YouSaid · the spoken record

Arielle Jackson

lines on the record: 100
first: 2022-08-18
most recent: 2022-08-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Sure. I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn. Twitter, I'm hi, I am Ariel. And if you're interested in this stuff but feeling overwhelmed, I will plug my Maven course. I teach a course on startup brand strategy that covers everything we talked about in this hour, or SCIS is more than an hour now. And kind of with a little more hand holding and feedback. So it's a crash course on all this stuff. The four founders that takes two weeks and you go through all of this. And that next cohort of that, I think we're on cohort four will be this fall. So you can apply for that course at maven.com slash reel slash startup brand strategy.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess old school thought leaders, David Oglevie, Rory Sutherland, Seth Godin, New School thought leaders. We mentioned Nick Sharma. There's a woman named, I'm probably going to butcher her name Anna Angelic. She has a newsletter that I didn't mention before. It's called The Sociology of Business. That's really good. She's a CMO chief brand officer type. She kind of turned around Banana Republic recently, which was cool. Emily Hayward from Red Antler. I also really like Ross. I don't know this guy, but Ross Simmons from Foundation, which is a content marketing agency. I'm not like a content marketing expert, but he really is. And I think he puts out some good content.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's probably tell me a project you're proud of. Tell me about a project you're proud of. This is really open-ended and get to hear a lot about a lot of things that way. And maybe runner-up is like, tell me about a campaign you recently come across that you were not involved with that you thought was cool.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's this little Netflix show called Old Enough. It's a Japanese show with subtitles about sending toddlers on errands in Japan. They like go by themselves. It's the 10 minutes. They're awesome. My whole family watched them together. It's really cute.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say I really like some of those Disney Pixar movies, Luca Encanto. Those are all really great. I mostly watch movies with my kids, but... I'm pretty excited. I had a celebrity crush on Anthony Bourdain, and I'm excited to watch his new documentary if I ever get around to it. TV shows I'm like equally bad.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love Nick Sherma's weekly newsletter. He's a growth marketer. He started his career, I think, at Hintwater, so he does a lot of like CPG type DTC. He has a great marketing newsletter that comes out every Sunday night on podcasts. I love how I built this. I know that's already really popular, but I love that one. It's not really marketing, but just like general business. The first round podcast in depth is pretty great. Lenny's podcast I've been listening to. And then my friend Jasmine from the Concept Bureau has a marketing podcast called Unseen Unknown. And it's kind of about like culture and branding and how these things and society and trends. It's not like street marketing. It's kind of more of like the culture and sociology that informs marketing.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marketing land, definitely the book called Positioning The Battle for Your Mind. It's from 1980. It's still my favorite marketing book. Another recent marketing book is Alchemy by Rory Sutherland. It's like my favorite area of reading is like behavioral science, psychology, meets business, and that's straight in there. For fiction, I just read the vanishing half by Britt Benet. It was like awesome. I then read her other book called The Mothers, but I think the Vanishing Half's better.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marketer, and really like what kind of marketer do you need? Do you need a product marketer, a performance marketer, a comms person, a creative person? Ideally, everyone wants all of that, but I kind of like that idea of like a T-shaped marketer who's really deep on one of those functions, but like knows enough to be dangerous across all of them.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, ballpark. Like, I see it kind of depends if you're a marketing driven business or a sales driven. Get that repeatable sales motion and marketing's job is to bring you more marketing qualified leads. So that's one to that kind of depends. If you're a marketing driven business, it generally seems to me like it happens around 10 people. Like the founders doing most of this themselves, they're not doing the best job usually, or they've hired some, you know, an agency here, a freelancer there to kind of cobble some stuff together. And they now realize like, okay, if I had a person who would be able to do all of this, it would manage these agencies and freelancers. This would be a lot better. It also is like, do you have a one point in time project? Like, do you need to do positioning? Do you need a website? Do you need a name? Do you need to run a test of Google ads? Like those things are all discrete when it becomes like this is ongoing work that needs to happen over time. It's better to think about higher.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you have a lot of problems that you're trying to solve that would be better solved by someone who knew what they're doing, or when you have a bunch of freelancers and agencies that are becoming too hard to manage by yourself.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To attract hourly workers. And so think about your company in a way to make it interesting and relevant. And don't sleep on local press. Like if you have a local business or a local story or local customers, this was a huge thing at Square. Like we turned all of our customers into heroes and went after local press. Most PR firms that service, you know, the tech community aren't experts in local press. But if you have a way to make some connections with some local press, like they are the ones hungry for these stories more than, you know, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it costs like $50 per person per month. And what it does is it provides urgent care and primary care. So these hourly workers who make too much to qualify for Medicaid and too little to pay their health insurance premiums. And so primary and urgent care for hourly workers. And we tie it into this idea of the great resignation and small businesses not being able to hire hourly workers, which was like a big trend, you know, end of end of 2021. And the company operates in Philadelphia and Delaware. We were actually able to get him like the Sunday after Christmas Philadelphia Inquirer story. But it was all about making this daycare and this restaurant in Philadelphia into heroes because they offered this cool benefit to their hourly workers. And so the headline was perfect for them, but it wasn't like, here's Vitable and here's what they announced and here's, it was like, hey, look at this cool new thing that local businesses are doing.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The other one is don't do a straight funding announcement. Like, a lot of founders raise money and they're like, cool, it's announced. It's like, no, we'll use that funding announcement as a news hook to tell a larger story. And the larger story might be your product's available. You have reference customers. You have momentum. You have some great partnership that you're announcing. There's something else going on, not just your funding. using your funding as part of that initial launch is great, but what else are you announcing? The last thing is really about making what you do interesting and relevant so that it's not just interesting and relevant to you and like the three other people who work there at the time, but interesting to all the readers of whatever outlet you're trying to target. And so an example of that is I worked on this company Vitable Health and the founder Joseph, he created a product for hourly workers that their employer would buy.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To secure funding for Seed Stage Company. And funding in and of itself is like not that interesting anymore. There's so many bad companies getting funding. There's so many, there's like so many good companies getting funding too. It's just like more than ever. The number of reporters and the number of outlets that are covering it is just less than it used to be. So really just thinking about like who writes about this space? Do they write about a company at my stage? That's another really big one, hey, we want the New York Times. It's like, cool, the ones at the New York Times has ever covered a seed stage startup unless it's like crazy for the last five years. Who do you think is going to write about you? But there are still outlets that do, you know.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It will take to get them. So a lot of people will be like, I'm launching next week. And it's like, well, cool that you're doing that, but no reporter is going to cover you next week. It just doesn't work like that anymore. Five years ago, eight years ago, founders could really dictate the date of a launch announcement. They could brief three to five outlets under embargo, which means like you all can't tell our secret news until we tell you at this time you can publish. And at that time, three of the five would all file a story and write. And it just doesn't work like that anymore. These days for early stage startups, we're almost always running the launch announcement as an exclusive, which means you give the news to a single outlet and they're the only ones who get to write about it. You can obviously still do all your own denominators. Your blog, your social, your investors, your friends and family, but they're the only like news outlet who gets to write about it. So having expectation that this is probably going to be an exclusive, it's harder than ever to”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So the first one is to get your story straight. So, so many times I have founders come to me and they're like, hey, we need help with this announcement. And I'm like, cool, what's the announcement? And back to the 30 minutes until I understand what the company is. So if you can't describe it to me in a sentence, your reporter is certainly not going to understand in a sentence and they won't be able to describe it to their audience in a sentence. And so really getting your story straight, all the stuff we talked about specifically around product positioning is so key. Almost always when someone comes to me and says, I'm ready to announce, we go back to positioning first. Also make sure that your website is ready for like the traffic you're going to drive to it, that you're not driving traffic to a name that you're going to later scrap. Like, are you really ready for this? So all those, go back to all the other things we discussed first. And then having realistic expectations about the outlets that will cover you and the time.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I take all those three components and then add a bunch of other stuff, I call it a creative brief, which is the thing you would hand to an agency or a writer who's writing on your behalf. It would include some other things too that we didn't talk about, like creative inspiration, direction. So clicking, you know, visual clips and written clips and all these things that you like and that you don't like so you can show both positive examples and counter examples to the thing you're looking for.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, yeah, you could do it that way. That's definitely one way of doing it. That's a good start. I think that one other place where it shows up, like we talked about that visual style guide that everyone has that they give to like an agency or copywriter who's writing on their behalf. I think these should all be inputs into that doc that you end up sharing. I think it should go into any like onboarding you do for new employees so that they understand who the company is then any partners that you're marketing with, co-branding, all of that like it should really be think of it as like your little brand bible about who you are. And also it should be revisited when you're doing, let's say, a new product or to make sure, does this need to be updated or does this new product need to fit into who we are?”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are daring but not stupid. So, like, taking that attribute a little too far. And so, yeah, then you end up with these five statements that are like we are exponent Y. And those are really useful in informing how you write and maybe even like what your visual design would look like and certainly what your illustration style, photography style ad copy will be like.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were competent and were reliable, like you basically haven't told me anything because you just use three words to say one thing and two words to say another thing. Whereas if you tell me, you know, oh, well, we're really savvy, but we're also really approachable. Like that's kind of cool because people who are expert are always approachable. You know, they have to have a little tension. And then you want to write them as statements that say like, we are X but not Y, where Y is taking X too far. So in the example, like Google is playful but not silly. So they would say, we are playful but not silly. Or maybe Mountain Dew would say.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you just did that, we would end in a world where everyone's sincere and competent, or maybe sophisticated and competent. It's like really boring world. So the next step after you do that is to define five attributes, like five brand personalities, thinking about those two dimensions. I like to think about this as a star, like a five-point star. And brands need tension to be interesting. So if you tell me like we're helpful, we're nice. We're approachable.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a mountain dew thing. Competence, reliable and intelligent, sophisticated, sophistication, which is charming in upper class, and rugged outdoorsy and tough. So sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness. And going back to those two brands we just discussed, Mountain Dew is rugged and exciting. Rolex is sophisticated and competent. And you can do this with like any brand you admire or just think about brands you like and kind of deduce them to their two of those five. So that's the first step. Which two of those five are you going to spike in? And it turns out a lot of tech companies end up spiking in sincerity and competence just usually does happen that way. Amazon is sincere and competent. Google is sincere and competent. Apple is not. Apple has a little more of that like sophistication to it. But in any case, like.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thus, two things are really, really, really different, right? And there's a lot in the middle, and not everyone's going to be a Mountain Dew or Rolex, but where are you? And so you can just like write it down. I think a lot of these answers come back to like, if you're good with just opening a blank Google Doc and like writing down who you are, by all means go for it. And if that feels daunting and hard for you, like use a framework. And the framework that I like to use has two parts. The first part is based on some academic research by Jennifer Aker. And it basically analyzed the top brands in the world and figured out that all brands can be segmented into five dimensions of brand personality and that really strong brand spike into the five. So the five dimensions that she found were sincerity. So this is like, is it down to earth and honest excitement? It's spirited.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when you think about brands that have a lot of equity, they really do have a personality. Like I often talk about like Mountain Dew marketing as that marketing that's like trying really hard to be like cool and rugged and itchy and fast and like kind of teen. And Rolex is very like, you know, you know, gray coupon like, you know, like, oh, dude. Roll down your window and do you have any gray coupon? Like it's fancy and sophisticated and a little bit like aspirational and maybe even a little British and like”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think personality is one of those inputs that will help define your visual design. And it will definitely help define your written copy. And it really comes from this idea of brands are like people. And if you start thinking of your brand more like a person, it's quite obvious that it needs a personality because all people have personalities. And these days, especially when brands show up in places where people show up, like TikTok and Instagram, like your brand certainly needs a personality or else you end up like ADP trying to be fun for the summer, which just feels really often weird. So personality is one of those things that it's actually the easiest part. I think it's like the fastest part. It often ends up like an hour you can get it done. But I have some frameworks I like to use that really just get at like, are you mountain dew or are you Rolex or are you somewhere in between?”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this kind of relates to brand personality, where the brand personality for ADP, I mean, I don't know, it's pretty not fun. And so for them, when they put on fun hat, it seems awkward and forced.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's an example of trying too hard. Like, they tried too hard to make it sound colloquial and fun. Like, there are security system. It should be more like. Secure your home while you're away. Feel safe when you're on your summer trip, like stuff like that.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's in my course, and we talk a lot about that, and we go through the exercise, a real role play in the course. Yeah, take some”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the type of language that I think people want to use. So the bar test is you particularly define your target. Now you pretend to be someone in your target having drinks with someone else in your target at a bar And you have to be able to say, Hey, I just started using product name. This really great category that benefit. And the other person goes, tell me more, or that's cool. What do you mean? Or some other similar prompt. And then you have to say your differentiator. You actually have to say it out loud. And if you run through that test, and it's actually stuff people would say out loud, then you've done a pretty good job and you can start using that copy publicly.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's something more structured. I have kind of like a worksheet that goes through all those things we just talked about. So it's like, you know, who is it for? What are they doing today? All those questions we just talked about. It's more like a structured brainstorm. There's an exercise I really love that I've called the bar test that is helping you get everything you've written into human language because one of the really big pitfalls I see, especially for B2B companies, but really for everyone, is they write in a way that people don't talk. So the document, when I get the first draft back from founders, often has things like leverages and empowers and like all these, nobody talks like that. And so getting this into like turns your iPad into a point of sale, blankets your home and fast reliable Wi-Fi, records your screen and cam at the same time, like really basic stuff that it describes your product in a way that someone would actually say.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I believe that great benefits if you've defined your benefit really, really well will actually be the thing that will be the H1 on your homepage and will be the thing that you want someone to tell someone else. Like think about Square Stand and turn your iPad into a point of sale, right? Turn your iPad into a point of sale like, yeah, if I went to a small business owner and they were having drinks with a friend who's also a small business owner, what would I want them to say about the square stand? Oh, yeah, I just got the square stand. It's this really cool new register that turns my iPad into a point of sale. That's pretty much exactly what I want them to say. And so if you can write that line that is your ideal benefit, like what you want people to say, and it's something that your target audience would actually say, that's great.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Questions, it ultimately leads into this classic four statement, which is not something I invented. It's something that's been around for like 40 or 50 years. And I learned it when I was 22. And I think it's one of the most powerful tools in marketing. It can feel like MadLibs if you just approach it cold. But if you've gone through that work of defining who is it, what's their problem, all it is is a distillation of that. So that statement is like four target audience who there's a statement of need or opportunity. And then you say like our product name is a category that has a benefit. Unlike the old thing they were doing, our product works this other way.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, okay, so the way that I like to run positioning exercise is to start with who is this for and then what is the problem that they have like there's some problem usually that these people have they may not even be aware it's a problem or they may not be experiencing the problem is particularly troubling but there's something going on for these people and then how do they address that problem today So they do something, you know, they're buying something they're have a workaround they're doing something today. And that something might not be another startup or your direct competitor. It might be the old way of doing things, but they're doing something. So we go through like, who is it for? What's their problem? How do they address it? And then what do you make? How does it work? And what would you want a happy user of your product or service to tell another? And that's kind of like if you answer all of the”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So when you are an early stage company, the worst thing you can do is try to be everything to everyone because you don't have enough runway and even like you just don't have enough of anything to do that successfully. The best thing you can do is find an audience that is big enough that if you dominated, if you got your significant market share among that audience, you would be a giant business. And Tech Savvy Dads is a pretty big audience. Also, that's just who your outbound going to try to acquire for the 18 next 18 months. I'm a tech savvy mom, or live with a tech savvy dad. I have an era system. You know, it doesn't mean everyone you'll ever acquire must be in that audience. It means that is who we're focused on acquiring.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the target audience, I like to think of it as someone, something you could name. So with Ero, it was TechSabby Dads, right? It's a category of people. And then the model persona, or like that individual user who represents a tech savvy dad, for them was this guy who had teenage kids, lived in suburban St. Louis, had a 2,800 square foot house that was made of brick, worked at home on Fridays. His kids were into gaming. He was the VP of sales at a company that was like tech adjacent but not tech. He was more of like a tech enthusiast than a actual software engineer. We knew a lot about him. Like I could tell you a lot about him. It's kind of robust. But tech savvy dads was the way to represent him and all of other people like him. That would be their target audience.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can think of it like concentric circles. The biggest circle is like your tam as you get smaller. These are like five parts to it. So the biggest circle is circle one, circle two, circle three, circle four is your target audience. All of the circles have to be contained within the bigger circle. And then the dot in the middle is your model persona. So this is actually like a person with a name and an age and a location and a job and feelings and priorities and interests and all of that. And so we talk about the model user and the target audience. The target audience again is who will you outwardly try to acquire for the next 18 months if you're an early stage company? It's very possible that you're going to acquire people outside of that circle, like in the next circle or even the bigger circle, but they're not who you're actively going out to try to acquire.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I start with your audience. Who's this for? And we really think about like, what's the broadest set of customers or users that you might have and narrow in from there to a target audience, which is who are you outwardly going to try to acquire for the next 18 months?”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it is. And I used to, when I first started consulting, I would spend the first meeting with a founder just like totally cold. Hey, tell me about your company. And they would take 30 minutes to tell me about their company. And at the end of 30 minutes, I would pretty much get it. But it always took the first 30 minutes. So now when I engage with a new company, I have them fill out this little worksheet beforehand. And one of the questions is like, what do you do? And they have to write, you know, in a box that's kind of like paragraph length. And then we go, I go in and I ask questions about that, and ultimately we get it to sentence length.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so positioning is the space that you occupy in your target customer's mind and everything you can do to influence how they describe your product. You know you have a positioning problem. If I ask 10 of your customers or 10 of your employees what the company does or what the product does and I get multiple answers. And unfortunately, that's the case for most companies. It's okay if the answers are like tiny slight variants on the same thing, but I have actually done this with some later stage companies where my first step is often I go in and I interview 10 people and the 10 people are, you know, everyone from execs to like people who talk to customers to a few customers. And when you get 10 people saying 10 wildly different things, you have a positioning problem. Other ways you might know that if you have a positioning problem is if you”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, there's another first round review article. It's called Three Moves Every Startup Founder should make something like that.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To them, their current events, so you make a long list of all of those, then you make a long list of all the ways that you might describe your brand's best self. And this is related to your product positioning, but let's say you haven't done it yet, so just think of it as your brand's best self. How would we want someone to describe us? When everything works perfectly and our product really delivers, what does it deliver? And again, like bullets, just ways that you would talk about that. And then you pick one from each side that's really the best articulation of what's happening in the world, what your product delivers. And with that context, now you're primed. With that context in mind, now you do the brainstorm of we exist to, let me finish this. And even before you get there, sometimes it's helpful to do the world would be a better place if. So for my company, the world would be a better place if and finish that sentence and then go into the we exist too.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually stole this exercise or borrowed it from Ogilvy that I actually think adds some structure to that. If you do it that way and it works for you, that's awesome. But if you want to go and go through a process to get there, what I like to do is list all of the cultural tensions that are happening in the world that are relevant to your business first. And so for alt, that would be things like there's an increase in interest in alternatives. People are nostalgic people who are now in their 30s are nostalgic for things that happened in the 90s. There is at the time really low interest rates and people are not getting any sort of like edge off of investing in the things that their parents used to invest in. So those would be like examples of cultural tensions. Cultural tensions are zeitgeists. They're things that your audience might be thinking of. They're things that they may be even subconscious.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gone through a little bit of like a rebranding, but theirs was to increase the transparency and liquidity of alternative assets. And in their case, the product positioning was really about like making sports cards as easy to invest in as stocks. So the idea of alternative assets in this case are not like private equity and hedge funds and real estate, but alternatives to alternatives like sports cards and Pokemon cards and art.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Awesome. And then another one that I worked on for another first round company, they're called Wolf. They're informed by the UC model where there's a bunch of individual schools that all exist by themselves, but they get something from being part of a larger organization. And what they do is they provide accreditation through being part of the larger wolf, but a larger wolf university, but every individual college can still operate as their own independent college. And so their purpose is to increase access to world-class higher education and ensure that it is globally recognized and transferable. So this idea of you should be able to take a class from the best instructor online and then go travel to Australia and take a class there and then go to China and take a class there and get the best education that the world can offer. Another one that I worked on a while ago is alt. So I think they've recently”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one company I worked on, first round company, they're called Logic Loop. And it's an operations automation company. You can think of it almost like stuff like a no code low code platform to automate a lot of the operations database work that people have to do. And we did this whole brainstorm, and I really like their purpose, that you can look at their about page. It will be right there. It's to make operations data work harder than operations people. And if you ever have worked in operations or have friends who have, like they work really, really hard and it can be kind of thankless. So it gets anyone in that field to root for you. Like your data should be working harder than your operations people.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it should make people want to hear what else you have to say. And the other thing it should be able to do is be the header for your about page. So meaning we exist too, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you would just take out the we exist and say the verb and start there. That could be the header for your about page.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes Yeah. So, you, I want you to introduce yourself at a conference. Like you're the keynote speaker at a conference and I want you to introduce yourself and I want you to go, hi, I'm Lenny. I'm the founder of Company X. And we exist to blah and say it and like have that feel natural”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, it's not just about LeBron. It's about me and like, how was my Peloton ride this morning too? So those are some famous companies. I could tell you a little bit about some that I've worked on that I think are pretty cool that are like companies you may not have heard of yet just because sometimes we get hung up in like thinking stripe and Nike and Google are awesome names because of all the meaning we have behind them. And I want to talk about some companies you may not have heard of because you can have a good purpose and not be Stripe and Nike and Google.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like gets you thinking about the internet as a country, and I don't know, it's like really. If you're an internet person, it makes you want to root for them. Nikes is awesome. Nikes is, I wrote Nike's down because I don't remember it. To bring inspiration and innovation to every...”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Google's purpose was to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And Google, I thought every company had a purpose that everyone at the company knew. Like I just thought that was my first job, real job, you know. It turns out that's not true. And Google's actually been amazing at this. Like if you, I had a person in my last cohort who had recently left Google when they were like, I don't know, 80 or 100,000 people, he said, everyone still can say that. Like that's amazing. But I joined, it was like 1400 people. And by the time of your first day, you already knew that. Like it was part of your hiring process. It was part of your onboarding. It was in your like offer letter. It was everywhere. And I just thought that was like really cool and a good purpose. One that is kind of related to financial gain, but I still think it's cool is stripes, which is to increase the GDP of the internet. And that's like really wealth said and cool.”
2022-08-18 · Lenny's Podcast · The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source