Great Startups Deserve Great Brands — Build a Strong Foundation by Avoiding These Mistakes

As our Marketing Expert in Residence here at First Round and in her own consulting work Arielle Jackson has helped shape hundreds of startup brands like Patreon, Loom, Front, Bowery and eero. 

If you suspect we’re padding the tally for narrative effect, by her count she worked with 71 companies in 2021 alone — and she’s been at this work for the past seven years. (To say nothing of her previous product marketing experiences at Google and Square, where she helped launch and grow products such as Gmail and Square Stand.)

Jackson has previously tapped into this deep well of experience to crystalize and share early marketing advice for founders right here on The Review, from a popular positioning framework and set of branding exercises, to detailed guidance for technical founders looking to hire their first marketers.

Recently, she marshaled this experience into a new format, a cohort-based-course powered by Maven (more on that further down) that allows her to work with even more early-stage founders. In distilling lessons learned and sketching out the tentpoles of the curriculum, Jackson found herself making a list of the mistakes that she was keen to help her students avoid — one that she thought might be helpful to share with Review readers as well.

“Working with hundreds of brands has cemented the importance of focusing on the fundamentals of your purpose, positioning, and personality early on. These are the essential elements of a brand strategy. When you get this stuff right, everything flows from there. You don’t get distracted by the competition. Your website writes itself. Your messaging breaks through the noise,” she says.

In this exclusive interview, Jackson outlines seven of the most common early marketing mistakes that she sees, sharing the very exercises and frameworks that she uses to help founders launch quality brands quickly.

Here's a preview of what's in store:

• The dangers of focusing too much on other startup competitors, and emphasizing emotional over functional benefits.
• Tons of examples of how products like Gmail, eero, Ring, and Loom picked the right category and polished their positioning.
• Exercises like the Cinderella spectrum or the 5-point star test to hone your messaging and infuse your brand with personality.

Prefer to listen? Check out our podcast episode with Jackson, right here. Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!

-The Review Editors

Founders: If this advice sounds useful but you'd like hands-on help, apply for Jackson's cohort-based course by the end of the week. ⬇️

Setting up a solid brand strategy early on will help you gain clarity on what you do and why you do it. In a carefully-crafted course powered by Maven, Jackson will teach you how to apply the lessons she shared in today's article. Learn more and apply here by 1/28.

Layering on sales? We surveyed +200 product-led growth companies to crowdsource best practices:

You've likely heard of product-led growth. But what's discussed less frequently in tech circles is how top companies like Slack, Datadog, Zoom, Atlassian, MongoDB and others have been layering in sales on top of their PLG motion for several years. That’s why we teamed up with Pocus to create the first-ever Product-Led Sales Benchmark Survey to learn how PLG companies structure, plan, and execute their sales strategy. See our findings here.

Want to dive deeper into the state of PLS? Join us for a fireside chat this Wednesday with Meka Asonye, Partner @ First Round (former sales leader at Stripe + Mixpanel), and Alexa Grabell, CEO @ Pocus as they dig into the results and what they mean for the future of sales.  

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