S5E20 – How To Build Up Brand Authority as a B2B SaaS with Melissa Rosenthal

Do you want to build up Brand authority as a B2B SaaS and not sure where to start? In this episode of the Grow Your B2B SaaS Podcast, host Joran Hofman talks with Melissa Rosenthal, co-founder of Outlever. Melissa, with experience at BuzzFeed, Cheddar, and ClickUp, shares her expert insights on how to build brand authority and become a thought leader in the B2B SaaS space. If you’re ready to stand out and become a trusted voice in your industry, this episode is packed with tips you won’t want to miss!

Understanding Brand Authority

Melissa begins by explaining that brand authority is about having a position of credibility, built through various facets such as voice in the market, product quality, customer service, and consistency in emotions. It’s a complex amalgamation of different elements that make a brand stand out as a leader in its field. Brand authority isn’t just about having a thought leadership program or a cool brand; it’s about consistency across all areas.

The Role of Thought Leadership

Thought leadership is just one component of building brand authority. It involves a multifaceted approach to communications and content strategy, spanning platforms like LinkedIn and involving the right conversations at the right time. Thought leadership helps in establishing credibility but requires a strategic and consistent effort over time. Melissa emphasizes the importance of persistence, noting that many give up too soon without realizing the long-term growth and credibility that consistency can bring.

Timing and Approach to Brand Authority

Melissa shares that brand authority should be a consideration from the start, even for her own startup. At Outlever, brand authority is being built stealthily through consistent and focused efforts on customer service and relationships. The aim is to create a best-in-class experience for customers, which naturally leads to building brand authority.

Steps to Becoming a Brand Authority

Melissa outlines several key steps for B2B SaaS companies aiming to become a brand authority. These include having a strong position in the market, a clear vision of the future, and a perspective that positions the company as a thought leader. Consistency in brand style and visuals is also crucial, as it helps in making the brand recognizable and memorable in the market.

Leveraging Humor in Branding

Melissa discusses the power of humor in creating strong emotional connections and winning over audiences. She argues that even in serious markets, humor can be an effective tool if used correctly. The key is to understand the pain points of your audience and turn them into relatable and humorous content. This approach was successfully applied at ClickUp, where humor became a central part of their brand strategy.

Common Mistakes in Building Brand Authority

Melissa highlights several common mistakes companies make, such as lacking consistency, involving too many voices in brand decisions, and failing to give enough time for strategies to show results. She stresses the importance of having a focused team, including the head of brand and a communications person, working directly with leadership to build brand authority.

Owning the Conversation

Melissa introduces the concept of owning the conversation as a way for companies to build brand authority. With traditional media companies losing credibility, there’s an opportunity for companies to step in and become the primary source of news and insights in their industry. This involves not just having a perspective on every piece of news but also elevating credible voices within the space.

Challenges and Future of Brand Authority

Building brand authority is not easy, Melissa admits. It involves navigating the strong opinions of CEOs and ensuring that the brand is both creative and differentiated. Looking to the future, she sees brand becoming even more critical, especially in markets where product differentiation is minimal. Brand will be the key differentiator, and companies will need to invest heavily in building and maintaining it.

Practical Advice for SaaS Founders

For SaaS founders just starting out, Melissa advises focusing on product stickiness, customer satisfaction, and finding viral growth levers. As companies scale, it’s important to maintain a strong brand, explore new growth strategies, and avoid relying solely on traditional playbooks like SEO, which are becoming less effective.

Conclusion

Melissa Rosenthal provides a comprehensive guide to building brand authority in the B2B SaaS space. Her insights emphasize the importance of consistency, understanding your audience, leveraging humor, and owning the conversation to become a trusted voice in your industry. With the right strategies and a commitment to long-term growth, SaaS companies can establish themselves as leaders in their fields.

Key Timecodes

• (0:00) – Introduction by Melissa Rosenthal: Consistency over time breeds growth.
• (0:58) – Guest Introduction by Joran: Introducing Melissa Rosenthal, co-founder of Outlever.
• (1:39) – Discussion on Brand Authority: What is brand authority?
• (2:47) – Comparing Brand Authority and Thought Leadership.
• (4:01) – Building Brand Authority: When to start?
• (5:12) – Credibility Under the Rug: Building brand authority in stealth mode.
• (6:47) – Brand Authority as a Byproduct: Building credibility through customer success.
• (7:23) – Importance of Positioning and Brand Strategy.
• (8:53) – Steps for B2B SaaS Companies to Become Authorities.
• (10:24) – The Role of Humor in Brand Strategy.
• (12:19) – Applying Learnings from Previous Experiences.
• (13:16) – Humor’s Role Across Different Channels.
• (14:04) – The Importance of Humor in Serious Markets.
• (15:08) – Identification Humor: Understanding customer pain points.
• (15:42) – Challenges with a Wide Customer Profile.
• (15:55) – Common Mistakes in Building Brand Authority.
• (17:50) – Importance of Leadership in Brand Building.
• (18:50) – Owning the Conversation in Your Industry.
• (20:56) – Practical Steps to Own the Conversation.
• (21:57) – Challenges in Building Brand Authority.
• (24:02) – Key Roles in Brand Authority Discussions.
• (25:06) – The Future of Brand Authority and AI Impact.
• (28:02) – Advice for SaaS Founders Starting Out.
• (29:33) – Growing to 10 Million ARR: Key Strategies.
• (31:14) – The Role of SEO and Brand in Growth.
• (33:19) – General Advice for SaaS Founders.
• (33:56) – How to Contact Melissa Rosenthal: LinkedIn.
• (34:22) – Conclusion by Joran: Call for reviews and engagement.

Transcription

[00:00:00.000] – Melissa Rosenthal

I feel like a lot of people do something and then they don’t think it works after three months and they give up on it. They say, Oh, we tried this. But consistency over time breeds incremental growth, which breeds long-term growth and credibility. It’s just emotion. Every single small decision that you made is a part of your bigger story. Does that make it harder? Because that means that you have to really think about all these things very intensely? The answer is yes, but the answer is also you can test a lot of stuff and see what sticks and go in that direction. Humor is such an inherent strong emotional connection to something that if you can make them laugh, you can win them over. And that doesn’t mean they don’t trust you. There should be a million other reasons why they should trust you. But I don’t think we should wipe off humor just because the company and the market is serious. Today we’re going to talk about how to build up brand authority or become a thought leader as a B2B SaaS company.

[00:00:58.530] – Joran

My guest is Melissa Rosenthal, Well, Melissa is the co founder of Outliver, a company which helps to turn brands into the number one news resource in their industry. Before starting Outliver, Melissa worked in roles like CRO, CMO, VP of Creative at companies like BuzzFeed, Chether, and ClickUp. For the last one, she’s still an advisor, along with a couple of other companies. She has been looking to many kitchens, as we would say. This also results in her having a lot of experience in shaping brand credibility and customer trust. We will talk about how to become a trusted voice in your industry, a. K. A. Thought leader. Welcome to the show, Melissa.

[00:01:35.310] – Melissa Rosenthal

Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here and to chat.

[00:01:39.130] – Joran

Cool. We’re going to dive right in. I’ll talk about brand authority. How would you explain brand authority?

[00:01:46.730] – Melissa Rosenthal

I think brand authority is having a position of credibility, and it’s complicated because that’s built through so many different things. It’s not just one motion. It’s building it through your voice and market, the things you say, how you come across your consistency within your emotions and the quality of your product, the quality of your customer service. I think brand authority is really the combination of all of those things. So is brand, which is why brand authority and brand having a really strong brand equals having a really strong brand authority. So people usually think it’s like brand authority is like a thought leadership program or a really cool brand. But it’s really all these things that builds it up and make it what it is. Where you look to the leader in market, you say they’re leader. It’s like, why are they the leader? Oh, because have you seen how fast they respond in customer service? Their product is top-notch. They have the best visuals in their brand. It’s so clean. They come across really well. It’s all these different things. I think the makeup, what a best in class brand looks like. Yeah.

[00:02:47.840] – Joran

How would it compare to thought leadership?

[00:02:51.120] – Melissa Rosenthal

Thought leadership is just one piece of that. Thought leadership is one piece that helps you build brand authority in market. And thought leadership is also very multifaceted a way of approaching comms and internal content strategy. It can span LinkedIn, it can span having the right conversations at the right time. It can span a very strong perspective from your founders. It can be founder-led growth on LinkedIn. It definitely depends on what stage you are at as a company and as an organization. But thought leadership, I want to say, it is one small piece of growing brand authority, but it is a full cylinder way of operating within building that. It’s not just one of these things. It’s a strategy. You have to focus on it and you have to do it well, and it’s not doing one thing and then giving up. It’s consistency over time. I want to stress that point. I feel like a lot of people do something and then they don’t think it works after three months and they give up on it. They say, Oh, we I’ve tried this, but consistency over time freeds incremental growth, which freeds long term growth and credibility.

[00:03:53.790] – Joran

It’s just emotion. I think that’s the most important thing in brand. You have to be consistent in the things you do to actually to be able to build up a brand?

[00:04:01.700] – Melissa Rosenthal

Over a long period of time.

[00:04:04.460] – Joran

Yeah. Let’s talk about that because you work in many big companies, right? When do you start thinking about building up brand authority? Are you already thinking about it right now for your own startup?

[00:04:14.360] – Melissa Rosenthal

Brand authority for us will happen as a byproduct of our motion. The answer is yes. It’s the hyper and micro focus on every single thing we do for every one of our customers and every person that we speak to on behalf of our customers. Dialing in that motion will allow us to create brand authority. The reality is that it will happen, like in a stealth way, but it will happen in a really commanding way if we do it really well. My motion at Outliver is unlike anything I built because it’s public-facing, but also less public-facing and the credibility is built under the rug, I would say. It’s a different motion. It’s a very different way of operating and building credibility, which is something that is absolutely top of mind, happens through our motion.

[00:05:12.410] – Joran

What do you mean with credibilities under the rug? Are you still somewhat in Stealth right now?

[00:05:18.110] – Melissa Rosenthal

We are and we are. Our motion is really to put our customers front and center. It’s not about building our brand, it’s building our brand through what we’re doing for them, which I think in a way, at the At the end of the day, everything you do is for your customers. Your product is for your customers. You want to create a best-in-class experience. You want to create all these things that do really well for them and have as a cheaper, high self-serve SaaS platform, you have to go out the gate with this very public-facing, We’re here. This is what we stand for. This is what we do. We’re not quite like that. We’re tech-enabled service, and we’re very premiumly charged. We just have to think about it differently. Us going out the gate and being like, We’re here. We don’t really need to do that. We just have to deal differently. Our motion is our credibility if we do it well. So we’re thinking about that differently. But we will have to think about that, and we will have to think about dialing that in a direction in which, how do we think about ourselves in market?

[00:06:14.330] – Melissa Rosenthal

How do we position ourselves in market. We are definitely not there quite yet, but we are in the active building credibility through the motion itself. But then, yes, we’ll have to deal with the thing that everyone else has to deal with, which is how to position ourselves, how to build credibility in a way that we ultimately We have the vision of positioning ourselves in market. Yeah, there’s a lot that will come in phase two of that. But phase one is just have really happy customers that have a ton of value from what we’re doing for them. That’s the starting point. And you have good build good relationships. I think that’s key for us right now.

[00:06:47.090] – Joran

But no matter if you like it or not, you’re building grand authority from the beginning as any SaaS company.

[00:06:52.530] – Melissa Rosenthal

Yeah, it’s already happening from customers that are really happy. We’re getting great referrals, people are talking about us. If we go into it and dive or the people that we’re interviewing are already interested in our motion because they’re having a good experience with us. So it’s happening all around. It’s like a triangulation of our motion. And if we do a great job, we are building that credibility, that authority. People are more curious about what we’re doing. And then obviously, then there’s the second phase of that, which is the branding of that, which once we’re in a good spot, that’ll be an exciting thing to focus on, but got to do zero to one first.

[00:07:23.400] – Joran

Exactly. Yeah. Maybe for people listening, we just had a podcast with April Dunford. You mentioned positioning. We just discussed how to position your B2B SaaS, and we just had one with Angeli Mullins as well, like how to build up a brand strategy. If we dive deeper into this, if we’re going to talk about how to become a brand authority, are there any certain steps or any certain things you would recommend the B2B SaaS company needs to do to become a real authority?

[00:07:48.120] – Melissa Rosenthal

I think there is a couple of things, and it’s tough to do these, but it have a really strong position in the services and offers that you’re providing, where you stand in market, and how you view the future. I I think the companies have the best brand authority, have a clear vision of what the future holds, and their perspective of how they fit into it is almost a byproduct of how they view the future. It’s almost like the company itself is a thought leader. If the company itself is a thought leader, what is that company’s perspective? Maybe it’s not one person from the company. It’s not the CEO. It can be the CEO. But when you think about that company, you think about the future of that industry. So I think that’s ultimately what the best and highest class of credibility brand authority looks like. It’s really having that strong perspective. It’s having a very clear, consistent style of brand that is recognizable in market, that when you see it without even seeing their brand logos, it’s that company. Those two things to me are it’s almost like the subconscious, I already know what this stands for, and I already know what this looks like, and it’s this company.

[00:08:53.280] – Melissa Rosenthal

I think it’s everything that you do is that company. Clickup, we realized very early that we’re spending a lot of money in performance ads. And these performance ads, yeah, of course, they’re meant to drive our align, and we have to look at the CAC payback, and they’re DR-driven. But at the end of the day, they build our brand. They will build our credibility, our authority, our personality, and people will relate us back to these ads. So they have to be amazing. We had to take a very strong perspective on what those would look like in market. And I think a lot of companies are just like, It’s just performance. It’s just this. It’s just that. And they look at as this micro way of acquiring users and acquiring customers, but they don’t think of it as a piece of a holistic brand strategy. So some of the things that are actually really important get really lost because they’re just being used as a tool, but not a part of a bigger story. I think that every single small decision that you make is a part of your bigger story. Does that make it harder? Because that means that you have to really think about all these things very intensely.

[00:09:55.890] – Melissa Rosenthal

The answer is yes, but the answer is also you can test a lot of and see what sticks and go in that direction. Having a perspective on all of the small decisions that go out every day. Maybe it’s an email sequence, maybe it’s a social post, maybe it’s a strategy across customer marketing. All of these things are a part of this, and the company needs to agree holistically how it wants to present itself and really bring these departments together, which are sometimes siloed.

[00:10:24.480] – Joran

I really love the conversation with Chris, I had regarding ClickUp. He’s doing social media. Of course, we’ve dived into his social media strategy, and it’s super funny, like the videos you see now from ClickUp, which are unrelated to sometimes what they do. You will remember that they’re from them and it’s some brand they’re building right now.

[00:10:46.000] – Melissa Rosenthal

That’s what the North Star was. How do we create something that will be memorable? We want to come off humorous. We want to play to being your most productive best friend. That should be echoed throughout every single thing we did and it was. I think that’s something that trickles down that’s working and you become known for it and you’re able to then have a real longevity within that occupying that space. Yeah.

[00:11:10.680] – Joran

Because he looked at purely from the social media aspect, but what was your role at CUP when you left?

[00:11:16.240] – Melissa Rosenthal

I was Chief Creative Officer, so over a sub brand.

[00:11:19.320] – Joran

Exactly. Then for you, it was not just the fun stuff, but also you were taking a look at the global- Yeah, it was everything, pretty much.

[00:11:26.950] – Melissa Rosenthal

But yeah, and social was a big part of it. Our ad strategy, our Our design strategy, all of that.

[00:11:32.440] – Joran

Yeah, at least I see a lot of the funny things, right? Did you leverage it in also all the other channels? Oh, yeah.

[00:11:39.240] – Melissa Rosenthal

Humor was actually our biggest tool when I was there, too. We focused very heavily on bringing humor into every single thing that we did. Chris has really focused on TikTok. We didn’t focus on TikTok at that time. We were building our larger performance strategy. What do our ads look like? We had a pretty robust video team, but it was all humor. Humor was the number one thing that we focused on from day one. Our entire team was really from BuzzFeed. We brought our BuzzFeed style into what that could look like for B2B SaaS. That’s how we arrived on, we want to make work fun. We want to be the place where it’s the water-cooler of what happens around work and we can laugh about it, and we did that.

[00:12:19.180] – Joran

Yeah. Is that something now, for example, you’re taking also back to your current startup?

[00:12:25.350] – Melissa Rosenthal

Not really. It’s very different. In my own personal brand, sure, yes, I am a funny person. I love satire. I love trolling. That’s in my personality. But my company now is just a little bit different. It doesn’t operate the same way. We don’t need mass awareness. It’s very different, very niche down. Different methods of marketing, different ways of thinking about things, which is fun. The best thing you could always do is take pieces of what worked from your last synth and apply those in a smart way moving forward, but never copy and paste the same playbook. If I do that, I’m bored. I’ve taken a lot from ClickUp so much. But the The brand strategy there is very different from what we’re trying to achieve here.

[00:13:03.870] – Joran

Yeah, because I think a lot of SaaS companies have the same challenge. They see, for example, a brand making a lot of humorous content, but they think, Yeah, this is not going to work for us or this won’t work in our industry.

[00:13:16.450] – Melissa Rosenthal

I disagree with that, though. I think companies that even like cyber security, of course, there’s the white papers and the things that you need to do to put out. But the reality is feature parity and company parity and product parity are in all time. You could create a product that used to take five years in three months. So how do you differentiate? I don’t really agree with that. I think also humor is such an inherent strong emotional connection to something that if you can make them laugh, you can win them over. And that doesn’t mean they don’t trust you. There should be a million other reasons why they should trust you. But I don’t think we should wipe off humor just because the company and the market is serious. And I really disagree with that strongly. I don’t know. I’m happy to prove it wrong. But if people are like, I don’t trust this company because sometimes they’re funny, that doesn’t really make much sense to me.

[00:14:04.140] – Joran

It’s a good point. I think a lot of people are like, maybe it’s hard to make things funny about in your company.

[00:14:09.920] – Melissa Rosenthal

That is definitely very true because it can’t be slapstick funny and it can’t be like we went around the table and we internally thought it was funny, but our market doesn’t think it’s funny. It really has to be getting into the minds and the brains of the truest pain points that your customers and your ICP face, and then turning those on their and making it like, we get you, we see you, we understand you. I think that’s where great humor comes from. It’s when people identify with the humor, and it’s not just slapstick. It’s not humor for humor state. You see yourself in the humor. I think that’s what I’ve seen work the best That’s what I learned from BuzzFeed, that always worked, and that’s what worked at ClickUp. We would really try to identify the pain points of our ICPs and turn that into identification humor, which is you see yourself in that humor because you deal with those problems and struggles every day. Not all of them are serious. They’re funny. They’re really annoying things that you deal with as a project manager. We see you, we understand you, and that was really our perspective.

[00:15:08.130] – Joran

Yeah. I think in this point you make, you really have to understand your ICP to have them relate to the things you’re going to put out.

[00:15:15.640] – Melissa Rosenthal

Which is hard when your TAM is very big and your ICP is across the board, from engineering to project management to marketing managers to agencies. Then you’re just like… That’s maybe the hardest challenge I’ve had to deal with, which is you have to understand so deeply all all of these different personas that then you can market to them well, and they can also find humor in your marketing. It’s a pretty impossible task for a company that has a very strong one, two ICP set. Might be easier, actually.

[00:15:42.670] – Joran

Nice. I guess we’re now talking about best practices or how to do things. If we turn things around, what are some common mistakes companies make while trying to build up brand authority?

[00:15:55.620] – Melissa Rosenthal

One is that they half-ass it. They do one part of the motion and then they stop, and they’re just like, That didn’t work. Two is that they lack the consistency of doing it every day. The expectations are that there’s ROI in the first month. The other is that you incorporate way too many people in the conversation within the company. Company is large enough and everyone has an opinion on brands, credibility, and authority. All of a sudden, you have 100 people in the conversation, you’re never going to get anywhere. So I think it’s just a byproduct. You got to stick to something long enough to see the results from it. You have to have a strong perspective And 100 people can’t give their opinions on what they think about it. It has to come from the leadership that you hire to build that and work with them directly to pivot if it’s not correct. If it’s not, track it, obviously very critically in market, have the analytics and the data to be able to do that. You run studies very often and surveys very often to understand how you’re tracking. But it has to be all these things.

[00:16:51.030] – Melissa Rosenthal

It has to be its own built-out motion. It’s like head of brand, right? But that person should be head of brand authority, head of brand credibility, because Because I think brand stretches to that in many ways. That role, in my opinion, should actually just be combined. Because sometimes you have a comms leader, and the comms leader is really tasked with brand authority, brand credibility. But at the same time, they’re not building the brand. So you have this disconnected comms team very rarely. I mean, we did actually very closely at. But I see where it’s very siloed and the comms team isn’t working as closely with the brand team. They’re working in their own area, they work with sales, they work with product marketing. But they don’t work with brands. But they’re both building up on the same motion. You’re doing this collectively. If it doesn’t work and if it’s not in sync and you’re saying different things or coming across differently, it breaks. I don’t know. I think maybe we see the combination of that roll over time. Common experts will hate me for saying that, actually. I’ll probably get some hate on that one, but that’s what I believe.

[00:17:50.780] – Joran

But it’s good for the views or good for the listeners. So we love that. Great. Now, what you’re saying, head of brand, if they don’t do the communication, then they can’t really control the outcome they’re being measured on. So that doesn’t make any sense.

[00:18:03.700] – Melissa Rosenthal

I just think we need to just start thinking about brand differently. I think it’s been siloed into this one area where it really does have much more of a far-reaching effect on everything. We should think about how we structure that side of the house a little bit differently.

[00:18:17.740] – Joran

Are you struggling to find people and companies which have access to your ideal customer profile? At Reditus, we just launched the second side of the marketplace, which allows you to search, filter, and contact B2B SaaS affiliates which have access to the audience you’re looking for. We do this by leveraging first-party data sources. Want to learn more? Go to getreadit. Com. When we talk about brand authority, I think it’s also, I did some research, looked at some LinkedIn posts, you talk about owning the conversation as people already talk about you. What do you mean with this?

[00:18:50.610] – Melissa Rosenthal

That’s our entire motion, Outletter. We believe that media companies are at this really interesting crossroads where they don’t really matter as much. The credibility is lost. They’ve gutted their newsrooms. They don’t have journalists anymore. They’ve got one person running it. The content isn’t great. A lot of it’s AI-driven and AI-written. And I’m speaking outside of maybe the New York Times and Bloomberg. Everything else has really lost its credibility. So what does that do? That opens up a huge opportunity for companies to now step in and be able to own the news, own the conversations in their area, which they never had the ability to do before. So now they can own the things that are happening in their space that they want to have a perspective on every single day. And there’s two parts of that. One is I don’t think that they need to have the perspective on every single piece of news. But what I do think is that if they’re able to elevate other people within that space that have credibility, that have authority, that are important, they, as a byproduct, receive their own view of credibility and authority. Basically, it’s a combination.

[00:19:54.640] – Melissa Rosenthal

What we do is a combination of thought leadership, brand and credibility, authority building, relationship building within your space. We’re combining a bunch of emotions that I think people are like, Wait, these things don’t always work together, but they should. And I think there’s just a new way of being able to look at it. And I think we’re at a point now where it’s entirely possible. When we were building Chetter, everyone was building a media company. There were thousands of media companies that have had these established voices that were building these up to establish their own credibility so that advertisers will work with them. That’s not the case anymore. We’re in a completely new different playing field where companies can step in and do that. I think they have to be able to think that way and understand the value of what that brings them. But it’s a really interesting time, which is why we’re stepping into the space that we’re stepping into.

[00:20:42.900] – Joran

Yeah, because one thing which popped up in my mind is with thought leadership you can run on LinkedIn, where you could promote my post, for example, if I talk about anything to Outliver. Any other practical things companies can do to achieve this?

[00:20:56.960] – Melissa Rosenthal

Work with us? I think founder-led thought leadership on LinkedIn is really important. Having a very clear perspective and consistency on there is important. I think having a point of view when you do get press and having you speak on a few topics very well and doing that, trying to do that consistently makes sense. I think it’s more of a sniper shot now, and a tree falls in the forest. You get one article, an entrepreneur, no one cares. But I think doing thought leadership pieces consistently and writing your own posts and writing your own pieces about where you think the world is going, I think that has a real effect. Then I think being able to own the conversations that your customers and your world is in every single day is this trifecta of how you build brand and credibility, authority, and thought leadership, and also giving people the voices that actually matter. It’s really creating that and thinking about it in just a different way.

[00:21:46.130] – Joran

We all make it sound pretty easy, I guess, building up a brand, building up an authority. But what are some common challenges, obstacles companies will face while they try to do this?

[00:21:57.520] – Melissa Rosenthal

It’s definitely not easy. The CEO usually has a very strong perspective, whether it’s right or whether it’s wrong. You’re trying to navigate both that person’s baby, which they’ve built and how they view it, how the market will view it, and how to bring that to life in a way that is tasteful and well thought of and creative and differentiated. And that’s hard. That’s really hard. There’s no navigating that. I don’t think people think. Maybe if they’ve never done it, they think it’s easy. But it’s one of the most challenging things you could do. You’re fighting battles every single day. Everything is being criticized, everything is being analyzed, and now you need to show a return on it. It’s incredibly challenging. I think you’re swimming upstream. It’s really hard.

[00:22:46.900] – Joran

Yeah. Then I guess you come back to the common mistakes. You have to be consistent. You can’t do it half-a-hour. You have to stay with it. And then from there, you can overcome these challenges. Yes.

[00:22:57.310] – Melissa Rosenthal

If you have a good leadership team that supports what this motion is. The other part is that they don’t believe in it, and they’re doing it because they think they have to have it, and there’s not enough love given to it and time and appreciation for it. I’ve seen that arrive very often It means, Oh, the company and the leadership team brought a brand team in or had a brand. They don’t care about brand. That’s not going to work. Everything is top-down. So if the leadership team, if the founder doesn’t believe in brand, you’re going to have a problem. I speak to brand leaders all the time, and it’s like, what do I do? My answer is, I never would have joined the companies that I joined if the leadership didn’t believe in brand. That wouldn’t have been a good fit for me because I was tasked with building it. How can you be tasked with building something that your boss, your founder, your leadership doesn’t believe in? It’s in contrast with being able to actually perform the function that you’ve been brought in to do.

[00:23:50.320] – Joran

If we make it real practical, because you also mentioned you can’t have too many people in the conversation, right? So leadership has to be involved. What are some key roles? Because you also mentioned CEO has a really clear perspective.

[00:24:02.800] – Melissa Rosenthal

The head of brand and the commsperson. That’s it. I think way too often you start to involve product marketing, you start to involve customer support, you start to involve all these people. It’s not like these are happening in meetings. It’s more just like, creeping in over Slack, creeping in over the conversations that are happening where one person, another person in leadership pings the CEO, I don’t like this. And then all of a sudden, there’s this doubt factor that starts to creep into that person’s mind where they’re not looking at the larger picture or what the data actually says. Someone else is in their ear. I think it’s hard because you’re a founder and everything someone says to you, you’re going to take and you’re going to be like, I need to really think about this. But if you do that too often, it’s going to fall apart. You have to trust or fire that person Because if you don’t like your head of brand and they’re not good, fire them, fire someone else it is. But to get in their way because you’re constantly listening to the opinions of 20 people that don’t have that discipline, that’s just not a good way of operating.

[00:24:56.780] – Joran

We’re going to take a When you look at the future. How do you see the future of becoming or building a brand authority? You mentioned already without either, right?

[00:25:06.820] – Melissa Rosenthal

So maybe even more- We’re a part of that. I think it’s effing hard. It’s really hard because companies today, there is so much… We’re back in 2021, we just are with AI. Seeing the amount of companies that are raising the amount of money that they’re raising and the bets going into these companies where there is little to no differentiation in what they’re doing outside of price, and Pardon me for saying this, but a lot of them don’t even need to exist. Oh, my God. It’s even harder because basically what we were dealing with in 2021 is you had XFALL, you had software sprawl. Everything that was coming out was a siloed product. You had Loom for video recording, you had Miro for whiteboarding, you had this for that, which didn’t mean that those companies couldn’t build brands. It just means that they couldn’t have the retention and the stickiness that a company that had bundled products would to have long term. That’s why a lot of these companies sold for about half of what they were valued or less than that, and why a company like ClickUp or at last in are continuing to thrive because it’s bundled.

[00:26:09.980] – Melissa Rosenthal

These AI products were seeing the same exact thing, and it’s harder because there’s literally zero differentiation in the product itself. To become a market leader in those spaces, you really have to either start bundling, have a really strong perspective, or have AI modeling that is 20X better than anyone else, which I don’t think it’s possible because they’re all built from the same models. So how do you do that? Brand becomes everything. I think now more than ever, brand will make you win, and that’s it, period. You have to start doing every single thing, and you’re going to pour a lot of money and a lot of fuel on that fire. If you’re good, I hope you raise $100 million because that’s what will take the market the shit out of what you’re doing, because that’s the only way that you will win, and product, and customer service. But to differentiate yourself, brand has to be number one.

[00:26:55.750] – Joran

Yeah, because in New York, nowadays, you can almost rebuild everything quickly with AI.

[00:26:59.600] – Melissa Rosenthal

Oh, Look at Deep Seat, right? Isn’t that the perfect example? They came out of nowhere, and now they train models for $5 million versus OpenAI, it’s $100 million. And I don’t know if you’ve played around with it, but awesome. It’s so close to OpenAI. It makes no mistakes. Honestly, I’ve had a great experience using it. I’ve been using it for two days. Everyone is now an expert on it. For that to come out of nowhere and rock the entire world, wipe a trillion dollars off the market cap, that should be a warning sign for every other company that there’s not longevity in what they’re building. I don’t know if the market leader today are the market leaders tomorrow. Let me only think that it’ll differentiate you this brand.

[00:27:33.740] – Joran

Yeah, I fully agree there because they can take over super quickly if it’s true or not what they say. I saw some debates on that as well. But either way, the market they take in is such a small amount of time, that’s crazy.

[00:27:46.670] – Melissa Rosenthal

Absolutely.

[00:27:48.110] – Joran

Cool. We’re going to dive into the final question. We’re going to take it a bit more broader. When we talk about growing a B2B SaaS, what advice would you give a SaaS founder who is just starting out and growing to 10K view the current value?

[00:28:02.300] – Melissa Rosenthal

Focus on the product, focus on the stickiness, focus on your customer set, make sure they’re happy, see if there is a viral coefficient within them referring other people, and really do 10X on that. Going from zero to 10K MRR for any self-serve platform is probably the hardest thing you can get to. Then the 20K, 50K, that’s going to be the hardest point in your entire, probably, existence because you have to prove that the product has value, that it’s sticky, that your retention is high and that your churn is low. It’s It’s all about customer experience, getting the pricing right, getting the viral coefficient and the growth levers. And from there it becomes easier. We are low millions of ARR. We’re still establishing all of these things, but in a way where we don’t know what our churn is yet. We don’t know what our stickiness is yet. We haven’t built out more than 5% of our product vision. We’re in this interesting place where we have a premium product. We do have a significant amount of ARR, but we don’t know all of things that sometimes self-serve platforms, fully self-serve platforms, learn very early on.

[00:29:04.960] – Melissa Rosenthal

Not that they fix everything, but I think it’s focusing on all the things, no matter where you are, it’s focusing on all those very core things to start. Because if you don’t have those as fundamentals, then you’re never going to grow correctly and you’re never going to be able to scale well.

[00:29:19.820] – Joran

Then let’s assume now we pass 10K MR, we focus on the fundamentals, we focus on the customer, and we’re going to make a big step towards 10 million ARR. What What advice would you give SaaS funders here?

[00:29:33.300] – Melissa Rosenthal

That’s the growth engine where you are incredibly sticky. People use you every day. There’s growth loops where you’re able to retain pricing, but there’s instances where you can upsell in a very smart and strategic way. People are recommending you to other people. The customer experience is next to flawless. You’re getting ratings on all of the big sites that say that you’re number one, number two, we know what they are. But I think it’s that motion of that’s where the credibility needs is really important. And I think it starts at that zero to 10K. And then from there, it’s like adding fuel to the fire there. These are the motions that are working. And then it’s also building brand. You have to build brand to get to 10 million, which doesn’t need to be doing a Super Bowl or spending millions of dollars on performance, but it is building brand. It’s founder-led, potentially. It’s having a very clear point of view. It’s trying new things. It’s being hacky about it. There’s less place to grow than ever before. Seo is at a really interesting flex point where, I don’t know if you saw the HubSpot drop off from 9 million to what, 800,000 monthly organics?

[00:30:38.620] – Melissa Rosenthal

It’s not good. The future of SEO, and also with the operator, we just saw that now it can go in and do the entire SEO function itself. So what does that mean? It means that the commoditization of SEO is just at this point where everything’s going to look the same and feel the same. It’s starting to think outside of the box. And I think a lot of people are just too used to the playbook. So my short Answers. I think it’s really you got to think about new ways of thinking to grow to 10 million AR at this point. You got the fundamentals, correct. Great. But then now you have to completely adopt a new mindset to get there to the next phase.

[00:31:14.800] – Joran

I think especially with AI, where normally people would say you have to do SEO, you have to do these things. It’s not that given anymore.

[00:31:21.180] – Melissa Rosenthal

If anyone says that, you know that they don’t know what they’re talking about. If you’re going to invest your budget into SEO, there are smart ways to do things. There’s making things more interactive, it’s making it more timely. It’s incorporating new voices into it. There are ways to try to hedge bets on a CEO, but you can’t do the old playbook.

[00:31:38.580] – Joran

Let me see if I can try to summarize this. Brand authority, combination of all different aspects related to your company. You are building a brand authority from the early States already, so make sure you drive value for your clients. Think about customer support product, great experience, focus on delivering them ROI. Thought leadership is just a small piece of it. Main thing, it is consistency over time, and the focus has to be creating happy customers. Have a strong positioning, clear vision of what the future holds. Ideally, your company being a thought leader. Best practices, own the conversation. Don’t copy and paste playbooks from your as companies or competitors. Really understand your ICP. If you’re going to focus on brand authority challenges, you are going to fight battles every day. Everything will be criticized. It will be hard if your features are super similar to your competitor So brand has to be your main differentiator. Mistakes, again, lack of consistency, doing it half as too many people in the conversation. Leadership has to be involved, but you can only start with the CEO, head of brand, and the comms person. We talk about 10K MR, focus on the customer.

[00:32:47.720] – Joran

It will be the hardest period, but focus on the fundamentals before moving to the next stage. And then 10 million ARR, have a sticky product, have multiple growth loops, and start thinking outside of the box to grow.

[00:32:59.630] – Melissa Rosenthal

Yeah, Wow. The fact that you didn’t need AI to do that, that’s great. It was a great summary.

[00:33:04.220] – Joran

Luckily, we can still make notes ourselves. If we, I guess, outside of the conversation regarding brand authority, any general advice towards other SaaS founders who are now listening on their journey you want to give to them before we close off?

[00:33:19.150] – Melissa Rosenthal

You’re going to have to get in the weeds of the growth very early, and you’re going to have to probably command it very early and be an aggressive operator and do the founder-led growth thing to start, because I think that’s where is. Having that perspective, having that personal brand as a founder is really important. I think that the traditional playbooks don’t work and don’t invest your money there. Think of things that are outside the box. Empire people that aren’t just going to come from other large organizations and copy and paste things that A, they weren’t directly involved in, or B, that were relevant 10, five years ago because they’re not relevant today.

[00:33:53.440] – Joran

Nice. If people want to get in contact with me, Melissa, how can they do?

[00:33:56.700] – Melissa Rosenthal

Linkedin. I am there all the time doing the founder It’s a lead growth thing.

[00:34:01.860] – Joran

Nice. I’m going to add the link to your LinkedIn profile. People can find you. I would definitely recommend follow Melissa because she is there all the time. She’s building a brand for herself, becoming a thought leader on LinkedIn, so definitely follow her. If you are listening please leave us a review. It’s going to help us to beat the algorithms and grow the podcast. Thanks for coming on, Melissa.

[00:34:22.280] – Melissa Rosenthal

Thank you so much for having me.

[00:34:23.990] – Joran

Thank you for watching this show of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. You made it till the end, so I think we can I assume you like this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you like this content, feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show, if you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. More than happy to take a look at it. If you want to know more about Reditus, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS..