Orly Zeewy is a brand wiz with a focus on startups. Her book, Ready, Launch, Brand: The Lean Marketing Guide for Startups, offers success stories and actionable exercises which help founders build their brand. Great chat, learned tons.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Orly Zeewy
Branding: Why Names Matter
"You ask people what they want, you give them what they want, and ... they come because you give them what they want."
Ugly Baby Syndrome
The Impact of Social Media
Advice From an Entrepreneur
Social Media Algorithms: How They Affect Branding
"Get clear on your story because people invest in stories"
Finding the Right Target Audience
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Transcript of “Branding for Startups”
Guest: Orly Zeewy
Sal Daher: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston podcast is sponsored by Purdue University Entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty, faculty of its top five engineering school, in helping them get their technology from the lab out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic. Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful to some of the startups in which I'm involved, including a startup came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.
[music]
Sal Daher Introduces Orly Zeewy
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. Today, we are really lucky to have a treat, my friend Orly Zeewy. Say hi, Orly.
Orly Zeewy: Hello, Sal, so nice to be here with you. Thanks again for inviting me.
Sal Daher: Now, Orly is not a founder or an angel. She is a very special type of person. She is a brand whisperer. Now, what's a brand whisperer? Now, let me tell you, branding is one of those deceptively hard things. My friend Katherine Roy tells the story that she used to work for IBM and people think, "It's easy to brand. You just create a brand." Says at IBM, huge, huge corporation, thinks they can support perhaps three brands. That's how hard it is to establish a brand. It's this huge enterprise.
I have seen startups come up with the name of the company and then they have this product and the other product and Hyperion. It's like, oh, no. Just simplify matters, explain what you do, get the point across. I thought it'd be nice because Orly is also an adviser to entrepreneurs and she has written a book called Ready, Launch, Brand: The Lean Marketing Guide for Startups. Her name is very memorable, Orly, like the French airport Orly, Zeewy, Z-E-E-W-Y. I tell you, if it hadn't been for your family, this would have been a perfect branding exercise, Orly.
Orly Zeewy: Well, I do mention it in my book. I don't know if you got to that chapter on identity. There's a whole chapter and there's a whole story of how I got the name and not a straightforward line as you could imagine. I don't know if you want me to tell you about the--
Sal Daher: Well, do tell that story.
Orly Zeewy: It's a great story.
Sal Daher: The book is 81 pages of effective text. I love the combination of these case studies based on your interviews, extensive interviews, and also some very practical exercises. Anyway, tell me about your personal branding exercise. How did that come about?
Orly Zeewy: Oh, my goodness. First of all, when you have a name like Orly Zeewy, you tend to go in a creative field [laughter] because you don't meet too many- nothing against accountants and people who work with numbers, but usually, they don't have an unusual kind of name if they're-- It's more of in the background kind of name. First of all, most people do think that it's French, but actually, it isn't, which is the first mystery around my name.
I was actually born in Israel. Orly is actually a very common Hebrew name, and it means my light. Or is light and Ly is mine, so inner light, which is why I call myself a facilitator of lightbulb moments. Zeewy was actually Ze'ev, which means Wolf and is a translation from the original name, which was Lupu, which means wolf in Romanian because both my parents emigrated from Romania after World War II and immigrated to Israel on that's where I was born. The sequence, most people don't have time to hear that whole story.
Sal Daher: It's fascinating. I tell you, it is gorgeous brand. It's just perfect.
Branding: Why Names Matter
Orly Zeewy: What else was I going to be if-- What's so funny is, of course, I've spent my entire life trying to figure out who I am. In a way, that was my training for doing the work I do now because I have founders, startups and also growth companies and teams. I work with teams as well. I help them figure out who they are and more importantly, I help them figure out how to communicate, what I call their secret sauce in a way that people want it and find it valuable enough to actually pay for it. [laughs] That's the other thing. It's not enough for people to want it. They actually have to want it badly enough to want to pay for it.
Sal Daher: Yes, it's very true. Figuring out what your company is about, to a certain extent, startups, is an experiment discovering what the company is about. There's an interaction between the messaging that the company is giving and the state of their understanding of what their business is. I've seen presentations. A business that I invested in, which is now quite successful, but Orly if you saw their original pitch deck, it was unintelligible. It was the spaghetti of-- They're in the digital health space.
The digital health space is massively complicated. They thought they were over here somewhere in the digital health space. They ended up being somewhere else entirely different because there's so much to do there. I tell you, I sat down with the founder, which is very close to me, and I went over with him the pitch and all that stuff, and there was no way that it could be less dense because they didn't know what their business was. Today, if you see their pitch deck, they're about to be VC funded, unbelievably clear, very, very clear.
They understand their business, they know what it is. It's an Iterative process because you can't have a message if you don't know what your business is. Very often you can't have a business if you don't know what your message is, because you can't grow your business. Maybe you have an inkling on a business. That is a really, really important process and you're going to do it over and over and over. You have to have a starting point. There's a funny story of a life science company that I'm involved with. Life science companies, it doesn't matter.
Their name doesn't matter because the people who early on are usually people in the industry. It doesn't really matter because they know the technology can be named Banana Peel, Biotech, it doesn't matter. It happened that the company was named after the founder, and at a crucial moment, trying to hire a person for the company, this very interesting candidate tells me "is the founder an egomaniac that he put his name on the company?".
I said, "No." [laughs] Far from that. It just has to do with the fact that the guy's brother happened to be good at creating graphics and all this stuff and he put the name of the family. It was the brother's fault if anybody's fault. I never thought that a biotech company would have to think about its branding. I think everyone has to think about that.
Orly Zeewy: You're definitely speaking my language there because I devote an entire chapter on identity and I just want to read this one quote because it sums up exactly what you're talking about. Hold on, I just have to find the chapter. You'd think I would know this book by heart by now [laughter] but somehow I still don't exactly know exactly. Here we go. The chapter is called A Rose by Any Other Name. I unpack marketing myths in my book. This is myth number four, people buy our products in spite of our name.
The quote, which you should recognize, here's the quote, "I never felt that the naming issue is all that important, but I was obviously wrong judging by how many people felt. I tell people to call it just plain Linux and nothing more." Do you know what the original name of Linux was?
Sal Daher: No.
Orly Zeewy: It was Freaks. [laughs] It's funny. Of course, the perspective that I have is the name that it's very difficult to grow your brand if you have the wrong name. Now, I know in life sciences things might be a little different, but Nike is another great example. Do you know what the original name for Nike was?
Sal Daher: I read the biography of Phil Knight. It is Sporting Company or Sporting Goods. Something Sporting Goods company.
Orly Zeewy: This is exactly my point. It's so forgettable. They had it for 10 years and no one remembers it. No one remembers it.
Sal Daher: Tell me again.
Orly Zeewy: Blue Ribbon Sports.
Sal Daher: Blue Ribbon Sports. Exactly.
Orly Zeewy: The point that I'm making with that story is that here's what happens when you are too close to the company, which every founder of course is, it's their baby. I have a whole thing about that. What happens is that you only know what you know. If you think about it, I can totally follow their line of thinking which is that well, blue ribbons are given out at county fairs for the best pig, whatever. We're the best in sports, so we'll become blue ribbon sports, right?
Sal Daher: Oh my gosh.
Orly Zeewy: This is exactly the thinking and so what happens is that you can always tell when the founder is the one who came up with the name because usually, it's very rare unless the founder has a marketing background that they understand the value of that. They go with really, traditional isn't even the right word. It's almost like it's the first thing that comes to mind that sounds like-- I teach this to my students. I teach at Jefferson University and I'm teaching in this program around exactly this. Putting together a pitch deck and one of the things we look at is the name of the company because if it's forgettable how do you market something whose name you can never remember?
Sal Daher: Do you know what the funny thing is? I read that chapter just a few weeks ago. I was sitting in a coffee shop at Starbucks because that's where happened to be available at the moment and I read that. I read the biography. I still couldn't remember the name.
Orly Zeewy: That's my point. I don't talk about this in the book but I had a client who had - it was a summer day camp, and they had been using the same name forever. When it came time to think about their brand again and, of course, typically this is the other thing that happens. If you don't do it in the beginning, what happens is you eventually hit a wall, and the wall is people don't remember you. They don't know what you do. You now are up more competition than you were in the beginning and you have no way to, as I talk about the idea of cutting through the noise because that's the whole point of all of this. What brands need to do is they're competing with thousands of messages.
Sal Daher: This is another thing that's in your book because you go through the practice of this woman who--
Orly Zeewy: The naming.
Sal Daher: No, no, a medical practice.
Orly Zeewy: Yes. Oh my God. That's such a great story.
"You ask people what they want, you give them what they want, and ... they come because you give them what they want."
Sal Daher: This is a wonderful thing. The strategic value of building your brand before your business gets so overwhelming that you don't have the bandwidth to worry about the brand.
Orly Zeewy: Exactly.
Sal Daher: She branded herself as a doctor who cared-
Orly Zeewy: Pediatrician.
Sal Daher: -before she was too busy to do that stuff. She thought very strategically, this is a low-value thing that I can do right now because my time isn't worth much right now. I don't have a lot of patients. Later on--
Orly Zeewy: Exactly.
Sal Daher: I don't have time for that.
Orly Zeewy: Yes. When I interviewed her, it was so funny. She said, "I drank a lot of coffee." [laughter] What she did, which was absolutely fascinating, she identified the neighborhood, and that was the first thing, where she knew that there had been a stroller explosion, lots of new babies being born. What she did is this is really marketing research 101. You find out who the influencers are. In this case, the moms who know everybody and then they put her in touch with everybody. The thing that was so incredible about that story is that because she interviewed all these people she actually could build her practice around the things that her potential customers, the parents, told her they needed.
It's such a basic thing. You ask people what they want, you give them what they want, and lo and behold, they come because you give them what they want. It's just such common sense. She was just phenomenally successful from the get-go. She spent six months but in the beginning, this is the other piece of it is she was able to make mistakes that didn't cost anything because again-
Sal Daher: Mistakes.
Orly Zeewy: -her time was not valuable. Originally, she thought it's going to be nurses or birthing centers who are going to be my referrals. That wasn't true because by the time you come to a birthing center you already have the pediatrician or the doctor connects you with one. What she found is really just finding the right neighborhood, getting in front of the people and asking them all these questions, and now she does adolescents. Her practice has just blown up.
Ugly Baby Syndrome
Sal Daher: That is so awesome.
Orly Zeewy: Literally, though, if you want to know how to do this, read her story. [laughs]
Sal Daher: Orly, now getting back to thinking your babies are beautiful.
Orly Zeewy: The ugly baby syndrome. I love that one.
Sal Daher: There's a fable, is able about the owl and the eagle. Do you know about this?
Orly Zeewy: I don't think so. No.
Sal Daher: The owl did a favor for an eagle and the eagle said, "Look, I can do a favor for you. If I see your chicks or something I won't eat them." The owl said, "Oh, yes, don't eat my chicks." "How do your chicks look?" The owl, "Oh, they are the cutest thing." Have you ever seen owl chicks?
Orly Zeewy: I know where you're going with this.
Sal Daher: They're just ugly little puffs, but to the parents they're beautiful. Of course, the eagle was flying around and spotted these ugly little puffs with the little black beak and just ate them all. This is wisdom from the ancient Greeks.
Orly Zeewy: That's so funny.
Sal Daher: It's very true. We're all like that.
Orly Zeewy: It's true. Blinded by love-
Sal Daher: By love.
Orly Zeewy: -because this is our baby. Just for full disclosure here and transparency, that came about because I was talking to a potential client and I was telling them about the process, that one of the things we need to look at is, is this working, and that he might need to change his name. He literally said to me, "You're calling my baby ugly and I won't work with you." [chuckles] I turned that experience into a chapter in my book. There you go.
Sal Daher: Mother owl. Think of the mother owl, the Aesop's fable about the owl and the eagle. Orly, let's talk a little bit about another area that you think is really, really important for someone who is trying to ramp up a business, get a business off the ground and have a lot of repeatable transactions.
The Impact of Social Media
Orly Zeewy: Of course, you can't talk about that without talking about social media because the number one game there is engagement. What people don't understand about social media, and I talk about this in my book as well, if you could think about it this way, is that marketing is the engine to sales and branding is the conductor, right?
Sal Daher: Yes.
Orly Zeewy: Social media, if you think in the old days when they had coal burning trains, that's the coal. You need a social media manager or an intern to feed that engine. The problem is that what most people do when they think about social media is they hire an intern to be the voice of their brand. The thing that I talk about all the time with my clients is, in the beginning, you are the voice of the brand. If you are looking to scale, the voice of the brand still has to come from the top down. An intern is not the voice. An intern manages the voice. Most of the founders that I've talked to don't like social media. They don't think they really need to do it. Yet you have 1.3 billion people on YouTube. [chuckles]
People are using it. It changes all the time. Facebook, I think it's 1.7 billion. LinkedIn, you have, I think it's 390 million active monthly users, and four out of five of those are decision-makers. What I tell my clients is if you're in the B2B space, you need to be on LinkedIn. If you're in the B2C space and you're talking to consumers who are under the age of 35, you need to be on Instagram. I haven't quite figured out where TikTok fits into all this.
Sal Daher: TikTok of teenagers.
[laughter]
Orly Zeewy: I haven't quite. I get Instagram, I know about Instagram stories and they're very valuable when you're building a consumer brand. Having Instagram stories are fabulous because the average American adult's attention span is around five seconds, and so that works really well with Instagram. Just so you know, in 2000, that number was 12 seconds.
Sal Daher: Oh, wow. There are trends that just are alarming. I have a friend called Jackie Olds. She's a psychiatrist. I interviewed her on the podcast about her book called The Lonely American. The episode is titled Love, Shopping, and Cocaine. Why? Those are three things that stimulate the dopaminergic reward system in the brain. Love, and shopping, and cocaine stimulate the same centers in the brain. There are a lot of people who go to drugs, who go to shopping, and other things to satisfy really important things when, in fact, what they need is human connection. This reduction of attention span is sad. It means it's because people's attention span is being stolen by media. There's also an attendant reduction in the number of confidants that people have. If you listen to the podcast, she gives that number, but it's staggering. People are lonely. People are cutting themselves off from others and just engaging in this very, very thin activity of social media, which has value for discovery of many things. I use social media. You use social media, but there's also a dark side to it. The danger that it becomes everything in their life.
They begin to imagine that the real world can be seen through social media, and they don't have a real life. Not a danger for people like us, Orly. You're a much younger person. We happen to have very thick networks offline, which guards against that. It's very tough. Anyway, so shorter attention span. Yes, it's very important to address that. Also, if you would like, I'd like to explore a little bit how you discovered your path in life, Orly.
This is an important service that I like to provide to young people who are listening to this. Usually, if people were thinking about becoming entrepreneurs, and you are an entrepreneur as well. It's a very entrepreneurial business that you conduct. How did you come by this?
Advice From an Entrepreneur
Orly Zeewy: Yes, it's a question I ask myself sometimes, actually. Just to clarify, I actually am an entrepreneur because I had a design and marketing communications firm for 14 years.
Sal Daher: Absolutely, yes.
Orly Zeewy: I really enjoyed it. It was great, but--
Sal Daher: I was making a distinction from someone who is a founder of a technology company.
Orly Zeewy: That makes sense.
Sal Daher: That's my beat.
Orly Zeewy: Got it. I would say that if nothing had ever changed, which, of course, as we know, that's not reality because things are always changing, and I actually quote at the end of my book, I quote the author of Future Shock.
Sal Daher: Alvin Toffler.
Orly Zeewy: Alvin Toffler, yes, who in the 1970s said, "Today is the least amount of change you're ever going to see." He also predicted that the 21st century would see 2,000 years of change, and I think we've already seen several hundred years of change since 2000. Anyway, for me, it's interesting because I think had the internet not happened, I would have stayed in my little niche, doing print media. We were doing very complex marketing programs, but there was always a brand component to it.
At some point, when everything shifted, I did not want to become a web designer. I also had kids, life happened, other things were going on in my life at the time. What I realized is that I am the daughter of an entrepreneur. My dad had several businesses. He also has 17 patents. He is somebody who's a very creative thinker, but was not a highly successful entrepreneur.
He's now retired and in his 90s. When he read my book, he said to me, "Orly, I wish I had had your book." As a child of an entrepreneur who struggled a great deal, I learned a lesson that for me helping an entrepreneur is not just helping the person, the founder. It's also helping the family. I think about other little girls out there who maybe are happier because their parent is more successful.
For me, the idea that if I can help somebody be more successful because they're able to-- Because what I do it's around helping them cut through the noise so they can scale fast, right, and having the right messaging, understanding who you're talking to, what that person needs, what is keeping that person up at night. Not everybody on the planet who could ever use your product, which is what most people think, including my students, I always--
Sal Daher: Boiling the ocean. Yes, boiling the ocean.
Orly Zeewy: In my book, I talk about how you put a big net out there and you hope you catch a whale, but in the process, you're catching old boots and fishing wires and all kinds of other things, and it takes a long time. The more targeted, and I know this sometimes sounds so counterintuitive to people because what I hear a lot is, "Well, but I'm going to leave people out." My answer is, "That's okay because not everybody wants, needs, or will pay for what you offer. The clearer you can get on who that one ideal customer is, the more likely you are to be able to connect with them with messaging that's actually related to them. What I talk a lot about is this idea that generic messaging speaks to no one. That's a real problem in a universe where our attention span is now hovering at around five seconds. It's probably going to go lower. I would not be surprised. By the way, like five years ago I was saying seven seconds. It's definitely on the downward spiral. What that means though, is that none of us has the time to figure out who you are. If you don't do it, and this is where the whole concept of my book came into play is this idea that I've spent the better part of my career coming up with this process and really whittling it down to its absolute basic because I know founders.
They want to get-- They're moving at the speed of light and they don't have time to read a thesis. What I really wanted to focus on was what are the key things that you need to do so you can scale fast and build that company so that you can scale, you can employ more people, you can off-- you can do the things you want to do because most founders, in fact, all the founders I've ever worked with are very passionate about what they do.
Sal Daher: Absolutely. They never lack for passion. The question is execution.
Orly Zeewy: It's not just execution, it's also focus. I don't think I'm speaking out of school here by saying that something like 95% of founders have ADD. It's a very common thing because it's part of what makes them so great at this because they're able to look at 20 different things and they're always thinking of the next idea. It's fascinating to have conversations with a founder, but from a marketing standpoint, it does not work. Then there's the other piece of this, which is when I was speaking of social media, let's say you're on LinkedIn. By the way, this is another thing that people always think, I need to be on 20 platforms. No, you really don't. Especially at the beginning of your enterprise, pick one. Like I said, if you're in the B2B space, you need to be on LinkedIn because 80% of B2B leads are coming through LinkedIn.
Sal Daher: 100%, yes. I am on LinkedIn. Then I waste my time on Twitter and why am I on Facebook?
Orly Zeewy: I'd never use Facebook for business, no. Just for staying in touch with family and that's about it, and friends who I don't see all the time.
Sal Daher: Well, Facebook ads can do some pretty nice targeting.
Orly Zeewy: You can.
Social Media Algorithms: How They Affect Branding
Sal Daher: Market targeting. I do use Facebook ads, but in terms of sharing content, the best channel for me is LinkedIn. It's just amazing. It's also an incredibly unpredictable, the variance in the performance of content. I was just looking at posts from a founder recently, thousands and thousands of views. Another person who's very intelligent, very attractive, a few hundred. It's like 10X and it's hard to tell what drives it.
Orly Zeewy: There is actually a way to work that system. I can give you because I do LinkedIn reboots. That's part of my whole brand tune up process. One of the things that I can pass along to your listeners is that when you do a post, do not include the link. Wait like 30 seconds and then edit the post and put the link. It will literally triple the number of people who come to your post. It's unbelievable. I tried it and it's amazing.
Sal Daher: Why does it do that?
Orly Zeewy: It's something about the-
Sal Daher: The algorithm.
Orly Zeewy: -the algorithms of LinkedIn. It's really incredible. I posted something recently. It wasn't anything fantastic, but it was about a talk I was doing. I got 1,000 views within a few hours.
Sal Daher: [crosstalk] 30 seconds later.
Orly Zeewy: It was amazing. Literally, you post it and then you go back in and you do the edit and put in the link.
Sal Daher: Maybe it goes in a different bin.
Orly Zeewy: Then the other thing to remember is you don't want to do more than three a day. Three times a week is something that's manageable for most people. I think one of the reasons why so many founders don't like posting or don't like thinking about social media is because they think they have to do it all the time, but they don't. They don't have to do it all the time. There's even times and different days and times when it's best to post, for instance, on LinkedIn I know like 11:00 to 1:00 I think it's on Tuesdays. I know, it's just this funny thing. There's so much data around this.
Literally, you can find out all this stuff. Where I always come back to is don't make it complicated because you're not going to manage. It's not sustainable. If it's complicated, you're going to do it once and then you're going to find an intern that you're paying $15 an hour or two and you're going to let them do it. Now we're back to having an intern be the voice of your brand. There's also this misconception that somehow millennials and Gen Z'ers are the only ones who know anything about social media and that is not true. I was able to learn it and I'm neither millennial nor Gen Z'er so. [laughs] I have two Gen Z'er sons.
Sal Daher: Yes. You're at home focus group.
Orly Zeewy: Exactly.
Sal Daher: Your inter-family focus group.
Orly Zeewy: They are not shy in telling me when I've got it wrong. [laughs] Yet, I still dedicated my book to them.
Sal Daher: No, my younger daughter is the official critic of the podcast. Well, she coaches the host, but, in fact, she's the critic. She's always saying, "Dad, you just talk too much. Let the guest talk some more." By the way, I should take a moment to thank Lara Iyad for connecting us.
Orly Zeewy: Yes, Lara. Wonderful person.
Sal Daher: Wonderful. Just a wonderful person, and I should thank Raul Rosa for connecting me with her. She's a friend of Raul's and she connected me with you. I see that you also know James Beirut.
Orly Zeewy: I do. Yes, I'm part of his network. I get his emails. I've attended a couple of his webinars, yes.
"Get clear on your story because people invest in stories"
Sal Daher: Yes, we connected via a mutual friend. Anyway, as we think about wrapping up the interview, what message would you like to communicate to our audience of founders, people who are thinking of founding companies, angel investors. This is a category we haven't discussed. People who invest a little bit of money and a lot of time and love into start-ups, and people who work in those early stage technology companies. What kind of thoughts, what kind of advice would you leave for those people?
Orly Zeewy: The answer I would give is tell your story. Get clear on your story because people invest in stories.
Sal Daher: Yes.
Orly Zeewy: They invest in things they care about. The best way to connect with someone is to tell a story that's meaningful. By that, I don't necessarily mean your personal story. People think about origin stories. That's fine on your website if you want to put that in your "About" section, but on a pitch deck what you want is to-- I've worked on a lot of those so I have some background on this, which is start with a question, a problem, a need, something that you have discovered through your own process that is a true problem.
Then, show how you've solved it, and then show the impact of that solution through a story. You can use your story in terms of how you came up with that solution. Again, the goal is not to have it be about you, but about how you're solving someone else's pain point. What I would say to any founder is this is why you need to get clear first on who you are. If you get clear on who you are, then you get clear on who your ideal customer-- Who is that one person? Again, don't think, I hear this all the time, "Well, everyone needs this."
Sal Daher: No.
Orly Zeewy: Do you have a $100,000 dollars a year to spend?
Sal Daher: That's the ugly baby problem. You think your product is perfect for everyone.
Orly Zeewy: Well, and it's not even that. It's that you don't have the marketing money-
Sal Daher: Right.
Orly Zeewy: -the marketing dollars to even-- All you can do in the beginning is focus on one customer anyway. One of the stories in my book, actually, is about someone who did not figure out who their ideal customer was, and spent a lot of time marketing to the wrong customer. By the time they figured it out, it was too late and they closed the company. There's a cost to that. I know it always feels like everybody wants to rush to the finish line. You just want to get to the-- We think there's some magic bullet, some magic pill that they can take. Here's the thing, people also say, "Well, you know, we'll eventually figure this out."
News flash, you will not figure it out because what happens is if you don't figure it out, you build a brand based on confusion. What happens is-- This is why companies fail. The highest rate of failure is around 5 years because anecdotally, what I have found in the last 25 years of doing this, is that between year 3 to 5 is when you hit the wall. The wall is people don't know what you do. People don't understand how you can help them. They get on your website and they get on the homepage, which by the way really should only answer two questions, why am I here, and why should I care?
Sal Daher: Excellent. Your advice about homepages is really outstanding. I need to work on that. If you have some exercises in there, I need to bone up on that and I will reach out to you for some help, Orly.
Orly Zeewy: That would be great. I'd love to chat with you about that.
Finding the Right Target Audience
Sal Daher: Orly, now, what you're saying about telling the story, it's adjacent to when I'm doing the diligence in a start-up. I always ask them to tell me how the startup came about. What's your founding story? How did you people decide what's the problem you're solving? How did you bring the different pieces together? That tells a lot about what kind of a startup that is, and it gets you involved in a company and understanding the people and what they do in the company.
Orly Zeewy: There's another piece to this and, by the way, if you read this chapter, you know what the the top three reasons why startups fail. Do you remember what the number one reason is?
Sal Daher: I did read the chapter, and I'm struggling because I was not entirely convinced.
Orly Zeewy: It's not my data, by the way. It's not me, but the number one reason is no market need. The number second reason is run out of cash, and the number three reason is the wrong team.
Sal Daher: In my experience of 70 startups, it may be related to no market need. The founders give up before they've found the need.
Orly Zeewy: Exactly, because they didn't do the work to figure out. I talk a lot about this, which is if you ask the wrong question, the answer doesn't matter. In this case, they don't even know to ask the question. They think, well, again, we'll just put it out there and somebody will buy it, and then they start to build their company based on who buys it, versus on who actually needs it, and will be able to help them build their company and scale it, because you can't scale it with just people who are buying it because they have that kind of day, or you're a good salesperson or whatever, but that is not sustainable.
Sal Daher: Not sustainable. Product market fit, a huge gusher and you will know it when it happens. It's like wow.
Orly Zeewy: For me, that is really the process. I reverse engineering all of that. Which is how I got to, for me, the key components of building the brand. I do this with brand tune-ups for more established brands, because they've hit that wall. They also don't know really who they are, and what happens is people don't think about this, but it impacts their ability to attract and retain top talent, because especially Millennials, Gen Z'ers, they're looking to align with missions and vision and values. If you haven't figured all that out, it makes it really hard to also attract the right people to your particular brand.
There's another piece of this, which is if I'm happy internally and I am connected, and I am wedded to the value that we represent here, and I see how my job supports that, I'm much more likely to put that out into the world. I will be better with the customers that I deal with because I internally understand it and am committed to it.
Sal Daher: That is very well put.
Orly Zeewy: I've had a lot of practice.
Sal Daher: I know. When you talk to an author of a book, it's great because the author understands what the message is, what the story is, and they can say it succinctly. They don't wander a lot. I must say, I must emphasize, because I reviewed your book on Amazon. It is a gem of a book. It's beautifully polished. Very tight, very nicely written and I can see that you put a lot of thought and a lot of love into it. Congratulations, beautifully written book.
Orly Zeewy: Thank you, Sal. I really appreciate that.
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Sal Daher: Orly Zeewy, author of Ready, Launch, Brand: The Lean Marketing Guide for Startups. I'm really grateful that you could spend these delightful minutes with us. Thanks a lot.
Orly Zeewy: Thank you so much, Sal. It's been a pleasure.
Sal Daher: This is Angel Invest Boston. I'm Sal Daher. Thanks for listening.
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I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.