Topics

Startup


Consider This Before Developing Your Go-To-Market Strategy

Consider This Before Developing Your Go-To-Market Strategy

Preparing to Develop Go-To-Market Strategy Developing a strong go-to-market strategy (GTM) is hard to get right – especially for any startup in high-growth mode. The right GTM requires bringing together all of the strategic assets that address your business and growth strategy: sales, marketing, product, channel, brand, and vision. The benefits of developing this kind of strategy are huge, but a lot of pieces have to come together in order to properly prepare and ready your organization for investing in it. Bringing in experts to help create a GTM strategy brings both a strategic and a...
Read more >

Entrepreneurs — Why You Need This Advice for Your Next VC Pitch

Entrepreneurs — Why You Need This Advice for Your Next VC Pitch

The Entrepreneur Pitch Every day, in offices up and down Sand Hill Road, founders meet with venture capitalists to make their pitch. For entrepreneurs, these aren’t mere meetings. They are defining moments, perhaps life-changing ones. Only the truly clueless would be unprepared for meetings of this magnitude. Rock-solid business plan? Check. Technology road map? Check. Go-to-market strategy? Market analyses? Financial projections? Check. Check. Check. And yet…despite all that exhaustive effort, many entrepreneurs are not truly ready for what might one of the most important meetings of their...
Read more >

The Value of a Sales-Led Brand Strategy For High-Growth Companies

The Value of a Sales-Led Brand Strategy For High-Growth Companies

A Sales Perspective Tracy Lloyd, founding partner and Chief Strategy Officer of Emotive Brand, shares how her sales background informs her work today, and offers insights on the true value of bringing sales to the strategy table. Tell us about your sales background. I have an interesting background that has led me to the agency world, and on to brand strategy. Initially, I got my start in non-profit fundraising and development. A start-up CEO bought an expensive table from me to attend a gala event I was hosting. Throughout the sales process of getting that deal done, he said to me that I...
Read more >

Bridging the Gap Between Your Startup Pitch and VC Funding

Bridging the Gap Between Your Startup Pitch and VC Funding

We know its not easy to put together your startup pitch deck as you shop around to the hottest VCs. You’ve got the most amazing idea ever. You’ve brought together a dream team to develop the app, service, or product that’s going to take over the world and be the next unicorn. Now there’s just that small matter of getting your value proposition, technology, growth projections, and your life’s work into the dreaded startup pitch to present to VCs. On your side of the table are people who understand technology – the masters of bits and bytes. On the other side of...
Read more >

Differentiate Your Product With A “Why” vs. “What” Approach

Differentiate Your Product With A “Why” vs. “What” Approach

Are you looking for strategies to differentiate your product? There is one key shift you can make to change the way people think, feel, and talk about it. It’s only natural for you and your team to focus on the “what” of your business. After all, it’s your responsibility to ensure that your product is in the app store, on the shelves, online, and on the minds of consumers. You built the product. And you live your product every day. You know it inside out. You know exactly how it works. You know all the ways that your product is better than the others. The only trouble is...
Read more >

Fast Forward: Our New Offering for High-Growth Companies

Fast Forward: Our New Offering for High-Growth Companies

Developing Fast Forward, an agile marketing, branding, and business offering was the right thing for our team to develop for startups, to address the issues startups are facing right now. We have created Fast Forward designed for our high-growth clients that need to make strategic shifts to quickly address product, industry, competitive, alignment, and other issues. Fast Forward is an agile workshop approach that very quickly develops a strategically aligned and nuanced understanding of your business and brand’s current situation. We bring the most important issues to light — business...
Read more >

How do you differentiate your startup in a crowded category?

How do you differentiate your startup in a crowded category?

Startups in crowded categories should lead with brand. There are many wake-up calls for the founders of startups. One of the more difficult realizations comes fairly early into your journey; the day you wake up and discover that despite your unique, disruptive offering, you have plenty of company. When you first started, when you made your investor pitch and got that angel round, you thought you were so far ahead, there was no category to contain you. But while you’ve been heads down, looking for funding, hiring people, grinding out product, and trying to get customers, a crowded category...
Read more >

Top B2B Business Problems We are Asked to Solve

Top B2B Business Problems We are Asked to Solve

When you’re a brand strategy firm with a B2B technology focus, there’s no better place to be than the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area. Silicon Valley has extended everywhere the bay waters touch the shore, so our location on the Oakland waterfront puts Emotive Brand at the epicenter of the action. Living and working in the middle of this incomparable start-up mecca, we’re surrounded by some of the greatest technology companies ever built, with leading VCs and amazing entrepreneurs as friends and neighbors. For many years, we’ve used brand strategy to solve business problems. Since we...
Read more >

Give People Meaningful Reasons to Innovate

Give People Meaningful Reasons to Innovate

We often come back to the Fast Company blog post by Seth Kahan, a change specialist and author of, “Getting Innovation Right”, published in 2013. Many of our clients are looking for help creating a brand strategy and developing corporate values that will help create a culture of innovation. Seth presents three practical secrets for the innovative leader. We were particularly struck by his second secret: Secret #2. Articulate the Way Forward People rely on their leaders to craft a vision of the future that makes sense and can guide their everyday decisions. Most of the leaders I...
Read more >

Need to Scale Fast? CEOs Can’t Just Focus On Engineering Benefits

Need to Scale Fast? CEOs Can’t Just Focus On Engineering Benefits

Scale Fast to Beat The Competition Why do so many engineering-led CEOs have a hard time scaling their company? I’d estimate more than 90% of our clients are engineers first and become CEOs later. An engineering background is of great value today – inspired ideas, technical abilities, and intense drive bring great products into the world. Unfortunately, the problem is that many of these products fail to scale fast, and dreams of  becoming the next unicorn are quickly squashed. Sadly, when this happens, the world doesn’t derive the benefits of the product the team has worked...
Read more >