Unbound with Chris DuBois

Chris DuBois
Today the importance of the founder story, working with limited resources and much more. Are you a leader trying to get more from your business in life? Me too. So join me as I document the conversations, stories and advice to help you achieve what matters in your life. Welcome to unbound with me, Chris DuBois.

And left him is the founder of fin marketing management. As a marketing problem solver, strategist and content creator, she helps entrepreneurs and founders grow and amplify the inspiring work they bring to the world. Ants worked with dozens of startups from pre seed to Series A, and serves as a partner helping to figure out the right tools, strategy and messaging to make dreams a reality. And today, we're going to hear just how she does it. And welcome, Amanda.

Unknown Speaker
Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.

Chris DuBois
I guess let's just jump right into your your origin story. Yeah.

Anne Laffin
So I actually began my career in market research, which is kind of a cool place for marketer start to be honest with you, because you really interesting insight cheesy pun here, as to how consumers act and think, and you get to work with a lot of big brands. So it was a really nice place to start a marketing career. From there, I kind of moved and I did this dance between actually financial services, and market research for several years until I landed at a a small financial planning startup. And that was when the I got bitten by the bug, the startup bug, and I just loved it. I loved the vibe. I love the fast pace. Some days, I didn't love it. And it was really hard. But I learned to love that too. And I decided I really wanted to start my own gig right in the middle of a pandemic, because that seemed like the right time, you know, and, and, but it's been great. And so now I have my marketing consultancy that is just geared towards working with early stage startups. And it's exciting. It's challenging. It's, it's, it's mine.

Chris DuBois
Right? Awesome. So one of the challenges of working with an early stage startup is that you don't necessarily have the reach and you know, the, the finances to just throw up problems. Yeah. And so a lot of it comes down to the founder, you know, being that critical piece and the founder story being what gets everything going. But Why else do you need to focus on just nailing that story, if you want to be successful,

Speaker 2
I think that it's easy to get lost in product features and benefits and things like that. But the founder story is kind of the heart and soul of a startup. And I don't think you can just sell products or services on heart and soul, you know, at least not forever. But it does make your startup human. And it makes it unique. At the same time, it can also make it relatable. So I think it's really important to be able to shed some light on, you know, why is this company here? Why does it matter?

Chris DuBois
Right? And so how do you kind of balance, blowing up that story, right, making it the big thing, but still ensuring that your entire marketing strategies cohesive and works?

Speaker 2
I feel like it's just one piece of the puzzle, to be perfectly honest with you, right? Like, you just can't, let's say we were doing, you know, 30 social posts a month, they can't all be about founder story, right? They still have to be about other things, too. So, to me, I think you use the nice word there have balanced, there still has to, we still have to address how your product addresses the needs of your audience. So is this tricky? If the balance

Chris DuBois
right? And even just getting that across? Like that story kind of bought in by your team? To make sure they're pushing it? Like, I'm sure there's challenges just in that?

Speaker 2
That's a really good point, for sure. I mean, it can't be the founder story, right? It's not, it should not be something that's fabricated. Right. Like that is it is the the why the company is there. So I think that's an interesting point to bring up too. Yeah, but the team needs to needs to be all in on that. They can't if they're if they are Wofully, or they don't buy it, customers aren't gonna buy it either. investors aren't gonna buy it. So I think that's a really interesting point.

Chris DuBois
Awesome. I like making interesting points. So I guess what, so what are the common mistakes that you're seeing with early stage service specifically,

Speaker 2
they're my favorite, which is inconsistency, lack of cohesiveness, not having a plan. And those are not flights or me pointing fingers. It's just kind of what I've observed. And really, that comes from lack of resources, lack of time, if we can, I suppose we could bucket that into the resources bucket. But, you know, if you are a founder, maybe you have a VP Sales, you know, like maybe you've got two or three people. You don't necessarily have time to make sure what's on the messaging on the website mass matches the messaging on your two or three social posts match. You know what? So you get this sort of patchwork quilt of tactics and strategies. And it doesn't usually work all that well.

Chris DuBois
Yeah, I have noticed that working, working with startups. It's like the, you don't know what's going to work and what doesn't work yet. Yeah. And so you want to try as many things as possible. But by dabbling, you're not actually trying anything. And you're making these trade offs? Yes. Yeah. So okay, let's actually, let's follow that thread. You can't just try everything, right, you gotta get kind of really specific on what you're working on. So when you how do you approach like messaging, when working with a startup to actually make sure you're nailing the messaging and not just trying 30 different things to see what sticks?

Speaker 2
I, I did not come up with this concept. I'm sure many people that are listening, have heard of Simon Sinek. But they start with Y is what I base a lot of my messaging off of. So I will start with why does the company exist? Why are we here? Why? Why do your customers need it? And then I answer the basic questions. I moved from that to what does it do? How does it work? You know, when who? I answered the basics. Because if you can nail all those people are going to understand, like, it's just they can easily attach themselves to your service or your product, right? They can say, Oh, this is for me. Yes, I have that problem. Yes, I would really love if someone could help me with that, right? Here's how it sounds so simple. It's not always that simple. But that is the framework that I follow every single time.

Chris DuBois
And then you just go about testing it. But yes, and then it's testing,

Speaker 2
right? I mean, I made that that's a very condensed version, right? You also need to think about your audience, right? Where is your audience to that's the other thing. And you have to of course, you have to test it, you've got to do a lot of there's a lot of conversing that has to happen between your audience. And after you make this messaging. And so one of the things I say a lot is, if you're not talking to your customers regularly about the decisions that you're making, you're making, leaving a lot of room for error. And you're leaving a lot of unknowns, which is really scary.

Chris DuBois
Yeah, yes. Especially in that space. So I guess if you're having resource issues, and you're feeling stressed, one of the ways to get around that is to incur a different type of debt, which would be investors taking on investments. And you've worked with companies to help secure investments as well. What are some of the recommendations you have for for kind of preparing even, like, not just getting the funding, right, having that conversation? But like, what can you be building right now within your company in order to kind of make it more of a sure thing?

Speaker 2
I think you need to be prepared to answer the question. Like, why now? Why should you win? Those are two questions, not just one question. But I think you need to be prepared to answer both and and no waffling on that either, right. There's a lot of people looking for funding right now. And, you know, you can be as buttoned up as you can, right, you could have your, you know, your ideal customer profile set up you can have, you know, you can have your first set of customers, you can have some sales, you know, numbers, you can have your founder story, like you can have those pieces pulled together, but I think you really need to be able to really state clearly, like, why is it us? Why, why us? Why do we deserve to win this? I stand by that.

Chris DuBois
Yeah, yeah. But I think a lot of the, how you set up the founder story, probably builds that up just an investor's mind. Right. They play nicely together. Right, and we're creatures of habit, I guess, that we will always go towards story. And so for and so why would investors be different? They're just people with money. I mean,

Speaker 2
you know, and the other thing is, too, right? Not everyone, not everyone, not every investor is the right fit for your company, either. So I think that's where again, like having a story that is relatable or human and being willing to share kind of those pieces again, you'll find that hopefully find the right fit in your investors too. So

Chris DuBois
right, yeah, see when you can see when that story actually resonates with the person that they might actually be a great fit. Yeah, that I haven't thought of it like that. Okay, so we're, let's say we've secured some funding we're now focused on just growing rapidly because we can throw money at our robots now perfect. How do we, how do we go about balance? Or really? How do you go about balancing acquisition first, like retention marketing, in order to to grow the brand,

Speaker 2
I sat on a webinar recently. And they brought up this this problem, right common problem. And she explained it in a way that I really liked, which is kind of like, it always seems like you are moving from what like one leaky bucket to the next leaky bucket, right. So maybe you move over to acquisition and you're working really hard on acquisition. And while you're doing that, retention is sailing, right? Or there's, there's a new hole that forms there. I mean, in the early early days, to me, you have to focus on attracting new clients. That's where that that's where the time has to go. It's where the dollars have to go. You need you need to prove you can actually sell a product, right? So you need customers. But at some point, I don't know if I can give you an exact point of how many customers when you know, right, but you have to make sure. Hey, are we are we following up with our current clients? Right? Do we know if they're happy? are we sending them regular communication? And updates about the company? Are we do we have some kind of automated sequence that follows through after they buy, right? So while while the early days are definitely focusing on attracting building awareness, and those things still have to happen even after you have customers, obviously. You know, I think once you get into a nice steady rhythm with attracting more customers, making sure you have at least those key automations email sequences to make sure you're not ignoring your poor customers that were excited to come on board is essential.

Chris DuBois
Yeah, no, just thinking through some of that more, like even working on retention and keeping those customers happy now feeds your Referral Engine, and everything else. So

Speaker 2
which is another nice tactic, honestly, that if you have some kind of referral program, right, it's like the next layer you can build out? It's, I do feel like it is a little bit of always trying to kind of like, you know, plug the leaky bucket, right? Because unless you have a massive team, which most early stage startups will not, it's impossible to work on everything all at once. So you have to be comfortable with knowing there may be a few holes somewhere.

Chris DuBois
So go further down that path, right? You can't do it. All right. Now, how do you go about choosing what channels you're gonna start marketing on? My it's gonna be different for every client, obviously, but like, what are you going to use for your? Yeah, criteria. So

Speaker 2
I mean, I always one, go and look, I look at the website. First, we talk about content. I've done a lot of email marketing. So I still love email marketing, social media. You know, paid paid channels are not my favorite. However, I think that can be a really nice place to build up some awareness. A lot of my like, a lot of my early stage companies, so they just don't have the budget to really hang in there to build a lot of traction through paid efforts. But I still think there is some value there. But for me, you know, content, social, webinars, conferences, a lot of my clients are still kind of using these very traditional tactics and having a lot of success.

Chris DuBois
So So I agree with you on the paid, because it only gets more expensive. And when you turn it off, everything just goes away. So it's great for like a quick fix or like, get more people to a landing page. Yes, quickly, but it's like the long term play just feels not yet not as

Speaker 2
valuable. No, you know, it's funny, I, I've had some clients where they really wanted, they were like, we want to do Facebook ads. And I was 99% Sure they were not going to perform. And so I told them that I said, you know, I don't think this is the right option for you. But if you are dead set on doing this, we will we will try it right. Like I hope I'm wrong. And I think there had there does have to be an element of give and take with clients, right? So if they really want that my I feel like my job is to let them know, provide my expertise, say we will try it and that hope they have the flexibility to halt if things don't go as planned.

Chris DuBois
Right. So yeah, you did bring up a great point, though, about using it to just build awareness. Even I had run a LinkedIn campaign for a client emerging market. So like, not a lot of people even knew about it. But through through an ad, people were like, Whoa, this exists. And just like just curious from that, and like, landing page didn't do as well as people weren't necessarily ready to change their mind. But the number of people that clicked on it was like, I mean, like 8% Wow, click through like it was it was huge. But uh, yeah, yes, sir.

Speaker 2
So but I think that it brings up another good point of just being strategic that about, okay, if I don't really have the budget or the resources to, like, truly bring in leads through paid right now, is there a way I can use it for me now? And do I have someone that can run it? You know, I mean, there's so many questions that go into the marketing mix. But I feel like there's always a way.

Chris DuBois
Actually, I'm gonna throw this question out. I don't know the answer. Why do so many big companies spend money on just their brand name and branded search terms for paid ads? When you generally people skip over the page, like anything it says sponsored or ad, but they're paying for their own brand name. If I search for that, I'm probably going to go to your company, but it never made sense to me, maybe you

Speaker 2
don't know. And I it's actually it's a little weird. To me, it's almost like maybe just so that they their competitors can't beat them out on their own brand name is the only thing I can think of. Yeah, I didn't think about that. But it's a little wacky, especially if you're a very well known brand. It's like, I actually, as a marketer, I 100% will skip over the ads to be like, want to be mindful of your budget. Right.

Chris DuBois
I have definitely done the opposite on competitors, and say, Here you go. Take that 15 cent click. So one of the things we're talking about in the pre interview was the importance of breaking things down into parts. Yeah, to be able to get after our targets better. Yeah. You want to get to share some of our

Speaker 2
sauce around that I have. I mean, I, I thought about this answer a bit. And I want to even break that down a bit further, there's two pieces, which is actually one is triage. So breaking down just the amount of overwhelm into parts that you need to look at first, like that, it's actually hugely important. And a startup has to be able to be like, what do we actually need to work on today? I will frequently see the to do list become a runaway train. And it's at that point that I'm like, well, we've gotten into this place where it was this overwhelm, let's triage. And then it's breaking those pieces down into how are we actually going to accomplish this. It's, I met less than I'm speaking for myself here. But I think other people experienced this too, which is, there's just always so much to do. And that can just lead to paralysis of getting anything done. So breaking those big problems down into just bite sized pieces of what are we going to do this week? What has to happen first, what hat what to get to the last piece? To me, it's the best way to get through the world of startup overwhelm,

Chris DuBois
right? Yeah, that makes sense. The book Essentialism by Greg McCowan, like revolutionized my efforts. I keep buying it for people even I need to get him on the podcast at some point just to I bought enough of his books. I can talk to him now. Okay, startups, we get the people will get the right people in place. We got the right processes. Now. We started looking at tools, platforms, you help companies with figuring out what's right for them. Yeah. How do you how do you approach that?

Speaker 2
So I feel super cheesy about the answer that I'm about about to provide you, but I'm excited for it now. Perfect. Okay. So, I mean, again, I work with early stage companies, which often means they're a patchwork quilt. So it's laying the foundation for tools, which is you need a CRM, you need to be able to track the customers you're talking to and the activity that you're having, you need an email marketing tool, right? Even if you send out one newsletter, a month, a quarter something we need to have way to track opens clicks to be able to test it's important, right? I'm going to assume we're going to be doing organic social media at the minimum, right, we need a tool for that we need to be able to schedule to automate. Again to track what's happening performance, all these things are key. And then I love things like Canva for graphics. Again, this is assuming we don't have a huge team, we don't have a lot of resources. These can be you know, great Grammarly to help make sure the writing is is sharp and buttoned up. And just getting these kind of basics into place. Right. There's other there's SEO, a few SEO Tools even now there's also some AI tools I might start recommending to help with just making the team feel bigger than it is. I think that's kind of the you know, the purpose of the tools that I recommend are really it's it's to make a process more streamlined, actually get a line of sight on what's happening with your marketing without Being hopefully overwhelming.

Chris DuBois
I very much appreciate your approach. Specifically honing in on the making your team feel bigger than it is because I've talked to so many companies who want to adopt technology. So they don't need as many team members. But it's, but it's like it's either expand or exploit. And so like, why would you not expand get your team now doing way more you can provide more value? The same number of people? I just have, it seems, seems to make more sense to me, but not I'm not the one paying their bills. I guess that's the

Unknown Speaker
I am with you. I feel the same. Yeah. Awesome.

Chris DuBois
So, okay, if I guess this doesn't matter if I have funding or not. There's only so much marketing you can be doing here it and at some point, you might have to outsource it. Yeah. How do you especially with early stage companies who don't have a big team, but they also probably don't have a big budget? How do they go about? How do you make recommendations to on whether they should actually outsource everything? Or just figure out how to do it in house?

Speaker 2
Yeah. So I think the answer to that is that the founder needs to have or if there happens to be a head of marketing, you know, a good hard look in the mirror about what is it that you really like working on? What do you truly have the skill set to work on? Not something and actually, it can affairs, it can also be What do you enjoy working on to, most of the time, I have found that marketing is something that it's not necessarily their primary skill set. And that's not always the case. But something else, sometimes it is. And, you know, creating content from scratch, you know, sending out emails, that it's just not really in their wheelhouse. And finding someone that can be a partner to to help with those things can really free up, you know, a founders time so that they can focus on the pieces of the business, that they are amazing, right? I mean, everyone has a piece that has a skill set that they are amazing, strong at love to do. Like, those are the things that you should do, the things that do not fall on that list, see if you can get rid of them.

Chris DuBois
Right. So on a different episode of the podcast, I'd met with Clint rush, share this idea, just get someone else to go back in here. But he talked basically a quad chart, and you have, you know, one side of the stuff you're good at stuff you're bad at and then the stuff you like, and the stuff you don't like. And a lot of leaders are really good at keeping the stuff they like and that they're good at, you know, moving some of the other stuff around. But a lot of times they get stuck in this stuff. They like what they're bad at and they don't realize it have you had to help people work through like, Hey, I know you like this, but like, it's not not your forte, and then we shift it to someone else on the team. It

Speaker 2
so yes, is the answer to that question. That's hard. Because I think the other thing that happens with founders and rightfully so, so this is not us. Again, this is not a slight. This is often their company as a baby, right? Like they built it from potentially nothing built from the ground up, they are so proud of it, they're so ingrained in it. And it can be really scary to let go of some of these pieces and give them to someone else to work on. And like I get it because I am also a founder, I'm not a startup founder, right. But it is, like, I sometimes I think to myself, like no one's no one's gonna understand as much as I do, no one's gonna get it. And then I'm like, oh my god, like, I'm my client right now, you know, and I get it. But having that such a strong attachment to pieces of your business and thinking perhaps you are good at to him doesn't ultimately help anyone. And so it's an honest, it's a difficult conversation, but it's an honest conversation. And one I think if you can attack it from a business perspective of just being like, look, I want to help you, like blow the business out of the water to do that we need to free up your time so that you can focus on XYZ I can help you do these things in here. How about here's how I can do it. Here's how I can can hopefully build your trust to know that I will get it done. I think that's that's how I approach it.

Chris DuBois
Yeah, I mean, into the the idea of winning, rather than not to enjoy Yeah. Awesome. And this is this has been like an action packed episode. Lots of good good tips in here. I want to move into our I keep calling them rapid fire questions, but I don't Alright, what do we got? We're gonna go semi slow. We'll go at first, what book do you think everyone you'd read.

Speaker 2
Okay, so I always screw the name up of this, which are two very different things, but it's called The War of Art. Have you heard of this? Have

Chris DuBois
you read this? Okay. Yes, Steven Pressfield.

Speaker 2
So I love this book so much, because it's the idea of a resistance, right? This kind of the theme of this book. And to me, it's the thing, right? That it keeps you from going to the gym, as he kind of says, like starting your diet, starting your business being the person that you were ultimately supposed to be. And I would want to read that it you know, I was early on and starting my own business. And I just got it, right. Like, there's so many times we could be like, I'm good. Or maybe I don't need to do this today. Or this is so hard. Maybe I don't. But I know, I knew that in order to really meet my goals, I had to move on past resistance. So I think this book is just a good fit for for founders, for entrepreneurs take a read, it's quite fascinating.

Chris DuBois
Because very what is next for you professionally.

Speaker 2
So I mean, just like everyone else, I'm still trying to figure out some of my own offerings, but I am actually working on a LinkedIn live at the moment. And I am partnering with a colleague of mine, her name is Alyssa Greenfield. And we are pulling together just this presentation on how to find and choose a marketing consultant. We are also half of the presentation will be on what we we the consultants look for and clients do. So I think it'll be an interesting take on that.

Chris DuBois
Yeah, that's a great way to to approach it. Finally, where can people find Yeah, so

Speaker 2
I am at fin marketing m.com. I would love to for anyone to reach out I actually would be very happy to give anybody you know, a free 30 minutes of consultation if they're so inclined, so that they see this.

Chris DuBois
Awesome. Well, that sounds great. Thank you for joining me. It's been awesome. Thank you so much. If you enjoyed today's episode, I would love a rating and review on your favorite podcast player. And for more information on how to build effective and efficient teams through your leadership. Visit leading four.com As always deserve it

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