 Keo de kato, na mai haire mai. That's greetings and welcome to the session of EHF Live. Edmund Hillary Fellowship is a collective of entrepreneurs, scientists, storytellers, creatives and investor change makers who want to make an impact globally from Aotearoa, New Zealand. In this session, it's part of a series where you'll hear from Scott Cobat, a lovely Scott there. He's an EHF fellow who's an experienced operator and entrepreneur with a track record of building customer-friendly mainstream brands to compete in historically unfriendly categories. His experience includes subscription businesses, marketplaces, health care, internet of things and consumer packaged goods, but that's really good for you. So in this session, it's going to be building on your MVP marketing engine. So Scott will do a little presentation to start with and then we'll jump into the Q&A part of it. So if you've actually got some meaty queries and questions that you want Scott to cover, then ask them through the session. Now these are really informal sessions. It's they're planned in a way that you can leave after the 60 minutes and feel that you know the fellow enough on a personal level. Understand what their intentions are for New Zealand and that you can connect directly with them. And just to remind you that this is one of a few in a series and I'll touch on what the others are in the series afterwards. So just note that it is being recorded. It's on the website. Just stay muted for now, but you can unmute to ask questions. You can raise your hand in the functions on the Zoom or you can put questions in the chat box as we go. But Scott, over to you to Shiga's screen. Thanks, Michelle. I appreciate it. Let me get by the way, I shouldn't and don't feel badly because everybody does this. It's actually habit, my last name, but it's I've been called far worse than I could have. So I'll take it. I did wonder that actually, because it's supposed to ask you at the very beginning, my bed. That's quite a right way. Is that let me just put that in the full screen. OK, you've seen that. Good. Excellent. Hey, great to meet everybody. Bar, good to see you again. I'm glad you could join. This I'll just before I jump in on anything just to talk quickly about the flow and to reiterate that I really don't want to spend these sessions talking at you. I'll give you a really quick background of myself so you know where I'm coming from. I have a few very short number of pages in here just to give you some food for thought on considerations and standing up in an initial marketing function. And some of the risks you should keep in mind and then really what it is most of the time to hear your questions and have a lively conversation. So I'll share a few pages, but feel free to jump in with comments or questions along the way. You don't have to wait till the end. Let me just quickly ask since we we have can we quickly just go around before we jump in and just say who you are and where you're calling in from. OK, so, Brad, if we're going to do this, we need to do it really quick as it will eat into your time. So, Brad, if you just want to do a quick shout out then. Sure, thank you, Michelle. And thank you, Scott Bradley, both calling in from Walmart, which is a suburb of Chicago. I am CEO of an environmental philanthropy called Earthshare and happy to be here. OK. Agra. Rosalie. Kia ora koutou. So I'm Rosalie Nelson and I just head up this, the Edmund Hillary Fellowship and just all of us in the core team are just trying to find ways to serve the fellows and really showcase the expertise and the skills they bring to out here. Hi, Rosalie. Thanks for joining. Hello, I'm Nick. I am the Head of Growth for Limba. Just started a couple of weeks ago, so I'm really happy to be here and working with Bart. Awesome. Welcome, Nick. Madeleine. Oh, Bart, I missed you. God, how would I go do that? It's because you weren't even talking. All good. Hi, I'm Bart. I'm the Head of Growth at Limba. And looking forward to this because we have a direct e-commerce business. Love it. But the very cool product. I recommend it to everybody. Awesome. See, I'm marketing for you, Bart. There you go. Madeleine. Hi, everyone. I'm Robbie and Madeleine here. We're from Wellington in the Creative HQ office at the moment, currently in an incubator programme. So both very early stage founders. Nice. Hi, well. Mark. Mark Horlowski, co-work two. So one of the old school folks from years ago, based in Boston, and I'm founder and director of the Sustainable Endowment Institute. And we have a cloud-based web platform called Brits, which is focused on energy and climate and working with five institutions around the US and Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. Cool. Thanks, Matt. Julian and Mark, I just said that they are staying muted and behind in the background. OK. Great. Over to you, Scott. All right. OK, guys. So let's, well, I got to move this so I can see what I'm talking about. One, just a quick background on where I'm coming from. So is that advancing? There we go. Yes. So just foundationally, I kind of just coming out of university, grew up in management consulting, mostly consumer retail, got my MBA and then cut my teeth as a classically trained consumer package goods marketer out here in the Bay Area. That's, I always say about that experience, what it teaches you when you're working in marketing categories that are pretty low growth by definition. It means that your success is really predicated on whether you can understand your target market, understand your value prop and effectively execute against that strategy. So I cut my teeth in that world. And then my years in tech have always been this sort of dual focus on likable brand and unlikable category. Going back, I'm dating myself, for those of you that remember the flip video camera on the left, that was kind of my first foray into tech. It's a dual focus on the brand piece and on building scalable revenue engines, particularly on subscription businesses. So it made my way through YC, Prezi, which is a SaaS business, One Medical Health Services. And then today, so I'm still in the Bay Area. I started 621 consulting five years ago, which I'll tell you about, we're a community of independent, 200 plus independent marketers from fractional CMOs to experience operators in various disciplines in marketing. And so we'll generally plug people in on a fractional basis to help companies build or up level their core marketing capabilities. And I'm happy to answer more questions on that. So I always think of this as an operator having been a startup guy myself from everything from two guys in a garage all the way up to being acquired by a big company like Cisco and working there. And, you know, just within our world, there's a certain amount of pattern recognition because I'm working with a lot of companies at your stages and I'm very sympathetic to a lot of these questions you're asking yourselves on, you know, how do we, how do we go about this whole marketing thing? So before we dive in, I just want to hit a couple of themes that I imagine maybe on your mind as you're, because you're here. Why? Why would you even think about marketing? You know, it's very common in the early stages of running a building a startup that you're under, you're very product and engineering focused on all likelihood. And so, you know, the answer to this is why we're here today. I was telling Michelle before everyone joined that to me the one of the biggest benefit I see to starting to think about this now. It doesn't mean you have to be committed to spending millions of dollars in marketing or advertising, but the reason to start thinking about it is it's incredibly important to start to build the habits and practices within your company around understanding your target audience, figuring out how you're going to connect your mission and values like hearing you guys introduce yourselves, a lot of you as most EHF participants are very closely connected to a really important mission and the way you connect the why you're here and who you are to the external manifestation of your business and your acquisition funnel and all that becomes really important and you as soon as you can start to build some of that cadence of experimentation and iteration, the more that benefits, not just your marketing, but everything you do, products, customer success, etc. And we'll talk more about that. I hear sometimes that, you know, both on the, well, a lot of times I hear B2B people say, I don't know, that's just for B2C folks, it's not relevant to us, or I hear B2C people say, our problems are uniquely different, it doesn't, it's so different than B2B companies and one theme I see a lot and it's been a soapbox topic of mine out here in Silicon Valley is that I think we've gotten too over rotated on the differences between them. I wouldn't be happy to debate until I'm blue in the face why, you know, each is relevant to the other, right? A lot of B2C companies benefit from a B2B orientation, having some B2B DNA and how you think about nurturing and converting leads. B2B companies can use some consumer DNA and how you think about what you're defining your core value proposition and engaging them in a meaningful way. So I would argue that everything we'll talk about today is relevant for both. Some of the examples will skew a little more towards consumer B2B, but, you know, I would suffice it to say I think this is relevant for everybody. And then the last thing I'll note here is that what's inherently uncomfortable about marketing is that it's there's just a lot of ambiguity. You can bring some science into parts of it. Some of it can be very quantitative. But, you know, I find that a lot of times that even the it's shocking to people to have to appreciate that even the stuff that feels scientific has some heart in it. And there's rarely one right answer. So a lot of the ways you get toward yourself on the road to building a scalable marketing engine is through getting a lot of different perspectives and debating them and litigating. It's not it's cut and drives just, you know, writing a line of code. That's marketing by definition. So next I'm going to hit on just a few areas I'd suggest that you focus on first just in getting started. This is not the sum total of everything you'll do, but to me if like, if you asked me for a starter kit of which should be the first things I do if I'm if I want to start to build the DNA of a marketing engine. First, I'd say, and it sounds so simple and I, you know, I learned this as an operator and it's certainly like my combinator with a pound over your head all the time. Who's your customer, right? What's the need you're serving? And how do you best solve it, right? And feeding those insights into your organization become incredibly important because it's always it's like the curse of I've seen this with so many startups. It's really easy to get trapped in the world of building a solution for a problem that you haven't really defined, right? And so so much of the early work you do in marketing helps you create downstream efficiency by creating the playbook and the roadmap so developing a real understanding of what's going on in the market. What's going on with our core customer? What are their pain points? How can we best solve them? Is it incredibly important, right? From there, once you have a theory on that, then you can start to build out your basic your core positioning and messaging. And I do find this is an area when I'm talking to early stage companies that, you know, a lot of times when the nature of our conversation is they're wanting to get into driving demand right away. And sometimes I pull them back and say, look, let's make sure we're first clear on, you know, who we are and what we want to say. What's our elevator value proposition? What's the core message that we want to push out? Because particularly to remember as an early stage startup, you're generally in a world where there's very little awareness of who you are, right? And so every single touch point, you or anyone on your team or your investors, your partners, your family, any touch point they have with a potential customer or influencer, you want to make sure that the message is consistent, right? And, you know, see this all the time where within this, you know, frankly, even in bigger marketing organizations, you have a lot of people in their kind of parallel swim lane, and they're all saying something different because they've interpreted the customer need differently or the value proposition differently. And that's some, it keeps me up at night as a marketer because that's just wasted opportunity to convert attention into interest in real business. The next, you know, I touched on this a second ago, there's been an interesting evolution in marketing over the last several years and that it's, you know, it used to be that marketing decisions were more binary, right? We're going to put all our chips on the table and make a big bet on a big marketing campaign and, you know, cross our fingers and pray and, you know, sacrifice a goat, whatever, just in the hopes that it works. And the reality is that the marketing world has become a lot more flexible and a lot more iterative as it's ingested a lot of the best practices of agile product development, right? So I think what's incredibly valuable, even if you're doing it in a really scrappy, low-fi way early on, is to start to figure out what hypotheses you have, what assumptions you need to validate, and how do you start to just do low-stakes experiments so that you can understand who's the right audience, what's the right message, what's the right conversion tactic, and building that kind of muscle and the team yields benefits again and again at scale. So getting that instrumented early on is really important. And then resourcing, I imagine you guys have a lot of questions on that. That's always a tricky one. You know, one thing I hear a lot with what's very common is I see, you know, very early-stage companies very product-oriented. They get some traction, they raise a little bit of money, and they say, great, we got to start marketing. Let's go hire a CMO. And the reality is at that point, you don't necessarily need a CMO, right? There's always this question of what's the right balance of seniority and doers, and within marketing there are a thousand different specialties now. So figuring out what skill sets to optimize for in the short term versus the long term becomes really important. So there's a whole lot to discuss there. I just want to put that out there as a topic worth exploring. Let me pause for a second. I've got, like, I think two, maybe three pages up. Any questions I could answer so far? You're free to raise your hands or put them in the chat. Great. All right, I'm going to keep going. So here, I just want to talk and please don't take this as preaching fear. I did want to hit on what, you know, as I, in my experience and what I see in the marketplace, there are some common mistakes or risk factors I just want you to keep in mind. All right. One is it's really tempting to go too big too soon, and that can take a lot of different forms. There's always this question of, well, when's the product ready to be introduced? And I'll qualify this comment by saying, I really do believe in the agile process of mindset of, you know, get feedback, learn, iterate. At the same time, there is a base level of product readiness you need to feel comfortable with. I always say, and it's a little bit of a counterintuitive thing to hear from a marketer. If you gave me a million dollars and said I could spend that on marketing a lousy product or spend it on getting the product right first, I'd say let's not spend anything on marketing. Let's get the product to where we think it's solid and it's ready to be introduced into the world. I think a great product is the best marketing you have. You know, we talked some about the minute ago about building out DNA around experimentation. I think it's important that you get, before you start to aggressively invest in marketing, you want to get to the point where you feel like you've got a machine that's at least partially working. Right? It doesn't mean it has to be fully optimized, but you know, before you're doing it at scale, you want to make sure you know what you're investing in and that it can work well. Sometimes in the early stages, it's easy for us to get caught up in the hype like funding rounds and glamour and big, you know, blog posts and press coverage. I just want to make sure that there's a there's a there there, right? You know, focusing too much on the bright shiny object without anything really to put behind it can can get you into trouble. This is a very common challenge for startups because it's in fact, it makes pretty good sense early on to focus your initial marketing on a mid funnel like ads on Facebook and Google and SEO, right? Which are really about harvesting the demand that you've created other ways and converting it. It's incredibly important. It's a great testing laboratory. It's all measurable, which is wonderful. The thing you have to look out for is over time. You'll notice I didn't say that that doing that is the mistake. The mistake I see is relying on not alone because over time you've got to build out your organic flywheel. If you're only focusing at the middle of the funnel, you're going to hit diminishing returns there. At some point it becomes more and more expensive to find new people, new customers, whether they're businesses or consumers to convert. Yeah, I talked a little bit about messaging consistency. I would say, like, look out for being too self-referential. See this a lot. It's like, hey, we have really bright product and engineering people. They've built cool stuff. Everyone should care about it, right? And that again is or if you don't have your insights in your positioning, right, that can be risky. The learning mechanism gets back to what I was talking about. Make sure, like, when we run the test, let's go in in advance knowing which metrics we care about and what success looks like, so that we're ingesting the learning and building that into the organization. And then, yeah, that organic flywheel I touched on a little. I think, look, it's important to recognize that you don't turn brand awareness on overnight. So taking time to do things like thought leadership content that kind of tell the broader story, like for those of you in the climate space, like plugging into conversations in the culture around, you know, green energy and climate challenge become really important in getting your name into those conversations. So it's important to be thoughtful about how you're at word of mouth here or case studies if you're a B2B business. The more you can let your existing early customers be the mouthpiece for your brand, the more successful you'll be in building an authentic brand and driving demand as opposed to having to just pay for it all the time. OK, last thing here. So I do think it's important to just whenever you're talking about marketing, there's this whole notion of situational awareness, right? Where I see expectations get missed online sometimes, it's like, hey, we did this big TV commercial and how come that didn't change or that didn't increase our conversion rate? It's really important that in anything in marketing that you're thinking about where, which level of the funnel are we looking to influence and what types of KPIs are the measurements of that, right? This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of KPIs, but for instance, for a B2B business looking at your MQ, how are you converting leads into MQLs or SQLs? What does that look like? That's at the consideration phase. We've got people interested. We need to figure out how we shepherd them through the funnel so we can convert them. Or you see an example at the bottom from Slack which is around how are we retaining and holding on to or increasing our long-term value of existing customers. So everything you do should be asking yourself and your whole learning plan. What level of the funnel are we looking to influence and what would be metrics that would be indicative of that? All right, that's all I'm sharing for today. I'd love to hear questions. I know I just threw a lot at you. What's on your mind? Feel free to unmute, raise your hand up, or put your question in the chat. There you go. This one from Mark. Can you discuss got some best practices related to B2B refer a friend-type programs? Yeah, you know, it's interesting with refer a friend programs. You'll learn as we go through these that I will give you my street aboveboard scoop all the time. I have not had great success with transactional refer a friend programs. I think there, you know, there is a, it's not so you shouldn't look at it because it's very category specific and the way you architect it I think is, you know, it's always smart to give people an incentive to refer and all. I will say that while the transactional piece is less interesting to me, I think that if you go back to my point a minute ago about using your existing customers as the face of the brand, I do think that's incredibly powerful. Right. And so I love seeing when companies are putting testimonials or like quotes and case studies from their customers into sales materials or onto a website or into a nurture email. For instance, if you're a B2B business. So, you know, look, there's this whole sort of precept in marketing that I imagine you guys would agree with this. Nobody likes feeling like they're being advertised to. Right. Like whenever a company is talking at you, there's a little bit of this discount factor of like, well, I don't know if I should trust them, especially if it's not a well known brand. Right. I don't know these people. I don't like, you know, I don't know if I should put my trust in them. And the more that they're able to see, hey, real people who have real problems like mine are using this, the more it breaks down those walls. So, you know, I think like interesting approaches to take are when you have your B2B business, you know, build some case studies, build some like some video testimonials or let your customer write a blog post, et cetera, et cetera, include those in emails, include that in social media, build it into your promotional materials. I think that can be really powerful. Refer a friend, you know, I think it's always smart to play with some sort of incentive that gets people. You want to take down the hurdle from for trial. Right. So, the best advice I could give on that is figure out a low stakes way to get person A to get person B to just try something. And if the product is sticky and they like it, then they're likely to retain it. I don't know, Mark, if I totally, I might have cheated on your question a little bit, but feel free to ask a follow-up if you like. What else? Uh-huh. Great. Yep. Meddling. Feel free to unmute, yeah. Kia ora, Robbie. Thanks for that, Scott. Really useful. We were just discussing a little bit as you were talking, I guess the balance between these agile methodologies you talked about of kind of testing and learning and how you balance that with or I guess incorporate kind of long-term brand building alongside kind of that shorter term sales generation and funnel. Yeah. Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah, I love that question. Thank you. Yeah, I think that it's important not so just to reframe it. I think it's important for everyone to hear that. I want to make sure I'm framing this the right way. I think your question is what we've got. Imagine part of what's on your mind is we've got this, you know, pressing priority to drive customer acquisition and demand and prove out that model. And at the same time, we know we need to build a brand over time. Right. I would say for starting point, it's really important not to look at those two goals as mutually exclusive. Right. I think what, so let me give you a tangible example. I think when you are part of how you will solve your acquisition funnel or, you know, solve the challenge of making it efficient is, as we discussed, run a lot of experiments, you know, you run a few Facebook ads, you try a landing page on your site, you try different sales materials, whatever else, which is really important. And it's interesting to me how often this gets overlooked is that insight, that is a real-time laboratory on your customers and on your value proposition. And all those insights you can feed back into other parts of your marketing engine and your product roadmap and everything else. And it is, even in small teams, it's really fascinating to me how often that learning gets siloed. Right. So if you carry that forward, you know, so I mentioned you should start with, we're going to tie together a couple of things here. I mentioned you should start with building out that kind of experimentation flywheel. I also mentioned that you should try to get a crack at your brand positioning and messaging. Now, remember with your positioning, you don't have to sign it in blood, guys, right? Like the idea is like this is the playbook and we can talk some, and we're going to do, I'm happy to talk a little more on that today. We have another session in that in a few weeks. That's a very participatory exercise of stakeholders. You try to agree on a, like, here's the core playbook we're going to use for now. And at the same time, you're getting real-time learning, like testing those what's in that positioning or testing different ads, different messages. And ultimately you'll hit a point where you'll say, you know what, we've learned enough that we need to refresh our brand position, right? Our customers evolved, our customer needs have evolved. That's fine. That's fine, right? And so the more you get those two ends of the spectrum working symbiotically, the better. Now, you will still likely come to a point where you're, you're a, you've got to cross this calcium of like, hey, we've got this, this marketing machine that works really efficiently on driving demand. And we need to start, sorry, in converting demand and we need to start experimenting with how we, we add more top of a funnel awareness. And that gets a little more complicated. But again, that doesn't have to jump to nationally, you know, multi-million dollar TV campaign. You can play with different tests and like, you know, a particular market or you experiment with running an ad on YouTube. This is where your, your communications, like your, your word of mouth, your social media, your leadership strategy becomes really important. So I'm happy to elaborate on all this, but hopefully that gives you a high level answer to your question. Yeah, thank you for that. I see a question. Yeah. Sorry. Good. Okay. And then I see a question from Bart here. Examples that get companies away from it? Yeah. So that's a nice trend. Thanks for that. I'm just going to read that one out for the recording, Scott, actually. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. Yeah, because I kind of have the chat in the recording it. So the question from Bart was more examples that get companies away from the mid-funnel because a lot of the people aren't looking for a rich relationship between that and other areas? You would have caught on to things and었다, and we had several reports about it. And they said you really have to practice flirtation in terms of加油 balance and building the organic flywheel. Yeah. So a few areas that I think are at a high level, here's some buckets of areas to explore. And then we can decide where we want to click down. There's the whole kind of world of communications, y Lan defenders is puen i qutien ka wuma. Y land amendment y spelai there devau, ka verme assistant agon think t тутant gade watangua. Haban shil за hankalo y kaartido. Erganaam received y diami Gad episura, pernredin ersola esy-si, moa zionu hankol lobo, akà maen rapi gade ca t this a bole neighant tanon. Oo m黎 dioodi i syodu. moko ? Maka perepiaw tawadu maithat ti maithat ca nā, a koi mabukatai tawadu p CrowdTrace, maithat ti maithat ti maithat wahan-bayai. A tawadu pa maithat ti maithat te maithat te maithat ti maithat i maithat ti maithat atau. Amoan, mokin, maithat ti maithat i mabukat ngunوا, your company not just to tech and investor press but to trade verticals and lifestyle and everything else. We can talk there. I do think there is a place for testing your way into brand advertising that is admittedly always a little scary. We can talk about that. I really like the idea of doing it on a targeted like an incubate, a couple test markets where you don't have to spend as much money and play with it. There's also this world of events and conferences. I think it's a little, it's important not to go too overboard on that but I mean particularly for folks in the B2B businesses, knowing where your customers are and finding way to engage them in a very authentic way is interesting. I'm less enthusiastic in the early stages of the company about paying a bunch of money to slap your logo somewhere. You need to remember that if people don't know who you are, your number one job is to educate them and driving just a bunch of awareness of your name without a story behind it is not going to be that effective. I'll tell you a story when I had taken a CMO role with a company that was looking at sponsoring a one of these bike transit city bike kind of things where we could get our logo on every bike that people would check out and use in the city and it was kind of cool. But ultimately what I landed on was they don't really know who we are. Is this really the best bang for our buck in educating people about us and it didn't feel like it was. It's the same reason like if for those in the States like if you're going to spend money in a Super Bowl ad you better damn be really confident that it's going to serve your strategy and your objective and unless you're you know like if Anheuser-Busch or Coca-Cola everybody knows then you got to figure out how that ad is going to educate. Anyway those are just some high-level themes part and we can certainly drill down into more of this. What else? Can you ask from anyone? Maybe go into depth on some of those questions then if you want to Scott. What's useful to everybody? Which one was the? Yeah let me think. You know look one thing we haven't talked about that I know is just a practical reality of being an entrepreneur is there's always this tension between you know spending money and marketing and the existential reality of funding right and you know I'm always a little weary of you know over rotating on vanity fundraising optics like just doing things that look good but don't have any substance around them and yet I will say in the work I do now advising a lot of companies when they're going through this existential process of like hey we got to prove out our model but we also got to make sure we're around in a year. A lot of times what's helpful is to fast forward to whenever you think you need what's the next big milestone whether it's a product launch or yeah we want to go raise a series A or a seed round in a year whatever else. What kind of story do we need to tell to credibly show that we're on our way and then you kind of back solve for for what you need to do to get there because I do think there's a risk that if you don't have that kind of I'm not talking about like a five-year goal I'm talking about like a 12 to 18 24-month goal you end up just taking little incremental steps in marketing that aren't really going to get you to the story you need to tell and um frequently you know as you guys see this a lot like it's series B to be honest where the criteria get a lot stricter for funding a company and the reality is you know the best possible position to be in is to say hey listen we've proven out the unit economics of how to market this business we haven't done it at scale yet but we can take additional funding and put it into a well oiled machine and so you know I would and I calibrated this with friends in the VC community I you know I would always rather see a company with the story that basically says you know we know how to acquire and retain customers we just haven't done it at scale yet I'd rather see that than to say we've been operating at scale but our unit economics are so so and it's still not proven out right so I would really think about what's the the narrow cast approach to testing and and building out your marketing machine and then the the following enough that we haven't really discussed I had this we talked about this briefly in the funnel slide but we should talk for a minute or just about the idea to keep in mind that depending on your business model um it's not just an acquisition game right like retaining existing customers becomes incredibly important because that's part of your the story you tell in your unit on your end and unit economics you don't want to be in a situation where you're saying hey we know how to acquire a bunch of customers for cheap but then they've gone in three six months right um so I would think holistically about that and keep in mind back to this point about the organic flywheel that the more you're retaining people the more your top of the funnel will organically happen because you'll have a lot of happy customers who are retaining and they're more likely to share and talk about and that's incredibly important I should have added a piece to that funnel slide about advocacy right like retention leads to lower lower acquisition costs for acquiring new customers I think people tend to underestimate how important that is to your end and unit economics sorry you got me on my on my high horse here Rosalie I see you got a question um Scott I'd love to get your thoughts about how we how can an organisation sharpen its value proposition because often in the very early stages they're not always absolutely clear about their point of competitive differentiation and it needs to evolve or if there's a new market they may have to educate that market as well before they can particularly if they're disrupting I'd love to just get your thoughts on how how do you approach that yeah that's a really good question is it gets back to it kind of brings us full circle Rosalie to the point about under about customer insights and segmentation and so let's let's elaborate on that for a minute um um first of all I so there's this there's this notion I learned back in my uh package goods days of when you're anytime you're you're launching a new product whether it's a new company you know our new line of business or even just a line extension of an existing product you go into it asking well what's the ACB the accepted customer belief and this is what this is meant to do it's it's supposed to help you define like this is not talking about us or what we do it's who's the customer and what do they care about what's their pain point right um it and it's you know in marketing language we say well what door are we going in right like we're trying to think of a good example like um there's so in the in the US so how many of you familiar with REI they they are retailer of outdoor products right so they um have this core below this understanding that their customers are people who are passionate about the outdoors they really care about getting outside right and so they ultimately came up with this idea to say look we're going to take this really unconventional step of closing our stores on Black Friday which you know is the biggest day of retail sales of the year by far in the States right and they say we're going to close on Black Friday and we're going to use that as a chance to reinforce to our customers that we want them to get outside and enjoy a tapest day instead of shopping and go outdoors and say that because they could not have and it was it was like remarkably beneficial for their business for a number of reasons they could not have arrived at that decision without first understanding what their customer cares about right so so that's one um but Rosalie there's there's the other point I really want to drive home that I think is a um people can be tempted to go in the other direction as oftentimes in the early stage of a company you know no one starts a company to say hey I want to be a niche player for a small group of people and just build a small really you know niche business that never gets really big right all of us start companies because we have dreams of world domination right and we have dreams of ubiquity like everyone will use our product or our service and and I love that and I'm not saying that that's the wrong ambition but I also think that the trick to getting there is to starting really narrow first and so the just back to the accepted belief it's not the same for everybody right and so part of what you need to do is build out you know a couple or three different segments or personas and really understand they have very different needs right and I would not be afraid to go I should have mentioned this when we're starting to experiment I would not be afraid to go really deep into one first it doesn't take away your option to go to others later right but the reality is the the discipline you'll build in going deep into one audience building out a marketing engine for them is one you can then reapply later right I mean it's basically if you look at what like Facebook at first was just for Harvard students right and then they learned some of how to apply that and they took it to Stanford and eventually it virally took off but I would not be afraid to go deep early on and then use those insights to help force you to build the and does that answer your question thank you yes nice good we've got time for one more question um if anyone has got one or wants to dig deeper on any one of those points beyond um beyond press releases in your general PR what what are the PR tactics that you see as kind of modern and relevant yeah I think it's really important like any good PR strategy should have multiple prongs to it I think the the temptation that startups sometimes fall prey to is that you focus your PR entirely on the the the people who watch startups right which is like tech press and influencers uh tech press and investor press etc etc and I I do look I do think that's important it's not to say you you shouldn't do that but that's a part of a broader whole and so generally I would think in buckets around there's that stream there's also the um like where is our customer that can be oftentimes like within the verticals that you are there are very focused vertical press whether it's bloggers or influencers or magazine you know publications that are focused and and very narrow niches and I would I would go after those and then I also think it's important depending on your business to look at consumer and lifestyle like there are ways to get even if you're a b2b business frankly because more often than not you're still it's a b2b to there's some sort of consumer at the end of it think about um where are these people going for general like trends and lifestyle and from like here on the stage like people magazine or good housekeeping whatever where they're not going to do an in-depth review on your product but if you can get your product into a cultural conversation I think that's smart as well as you know I would say to more just so much of this has moved to social and influencers I'm not a huge fan of a lot of paid influencer engagements I think those feel very inauthentic but there are ways through sampling products like to people who like the right folks who all showcase it on instagram and talk about it I think it's really important I I've always my view as uh when I was a CMO was always that I left a good portion of our budget for just sampling product I felt like the more people can interact with our product or our service offering and learn about it the higher the likelihood that they'll evangelize it like we can't get out of the gate if no one's actually using it it's true I've got one of but stalls under my fate right now that's right that's right and so you know yeah in that case like how do you get everyone who's using one today like shoot a photo on instagram and talk about it and and you know that then it starts to feel like a community no one likes taking in consumer businesses no one likes to feel like there's something exciting happening in the culture and I'm missing out right so the more you perpetuate the sense of like gosh I'll everyone's like on top of everyone's all over this I gotta I gotta go check it out right and the truth is a lot of that a lot of bb products get adopted bottoms up that way too like Slack was a perfect example right like hey that seems that seems cool everyone I know is using it at work and then they were smart because they created a really easy bottoms up way to you know buy a cheap little license for a three-person team which worked overtime good well if there's no last question I know I said last one before but that was a nice quick answer I'm going to pop Scott's email address in the channel there for you let me get I'm actually gonna put my um put your work on that's fine I'd say use my I'll put my work on in there um but otherwise what I want to do is share my screen I'm just going to show you the rest of the sessions that we've got coming up as well so make sure that you sign up for those so we've just had the building your MVP and then we're gonna on the 27th of May we've got the brain positioning and then on the 30th of June we've got the building a marketing team and 19th of August customer acquisition so make sure you sign up for for those and then we also have a whole bunch of others that are up there as well um but yeah because I would just add oh sorry Michelle go ahead go ahead I was just going to say it everyone first of all thank you guys for joining thank you to Michelle for for organizing I I did want to just um and I'll sincerity say that we've we've come up with this idea of this series to be helpful for you guys so if you have any feedback on how we can make this format work great or you know what kind of content or what anything I love to hear any any observations yeah feel free to you know email Michelle and me or you know whatever works like we really we're not doing this for vanity we want it to be useful so um please keep us posted on that okay yeah so if there are any particular questions prior as well perhaps um of those other sessions coming up that you want Scott to delve into feel free to email those through as well good well great well thank you Scott and thank you everyone for showing up have a wonderful day thank you it was great seeing all of you