotel market either. So what is too big of a niche to start it? Like where is the niche so big that you can find your footing?

anywhere. And so their niche is this market of people who travel who want to feel less alien, less strange to a new place, right? And they do that by going into someone's home instead of going into a hotel room. And now that they've launched all their experiences, they do that by signing up for something that people in the know would have access to, right? So their news is attitudinal, right? I want to belong in San Francisco even

though I've only ever been there twice in my life. And I want to feel comfortable there and so I'm using their brand to help me do that. So attitude is also an interesting niche to address. But in terms of being too big, when are you being too big? If your brand's not resonating with the people that you really want to serve, if you're not being specific enough, you know, so like my target market, I work with lots of people and some of my clients are men, some are women, some may be non binary.

You know, I don't know all the time, I don't ask. But, you know, for a long time, I noticed a pattern that there were, most of my clients were men in their 40s and 50s who had started a company who had come to it without a business education. Generally, there were sports fans, they were married. And they enjoyed American culture. And so if you read my newsletter, which I publish, once a month, I write with that person in mind. You know, I will make sports references once in a

while. I will make American cultural references. I think in my next newsletter, I'm talking about Star Trek, but

interesting. And I feel let's talk about the evolution of the brand that allows you to do this because we just talked about Airbnb going from tiny niche to becoming this kind of experiential, attitudinal thing, which is a great observation. I think this is what many tech companies have figured out that it's not about like being in that tech space. But being something that aspirational for people, right? We want people to allow themselves to become a better version of themselves.

And that is our purpose. But that takes a while to come to that point, right? It takes an evolutionary process. So how does that work for a brand? Like how do brands grow up? What are the signs? Are they getting rowdy when they come into the teenage years? Like how does it work?

because they really didn't understand it. And they were afraid they were going to sink money into it and time into it and not see any return for it. But the common trajectory of a lot of their brands was that they would start off and they'd find a lot of takers and it would go really well for several years and then they hit a plateau. And when they hit this plateau, it was mind boggling because they said, I'm saying

all the same things I was saying before. I'm talking to the same people I was talking to before and all of a sudden, I can't seem to get above this level, you know or I'm tapering off a little bit. And what I discovered and the reason I call it a brand adolescence is that brands evolve over time, right? So that definition of a brand that I talked to you about earlier, about being the sum of all your experiences and all

your impressions. You know, when you first launch a brand, when on day one, if you're a founder, you get to tell the world what your brand is, what you intend it to be. But once your audience has a chance to experience it for a year or two years, they're gonna have all these different interactions. Maybe it's still

all with you if you're a solopreneur. But maybe you're lucky enough to be growing and they're having interactions with your employees or they're seeing reviews online or they're talking to other people who are using this totally away from your earshot. You can't hear what's going on. And all those

activities factor into their impression of the brand. And if they're finding that your brand is better for one thing that's not what you launched it for, over time, you know, the difference between what you said your brand was on day one and what it is in their mind starts to separate, it grows further and further apart. And when the gap gets big enough, your initial marketing messages no longer resonate because they're

not speaking to the way that people think of your brand. And so the way to deal with that is to stay in touch with your customers, listen to how they're using your brand, listen to what it means to them, you know, listen to their thoughts about it so that you can stay on track with the way that it is appearing in the world.

and you cannot control it, but you can influence it, okay? And the way you influence it is by being consistent in the way that you put it out in the world. And so, if you're a solo and you're continuing to lead the brand yourself, then you need to find out how the world perceives you and how the world perceives your brand and be consistent with those. And that's another thing

I talk about in the book. Those are called brand attributes, you know, so, you know, one attribute you might have, Arvid is kind of technical because people know you from that's sort of a common thread through your businesses. And so, when you talk, you're talking to an audience who's coming to you for things that are technical and you, you know, you're not talking to me about, you know, how to bake doughnuts or

something. This is out of the wheelhouse. You're serving that expectation and the voice and the language you use also acknowledges, you know, that kind of technical bent. So people need to find out how they're perceived, how their brand is perceived and kind of stay consistent about that. And when they do that, that will help the way that people outside talk about them and think about them.

between a serious brand and an adult brand. I don't know like if that makes sense to you, but I'm hearing you tell me like you want to stay consistent, you should stay consistent in the messaging and that kind of communication that you give to allow people to have the opportunity to use that and talk to their peers in the same way and have this kind of cohesive narrative going on in the world outside of your marketing activities because other people are doing it and inside of them

because that's just keeps it going. Now, over time, I think many particularly in the tech field, people have this expectation of things becoming more serious, more enterprise, right? More business

go after McDonald's every once in a while. They tease them and they're a huge, large, well established brand. And people love the snark. They love the rebellious attitude. That's how they're known. And so getting larger isn't a time to bail on the way that your brand has been. I would say on the other hand, it's a time to lean in. You know if you're talking to your customers and they love you know, the casualness of your blog posts and the ease of your manuals of use and all that

stuff. Don't ditch that, you know, lean into that. So that if you're growing and you need to hire employees, you need to kind of codify what your values are and how you want the employees to represent your brand so it can be consistent. So you can continue that not so you can become stodgy. Nobody wants

that. Otherwise, we wouldn't be in episode 200 something of this podcast at this point, right? So consistency is central for me to build for building a business or immediate business or a brand to begin with. And it's nice to hear that that is something that will keep attracting people. I think that's the fear that so many founders have, right? Oh, I am going for bigger businesses. Their expectations are different, I need to change

that. And then they have this weird dichotomy where they now want to change who they are for the people that they want to attract. But in that lose the connection with the people that they have already attracted. That feels like such a hard balance to strike.

through. But you've worked really hard to differentiate yourself with a brand personality, with the values you bring to the culture, whether it's you personally or whether you have a team, you know, so that becomes an asset that's valuable. You don't want to throw that away, right? You want to build on that. I mean, think of the early days of your brand and the culture that you're building in the company as a

foundation, right? So you're not going to build stories upon that by ditching the foundation, you know, by ruining it or putting cracks in it. You're gonna need to make sure it's solid and then just go up from there.

raving fans, you have a business. You know you're good because they're gonna buy whatever you sell. So those initial customers are really important.

could just be a user of the product that you offer. Do you have any tips on how to find these fans like how to kind of sift through the hopeful masses of people who you know, are involved in using a product or hanging out with you on social media and find the ones that really, really care about you and then cater to their needs?

sort of raise their hand and make that effort. And that is the sign that this person could be very, very, you know, important to your brand and has a lot of thoughts about that. And those are the people you want to pay attention to. So, you know, when I get comments on posts on social media or when I get responses to my newsletter, I try to respond as fast as

possible and keep the conversation going. And that's how I learn about, you know, the most engaged, you know, the audience that I have because, you know, they're willing to share their thoughts, they're happy to share their thoughts, they'll also tell you where you're wrong. And there's a lot

of learning that can happen there. But also a lot of people who, even if they say to you, I'm writing to you because you messed up x, if you engage in the right way, not only do they become a raving fan because you're willing to listen to them and you're willing to learn from them. But they feel a connection to you now, right? That goes back to the relationship

building, right? You want to build these connections and the people who feel most strongly connected to your brand, are the people who are gonna raise their hand and try to reach out.

much as you just helping somebody with their problem. I had this experience building Feedback Panda with my girlfriend. The people who reached out to us in the beginning, our first couple of customers, again, initial customers that reached out that had a problem, but one in itself because they saw potential in the platform, I spent sometimes half an hour chatting with them through the chat system on our website. And those almost all of them became evangelists for the

product, right? They were just regular online teachers doing the job. But they took the time out of the day to whenever they saw somebody talking about a similar problem to one that we solve, to kind of pitch us as a solution to that problem. Because they were often saying, hey, these people, they will actually help you when you have a problem. Because for some reason, it is an outstanding capability of a business to actually help people through their customer service at this point.

these gigantic like Google products, right? If you go to Google Drive or use Google Sheets or whatever, you probably won't impact the business direction of that particular product with their customer service. But if you do that to a SaaS product built by an indie hacker somewhere, it's quite likely that your suggestion is going to make the feature list, right? So that is something that most people that we served did not know before because they only ever use these gigantic

products or really care about you. But here's feedback Panda, they seem to really care. That was super strong of a differentiator that we used. We wrote that wave like most of our marketing, if not all, was word of mouth with that business. We did try paid customer acquisition at some point, didn't really work. Didn't need to because people were already talking about our product and we just amplify their voices.

business, the product that I represent. So I always felt the kind of hinderance that I put in myself so it was just a mental blockage. But you know how people are, right? Our brain often fights itself in many ways and trying to encourage people to talk about my product felt desperate or needy on my end. I know now having done it and having understood that it's not that, that that was just, you know, a construction that my mind put in there to, I don't know, protect itself from change

or whatever. But for an introverted founder who's having trouble understanding that marketing or encourage word of mouth is not desperate or needy, how would you help them overcome this particular blockade in their mind?

think of it as you are broadcasting to the world. If you're reaching out to someone, it's just two people having conversation, you know, and the worst that they could say is no, right? And so, but you know, my dad has a wonderful saying. He's like, give yourself the option, you know, because you don't know if you don't ask and so I would think about that is, you know, maybe no doesn't feel good. But most of the time, you're gonna get a yes and most of the time, you're gonna get an answer. And

that feels so good. And so far outweighs the shyness, you know, the the aversion to being in contact. So that's what I would say focus on to one to one conversation. And that's all that's at stake right now.

because they don't want to use your software. Like to tear that apart and see the no as a business decision on this side of a potential customer that still thinks you're a great human being that could probably help you with approaching them, right? In a conversation to deconflict deflate, I don't know the word for that. But you know, like taking these things apart,

that certainly helps me. Because if somebody doesn't want to, I don't know, sponsor this podcast or you know, my newsletter or you know, buy my book or whatever it is, I don't see this as an attack on myself. I see this as somebody's budgeting choice. All right. And it's all about what they think is good for their business as a tool at this point. It's not about my personal likability.

so many things. And I will tell you, there's this great, I'm gonna I don't know how to pronounce his name, I'm gonna say Jia Jang. But he did this experiment called 100 Days of Rejection. And so he tried, he said, I'm going to try and get rejected 100 days in a row to thicken my skin. And if you Google or you know, search for 100 Days of Rejection, you'll find his videos, they're hilarious. And what you see is he learned, it wasn't about him, it was often about the people.

And a lot of times when he tried to get rejected, he actually got a yes. And so it's just very entertaining. And it also kind of helps you get out of the mindset. It's not about you. It has to do with the circumstances in the moment.

and it's actually a strengthening moves. It's kind of what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but put into you know, interpersonal relationship.

asked us to cut our budget by 10%. And I can't add anything new or you know, this doesn't exactly fit my need, but I think what you're doing is really great, get messages like that. And it kind of saves you. So if you can muster the courage to ask why could save yourself a lot of angst.

because it could always happen. So the only thing you can do to any theory is to invalidate it. And getting a no and the why leads to so much closer to a potential invalidation than a yes. Even though the yes is great for your business. But you haven't learned anything. The only thing that we've learned is okay, this is yet another kind of argument for what I'm currently doing. But the no and the why will give you much clearer insight into why what you're currently doing may not

be the perfect version of itself just yet. So there is value in the no maybe even more than in the yes.

So thank you so much for sharing everything you shared. Where can people find you, find more about you and your work?

bookshop.org or anywhere you buy books, you can find it. And then the other thing is, you know, if you kind of like what I have to say, but you you know, I'm not ready or to share any funds or you're building in public and need every penny for what you're doing. Penny because I'm in the US. I would say you could also at my websites sign up for my Varsity Marketing Newsletter, which is only once a month. I don't stuff mailboxes and includes a brand story every single month.

show. So thank you very much for listening and have a wonderful day. Bye bye