Fostering founder brand as a competitive advantage with Dave Gerhardt

Foreign.

So, Dave, we're in an era where most competitors in most markets look very similar to each other, both product and marketing wise. So how can a visible founder make a difference here?

I think one of the biggest opportunities is this is like, sounds so silly to say it, but like, social media is one is still the biggest opportunity for startups. And I think it's just been missed. People have approached it wrong. And so like, I feel silly telling you, like, yeah, you should be active on social media, but I think it's the reason it can be such an advantage for a founder is because, like, you're literally able to reach your, you're able to reach your dream customers online directly from anywhere in the world without spending a dollar and get feedback on ideas and things that are interesting. Like, it's just such a cheat code for getting, not only getting initial customers, but just getting your finger on the pulse of what's happening in your world. But I think so many founders have just been like, social media has been like an afterthought or it's like ghost written and managed by the PR team. And what that means is like they just tweet out webinar links and you know, Boston Business Journal awards versus, like what people actually want to hear today is thought leadership from the, from experts in their industry. Like, we are driven by, as humans, we're all driven by expertise, right? I, I two things that I like outside of work are like golf and, and fitness working out. I'm always looking for people who are saying, who have interesting perspectives and points of view and can teach me things. And the same is true. And so those are the accounts that I go follow. And now I've been following someone for six months online and now he just put out like a home. I'm traveling this week and he put out a home workout course and that's the one that I go by. It's like the same thing that happens in our personal lives can happen in B2B. And so if you sell to marketers, you sell to finance. The opportunities to build up a direct relationship with those people are online. And the way that you do that is not by promoting yourself, it's by adding value and being a thought leader. And the way that you be a thought leader is like putting out, you know, relevant, interesting content about your niche every single day, every single week. And it's just not a promotional channel. It should be a, it should be a conversational channel. And that's where a lot of founders get wrong with it.

And why does it need to be a founder. Why? Like, content marketing. Due to it or whoever you.

You can. I just think that so many people are, like, just burnt out on marketing from brands today. Like, we don't like marketing. That feels like marketing. And so when it's the content manager, that. That's great. It is one way of amplifying that brand. If you're the content manager at Winter and you love the brand and you want to be an advocate, great. But there's nothing more powerful than hearing from Pep. Who's the. Who's the founder? Who's the. This is his company. He started this. Like, it's so damn hard to start a business. You have to be crazy to start a business. You must have some deep burning passion or insight or expertise or whatever that led you to start this. Like, that's the. You're the one. You're the one that's in these conversations every day with investors, advisors, customers. You're talking to people in the market. You're. You're having the most interesting conversations. And I think the opportunity is for people to hear from you. We don't want to buy from nameless companies. We like to buy from brands where we actually know someone. And I knew that about my personal life. Like, oh, you're going to go to the local butcher, because you know that person, right? But I felt this, like, firsthand at Drift when it was crazy. It was like, it was. People would buy because people would buy solely for. There's a very competitive market, but solely for, like, they liked our marketing. Just like an insane thing to think about, right? Like, we do all these crazy tactics and channels and optimizations and campaigns as marketers and like, hey, why did a lot of people buy from Drift in the early days? Because they love David Cancel. They loved his social media presence, they loved his podcast, and they thought it was interesting. And we had a unique point of view. We came, we said, hey, we think this way. People are doing it is broken. We want to do it this way. And that was the reason. It was not because over time, it became this, and we learned over time, but it was not because we had this one tiny feature that Intercom didn't or whatever other company in the space. It was because they were like, you know what? I want to. People want to work with people. They feel like they know and they like and they trust. And so they were like, look, if you're all similar, fine. That's my perception of the market. I'm gonna go buy Drift. Cause I love their marketing and I Love their point of view on things and that's why I'm gonna buy. So that changed the game for me because as someone in to be, I saw. We saw all these people coming in for the first, I don't know, $10 million in revenue for the company. People were literally just coming to the website because they heard, they, they heard about us and how, how we did marketing.

And so how was that different from, let's say, Intercom at a time, you know, desk trainer also, you know, put some content out there and spoke at conferences, but was the only difference that he didn't go that aggressively into like a podcast and social and.

No, I think they, I think they did. I thought Intercom did. Has always done a great job with content. Even like before I worked at Drift, they had. I remember hearing interviews from, from their, their founders on like, you know, other people's podcasts and stuff. The decision that we made, the how to win piece of this was we kind of repositioned them as a chat solution for product people because all of their content was very focused on product managers, right? And you know, in app messaging and where David and Elias, the Drift founders came from was a sales and marketing background. They built a product at HubSpot. They had a marketing automation company performable before that. They kind of. They spent over a decade in sales and marketing. And so what they set out to do was, was to build a marketing automation platform that was built on chat and messaging. And the focus was specifically on sales and marketing because that was where they came from. And so we saw that and we're like, oh, wow, this actually lines up perfectly from a content standpoint. That was our company strategy. This lines up perfectly from a content standpoint because we're going to go hard on telling the story. Like Drift is built for sales and marketing. You know, Intercom is a great product. Intercom is a great product. Kudos to them. They built an amazing business. But they're building for product manager, they're building for product people. Look at their. Look at the stuff they write about, look at their content, look at the integrations that we're building, right? And it's not just fluff, by the way. It's not just like marketing message. You have to deliver on that in the roadmap. And so what that meant was at the Drift product team at this stage was like, amazing. And just in cranking out new stuff and everything that they put out, it'd be like every week they're putting something out. It had to be. Be backed up by that, like, built for sales and marketing. And so while Intercom may build some product management SaaS app integration that product managers will love, we need to be putting out things like, I'm trying to think of an early one, but I can't have some. We need to be putting out things like that, have a direct use case for sales and marketing. And the way you show that to the market is by constantly delivering on that. And so. And I don't think I've ever told this story out loud, out loud before, but it was. This is why it's so hard to give marketing advice online sometimes, even though I do and take a very definitive take and people, you know, get really mad about it or whatever. But there's so much nuance because we had all these secret ingredients. Like, one of the key ingredients to the Drift strategy was the fact that we could use when like we literally sitting at a whiteboard and just think about, like, our what. What ammo do we have as a company to tell our story? Well, David and elias came from HubSpot. Everybody in this world is going to know HubSpot. He was a chief product officer there. Elias is a VP of engineering. Their company got acquired by HubSpot. They rebuilt the whole product. We can tell this, like, decade of experience in sales and marketing story. Okay, let's go use that to our advantage. And so what's cool about this is, like, this is why people say your story is your strategy. This is a perfect example of that, because that story, the VP of product, was aligned on that story. And so the things that product was building was aligned to that story. The things we were doing in marketing were aligned to that story. And this is why, like, it's not about the little tactic, it's about fundamentally, like, sitting down as a leadership team or the founders or whatever stage of the company you're at and being able to articulate your strategy beyond features and integrations you're going to build. And this was such a simple way of framing the company and framing what we needed to go do. I've never been a part of a team at that stage that was so aligned and cranking. And that was a big reason that we grew so fast.

You were a CMO at Privy, so how did you approach founder brand there and what kind of impact did it have?

So when I went to Privy, I had like, the almost the opposite problem. Not a problem, but like the. The opposite playbook from Drift. Like, when I went to Drift, it was starting at zero. But the founder was kind of well known David. When I went to Privy, they had half a million people using their app and they were like one of the top apps in the Shopify app Store. But not a lot of people in that world knew Ben. And so the opposite scenario was, well, here we already have distribution, we have plenty of people we can reach out to and email and talk to about this. And so there it was more like, we need to get this guy a microphone. And I wish I had some like crazy sexy playbook that we did. But it was like the ingredients there were like, he already had. They already have distribution. They already have half a million people using the app. They already have. You know, however much website traffic, he's been in this space for 10 years, just been very quiet about it. He, he came to me and he's like, one of the reasons that I went there was because he's like, I want to turn the volume, I want to go do this thing and I think you can help me. And so the very first thing that we did was launch this. We called it E Commerce Marketing School. And it's like a perfect example of creating like the show for your dream customers where there was a lot, there's a lot of podcasts and information about e commerce and the Shopify ecosystem and marketing, but there's not somebody who was the leader for small businesses. Because market teaching small businesses how to do marketing is very different than B2B. It's very SMB. This is like, you know, somebody who just had an Etsy store and might now migrate to Shopify and you're teaching them how to, how to do email marketing. And so we created a show that was, we're going to bring like 101, 102 level marketing information about how to, how to run your Shopify store. And I hosted it at first to get it out the door, but Ben actually was like, I'm really hungry, I want to do this. And so we made the decision after a couple months to do. He did a daily podcast for like six months and it was 10 to 12 minute episodes. And he had a list of today I'm going to talk about one or two very tactical lessons. And so over the course of a year now, we built up over a hundred episodes of very tactical e commerce marketing lessons that gave him ammo to then that's what he can post on LinkedIn about. That's what he can post on Twitter about. He wants to go speak in an event. He's now done 100 mini speaking opportunities. And so there it was just like putting the pieces together again. The key ingredient though was like he wanted to do that. And in either of these cases, whether it was like David at drift or Ben at privy, it wasn't like pulling teeth to, to get them to, to, to do these things. They believed in the value of them and they weren't like looking back at me two months later being like, what's the ROI on this? You know, show me the pipeline. Like they, they, they saw that they believed in, in doing it this way and we're going to ready to make the long term investment.

When we look at some, there are some examples of public visible founders that then did something stupid. So you know, the GoDaddy founder shooting the elephant, the base camp saga. So what would you say to the argument that, you know, it's like a single point of failure is a, is a public founder then, you know, gets drunk and says something stupid, you know.

Yeah, I would say that it's probably. There's risk in anything, right? There's, it's, to me, it's a, it's an investment strategy. It is a channel that you're, it's an investment strategy and you know, there's risk. Right. Everybody in this world is into Bitcoin right now and you're buying it and you know that the whole thing could go to zero and you're still doing it anyway and you might make a lot of money on it or you might not. And, and so I think like, yeah, there are, there are those examples of the founders who do something or you know, say something at a time. There's lots of examples of, in, in founder history where, and especially today in 2022, it is, it is more, it is easier than ever to wake up the next morning and be like, oh my goodness, I just alienated half of my customer base. I pissed off half of my customer base.

Fire people on Zoom, eh?

Yeah, no kidding. I mean, is that story even real? Like in what planet does that happen? I think, I think it's a risk, But I think 8 out of 10 times it's worth it. And yeah, I don't, I also think like it's so hard because some of the stuff, like if you try to, if you try to be, you can try to be too safe and then you end up saying nothing. And I don't mean like go shoot elephants and post your pictures with them. Yeah. But like, you know, but part of what makes the founder brand stuff work is it's not just you tweeting out links and articles and stuff about Your company, it's, it's about you. It's about. Yeah, you know, here's an example. Like, I love the fact that you post videos of you doing pull ups. Some people probably hate that, but I, but I like that. And I think that gives like another piece of you that I can feel like I get to understand on, on social media.

So there's trade offs similarly, like, you know, you posting pics with your kids and, and whatever and you know, like, I mean, I even sneak it in strategically to humanize myself because it's so easy to hate on a visible person.

That you don't know 100, a hundred percent. 100%. That's why I'm like, I'm gonna do more podcasts again. Because some lady told me the other day, she's like, you are much nicer and funnier than I, than I ever would have imagined.

Yeah, yeah. Whenever people tell me like, oh, I hate Gary Vee and like, get a life.

I love Gary Vee.

Me too.

I do.

Guy's a genius. Well, let's go back to one point you made. You said nobody asks you to show the pipeline yet. We do need to talk about the roi or how would we measure this or how do we justify that? There's opportunity cost. Could you invest the time in something else? Is it worth doing it?

Yeah, it's worth doing it. And you know this because you're doing it right now, but you just get more in. I wish I could had a sexier way of explaining. You get more inbound, period if it, if it's working. And so, so, so we, here's an example. In the early days of Drift, we didn't think about how to measure it. I'm sure if we had done the show for like a year and two years and never thought about measuring it, we, we would have been asked to. But like very early on, people would show up on our website and get a demo from sales and the sales rep would go in slack and be like, I got a demo today. And the demo source would be like seeking wisdom fan who were like, okay, so we'd screenshot that and send it around. And this is like the company's like 12 people. And so it happened so early at that small level that it just became baked in it. So then like the next week we get another message like that. The next week I get a LinkedIn message from some CMO that I've never talked to who says that they're huge fans of the Drift podcast. Then this is literally how it happened. Then one of our investors sends us a tweet that one of their company, their portfolio companies talked about and how they're listening. Like, it just became everywhere. And we had no perfect spreadsheet to quantify it, but it was like, it was a gut feeling thing that, holy cow, at least once a week, people are doing it. And then we had an office in Boston at the time in this Copley Mall. And David and I would be walking to go get a coffee, and one day these. These two people yell out. They're like, seeking wisdom. And, like, obviously, Boston can be a small place, but it was just. So we. We started joking, and David and I would joke around the company. We. We would always then say. We'd say, how will we ever measure if a podcast is working? And it became this joke. And so everyone in the company over a couple years would then share screenshots of somebody who said something nice about seeking wisdom or whatever. We would then share it in the company Slack. And with it, with, like, a joke, the tagline would be like, how will we ever measure our podcast? And so it became this thing inside the company where everybody was feeling it at this kind of, you know, qualitative level that it. That it never became a. Like, should we really measure? Should we really measure doing this? And then, you know, because it's so hard, I think the measurement would have led us in the wrong direction anyway. But we felt it at that level, to the level where the CFO was like, whatever you guys are doing, just keep doing it. Like, and I think you have to. I know a lot of people don't like this, but, like, you have to. There is a story with some of the numbers in some of these channels. And so I think, like, I. I'm in management meetings, and I'm showing numbers and spreadsheets and charts, but I'm also showing screenshots of podcast reviews and screenshots of things people are saying about drift and the podcast on Twitter, because I think you need to, like, reinforce those things. And, like, the attribution puzzle is much. Is much more complex than what you usually see.

You mentioned that people, the founders, should post daily, every single day. So is it really, like. Like, advertising, reach and repetition? Can I do it weekly? Is. Is more better?

Yeah, I think more is better, but more is not better. More is not better for, like, the content reach in the early days. More is better, actually, for you because you need as many reps on this as you can get. And so if you post once a week at the end of the month, you're going to say to me, dave, I posted once a week and I got nothing. Well, right, because the whole magic in social media is the feedback loop. And so in order to get more feedback and feedback, I mean, likes, comments, retweets, those are like the signals on social. You know, if you post four times in a month versus if you post 40 times in a month, that's 40 more times that you're putting your messages out there. And social media can just be this amazing way. Like, once you have a little bit of an audience, I mean, you probably feel this now, but I feel like I could. I feel like I can. I feel very good about 99% of the content that I am going to invest in, because I feel like I've already kind of tested that idea in one form or another, whether it was a Tweet or a LinkedIn post. Like, the majority of the way that I write my newsletter now is I take topics that I put out that got a. That, like, people really reacted to, and then we'll write them more in depth for the newsletter. And so, like, you have to be there. And when I say every day, does it have to be seven out of seven days? No. But if you do it five out of seven days of the week, that would be pretty good because that's five times a week. You're getting a chance to test content. And social media is just like a feed of your. If you do it right, it can be a feed of your ideal customers. And so I want to be putting as many messages out in front of those people as I can to get more feedback over time. As you start to find your voice, as you start to find what content people like, you don't have to just. The goal is not just to pump out meaningless stuff every day, but I think you need to do it in order to find your voice, probably at least for the first year or so. And I also just think, like, it's all relative, right? If you say, I'm going to post every day, but you only post four out of seven days, did you fail? Hell, no. That's. That's great. That's better than. But if you say, I'm gonna post once a week, you probably will actually only post three out of four weeks in a month, and you only posted three times. So it's just. It's also just a little bit of like a psychological exercise, too.

I see people who are. Who have the, you know, the repetition down. You know, I see them on Twitter, on LinkedIn, or whatever. Yet what they're posting is meh. I mean, it's not that everybody, like, nobody has every, Every post is like a greatest hit, right?

Yeah. But however, you can see when people are on the tread. People are on the treadmill and just kind of pumping out blah stuff. And I think very easy to. It's very easy to make an adjustment on that because if there's no comments and engagement and reactions, like, you know, the, the audience kind of dictates that. And I mean, you, you know, you know, it. You put out one out of every ten things you put out. You're like, you check your phone three hours later and you're like, whoa, okay, that was. People really were interested in that. And so I think you should let engagement. Engagement rule. Right. And even, even I say post every day on LinkedIn, but I think sometimes I post things and I get very little reach because it's not interesting. And so I could, I could probably be. Be more efficient in posting, but I don't think the value. You have to have some. Here's a hot take for you. You have to have something interesting to say. And so if you just post every day, but you post nonsense or just like fluff or no. Strong opinions or no. Or something people don't care about, then. Then they're not. Then the point is, the point is moot. Is it moot or mute? It doesn't matter. Right? Like, that's not the goal. The goal is not post every day and you will magically have something. Right. Because I would actually argue that you, you could make the argument that or you could only post once a week, but when you post once a week, you have the most controversial, insane solution problem. Like, if you, you know, if you have that level of content, then, then great. But I think most people, it's somewhere in the middle where, where most, most people find fall.

Yeah. My observation is also that the, the smaller reach you have, like your audience, your followers and so on, the better your content needs to be. Like, Gary Vee can tweet out, like, have a great Friday, and it's a million retweets, right?

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And like, that's not, that's, that's not engage. That's the mark that shows the mark of an engaged audience. Right. That that guy can just post anything and he's going to get hundreds of thousands of comments because he has 2 million followers on LinkedIn. But yeah, you don't. And so you got to win. And I think that's the overall, the Way to win with building your brand as a founder is not to tweet six times a week. It's to have something meaningful and interesting to say. And so the reason why I think social media is a great channel is because if you're a founder, that means you started a company, which means you're crazy in some capacity or you have some burning deep problem or, you know, Eric, the founder of Zoom, was like the former VP of engineering at WebEx and they did so, like there's some related thread that puts you in a position to be very marketable. And as the founder, you started this company because you, you're trying to solve this problem or whatever you're doing. And so you're always talking to partners and candidates and investors and you're, you are the deepest in this market that anybody could be. If you can then turn. All I'm saying is, and then basically just like hit the on button and just start talking about some of that stuff publicly. That, that's the dream scenario. But if you not, if you're not interesting and you're not doing something interesting and you don't have interesting takes and perspectives on it, then yes, it's, the advice is not post every day on social media and you will grow your business. And so I would. First, before you go and think about getting on social media, if you're not already, or maybe you are, and you just kind of been posting kind of token whatever stuff, go for a bunch of long walks and think about what are two or three beliefs that you have. What are two or three things that you've seen or done differently or you know what, and this can be like, ideally these are related to your company and your product, but they can also be kind of company values level things too. You need, you need a hook, you need, you need probably two or three strong hooks in order to be, in order to be effective on social.

What are some of your favorite examples of founders who are making some customers choose their business in a, in a competitive market, like, I don't know, in marketing automation or CRMs or you know, commoditized market where the founder makes a huge difference?

I mean, everybody's favorite example of that is probably Elon and all of the Tesla fans that have been created from, from that. But I don't think that's like actionable advice because, yeah, just go be like Elon Musk is not, it's not real. Is not real for everybody. I don't know, you know, I don't even, I don't have A good example off the top of my head. I think that's because I think the best time to do this is like in the, in the earlier stages of the, of the company. The kind of like, I love the idea of building in public. I know that a lot of people lately have just been saying like, just only post wins and post your, your revenue charts. And I, I, I, I would not be sharing my revenue in public if I was building in public. But what building in public means is you're talking about conversations from meetings you were in and discussions that you had internally. I think those, those are the, those are the best examples. I, I, I've been kind of like out of the, out of the startup marketing game lately. So I can't think of like a brand, I can't think of a brand that I bought from recently because of the founder, but that's more of just a personal thing. You're, you are the deepest in this market that anybody could be. If you can then turn, all I'm saying is, and then basically just like hit the on button and just start talking about some of that stuff publicly, that, that's the dream scenario. But if you're not interesting and you're not doing something interesting and you don't have interesting takes and perspectives on it, then yes, the advice is not post every day on social media and you will grow your business. And so I would first, before you go and think about getting on social media, if you're not already, or maybe you are, and you've just kind of been posting kind of token whatever stuff, go for a bunch of long walks and, and think about what are two or three beliefs that you have, what are two or three things that you've seen or done differently or you know, what.