Startup Branding Strategies That Work – Insights from Daniel Francavilla
In this Founder Institute webinar, marketing advisor and brand strategist Daniel Francavilla guides startup founders through the process of clarifying and aligning brand messaging with their mission. He begins with a brief host introduction and emphasizes that branding is a long‑term, mission‑driven discipline that outlives any single advertising campaign. Francavilla outlines why strong branding matters for trust, differentiation, loyalty, and growth, then walks the audience through a series of practical frameworks: Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, Scott Galloway’s Brand Identity Model (purpose, promise, positioning, personality), Julian Cole’s Messaging Pyramid (core message, supporting message, proof points), StoryBrand’s character‑guide‑plan structure, and a classic positioning‑statement template. He illustrates each model with well‑known brands (Airbnb, Tesla, Slack, Spotify, Nike, Apple, Dropbox, Notion, Canva) and highlights common startup pitfalls such as unclear messaging, inconsistency, generic language, over‑promising, ignoring feedback, and feature‑focused copy. The session then shifts to audience‑centric research (demographics, psychographics, behavioral patterns) and the four pillars of effective brand messaging: value proposition, core brand narrative, tone of voice, and cross‑channel consistency. Francavilla provides a step‑by‑step action plan – conduct a brand‑messaging audit, test messaging with real users, align all touchpoints, and create a brand style guide – and leads participants into breakout‑room exercises to apply purpose‑position‑promise‑personality statements, the messaging pyramid, and positioning statements. The webinar ends with a recap stressing the need for differentiation, mission alignment, consistency, and ongoing evolution, and offers contact information for further support.
Chapters
You might have 5 selling features, right? What is one thing that people should know about your, uh, business or your product or your service or your offering, right? Or your brand. Next is the middle here. So that's the supporting message. So what backs up your core message? So you've made this statement and then you need kind of a second thing that backs it up, right? So, um, for example, You know, people need to know most likely what it is you do, but probably that unique way.
Hello, hello everyone. I hope you're having an awesome day. Thank you so much for joining us here at another Founder Institute event. If you're here for the first time, the Founder Institute is the best place in the world to turn your idea into a fundable business and a fundable business into a global startup. So today I'm super, super excited for our speaker, but before we kind of intro our speakers, I'll introduce myself a little bit. My name is Daniel. I am a part of the Founder Institute marketing team, and I'll be helping out with the event today. And before we kick things off, why don't you all tell me where you're all joining in from? I am based out of Karachi, Pakistan. I can see that we do have people from across the world. We have about, I believe, just over 300 people registered to this event. So it's always like a really awesome crowd. I see people from Vancouver, I see people from Washington, DC, Portland, Amsterdam, Düsseldorf. Awesome, awesome. Maryland, a lot of people from the US today. Awesome. Denver, Paris, Basel. Okay, awesome. Dublin, amazing. It's always a really global audience, and I always kind of love that about the Founder Institute because you have like a good sense of like the passion that people have for, you know, solving real problems and creating businesses. And the really cool thing about our speaker today is he's been here a bunch of times and we've always had a really, really great time with our speaker, Daniel Francovilla. He will be talking to you all about aligning your brand messaging with your startup mission. So before we bring Daniel on stage, just a couple of housekeeping rules. Folks, feel free to share your thoughts and comments in the comment section. I see everybody is already doing that. Today things are slightly different. Daniel will be doing his workshop and right after the workshop, instead of me helping him out with the Q&A, you'll have the opportunity to ask him questions yourself in the breakout rooms and also network amongst yourselves. It's always really awesome to speak to founders and aspiring founders from across the world. So that should be kind of like a, you know, fun new thing that we're trying out here. So without further ado, uh, let's have Daniel on stage.
Okay. Hello, hello.
Hey Daniel, awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, I think we lost your— yeah, you're back.
Okay, can you see my— can you see my presentation or no?
Not yet.
Okay, let me try that again. It went away, but here we go.
Awesome. And folks, yes, this, uh, event will be recorded. You'll get a recording in 48 hours And yeah, just one last bit. If you enjoy what Daniel's saying, if you, if you love what you hear, you'll see an emoji icon right at the bottom of your screen. Please do show him some love, and I'll see you in about 30 minutes.
Awesome. Okay, sounds good. Super, uh, happy to get started here. I will make the best use of our time, uh, today. Um, as we know with all things marketing Branding, it's not a science, it's a journey. So there's gonna be a lot of trial and error here along the way, but we'll hopefully focus on the good things that we are learning. Today we're gonna talk about clarifying your brand messaging, as you know, and aligning it with your mission. I'm happy to do that through, I have a few slides and then we'll go through some exercises at the end. Start off with this quick quote here from the legendary Seth Godin who says, marketing isn't advertising, It used to be, but it's not anymore. Marketing is what we make, how we make it, how we talk about it, and who we make it for. If you begin with that, then strategies are a collection of the hard choices we get to make about who our marketing is for and what it's actually for. So just another way to think about marketing. Now I operate at the intersection of the worlds of marketing, entrepreneurship, education, In every venture I've started or consult on though, I take a brand-first approach. And today I'm gonna talk a little bit about that. Super quick overview of my background here. I ran an agency for 11 years. It was acquired 4 years ago and I just exited today. I'm a marketing advisor and brand strategist, and I also run a training company and teach marketing advertising to various university and college students here in Toronto. I'm also proud to be a recent innovation partner at Founder Institute as well. So why does brand matter so much today? The platforms and the tools are always moving targets, right? Long after your last Meta ad stops running, people's understanding and feelings about your business are tied to the brand, right? The core of a strong brand is what outlives any individual marketing tactic. Any trend or any ad campaign. How strong you build that brand up today, though, will help determine how successful your startup can be in the future. I'm not going to spend too much time defining a brand because we've got a lot to get into, but I just want to emphasize that brands are more than you can see. And I've talked about this in one of my previous presentations as well. Why does branding matter for startups today? It, of course builds trust and credibility. It differentiates you from all the others in the competitive market. It helps drive loyalty and engagement. And the 3 elements of branding, just as a basics before we get into this messaging, is of course there's your visual identity, the logos and things that everyone sees. Then there is your brand messaging, which we're gonna talk a lot about today. And then on top of that, there's, you know, within that there's a tone of voice, personality, style of messaging, how you show up, right? Right now, messaging matters, uh, because of course it's part of your brand strategy and it signals to the world how people should perceive your startup. Strong brand messaging builds that brand trust and credibility, as I talked about, differentiates you, and it connects emotionally with the audience. Ultimately, it's going to help you drive business growth. So we'll look at some— we'll look at some examples throughout the presentation today, and I have some great frameworks for you. One example of an overarching strong brand messaging here is Airbnb, and they say their overall brand messaging, Belong Anywhere. It's really clever, but it speaks to that emotional desire for connection and adventure. Belong Anywhere. Super simple, right? Two words, but a lot of thought goes into that. Now, some of the most common startup challenges that I see when it comes to their messaging is lack of clarity or focus. And let me know, by the way, if there's any of these challenges that resonate with you or one that resonates most. So lack of clarity or focus, misalignment perhaps with your mission and values. Maybe the stuff on your website is not as aligned with what you really believe in, what you're doing. Uh, 3 is inconsistent messaging across various platforms. It's not the same everywhere. That's a really common one. And 4, failing to connect with the right audience. And finally, trying to appeal to everyone. This is another one that I see is most common. If that's you, please give me a thumbs up or let me know. I see some thumbs up popping up there. So in order to actually, you know, create this messaging and align it with your marketing, you need to first answer the question of your mission, right? Why do we exist? And today, is not a workshop on, you know, coming up with your whole business from scratch, but I will share these important points. You know, why do we exist? Who do we serve? Right? Really getting close and defined with your audience. And finally, what impact do we want to create? You can think about your mission messaging using Simon Sinek's Golden Circle framework. If you've seen this framework before, give me a thumbs up. It's a pretty common one. Obviously a lot of people have heard the Simon Sinek talk, Start with Why, right? We're not gonna go too much into it today, but I did wanna mention, you know, the why is what represents the core purpose or belief that drives your business, right? It's the reason you exist beyond just making money, right? The how is what refers to the unique approach that you have or the values that you have that differentiate your startup from delivering its products or services. And then we've got the what, which is that tangible product or service that you actually offer, right? Is it an app? Is it a download? Is it a consulting session? What is it, right? And as a founder, you can use this framework to clarify your brand messaging by starting with your why to create that emotional connection with your audience, right? Then you explain how to fulfill that purpose. And finally, you go through what, what do you actually offer? Another example here, when we talk about messaging of a brand, is this big picture stuff like Tesla says its overall mission is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. They don't actually mention specifically the product there, right? But this is an overarching mission. It's something that they believe, and hopefully you'll see that incorporated. There's a comment in the chat saying Tesla messaging is dying. Due to Elon. Elon, of course, you know, as a visionary founder, created a lot of the values and the messaging. But, you know, they still have, they still have a marketing team and a brand. And to help their products differentiate themselves, you know, they have to have this mission that they're tied to, and they can hold on to that to keep them unique, especially as more and more people and more and more brands compete in the space of EVs. Right. Okay. So let's talk about some keys to actually making sure your messaging is aligned. The first one I talked about is identifying your demographics. Hopefully you've done some exercises on this before, um, in the go-to-market strategy workshop that I did with Founder Institute. You can take some of these exercises and identify those. Again, it's always good to look at them over time. Um, next you've got understanding the psychographics. How are people thinking, right? What do they value? What are their pain points, right? Um, what are they motivated by? Then you've got their behavioral patterns, buying habits, challenges that they face on a day-to-day basis, and things like this, right? So lots to look into and consider. Um, and the reason we're considering that is because we want to create audience-centric messaging, right? At the end of the day, um, it's not messaging that is meant for you. It's not about you. It's about who you're serving. So your messaging needs to address those pain points directly in your messaging. It needs to align your message with their desires and their needs. And of course, it needs to speak their language and ideally Avoid jargon, right? This is for both B2B and B2C, right? Super important, especially with, uh, with pain points. And if you are B2C— you are— sorry, if you are B2B, you're still selling to that individual customer. What is that buyer, that individual person, that employee in a certain department, what is their pain point, right? Or what are they— what will help them make look good in front of their— in front of their boss or in front of their team, right? All these things are super important. And in B2B especially, there's a lot of jargon that's used, right? And it doesn't need to be because you're still selling to people. So, um, just wanted to answer that question there in the chat. Um, an example here of a B2B product is Slack, right? And what they say is they're making work simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. They don't say what the product or service is here, and they really help to create that positive feeling, right? Simpler, pleasant, productive. That sounds awesome. I wanna, I wanna buy in, right? I wanna know how they can help me. 4 pillars of effective brand messaging to help you kind of craft something that's based on those examples there. We've got— sorry, one second. We've got things like your value proposition. So what actually makes you different and valuable? Then you've got your core brand messaging at another level. Again, that's your, Mission, vision, and value. Some of that stuff you do in the backend, but you want that to all align. And then you've got your tone of voice, how that shows up. How does your brand actually sound when you're talking? What do the captions look like on social media? What are the emails, newsletters? How are they worded? Are you saying, hey guys, in your message or hey people? Are you saying, you know, good morning? Are you saying not even putting the name right? What is it that you're using in that language? And finally, consistency across all platforms. The number of times I've seen startups that have an amazing website and then their social looks like it fell apart, you know, it makes a big difference. Or their videos are super low quality, but meanwhile, their, you know, their sales collateral is beautiful, right? You've got to keep that consistency there. Spotify is an example of a brand that kind of speaks to personalization and versatility. So in their statement, they say music for every moment, right? And every moment, of course, they're not trying to necessarily, you know, appeal to everyone, but they're, they are very clearly making the statement that they're specializing in music. Now, I'm not sure if they've updated this now that they've tried to pivot and focus a lot more on video and podcasts as well, but music for every moment is this very light, you know, easy to accept statement, right? So when it comes to, um, you know, crafting your, your unique value proposition here, a strong value prop includes, like I said, who you serve, the problem you solve, and the unique benefit that you provide. And we'll go into a little bit of a framework here, which is super basic one, right? There's a lot of different formulas and templates you can use, but, um, you know, we help target audience solve X problem with X solution, right? This is a super clear basic formula for a value proposition that helps you with your brand messaging, right? And like I said, as an exercise, I would ask you to think about later, write your startup's value prop using this formula, write it a couple different ways. Um, you know, at some point think about how that shows to the customer. Now, I also want to mention a few of the common mistakes that we see very often and how, you know, eventually you're going to try to avoid these. The first one is inconsistency. I've already talked about that. The next one is being too generic, right? You need to really focus on how you're going to differentiate yourself early on. The third would be overpromising, right? Claims that can't be backed up, saying you're the, the best, the biggest, the, the brightest, whatever it is. Or making other promises. Then we've got ignoring audience feedback, right? Or not even collecting audience feedback in the first place. That's another one. Messaging needs to evolve with your customers, right? And finally, focusing too much on features instead of benefits. This is huge. I see so many startup founders do this. They're telling me about the products. They're telling me about the tools, the features, the things it can do, but the stats, right? but we gotta focus on the benefits, especially when you're talking about aligning your brand messaging with your mission. So startups often focus on technology specs rather than outcomes, as I mentioned, right? When it comes to aligning your messaging across channels, you wanna look at everything, right? As I said before, your website, your landing pages, social media platforms, email marketing, right? All your sales materials, your investor and partner communications. You know, investors will call you out if what they're seeing, what you're saying to them doesn't actually match and align with what your website says, for example, or what your pitch deck is really highlighting, right? So those are a few important things to think about. And I'll ask you these questions to check yourself, right? Are your tone, language, and visuals consistent? All of the above, right? Does every touchpoint reflect your brand? Your mission. So think about that. Again, if you somehow gotten down a path where you're too focused on the feature and you're not thinking about the big picture mission, you're gonna lose people to competition a little bit easier that way, right? When we look at Canva, they have incredible consistency with their messaging across their web, their social, and within the product experience. I think that's one of the best examples from my perspective is Inside of Canva, you know, they have a lot of assets and graphics and visuals and messaging. Even the pop-ups and the, you know, the interface is super consistent with what it looks like on the outside as well. And that's really important. Before we go further, I'll just pause to talk about, you know, the difference between branding, marketing, and advertising, because of course I'm mentioning the word brand and brand messaging a lot today, but All of this needs to go together, right? So your brand is something that, you know, we know it's, it's long-term, right? It's something that helps build that customer preference, loyalty, and emotional connection over time. It defines who you are as a company and it creates those emotional connections, like I said. Um, it also influences everything from your visuals to messaging and experiences. So when we then go into Marketing, which a lot of people go straight to marketing or even worse, straight to just running ads, right? In marketing, you're encompassing, you know, all the different strategies and tactics that you're gonna use to promote. You're gonna focus on identifying those customer needs and positioning solutions to those needs, right? And all the different channels we, we discussed, right? Social media, SEO, partnerships, et cetera. But the purpose of marketing is ultimately to help drive engagement, leads and conversions over time. Now, advertising specifically is that very, you know, short-term definition here, which is it's part of marketing, right? It's a subset of your marketing and it's focused on paid promotions to drive immediate awareness and sales. And you've got those targeted messages through channels like social, TV, print, digital ads, all of the above. Is gonna be part of just advertising, right? But again, typically it is more product-focused and calls for action. Yes, you're gonna have big, big brands, like I mentioned before, like Airbnb, who can afford to do a massive TV buy that's simply a brand campaign, but that's because they have drilled their brand messaging for so long that we know what they are, who they are, and what they stand for, right? We already know, so they don't have to focus you know, as much on any of the other components. And like I just said, like Airbnb as an example, it works best when aligned with branding and marketing strategy. So looking at quick examples here, we've got Nike. Nike has this brand platform, Just Do It, that's been around since 1988, right? And it's all about inspiring action, empowerment, and perseverance, right? Um, they have this ongoing brand platform, right? An example of brand, an example of marketing is when Apple launches different campaigns for these new products, right? They still focus on storytelling, showcasing that innovation, benefits, lifestyle, right? And it's everything, right? They have a lot of channels. Apple's very unique, but that is an example of their marketing when they have a new product. And then an example of advertising is Dropbox. They're, you know, they're famous for their referral campaign when they first started, right? For the first few years. But they use a lot of targeted ads to incentivize people to sign up, right? And that helped them really quickly scale. And that was just, again, running ads with a referral program. So these are just some quick examples here, but what's next? What are we going to do about it? I want to give you, you know, a few steps you can take. So one, you want to conduct a brand messaging audit. So look at everything you have out there in the world and stuff that you've told people and sent people, right? Two, You're gonna test your messaging with real users. And 3, you're gonna align messaging across all your platforms. Please make sure that that is consistent because if you don't, it literally confuses buyers and it potentially loses their trust if they see that, you know, things are all different everywhere. Finally, you wanna help develop a brand style guide to make sure that there's consistency. Right now you might have, you might be a sole founder, right? A solo founder. You might also be someone who has a small team, but what happens when you have interns? What happens when you have, you know, full-time team members? What happens when you hire an agency? You need to have that brand style guide for consistency. So that's important to think about. I also want to mention this, this formula here, this example of StoryBrand. I'm not sure if anyone's heard of it here, but looking at the StoryBrand formula, you can really take people through, you know, this, this process of, you know, telling a story, right? You've got a character, character has a problem, they meet a guide or someone that can help them or a service or a tool or your product, right? That gives them a plan. Then there's a, then they get called to action. and that either ends in a success or helps them avoid a failure, right? A lot of you will have seen this, uh, StoryBrand formula. I recommend that you look at it when you go into, um, the process. Case study, uh, I wanted to share with you is Notion. So Notion as a brand, they, they position themselves as this, as this all-in-one tool, right? All-in-one marketplace that solves, um, they wanted to basically say you don't need all your productivity tools, you can do it all in Notion. Now, they worked in such a competitive space, right? B2B SaaS, extremely competitive. But they successfully built a brand across multiple verticals by embracing the 3 C's. The 3 C's I've got here, if you're not familiar: context, clarity, and community. Those are the 3 C's. And so brand building, um, is best achieved through understanding those things, right? Understanding context, achieving clarity, and leveraging community. So I'm not going to go into too much detail, but this is how Notion did that. Um, we're going to talk a little bit about some, some positioning and messaging frameworks, and then again, we will, uh, we will go into some material. So just give me one second here. I actually— yes, okay, I'm actually going to skip this one for for time purposes, but you could look into April Dunford when she goes through defining positioning. April Dunford has a guide to positioning that she looks at. The other one is the brand identity model, right? This is where you're gonna look at, you know, all different pillars. Purpose, that's all about defining the why behind the brand, as I talked about. What problems do you solve, et cetera. The purpose is important because again, it sets the tone for everything else. Then you've got positioning. All of these kind of work together at the end of the day to help you better tell your story. I actually think, if you don't mind, I just need to refresh my slides for 2 seconds. Sorry about that. Just so I can make sure I'm getting the right slide for you next. Okay, perfect. Thanks for your patience. I'm looking forward to kind of going through these frameworks with you in the breakout rooms as well. So make sure you note them down. So, okay, we'll talk about the 4 pillars that, that you need for, for a brand before we move ahead here. Okay, so purpose, We talked about this before, right? The purpose pillar, though, takes your strategy right back to your brand's core. Then you've got positioning, right? So position is how you differentiate your competitors. A lot of people talk about the word positioning. It is. That's what your brand messaging does, right? When you're brainstorming your positioning, think about, you know, how you're speaking to that ideal audience and how it differs from what's out there. Right. And again, if you operate multiple sub-brands or products, how are they each positioned in the market? right? Your brand is in a very distinct place in the minds of those people who experience it. That's important. Your customers, your potential investors, your employees, your team, they all think of it differently. So positioning is really important. There's a lot of questions you can ask. The next is your promise. Your brand promise is often, you know, a very clear statement of commitment to your cause or to your mission. So for example, Brands often promise to offer low prices without sacrificing quality, right? That's a super common one. Everyone, you know, even someone like a Walmart or a grocery store will, will say that kind of thing, right? But the brand promise isn't just a message that lives on a website. It's supposed to be part of the way that your, your product runs, right? Your, your app, your tool, your experience. Promises really let people know what to expect with every interaction, right? Next, we have personality. So the personality, or also known as the identity pillar. This is referring to your brand's human characteristics. So start to think of your startup brand as a person, right? That is really helpful from a, you know, from a bigger picture perspective. But, you know, you want to define what qualities make your brand unique and identifiable to your customers. How does it act? How do you behave? How do you respond? Right. The personality helps create that connection and that familiarity. right? Is it a memorable personality? You know, can people recognize the brand colors, tone of voice, and anything else that your brand publishes before they see your logo? That's how you know that you have a strong brand personality. Obviously, there's a lot of big brand examples here, but I'm not gonna, you know, throw those in. Some common issues to avoid, and we're going to talk about these in the exercise. Is one, the awareness hurdle. So let me know if you have these, uh, any of these so far. So the awareness hurdle— people don't know you. Doesn't matter how amazing your product or service is, people don't know you. So that's one. The second is the comprehension, comprehension hurdle— people don't understand you. How many of you have this? Give me a thumbs up if, you know, someone has found you, they— you've had a meeting with them even, but they don't necessarily understand what you do. right? So that's, that's important. Next one is the trust hurdle. How many of you have this hurdle where you feel like people don't trust you or your brand, right? That's super, super important. And we've talked about how to build trust through your brand. And then finally, the differentiation hurdle, right? People don't know or don't see why you're different. I've seen this happen. I've even been on sales calls for various startups and products when people don't, you know, I don't understand why they're different. I'm like, okay, I get that, but then what's the difference between the service I'm already using, right? So these are kind of 4 common branding issues, and these are hurdles that you want to really try to avoid through your brand messaging that's aligned to your mission. So thanks for sharing in the chat. Connor says he's been through all the hurdles. Alan relates to 3 of them, and of course You can build trust with people well, but remember, you're also— it's not just you as a founder, it's also the brand, right? It's also the brand itself that people need to trust as well. Cool. Thanks for sharing. So we'll put some of these into action. And I have, I have a few activities. What I would probably do is take note of these ones and then we will, we will go into the breakout sessions and we can do them. But I'm going to spend a few minutes going So feel free to take a screenshot. The first one here is, I'm not sure if any of you have heard of Scott Galloway, also known as Prof G. He has, he talks a lot about brand and brand strategy, but he has this brand identity model. And that includes things like, you know, purpose, promise, position, and personality. So what I would recommend in this kind of activity here is you're gonna basically quickly build a brand identity that's aligned with your mission. By doing the following.
Purpose.
Write your startup's purpose in one sentence. Again, note this down. We will go do these in the breakout room so you can choose one of the three activities to do in the breakout rooms or all three and I'll come help you. Purpose. Next is position. Describe where your brand fits in the market, right? Is it the, the more expensive one? Is it the, is it the new innovative one? Is it the you know, easy to access, accessible one. What is it? Where does it fit into the market? Um, 3 is promise. What should customers always expect from you, right? Is it amazing, amazing service? Is it high quality? Is it speed? Is it, you know, what, what is it, right? Um, what can they trust? What can they expect from you? And then finally, personality. List a few adjectives that actually describe your brand's personality. And this is what I talked about before where, you know, making it a person, right? Your, your brand is friendly, it's fun, uh, perhaps it's, uh, very, very serious and trustworthy, uh, perhaps it is energetic, right? List those objectives that describe the personality of your brand or what you want it to be. Um, purpose sentence is a little bit different from a value prop, to answer your question, um, because again, it's, it's why you exist. The unique value proposition is more geared towards the customer directly. You know, this is, this is what we exist. This is what we solve for you. But they are, they're extremely similar and you could, you could modify the sentence to be worded differently to basically mean the same thing. So in this framework, it's how do you define your purpose, purpose, position, promise, personality. Okay, I'll go into another framework here that's going to be helpful for the second activity. And again, you can do them all, or you can do one of them today. So there is a— this, this is what Julian Cole calls his messaging period pyramid, sorry. And you've got on top the core message, the supporting message, and the proof points. This is going to really help you with things like sales materials and marketing collateral, right? So, you know, you're going to do a little bit of an audit to what you already have. And if you don't have it, again, you're still going to rewrite it. So you're still going to write it from scratch. But if you have it, you're going to refine that messaging you have. To make it more clear and, and impactful. So the first step here is using the pyramid. You're gonna, at the top, you're gonna do your core message, which is what's one thing people should know? Again, you might have 5 selling features, right? What is one thing that people should know about your, uh, business or your product or your service or your offering, right? Or your brand. Next is the middle here. So that's the supporting message. So what backs up your core message? So you've made this statement and then you need kind of a second thing that backs it up, right? So for example, you know, people need to know most likely what it is you do, but probably that unique way. And then in the supporting message, what backs it up is either the experience you have or the amount of testing you've done or the amount of software and tools you have behind it or the team you have, whatever it is that kind of emphasizes emphasizes, yeah, yes, we are actually, you know, backing up this claim by being the, you know, go-to platform, the fastest, fastest way to book XYZ online, right? A supporting message are what actually helps to back that statement up in the public's eyes. And then finally, the bottom of the pyramid are those proof points. What evidence supports your message? And that, that might be something where, again, you actually have numbers in there. And that could be over time. So, you know, you're not going to have a number necessarily right away if you're, if you're pre-launch. But once you're in the market, or perhaps it's, uh, research that you've done, right? People, uh, you can get it, you can easily get a study, right? Easily get some data out there that if you're, if you're solving a problem in the— let's just say, you know, for Airbnb's sake, uh, we're solving a problem in the short-term rentals and accommodation space. We want to throw out a stat like X percentage of people prefer to stay, uh, in someone's home, or X percentage of people find hotels, uh, too expensive and too stiff, or whatever it is. You're going to have some data that help you back up with those proof points, right? Eventually you want them to be your own proof points, um, as well. But I know again that some of you are new, right? So you might not have all of that. Now then, of course, within, within the breakout rooms you can review, or just offline as well, you can review your startup's website or pitch deck to look at those gaps. What are those gaps? What are those inconsistencies that exist with your messaging? And then make sure that again, all of your messaging is ideally following this or aligned with it. And lastly, you can, you can share your findings with us in the group or just note down some improvements that you want to make. Lastly, I do have a positioning statement template. Now I know this workshop is not on positioning specifically, but again, how you actually, you know, align your brand messaging with your startup mission and how you communicate that messaging is that you've got to have the positioning down pat. So this is a very common positioning template. Many of you have seen this before if you've worked with FI or if you've you know, Google different tools. So this template is explaining that, you know, for this target, your startup brand is the category that is the, again, point of difference, so that those users can get this benefit because— and then reason to believe, right? And the reason to believe is how you all align. So tie everything together with this activity, the positioning statement. And the way to do that, again, define your startup's unique position in the market, leverage what you've already done. I also recommend you, you look at the competitive options out there. So who or what are your competitors? This does help you to answer the question. Look at those key differences, right? What makes you different? How do you help customers? What's that real value you're providing? And then who are your primary users? Like, who are those different customer segments that you serve? Because you could have the exact same product or tool but for a different market, right? And that's the key. That's one of those big differentiators that you might have. You might have all the same features and tools. Um, I mean, people have seen this, people have done this too. Like I said, go back to Airbnb, right? It's like you could be the, the Airbnb of office space, you could be the Airbnb of cottages, and there are sites that specialize in just cottages, for example. So think about that. As part of this and then share your positioning statement with us in the group. And if you already have one, you know, that you'd like to share that you're working on, please feel free to do so. So what's next? I'm going to recap here before we go into the breakouts, which is, of course, strong positioning differentiates your brand. Brand messaging is what builds that long-term trust and loyalty. The next one is that brand messaging It has to align with your mission and resonate with your audience, but clear messaging starts with understanding that first, right? Understanding who the heck is your audience and what actually are you trying to do? What are you trying to solve? And finally, um, here, consistency is what builds that trust and drives that impact over time, right? Consistency across all channels is what's key to credibility. Lastly, um, you're going to want to keep evolving and of course avoid those, those, common mistakes that I mentioned, but it is something that you're gonna keep evolving. Although it is core and fundamental to, you know, your business and what you do, you may change, you may pivot, you may find a new market that you're serving. And, and so it's okay to, um, kind of adjust that as well. Um, before I, I wrap up, we will go into, uh, some of the breakout rooms. I do want to mention, let me skip through this and just say, this is my contact information. If any of you are interested, please do connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to, you know, share more resources on all things brand, brand messaging, positioning, brand content. We'll probably break out and then do those activities. So if you, if you did need help, I'm happy to jump in. I would love to hear some of your positioning statements and some of the brand messaging that you've come up with. That you've worked on. Daniel, I'll turn it over to you. Let's see you pop up. Awesome, awesome.
Thank you so much for this super insightful presentation. On the point of consistency, like I said, Daniel's done a couple of these now, and I feel like every single time Daniel does a presentation, you can tell it's a Daniel presentation. Because it's so consistent every single time. I loved it. Honestly, folks, tons of gems there for you to pick up. Like I said, we'll be sharing the replay in 48 hours. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us. I know that we'll be heading into the breakout room, so folks, do stick around. You'll have a chance to ask all your questions from Daniel directly. So yeah, Daniel, before we kind of close things off here, do you have any maybe parting words?
Nothing other than my recap. And I just wanna remind everyone that, you know, look for inspiration out there, like look for what other players are doing, but don't just duplicate it, right? The whole point here is that you need your brand messaging to be different, otherwise people, as we went through those common problems that people face, a lot of you had those, you know, you're going to continue to face those problems where people don't actually understand what's different about it or why it's for them. So get out of your own mentality of, yeah, this is what I'm trying to do, and think of it from the external perspective, right? So that's my tips. Thank you so much to everyone. And thanks again, Daniel, for having me. Like I said, I will be in the group for the next 20 minutes or so. At least I'll be in the breakout rooms and Uh, if you need me to reshare any of those activities, we can probably figure out a way to do that. Uh, but hopefully you, you wrote some of those exercises down and we can go work on them.
Awesome, awesome. There you have it, folks. Uh, if you want to be a part of another Founder Institute event, head on over to fi.co/events. Uh, that's it for me. We'll see you in the breakout rooms. Have a great day ahead.
Awesome, thank you.
