At TechCrunch Early Stage, I spoke with Coatue Management GP Caryn Marooney about startup branding and how founders can get people to pay attention to what they’re building.
Marooney recently made the jump into venture capital; previously she was co-founder and CEO of The Outcast Agency, one of Silicon Valley’s best-regarded public relations firms, which she left to become VP of Global Communications at Facebook, where she led comms for eight years.
While founders often may think of PR as a way to get messaging across to reporters, Marooney says that making someone care about what you’re working on — whether that’s customers, investors or journalists — requires many of the same skills.
One of the biggest insights she shared: at a base level, no one really cares about what you have to say.
Describing something as newsworthy or a great value isn’t the same as demonstrating it, and while big companies like Amazon can get people to pay attention to anything they say, smaller startups have to be even more strategic with their messaging, Marooney says. “People just fundamentally aren’t walking around caring about this new startup — actually, nobody does.”
Getting someone to care first depends on proving your relevance. When founders are forming their messaging to address this, they should ask themselves three questions about their strategy, she recommends:
- Why should anyone care?
- Is there a purchase order existing for this?
- Who loses if you win?
These questions get to the root of what you’re providing, whether there’s a customer and who you’re up against. From there they can also help companies identify how to broaden their relevance in the face of new developments in the market.
“As a startup you start with no relevance,” she says. “So your relevance comes from: you’re a founder people know, you’ve come from a company people care about or you’re in a space that’s already relevant and people want to know about, or you’re about to kill a competitor that people really care about, or you have customers where you sort of get the relevance from the customers.”
The key: identifying the specific audience that you are — or could be — serving. From there, ensure that your messaging is actually geared toward that target group.
Beyond showcasing your relevance, good messaging — especially when you’re talking about technology startups — sells a vision of the future. In our chat, Marooney talked specifically about inevitability and how founders should think about and frame how their product fits into their audience’s vision of the future.
When founders are sharing their future vision for the inevitable nature of their product and the world it enables, Marooney laid out three questions they should ask themselves as they plan out messaging:
- Is this an end state people would agree on?
- Do people generally like this end state?
- Are you rolling a boulder up a hill?
“You want to take people on this journey of an end state. Now, if they like that end state, the boulder goes down the hill and it’s like wind at your back. If they don’t like your end state… that’s more like rolling the boulder up,” she says. “Now, that doesn’t mean don’t do it, it just means be aware that your future end state may scare people and understand how you need to mitigate that.”
Asking those questions will not only help you understand your audience more, it might help you zero-in on the challenges ahead that your messaging plan will need to address.
Painting an ambitious vision of the future can be challenging, but the harder task is selling a message that people believe is feasible for you and your company to capitalize on.
“There is always somebody else who should make this end state happen to these people,” Marooney said. “This is the thing you have to wake up and work on every, every, every single day. Wake up every day and care more, prove more, do it.”
The big issue, she says, is that messaging isn’t just about figuring out what to say at launch, it’s also about showcasing your momentum toward success.
Understanding all of these things is key, but then you have to communicate it. From there, it’s all about simplicity and staying consistent, but simplicity can be a particularly tough concept for founders to grasp, especially when they spend so much time focused on the intricacies of their business.
“Don’t let the complexity of your intellect cloud what needs to be simple,” she says.
Check out Marooney’s full video below and hear her answer questions from the founders in our virtual audience.