Daniel Francavilla: How to create a Go-To-Market Strategy, defining your brand and more.

Hey everyone, how's it going? My name is Ehan. I'm the head of global growth for the Founder Institute. Thank you so much for taking the time and joining us on today's Monday's webinar. We do these weekly, we do them on Monday and Wednesdays. Today we have an amazing session planned out for you. We have an amazing speaker, Daniel Francavilla from Toronto, Canada. He's gonna be talking about everything related to go-to-market and building out your first marketing plan. I think there's a lot of you folks who already know Daniel because we've had 600+ people sign up. So I'm assuming they all came to hear him speak. Let us know in the comments where you're coming in from or the chat. We have a pretty strong international crowd. I see Israel, Germany, Colorado, Chicago, interesting, Ghana, Maryland, Fort Lauderdale. So we have some pretty, Pretty diverse and international crowd. South Africa, Bulgaria, awesome. I think we'll get to about maybe 200, 250 people live, so this should be a fairly fun session. If Akshay in the back can bring up Daniel, let's kind of get things started. While he's doing that, I'm gonna go over what the agenda is going to be. We'll bring— Daniel will jump into his presentation. He has about 30 to 40 minutes of content. As soon as he's done, we're gonna go and open it up to Q&A. If you see on the same, on the sidebar where you're chatting, there's also a Q&A button. Please, please add your Q&As or your questions there. What we will do is rank it accordingly. You guys can also upload it. So we'll take the top 5 questions, we'll open it up, we'll bring it on stage, Daniel will briefly answer it, and then yeah, we'll go from there. At the end of the session, you know, you'll see all these virtual tables pop up. That's gonna be used for networking. Please, if you wanna stick around, I'll have my table there. If you guys wanna ask me questions about the Founder Institute, about go-to-market, growth, outbound sales, inbound, whatever, I'm happy to answer that. And yeah, you guys can kind of chat with each other. All right, we got Daniel. Hey Daniel, can you hear us? You are on mute, so if you can unmute yourself.

Yes, sir. Yes, sir, I can hear you. Hello, hello.

Awesome. All right, everyone, we have Mr. Frank Avila here. I'll give a very high-level introduction 'cause I know Daniel is gonna self-introduce himself, but I've known Dan for about 5, 6 years now from my time in Canada. He's a great guy. He's, you know, please do follow him on social. He understands everything brand marketing. He's worked with a lot of startups. He's worked with a lot of brands. Some of them are more popular in Canada, but like he really knows his stuff. I had a look at the presentation. A lot, a lot of great content he's gonna be sharing with you. So please make sure you take a lot of notes, screenshots. We'll try to get some of this content out to you in the next 48 hours. You'll also get the recording. So if anything, you'll get access to that. I know Daniel has some stuff he will share with the audience exclusively as well. All right, Daniel, your video went off. Can you come back up? I know you're— I'm digitating. Okay. So I'm going to mute myself, remove my video. But so Dan, do you just wanna screen share just to make sure that everything's good to go and then I'll hop off. We're at 209 people live so far. So all of them have come to see you, Dan. So no pressure, but you gotta make sure you, okay, awesome. All right, well I'm gonna hop off now everyone. I'll let Daniel take it from here now. All right, thanks.

Perfect. All right, everyone, hello and welcome. Thank you so much. I'm excited that you have all joined today. Uh, today we're going to be talking about go-to-market strategy, of course, but, um, one of the things I wanted to start off with is just a quick reminder to everyone that, um, it's not an exact science. It's a journey full of, uh, wins and lessons, not necessarily losses. but lessons. And so, let's keep that mindset as we jump in today. Um, today's session is gonna be, uh, an overview of all the different aspects of go-to-market strategy for you to consider. Um, but I'm gonna go through them pretty, uh, quickly because there's a lot. Um, but after this, I want you to take the time to, you know, go through the slides, look at some of the templates, and complete all the components for your venture. Uh, and as Ehan mentioned, I will be, uh, we will be sending out, um, a link for you to be able to access as well with some of these specific templates. Quick intro about me so that you know where I'm coming from. And yes, to answer your question, the full recording will be posted online sometime this week. So currently, my main functions are I'm the director of strategy and a partner at an agency here in Toronto, Ontario called King Street Media. I started my agency back in 2013 and I, and I merged into my agency was acquired, merged into King Street Media. I also run my own practice focusing on brand strategy as well as marketing advisor. I love to work with a lot of social good organizations, social enterprises, charities as well. Outside of that, I also co-founded a venture called Creator Club, which is going to be expanding. It helps brands and founders like you create content at scale. So there's a few different things. A little bit about me. I went to school for design, so I have a background in graphic design as well. I'm on one of the committees on the Canadian Marketing Association. So super happy. I will stop talking about me, but super happy to meet a lot of you today in the chat. So thank you for everyone who's introduced themselves so far to say hi. We're gonna jump right into this main question, which I'm sure you've been asked many times as a startup founder, which is what problem are you solving? That's where it all, that's where this all starts today. And when do you actually need a go-to-market strategy? What, you know, when is it time? What stage do you need to be at? Some of you may already be launched, some of you may be in pre-launch mode and you're planning this. Um, but there's valuable elements here no matter which stage you're at. So there's a few times you need a go-to-market strategy. One is, of course, when you're launching a new product into an existing market. Uh, one is if you're already established but you're bringing, uh, an existing product to a new market, so you need a new go-to-market strategy there. Uh, and lastly, uh, testing a new product in a new market, of course, which is I'm sure where some of you are at today. So it's really important to get clear on who you are building for. As a startup founder, you know, you're passionate about what you do, um, but you need to focus on not just the product itself but who your audience is and, and what— who you're solving the problem for. Start by getting clear on this. I'm sure you've thought a little bit about this already, but, um, it starts Today it gets really important to go in depth and get as specific as possible with your target audience because you're gonna be building a community around them. All of the copy on your website and your social captions and your bios is gonna really speak to this person or this set of people. It comes down to everything from the tone of voice you're gonna use to the style of your emails. So you're gonna start off by creating some customer profiles. Again, many of you may have always, may have already done this, but it's good to do this every so often as your product changes, as the market evolves. So this is an example of a customer profile. We have this guy Adrian, a little blurb about him, things he cares about, right? He cares about accessibility, he cares about word of mouth, he cares about reviews, um, you know, things that are beyond just his age, for example, right? Um, you're still going to focus on things like his job and age and where he lives, but also Which social platforms is he active on? What industry is he in? Which method does he prefer to communicate in, right? Does he like email more than he likes text? Does he never check text but loves to check LinkedIn? So you gotta kind of really get to know more and more about your customer in order to truly identify how you're gonna reach them. There's a tool called the persona canvas that can really help you you know, show you different ways to understand customer profiles. It helps you put yourself in the shoes of that customer. So personas make talking about your customers more tangible and concrete, helps you to be able to share these personas with your team and maybe your partners and investors, and helps you to share mental models in common languages. So this is a persona canvas template. This template is from Design abetterbusiness.com. And what's interesting about this is you could have many personas, of course, but start with one. And so look at a few different considerations around this, starting with their name and the role. Give them an actual name. Personify your person. Give them a name, give them a role. You know, who's that perfect person? A lot of times you think, I don't know, I can go on, I can target to anyone that works in B2B. Okay. But who are they? Who is the person in sitting in that office, right? Look at what, what are their headaches? What gives them problems, right? Look at their pain points. So I've listed here a few of these things to consider. So giving your persona a real name, I spoke about outlines. The canvas makes it easier for to draw what your customer looks like. So, you know, what do they actually look like? Are they happy person? Are they stressed out? Do they wear specific brands? You can really go that detail depending on your product. And then the need, what decisions will they, will be required for them to address this need? You know, look at some positive trends they experience in their life. Maybe they're getting engaged, maybe they're buying a new home. You know, maybe they, they just got a promotion. Like, what is it that's a positive trend in their lifestyle? What are other opportunities for them? What are their hopes? Again, one of the biggest things to get in with your customers is to identify their future hopes and dreams and how you can tap into that and maybe help them a little bit. Negative trends, always gotta be aware of those negative things that are happening in the world and be mindful of them. And then headaches, very important. How could you potentially solve some of these headaches in their personal life or their private life or at work. And then their fears. What fear do they have? And it's an obvious statement that you don't have a business if you don't have customers. So start by getting clear again on who you're building this business to serve. A few other aspects here. We talk a lot often for— so very often we talk about demographics, and that's things like age, et cetera, income. But looking at the psychographics, some of the examples that came up in that example I showed you of Adrian are the psychographics. So this example with this individual here, they love crocheting while listening to podcasts in the evening. Um, they want to become the CEO of a sustainable business. Specifically, they run 5K every day. Um, they spend a lot of time on Instagram looking at healthy recipes, and they enjoy solo Travel. So things like this, if you really get to identify those, you can see how your product, whether it's an app, whether it's a physical product, whether it's a resource, whatever it is, or content, how and when you can reach them in their life. And again, psychographics take into account— you can go deeper when you get into things like their content and your email marketing. You know, what are their interests, likes, opinions, hobbies? What do they value? and how can you tap into that? How can your company support that as well? So really, really, really dive deep into these psychographic factors as well, right? Beliefs, dreams, motivations, all this kind of stuff. All right, you get the idea of that. Now when it comes to positioning, okay, I take a brand-first approach. So we're gonna dive into branding shortly. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about some positioning stuff first, and then we will go into branding. So positioning is the single greatest influence on a customer's buying decision. It creates an image in the, in the mind of your target customer about your startup, your product, in relation to all the other options that are on the table. Your positioning has to let the customer know what you do and what your product does for them. For consumer and small business products, product positioning and branding matter even more than the company positioning. The product positioning sometimes is more important in that case. And then in business markets, the branding of the company actually may matter more than the branding of the product itself. So keep in mind that difference, whether you're a B2B business or you're selling to consumers or small business. Ask— when a customer asks these questions, you need— your startup needs to be able to have that answer. You should be the solution for these two questions, right? What does your company do for me? And why does your company exist? And how is it different? All right. So let's look at the target customer here. Sorry, let's start— let's identify some of the things that help you to put together a value proposition. So this should include Your target customer or market, a compelling reason to buy, the product's placement within a new or existing category, as I mentioned, what key benefit directly addresses the compelling reason to buy, primary alternative sources. So again, competitors with the same benefit, what are they, and what's your key differentiation point, right? This is super, super important. A lot of times people will pitch their startup and someone will say, well, isn't it just like that one, or isn't it similar to this? You shouldn't just say yes, you should say yes, but here's what's different about ours, right? So that's positioning. When it comes down to your actual positioning statement, this is a format that I recommend, a structure that you could use for your positioning statement. This positioning statement is going to go, you know, the top of your website, it's going to go in some of your pitch decks, it's It's gonna maybe even, you know, be somewhere on your social media bios. But this explains who you are, what you offer, who it's for, why it's important and compelling. So these 6 components are very key, of course, to include. Who it's for. So talk about the target customer or market that we just defined. Who, who is it for? Have a compelling reason for them to buy. Again, Your product is a what, right? What is it? How does it fit into the existing category? It's a new way of doing this, or it's a better this. And it provides— when you talk about what it provides, talk about your benefits. And then unlike— this is where you talk about what makes it different. And lastly, our product does X, the key difference in relation to the specific target customer. So again, This is a great format for you to follow. It sounds jumbled up now, but when you put it into a sentence yourself, there you go. Now, moving from just positioning to actual communication. This is a great diagram here where we look at, okay, so every customer evaluates products in the market according to their mental map of that market, right? So we know that positioning exists in customers' minds, not just in positioning statements. So we talked about positioning statements just now, but also it's, it's how that customer thinks about your brand and your product, right? So people don't just easily change their minds about a product's positioning once their opinion has been formed. Um, positioning must first demonstrate a product's relevance, right? How is it relevant to them? And then use supportable, credible, factual information and terms. Making a product easier to buy through effective positioning makes it easier for you to clearly sell more of it, right? And to help grow your scale ultimately. So think about all these things, you know, what is it, what does it do, what it means, and why should I care? A few things that you should always be able to answer along the way. And you may get feedback where you develop the answer for the answers of, of some of these questions as well. All right, so let's look at this, uh, just one example of the visual way you could, you could put your positioning together. Um, this is called a perceptual positioning perceptual map. Um, quality and price are just two examples of what you could put on a scale. You could change up the axis, right? You can change up what's on each side and, and top of the axis here. But put yourself in here. So where exactly does your brand or your startup fall on how these companies are perceived? Is it a very expensive one and very high quality? Then it's gonna be all the way over to the top right. Is it the cheapest option but, but it's pretty low quality? Then it's gonna be, you know, the very far left. You, you te— you typically wouldn't wanna be like the absolute low lowest quality out there. But see where you can provide the most value to your audience, right? If your audience are people that are, they value quality more because they're a higher-end client or they're, you know, very large companies and have big high standards, then yeah, they're gonna be willing to pay more for that, right? But there you have to be able to experiment. Where are the other players and do they already have a lot of that market share, right? So we're gonna now, as I mentioned, dive into branding for a second here. Because I think a lot of times people skip over their brand, they get a quick logo from a site online or a template and they go, well, a brand is more than a logo, right? So brand is anything that of course distinguishes a startup or a product from its rivals in the eyes of the customer. And as I mentioned, brands are more than you can see. So that logo piece is just at the very top tip of the iceberg, right? Which is, you know, the logo is that visual identity, right? And it's more than just logo, it's colors, it's fonts, it's how it looks altogether, right? Images you choose. Key messaging falls right under that. That's where things like your positioning comes in, your tagline, your bio. But then under the water, right? This, this line here would be the water. The iceberg is what you can see above. Below that, what goes into this brand also includes the team members, how your team culture develops and all of that, right? The environment, creating a place that supports your vision and values. Your core values are, are way under there. And then your vision, as well. So it's all really important to look at these different things here. All right, this is an example of, uh, an exercise you can do. One of my colleagues, uh, Heather Briggs, created this thing called the Brand Soul Canvas. There's many different models and frameworks of how you can put your brand onto paper, right? So I'm gonna show you a couple of them. This one here, um, focuses around these key questions of your Purpose, why do you exist? Your vision, where are you actually going in the long term, right? What's your big picture? Your message, what are you saying? Your niche, who are, who are your people, right? You're not for everyone, right? Then we have your value. What is it that you offer? An identity, what makes you different? And lastly, the promise. What's the plan? How do you deliver on all this, right? So in the middle, in the middle of this circle here in the canvas, you've got the essence, and everything else kind of drives into that. So this is just one way of formulating it. All right, it's just reading some of the comments. And then this one here, what defines your brand? Another framework you can use. This is, this is important because as your startup gets bigger, you have these You know, you can go really deep into defining this brand. So you've got your extended identity, which is the public-facing aspect of the brand that brings your product, your brand to life. So you've got you, you, your brand could be known as a person, a symbol, an organization, or a product. We know, for example, that some brands it's the person, like for example, Tesla. Yes, Tesla has a logo and they have products, they have cars, but But previous to, you know, his Twitter acquisition, the person was Elon Musk. Like, the face of Tesla is Elon Musk, and people directly correlate the person when they think of this brand. So that's actually a big part of their extended identity. More people follow Elon Musk on social media than follow Tesla social media, for example. But it could be the product that's the face of it, right? There's times where certain brands have the product as the face of it. You don't even know who the real, the real person is, right? You may know the CEO exists, but they're not the face of it, right? Apple's an iconic example, of course, where like Steve Jobs was definitely the face of it. They have a very strong symbol and a very strong product. But again, Steve Jobs was, you know, synonymous with the brand Apple. Okay, so that's the extended identity. Then you've got your core identity, which is this, the high important elements of the brand that, you know, just fit under this extended identity. Things that are substantial, right? They're still big parts of your brand. And then underneath that all you got the brand essence. This defines what your brand stands for. It's the one thing that comes to mind when we think of a brand, right? It should be simple. It should be a visceral reaction, something quick that comes to mind and aspirational. right? You want, you want this to be positive and something that you're striving towards delivering on. And so I would look at it as something that can be inspiring. And when we go back to the, you know, psychographics, demographics of our customers, this should focus, this should try to appeal to those like psychological needs, right? That your product or your startup answers for them. What does your brand look like? Of course, once you've actually done all that work, now you can dive into the branding, the visual identity side of it, right? And this is just the difference I put on this slide, the difference between a brand and identity and a logo, right? You've got the brand. I won't dive too much in this because I went pretty extensive into the branding prior to that as well. This just shows you the difference between them all. If we look at some visual identity designs from from startups here. We'll see, we're seeing a lot of trends. This is just a random selection, of course, but it's not just simply a logo. It's the colors, it's the fonts, it's the iconography, right? There's some definitely, there's definitely some great references and examples. And sometimes these companies make their brand style guides available. Airbnb, for example, has an entire like blog and social account for their design team. So does Dropbox, right? They really let you in on the design side of their brand. Slack has a ton of resources on, um, you know, some of this, uh, some of these elaborate brands, um, that have a lot of touch points. So like, for example, Slack has an interface, right? Dropbox is a very simple product, But outside of that, their marketing is more complex and they're expanding their ecosystem. So when they launch or when they acquire new products and integrate them into Dropbox, they apply this visual identity standard throughout, right? Same with Mailchimp. They've been acquiring features, etc., etc. Take a look at the visual identity design. And then you've got here— the reason I'm showing this is because the visual identity is so strong with these brands is it's, it's so strong. Sorry, I'm just getting distracted reading a couple of the comments. But the visual identity is so strong with these brands that even though the name is completely not there, we can tell which brands these are, right? So we've got from the top left, we've got Burger King, we've got McDonald's, we've got GM, the new GM logo, we've got Pfizer, we've got Gap, right? There's all of these very strong visual identities from these big brands that have been established regardless of the name even being there. That's how you know that their visual identity is strong. Okay, so just some fun examples here. And again, it's not always good to compare your— it's always good to compare your startup in the early stages with a massive multinational you know, brand with, you know, massive marketing teams and things like that. But it's good to know the value of a brand here. All right. I'm gonna skip over some of the visuals that I put in here. Um, there's a template here that HubSpot makes available, which is a brand style guide template. The reason I've included it is because there's a few things, um, that are good to include that you should know and you should make available to your team and to your partners. You know, such as your purpose, right? What's your purpose beyond making money? What is it? How does it connect with people on an emotional level? Things like that. And then in your brand overview, you're going to include things about your values that I spoke about. You're going to include, you know, your positioning, the personality. This is all really important if you're, if you're going to press, media, if you're hiring team members, they all have to be on the same page, right? Then you've got your visual identity guides, mistakes you should, you know, not do, how you should not use your logo, color palettes. This is all very important to help out, to help out what you're doing to be accessible. This is also really important. Typography that you use, all of this stuff can go into your brand style guide, this is a template you can, you can fill out. Okay. So take a look at that. It goes down to even the style of photos that you choose, right? All of this is— makes it super simple when you onboard new marketing team members, for example, or a new agency. You can do that as well. All right. Moving on to brand voice, which is also part of this template. Tone, super important. And your brand voice, you'll see this with brands like in the way they speak on social media. Sometimes you'll see some startups that, you know, tweet pretty casually, for example, and they have like a casual conversational tone, right? So there's some examples here. And here's some additional resources. So now that you have your brand, we've talked about all that, we're gonna dive into things like marketing plans and some of the execution. So with a marketing plan, I'm sure many people have asked you before, what's your marketing plan? Do you have a marketing plan? Or said they need— so you need a marketing plan. I'm not one to say that you must, must, must have like a full-on marketing plan before you can launch anything, but this is gonna give— this is gonna be a really helpful roadmap to help you track everything and measure over a period of time, right? Within your marketing plan, you could have different strategies, you could have different team members involved. But again, you really want to be able to document all the tactics and strategies in one place so you can properly track and measure them. It'll help you really think of all these things together and not miss anything because it really is a lot. As I've kind of discussed, there's a lot of aspects of marketing these days as well. So few basics of a marketing plan. To of course include your company's mission, determine the KPIs, identify your personas in there, describe the content initiatives and strategies, where you're going to be, right? Define things you're not doing because of course you can't launch on every platform, on every platform everywhere, right? Define your budget for each item on there, identify who your competition is, and of course, very importantly, outline who else is supporting, whether it's again, a freelancer, an in-house hire, an intern, a team member, the CEO, whatever it is, whoever's supporting, what are the roles and responsibilities for each aspect of your marketing plan, or it will never get done. All right. We've got the 4 Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. So this is a way of looking at the marketing mix. That you have with your startup. So defining your product, of course, the price, how much you charge, how does your pricing impact your customers' view of your brand, right? I talked about earlier the positioning. Are you someone who is positioning yourself as a premium product? Okay, then we've got your place. Where do you promote your product or service exactly? Even if it's just online, where online? And where do your customers go to find out about products from your industry, right? Where are they finding out about your peers, about your competitors? And lastly, promotion. How do your customers find out about you? What strategies do you use? And are they creative? All right, so take a, take a look at these. What are some examples of what goes into these? So product is going to look at things like your brand, the quality, the packaging, the design. Price is going to look at things like the retail price, but also what discounts are available. What payment plans? Are there bundles, right? Are there corporate rates? Like, what are the pricing options? Are there discounts? Under place, which markets are you in? What channels are you using? And what is your method of distribution? And under promotion, you're gonna cover all types of things like advertising, publicity, different promo you're gonna run for sales and, and email marketing as well. We're gonna focus mostly today on promotion. I've covered some of the other areas. But I'm first going to show you this video on creating value. Let me know if the audio is working or not in this video. Just give me one sec. I may need to adjust it here.

One sec. The Hernandez family is dropping their youngest daughter Gabby off for her freshman year at college. But before the proud parents say their goodbyes, they decide to head down the block to grab a cup of coffee. It sounds like a simple proposition, but for the Hernandez family and billions of other consumers, a cup of coffee means different things to different people. Gabby loves a good independent coffee spot that utilizes artisanal beans. Her mom, Marsha, prefers a coffee chain like Starbucks that delivers a consistent experience no matter what city she's in. And Gabby's dad just wants a plain cup of decaf. To him, coffee is best when it's plain, hot, and cheap. 3 consumers, 3 very different ideas about the value of that cup of joe. Value looks at what the customer gets. Relative to what they give up. If the customer gets back more than what he gives up, that's a successful value exchange. But if the customer gets back less than what he gave up, well, he's not likely to make a return visit. Creating value is essential. In fact, it is the fundamental purpose of marketing. Businesses depend on the right marketing mix comprised of the 4 Ps: to create the maximum value for their target customers. Gabby thinks of coffee in terms of an experience. She enjoys independent coffee places that cultivate a cozy vibe, offer free Wi-Fi, and use only local artisanal beans. She knows her coffee is going to take longer to make and cost more, but in Gabby's mind, she's getting back more than what she's giving up. It's a positive value exchange. When Marsha When Gabi thinks about coffee, she sees the value in a business model like Five Bucks: high-quality coffee drinks made to order quickly, conveniently, and consistently for what she considers a fair price, whether she's inside her local grocery store or visiting someone on the other side of the country. Gabi's dad, however, has no interest in all that fancy stuff. He's happy refilling his travel mug for 25 cents at his local donut shop and moving on with his day. It's no frills, just straight drip that's priced right and hits the spot. Each family member relies on promotions to become aware of the different value propositions coffee marketers offer, as well as the availability of product attributes and benefits that matter to them. So the definition of value shifts depending on what each customer is looking for. It's up to every business, whether they provide a good, service, or idea, to maximize value and satisfy their customers' needs by creating their own special blend of the 4 Ps.

Okay, so apologies for those who are unable to hear the video. I did link the video above. So what's interesting about that is, again, those 3 different customers valued completely different aspects of the actual end product, right? And so you're going to need to really help and really focus and dive deep on your product, um, not on your product itself, but on who the audience is and what they're looking for. That's going to help you with how you position it and how you price it and who you ultimately decide to go after. Just keep in mind, um, that people are, are looking very differently at that. The example of the video was, you know, a product, just a retail product, right? A consumer good there, um, in the food service industry of coffee. But the same thing applies to, you know, whether it's a software product or whether you're selling a service. People are going to compare. And to your question, I see a question there regarding that. Um, if you have 3 different options, such as a done-for-you service, a done-with-you service, right? Um, or a fully DIY service, that's gonna be those same 3 types of users, right? What do they value? Do they value the hands-on approach and customer service? Do they value the speed and convenience of doing it on their own time? Do they need more support? What is it that they value, right? So when you go to promotion here, now that we've kind of identified some of those things, looking at which channels your audience uses most often to consume information. Sometimes we think we need to create social media profiles on every platform, but if our audience isn't active there, that's not going to be the best use of our limited resources, right? What kind of message tends to be more effective when promoting it? Is it like, you know, need-based, fear-based? Like if you're selling things like IT services or software, you're talking about threats and risks. Or is it more so that you want to focus on the positives and the opportunities, right? What kind of messaging really works there, right? What's the ideal period for promoting your product? Is it a certain time of year, certain time of the week, whatever that could look like? Is there concern about it being, you know, seasonal or not? Or is it, is it all year long? And then how do your competitors promote? Always look at what they're doing and how you can either tap into that or do something completely different. Obviously, there's a ton of avenues out there right now as to where you could promote. I would firstly start off by identifying all the organic options and not leaving out the paid options. Whether or not you have funding, I think it's really important to go ahead and consider paid even without funding just yet, because you're going to be able to determine how you can reach net new audiences that maybe you can't reach through these other methods, right? That can, that can do everything from the long, long game, like building effective SEO, down to, um, you know, running specific targeted ads on Meta, uh, through Facebook and Instagram. Um, you could look at developing leads through content marketing and through downloading free resources. We've all seen those. You can do some sponsored content. There's some really great partnerships now where you can partner up with a publication or a creator, an influencer, have some sponsored content there. Good old affiliate marketing once your product is live. If you're doing an app that's in the App Store, you can advertise within the app stores. Email and LinkedIn outreach are still very effective, although there's a ton of spam out there. Definitely consider that. So here's just a taste of those. Look at events and trade shows. A lot of those have— they went away for a bit during the height of the pandemic, but they've come back. And in many cases, sometimes going to one trade show can get you one or two major contacts, especially if we're doing B2B. All right. Again, just in summary here, until you've grown enough to hire a full agency or marketing staff, most important thing to remember is be where your customers are most, and you cannot be everywhere all at once. So try to look at, you know, the data, look at the trends, Give one or two platforms a fair shot. That's what I always recommend. Put a solid effort there as opposed to it being, you know, spread too thin on every single platform from the get-go. When it comes to launching, of course, you're going to look at things like, you know, stuff you can share beyond just your product, beyond just, hey, our product's available, our apps are available. You're going to talk about things like Building hype along the way, documenting the process. Maybe you'll have some, some early offers, some incentives to sign up early. You're gonna maybe have the ability to do some different landing pages for different target markets. You know, create, create those landing pages, test those out. Are you gonna offer subscriptions? Are you gonna offer just one-off purchases or downloads? See which, what people are interested in, right? Experiment with that. Crowdfunding is a good way to test your, your product, to kind of soft test it. You don't have to use your brand for that. You can do that off to the side in a crowdfunding platform and see how it performs. Um, again, looking at a soft launch, looking at, you know, doing a waitlist, there's a lot of different tactics on how you can end up going about launching. Now let's map into, uh, jump into the customer journey here where This will really help you to actually get insight into how your product is being perceived on the market, right? So track it. How, how are you addressing these problems, right? How does a problem, problem or opportunity showing up in their lives? How are they experiencing it and how do they interact with you? How do they come across you, right? What I recommend here is think that, think about it from your customer's perspective. So your customer's goal in life is not to buy your product, or use your service, right? That's usually— it's a means to an end. So what is that? What is that end that they're trying to get to? How do they experience the problem you're trying to solve? And how do they really experience it? What are they currently doing to deal with that problem? So while you're defining these moments for the customer, try to, you know, order them out, put together like a day in the life of a customer, or, or if you are— have a slower purchasing cycle, the year for a business, for example. And the goal is to find those key moments for the customer and then look at the touch points where your product or your startup comes into the picture, right? Because you're obviously not part of their whole life, their whole everyday. Um, one of the easy ways to do this is to build You know, think about what happened first. Think of it like the movie frame, right? Right now they're on your website, but what happened leading up to that exact moment, right? And think about how they felt. So again, a few things to think about when you think talking about the customer journey and how it applies to your business. Here I say that, you know, no, no journey is totally complete or made without assumptions. So you will have to make some assumptions, of course. But it's important to actually get feedback and ask as well. So I'm gonna share with you a tool that is called the customer journey canvas. So that, that whole thing I was just explaining to you about thinking about it from a customer's perspective, their, their day-to-day, you know, this is the, this is what you could do with this diagram here. Okay. Again, this is from the same resource, It's called designabetterbusiness.com. And here are some of the questions, right, or some of the components of this customer journey canvas that you'll complete. Persona, check mark, we've covered that. The touch points, what are the moments of interaction, right? Is it in person? Is it on a phone? Is it mail? They get an email. Is it through a shop? Is it a referral? What are those touch points, right? The mood, What was the customer's mood at that very moment? Are they happy, frustrated, angry, right? Determine how they're coming to you and how you can then change your language and your process. If you know you're dealing with people in a crisis, let's say that you're helping them with cybersecurity or you're helping them with another issue, financial issue, you do not want to make your signup process long and inconvenient and stressful, right? You got to really focus on ease. at that point, cuz you're thinking about what their mood is, right? And then timeline and stages. So define at least 5 moments in the journey, right? Um, what's that time span look like? Don't overcomplicate it. And then someone said video is gone. Uh, it's showing up all for me. Hopefully you can also see me. And then your customer needs. We talked about that earlier. Thank you. Uh, what is the job the customer wants to get done in each of these stages, right? When are they looking to actually make a decision? Sometimes they're not at that moment. This is another example here of a customer journey. I have a few different process examples here because it's going to vary so much, right? But this is basics, you know, from a marketing standpoint, we've got the awareness, consideration, decision, onboarding, and then adoption and retention. So what happens in each of these stages, right? And awareness, it's going to be your marketing, your content that you're putting out there. Media appearances, things like that. Your consideration is when marketing also turns into some of your sales material, right? The decision, pre-sales, then they can maybe speak with someone in sales or find out some of your, you know, read the information on your checkout page, etc., etc. And then you've got the onboarding process. You don't want to lose them here, right? Sometimes people sign up for a project, product or service, they convert, and they don't end up going through the onboarding, right? So, you know, how can you help them from a customer success standpoint, a support standpoint, to ensure they get in and they adopt it and they stay, right? So really important to consider the whole spectrum. Sometimes, unfortunately, with bigger companies, this is divided up into many teams, and there can be gaps in between each of these colors, right? And that's unfortunate sometimes when things can drop off. I have an example here of retail as well. So, you know, you've got the need to purchase a product, someone researches products on their phone, they may physically go to the store or go online, they purchase that product, they use it, they need some support, and they may choose to repeat that purchase. Very, very basic example here. Similar in the B2B space here. So for this one, someone needs a solution to meet their business needs. Maybe someone else at their job told them they need to purchase something, right? Maybe they're the procurement person. You got to really look at who's that decision maker there. And then they research their options. They may come to a decision and have to sign some kind of contract that might delay things, right? Then you've got onboarding. Are you just training one person? Are you training a whole team? Then you've got the ongoing usage, support, and then renewal sometimes as well. All right. So that's an example of customer journey. Then we've got product market fit. So I have a quote here from a guy named David Wong. He has a really great blog with a ton of resources, which is this quote, the secret to finding market fit is about maximizing the number of product iterations with the limited resources you have. The deeper you know about your customers, the closer you are to finding product-market fit. Okay, so just looking at this, this graph here that this guy Dave also put together, which is looking at where you're at. I'm assuming a lot of you are here at the beginning stage, but you may all— you may already, you know, be well into launch and finding product-market fit. But for the most part, you weren't gonna wanna go through the ideation, validation, you know, planning, design, development stage first, then launching something and, you know, realizing of course there could always be a decline as your product ages, gets out of date, or has a lot of competition. But then you can choose if you're gonna keep it or kill it and restart and do something else, right? This is gonna vary slightly, of course, depending on which industry you're in. And the economy and who you're targeting. But this is just something to consider. And then here, I just wanted to cover this kind of little circle here of product market fit where, you know, really, it's going to be between this like a strong market with a critical mass of consumers, but a product that specifically solves a problem to many customers, right? That's the overlap of that is where you find the perfect product-market fit. So these 6 steps here. Number 1, line up your product goals first. So think about, is it exponential user signups? Are you looking for the most revenue growth? Or are you looking to have the highest, uh, largest market share? You can't have all of them at once, right? But what, what's your product goals? Number 2, come up with a product hypothesis. Um, this is sometimes called product ideas, product initiatives, like, what is the actual, what's the actual concept here, right? What do you think your product's gonna do? Next, prioritize the product hypothesis. So you're gonna discuss with your team, select, you know, which ones of these will get, that you're gonna choose to go get customer feedback on, right? So you may have a few different hypotheses for your product and how it's gonna act and how it's gonna do. Um, and then lastly, or sorry, next, um, get feedback from 5 customers on the product hypotheses. Um, by getting this feedback, this should give you a good indication of whether the idea is worth pursuing or not. This is before you get into marketing, of course, right? Use a mix of customer insights, such as, which is going to be qualitative data, and then customer behaviors, which could be quantitative data if you have something out in the market. To inform your, your feedback. And then next, make small bets with MVPs. So again, try with— based on this data, based on the input you have, you know, you're going to try to make some, some, some movements, take some chances, put some stuff out there. But yes, to answer your question, you need— you will need to have an MVP, or at least a concept, a landing page that demonstrates the concept and shows the need and shows service and the solution and ask people again, here's my hypothesis. I believe that this product will solve your problems. Do you agree that, one, this is a big enough problem? Two, is this something you or your company's willing to actually pay for, you know? And, and three, is this something that you're currently even looking for or not, right? Um, and maybe you'll find out they already have a solution. Maybe find out there's already an internal fix for them. But, um, asking those questions to answer your question, that will help you even though you don't have an MVP. Um, you'll be able to still frame that and find out if it's good. So all that being said, there's a ton to do. Um, and of course I didn't cover— I didn't cover in depth for every single thing here, but, um, from positioning and branding to customer personas and journeys, which is going to take you a while to fill out and go through, finding product-market fit and marketing testing, At the end of the day, testing and iteration is critical, right? You're not just gonna do this whole process for a year and then go live once, right? So very, very important to consider. That being said, one of the previous Founder Institute presentations, the presenter there named Ava, she actually created something called the Go-to-Market Canvas, which is one way that you just— one of many ways where you can kind of put everything in one place, right? Maybe you want to have a slide deck with a page for each of these sections. Maybe you want to just use a canvas, put it up on the whiteboard. But everything I've discussed today and other things I haven't discussed— I've touched on almost everything here, though— you're going to want to be able to map out at any given point in your business. And that's why you're going to indicate what the time frame is, because maybe this is your go-to-market canvas for, you know, Q2 2020. 3, but you might have another version of it, you know, 2 quarters from now, for example, towards the end of the year. So this is another one. You can get this go-to-market canvas document, it's a PDF, just by going to the link here that's listed. It's not my resource, it's Ava's, and she has a PDF download for you, a fillable version, on her website as well, for those of you asking. Another way you could organize things are through, you know, templates like this. So this is an example of using a project management system like Asana. Asana has a bunch of free templates, right? This is an example of just like how they've created a list, but you could also turn it into a board view, you know, a timeline view, a calendar view. Everyone is probably familiar with project management software, but the reason I'm including this is to throw your go-to-market strategy components into this, right? Categorize it so that you're not missing, right? And you know which team and which person is responsible, because it's a lot, right? There's a ton going on. Some things have to really be developed in tandem, and some things can be developed, you know, one-offs. The link to that, I just pasted in the chat as well. But there's all kinds of templates if you, if you just Google them. Really helpful for everyone to get aligned on the components. We're almost through, just a few more points I have. I can answer a couple questions. So I like to think of this just to kind of switch gears from an impact and innovation perspective, right? Always ask yourself, even though you're deep in these details of the marketing specifics, what makes your business have a positive impact and what is innovative about it right now? You know, it's really important to focus on those differentiators and the world needs more innovation and impact, right? Right now, the data shows that people are willing to pay more for things that are going towards good causes, that are helping to make the world a better place, that are helping people in need, right? And I'm in Canada, so I just put a Canadian stat here, but 70% of Canadians are more likely right now to actually purchase from companies that give back. So you can include that into your branding, into your messaging, into your business model if you can, right? Many startups today are becoming B Corps, social enterprises. You can still grow and be epic in scale while also having a social purpose and a cause. So that's just something to consider. And I'm, I'm mentioning to you today because again, it is something that your audience may very well choose to care about as well. A few final tips here to wrap it up, which is to try to inspire others to follow your journey, right? Um, share with your personal brand as well. Share your story on LinkedIn, on Twitter. There's a lot of great founders on there, a lot of great stories. You can add me on LinkedIn as well. Maybe we can paste the link to my LinkedIn there too. I love sharing other, other founders' and entrepreneurs' stories as well. Um, I have a podcast. I'm constantly talking about the journey and what I'm learning, right? So do that, definitely. Um, also I'd like you to Show the human face of your startup. Sometimes that means posting pictures of your team. Sometimes that means selfies. Sometimes that means behind-the-scenes content. Oftentimes, especially in the early days, or if you're in stealth mode, you know, it's, it's pretty like you don't really have any pictures of you or your team on there, but try to get a couple things out there. It really does help. Be open to feedback and try to gather valuable feedback everywhere along the way. That's super important. And refine, continue to refine and be extra clear with your messaging. When you need to stand out, the most important thing is you're not just saying everything to everyone. You're, you really do have your clear messaging that helps people know in a very short period of time, uh, what they can learn from you and what they can get from your, your startup or not, or your product. Don't make them put in extra work to figure that out. And lastly, the world is changing. People evolve and brands evolve. Remember that whatever you do today, if you fill out all these documents, things will change, right? Things will need to evolve. It's not set in stone. And that's the beauty of being a startup and being nimble is that you can adapt and you can change. So that's a little— that's it for my presentation, my workshop. I can stay for a few minutes answering some questions. And this is how you can connect with me as well. Thank you so much. Okay, I'm going to— should I jump a couple of the questions in the chat?

I'll help you moderate, but thanks so much, Dan. As you can see, you got a lot of love on the emojis, man. You're getting the thumbs up. You got a few hearts in there. Awesome, man. Sorry, just so we know, we're 3 minutes before the top of the hour, so try to get maybe 3, 4 questions in if that's okay with you. Yeah, folks, all right, let me just switch this off and then, thanks. So there's a few in here. There's actually quite a bit. So I'm gonna do the first one, which was here. Glenn, who's from Denver, is asking, you know, You can see the question here, like, what are the methods of engaging with them? Like, I guess, how's the best way to evaluate a persona and like start doing those customer development questions?

Yeah, one of the, one of the great things you'll see with, um, a lot of startups, especially ones that are really going in to test an audience from scratch, is they go straight to the user, right? If the, if the user at the end of the day is someone within their their family or their friend network, um, that's great. But you don't go to your parents because they're going to always be biased, right? They're not going to give you like the right honest feedback. Um, so try to find people that are, you know, second or third connections of you that are willing to just answer a couple questions. If your product— you'll notice a lot of even big brands like massive multinationals like Coca-Cola, they will test things like on university campuses, right? University and college campuses are a huge way, um, that a huge opportunity to tap into students that have the ability to share their feedback. Sometimes they actually have time, they're looking for something innovative, then give you quick feedback. Another thing you could do is, you know, test your idea, run it by groups like Founders Institute. There's a ton of other online networking groups, uh, where there's fellow founders and forums where people can give you that quick feedback. Um, but yeah, most importantly find a handful of people to get that qualitative data where someone's not just gonna vote yes or no, but they're actually gonna give you that qualitative feedback. And sometimes you have to take, you know, the non-typical approach to finding those groups. But when you do, really, really value that feedback and go back to them with updates to see if your improvements have actually changed their views.

Awesome. That's a great response. Let's go to the next one. I'm just picking these as we go. I really like this one from Patrick from Munich. B2C versus B2B. What's your, yeah, what's your thoughts on this? Yeah, I can talk about these, but curious to know what you're saying, what you're, what do you think?

Yeah, this is, this is really great. With B2B personas, it's so difficult to pinpoint the exact person in a company because sometimes you don't even get to speak directly with the decision maker at the end of the day, right? There's, some of their people that report to them, some other staff, some, a procurement team, right? And you don't actually get to define that persona. But guess what? Those people who are doing the research, who are making the recommendation, they are the persona, right? It's not necessarily just the decision maker, you know, sitting in the very senior role. If you're selling a product or a service down, you know, to, to people that work in marketing, for example, and you have a SaaS product for marketers or for accountants, you gotta actually get to that end user. They're more important than necessarily just the buyer when you're in the early stage. At the end, of course, you're going to want to figure out how to frame it so that that buyer knows, you know, why you're the best choice, why you're justifying your pricing and things like that. But that's the big difference in B2B is that there's layers, right? There's different layers that you need to go through for purchases.

All right, let's do one more just because we're a minute over. Nathan is asking this. I was like, how do you think big? You've done a great job of outlining the processes, templates. Like, is the plan here to just go through and fill in the blanks, or is it like, hey guys, should we think big? Or like, what's attainable? What's achievable?

Yeah, that's, that's a pretty good question. I think from my perspective, um, you, you wanna have your solution, like the problem is where you're gonna think big, right? This big picture problem that we're gonna tackle. And the reason why we think this is valuable, that can be your think big. When it gets time to filling in all of these very specific, you know, tactics and specific positioning, that's going to be pretty, you know, often it's pretty practical. But where you should think big is when you're focusing on your mission, vision, and values in your branding, right? That's that kind of aspirational piece that you want to keep. But every brand, no matter how cool and flashy and aspirational it is, it's gonna have these like very specific direct marketing mix that they complete and all these processes that they complete at the end of the day.

Okay, awesome. Unfortunately, folks, you know, we're just on top of the hour. I wanna be respectful of everyone's time. Dan, thanks so much. We had close to 350 people live at one point. I don't know if you noticed that. We're about 270 or so. So So folks, if you enjoyed Daniel, connect with him on LinkedIn, show some love in the thumbs up and the hearts and all that type stuff. Okay, Daniel, getting a few. You know, thanks so much for taking the time. Alright, folks, what we're going to do now is we're going to wrap things up, we're going to go up into networking lounge, I'm going to be in there, some folks from FIH will be there. If you have additional questions, you know, feel free to, to jump on those tables and network with each other, we have about 250, usually about like half of you still stick around. But yeah, Dan, any final words you want to give to the audience? Any motivational stuff before?

Yeah, I was just gonna say that it is, it is tough to find— again, find product-market fit. Nothing's going to be perfect, but keep iterating, because once you do find that perfect person, that perfect persona, um, the network effects can happen where you ask them to recommend people and you go from there and it blows up. Sometimes the, the, the, the reminder is to focus eventually on a niche that actually can truly benefit and make the most impact for them. That way they'll be your biggest ambassadors, your biggest fans, and they'll continue to grow. You don't have to reach mass audience for every single product that you launch. So feel free to reach out to me. You can go to my website, you can work with me at King Street Media as well if you're looking for marketing when it comes time for that. But add me on LinkedIn in the meantime. I'm super happy to connect. Thank you all for sticking around.

Perfect. Thanks, Dan. And thank you, folks.

All right, have a good one.

No worries. All right, folks, I'm gonna wrap things up. We'll see you in the networking lounge. All right, take care, guys.

Bye.