3 Lessons On How To Become A Viral Brand In 4 Short Years
Billie Eilish is an 18-year old pop star who’s grown a 52.9 million fan base within 4 short years.
I think Billie’s the perfect case study of what to do when creating a new brand, especially if you’re launching your small business in current times.
Between 2017 and 2018, Billie Eilish’s Instagram audience grew from 257K to 6.3 million. At the time of this piece, she’s now at 52.9 million followers.
In my opinion, her insane audience growth is a result of branding that you’re either mesmerized by or absolutely loathe. She’s polarizing, and it works.
Below are three ways…
Not all business coaches know what they’re doing — here are the telltale signs.
If you’ve worked with business coaches before, whether through 1-on-1 sessions, group coaching, or a course, you may have had healthy exposure to coaches that made you feel worse rather than wonderful about the state of your business. Or, you may have received business advice that was unhelpful, maybe even detrimental to the progress of your business.
Real talk: there are business coaches out there that don’t know what they’re doing and take a lot of innocent businesses down with them through their lack of experience.
When business owners seek help, they defer to the experts to guide them. The…
3 important design thinking teachings that’ll give you a competitive edge.
When I reflect on what has given me my edge over the years as an entrepreneur and as an advisor to startups, I always come back to the tools I’ve pulled from the design thinking methodology. It has largely informed my unique concoction of my special sauce, aka my competitive edge.
Design thinking has been an important asset to me and has informed the build of each business I’ve built over the course of 14 years. …
3 guiding questions to turn your brand into one that provokes customer action.
If you’re a newer business, it’s likely that auditing your brand hasn’t been high on your priority list. Slapping a logo on your brand and having enough content to fill up your weekly channel drop may feel like it’s enough to have a working, effective brand. You may feel like things are in a good place because you’re putting content out there and saying something.
Having something to say without strong ROI or strategic intent behind it is in my opinion, a solid waste of time. …
When is showing yourself too much for your business?
Every business owner comes across the crossroads of identity early in the process of building out their business. There is a lingering question of how much to reveal, how much to integrate the founder’s story into a business, and when it’s all too much.
This is an important question to ponder if you care about optimizing your online storefronts so that you don’t leave money at the table or lose sales. Omitting or neglecting your personal story from your brand’s narrative is the biggest sales mistake you can make, in my humble opinion.
Ignoring the importance of a founder’s/founding team…
A simple three-step framework to get you from loathing to joy
There are a set of tasks all of us absolutely loathe doing for our business.
Social media marketing, financials, and sales calls are usually the top ones, but you can insert any feared to-do list item in your head into this exercise and it’ll work for this framework I’m about to show you.
I am at a point in my business right now where I don’t do any work I dislike. It’s not because I got them off my plate. It’s because I’ve used a framework to help me shift the perspective I hold around those tasks.
I discovered this…
Wisdom found among the entrepreneurs we admire, and the traits we can adopt to become them.
Have you ever met an entrepreneur you really look up to? Where everything they say lights you up and resonates with you on a deep level? This is someone who drops knowledge that has a transformational impact on you or brings immense clarity to whatever challenge you have at the moment.
I call this person an Entrepreneur Jedi. Maybe a splash of Yoda in there too.
An Entrepreneur Jedi is someone who is all wisdom, no bullsh*t. They’re the epitome of elevated consciousness, success, and you’re always on the edge of your seat when they have something to say. …
Here’s why the startup advice you read online isn’t changing your business and three guiding tenets to help you.
The majority of startups, including yours are mostly funded through personal money. Self-funded startups represent the largest slice of funded startups, and yet, these types of startups are given the least advice unique to their situation.
Aligned with what I mentioned last week in my piece called the “Anti-Silicon Valley Business Plan” — popular online magazines like Forbes and Entrepreneur Magazine typically write for the 1% of startups that are funded by VC and angel investors (led by what I call super-funded founders), not for the remaining 99% that are self-funded, receive friends and family money, and more when launching.
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What startups that don’t get funded by VCs and angel investors should focus on.
This is Part II of a two-parter. If you missed what you *shouldn’t* be doing in years 1–3, find that post here.
I think that there’s a lack of humanity in how Silicon Valley startups look at user acquisition.
It’s all so numbers and data-heavy, and you rarely see these founders having deep discussions about how their audience feels about them, or how to get their audience to fall in love with them. They talk about numbers way more than talking about the human emotions that ride behind user acquisition.
It’s all CPA, attrition, burn rate, and not as much…
What startups that don’t get funded by VCs and angel investors should not do.
This is Part I of a two-parter. Click here to read Part II.
When I have the opportunity to coach an entrepreneur through building a new business from scratch, our first order of business is to remove all the bullsh*t “should’s” that startup culture tells entrepreneurs to populate onto their to-do list.
Here’s the image a lot of entrepreneurs have in their head of what they should be doing when they have a new business idea: 1) dream up idea 2) write a business plan and pitch deck 3) look for investors 4) build 5) make sales, hopefully, hit traction…
Sophia Sunwoo
I create moneymaking brands with womxn entrepreneurs who refuse to settle for mediocre. www.ascent-strategy.com
