The alchemy of iconic companies

I have been a lifelong student of the capital enterprise. I have started 4 companies, sold 2, and am still learning about what it takes to build an iconic company.

• Solve a problem that a large number of people of companies have? Sure ✅

• Build a great product and hire a great team? Definitely. ✅

There are several products and companies that do sort of well financially, grow slowly, even in a large market and don’t end up being the goto choice for that problem (I have built such “pushing the boulder up the hill” businesses). By the way, there’s nothing wrong with that. I love “lifestyle” or managed growth businesses.

However, what separates Apple, Nike, Salesforce, Slack, BJP and Sadhguru from other similar efforts? What have they cracked?

Building an iconic brand.

For the past 10 years, I have been trying to learn what it means to build a brand. I have come across some great tools with good supporting evidence.

Here’s my understanding along with a brief action plan for startups thinking about their go-to-market plan —

What does brand mean when you’re a founder of an early stage startup?

It is very hard for the human brain to consume large amounts of information. Especially, when there is lot of information and several sources (different competitors) sharing the same information. Your customer is hard wired to reject similar rhetoric and instructions that are delivered via cold emails and blogs again and again.

As a society, what set of rules or laws or systems have survived 5000+ years? Can you remember their evolution? I can’t. The only thing that survives or is imprinted on the brain with resilience is stories. For instance, religion and the different brands of religion have persisted even while nation states and economies changed - this is because of effective story-telling.

Does brand mean story-telling? Not quite. Story-telling is the vehicle through which you communicate your values and what you stand for. A brand is about values. What is important to people personally = valuable = values. Values are not beliefs.. people often confuse the word “belief” with “value”. People can have different beliefs about many things and still share values. When these shared values are brought together through a story or “strategic narrative” it results in communities (or cults) of people.. and the most iconic brands align all these elements, i.e. values, stories, and community. Let’s break this down below with an example.

How does one build a brand?

There could be various paths to building a brand, I have boiled it down to these 4 pillars.

1. Define your values

The environmentally-friendly clothing brand Patagonia’s founder has one true and overarching value — let’s take care of the environment. He cared about it deeply. This was his focus before the product or company even existed.Today, after several decades, the companies values are reflected here. The original value is still a core part and they have expanded on it based on their journey.

Founder Action Item: write down your values. Keep in mind, this is not a contrived or forced exercise. Forget your company and product, and write down your true values. This entire exercise is about capturing your true and honest story, not one for marketing. Each one of us has our own true story, please don’t fabricate any portion of it. Here is some inspiration — Patagonia founder’s story. Once you read this, you will understand where the values came from.

2. Write your strategic narrative

Founder Action Item: I am going to start this section by asking you to spend an hour watching this video — Andy Raskin on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast explains what a strategic narrative is (a single story to align your entire company around), and how to craft one. An hour out of your day is a lot, but it is a fraction compared to you blindly going through the next 5 years pushing your sales and marketing team transactionally. I strongly urge you to watch this video — it will immediately flag some positioning mistakes you might be making currently — I made this mistake when I was building Recruiterbox, a company that my co-founders & I bootstrapped and sold to private equity.

For me, strategic narrative — this singular story — comes from two things:-

- Using your values as the primary ingredient/raw material and

- Pointing to a fundamental shift in the world

My 3rd startup, Recruiterbox, provided an ATS (applicant tracking system) in the cloud. We were one of the first of likely 100s of ATSs that were being built for the US market. At the time, feature for feature, we were better than all of our peer companies, but the eventual perceived leader in the market was the one that had the foresight to define a strategic narrative for the future of recruiting. They said that the “age of data-driven recruiting” is here, and distributed this narrative to its potential customers and VC firms very effectively. To me, this was the key lever that they pulled to accelerate their adoption amongst their target audience.

3. Commit to this story in your distribution

This brand exercise is not for your home page, or a sales call, or your collateral. It should be in everything and everywhere. I remember when Zuora coined the term “subscription economy” — every single team member on LinkedIn had that in their header title.

The story has to be told effectively. The truth, the construct, the design and the distribution matter. It should be used in your hiring, in your product sprints, in your sound bytes, in your identity everywhere online — it is your true north. You and your team are Ground 0 of the community you are trying to build around this movement. Every successful brand has been a movement, not a marketing campaign. A movement. You need subscribers and followers and voters to your movement, not to a campaign or a social media account.

4. Pay attention to your design

I am extremely biased towards the power of design. That is why I have made it its own point. I have had engineers and collaborators tell me in the past “is this really important right now?” and I never had a good answer. Why are design changes or design decisions important? What do they have to do with tangible revenue?

Now I understand that in the above quest of building a movement, building a brand — design is the unspoken hero that makes sure your narrative is being shouted the loudest when you are not speaking, and long after you are done speaking.

Design is not a logo or a color or even an icon. Design is how the world experiences your narrative. It could be the label on a Patagonia jacket, it could be the ping sound on your Slack, it could be a super smooth onboarding flow on your SaaS app — that tells your user that you know the story I told you about bringing you into the future with me? Here it is!

When should I start thinking about this?

You may think that your company solves a problem and is already getting paid for it. Do I really need to care about this brand mindset at the 0 to 1 stage? Especially if I sell to businesses and not consumers?

1. Your strategic narrative will drive everything you do. Brand is not a standalone marketing exercise. It is your identity. If you don’t know who you are and who you are building for, how will you make long-term scalable decisions? You don’t need a massive investment of time and money at the earliest stage when you are resource-constrained, but you should definitely go through the exercise now, and as you build your company, you can add to the narrative. Early on, this is an investment of your time as a founder, later it becomes an investment of money.

2. Founder Action Item: If you have read all of the above, and are interested in learning more about how iconic companies are built through the power of creating a following, please read this book — The Culting of Brands. It is the right amount of inspiration and framework to help with your exercise.

I welcome a chance to share thoughts on the strategic narrative for your startup — just comment below and I’d be happy to chime in!