In a feature-parity world, it’s all about your brand — here’s how your startup can nail it in the first 100 days

Let’s say you‘re the CMO of a scrappy startup, and you’ve got limited (or no) budget. You’ve got no name recognition, and no time to waste. So, where do you start to make the biggest impact?

Brand.

I’ve seen this firsthand. I helped build Drift into a category-defining brand and turned my company, Exit Five, into a seven-figure media business.

If I were starting from zero today, I wouldn’t wait. I’d go all-in on brand from day one. Here’s my approach to building a brand in your first 100 days, before you have money or traction. Let’s dive in.

Why Brand Matters More Than Ever for Early Startups

Today’s AI-driven market is full of copycat software tools. So, your brand needs a differentiating factor. For an established company, that’s brand proof. The CRM with 20 years of experience has more proof of its brand value. Early-stage startups can’t point to that type of history.

So, if you’re a scrappy startup, you’ll need to try harder to stand out. That requires really knowing your story. What’s your message, and what makes your journey so compelling that people remember? Then, can you reinforce that message with brand elements — a unique motif, a recognizable logo, or a color scheme that screams you?

Take a look at this company called Blaze AI, a marketing tool built to drive automation. The branding is so eye-catching that it stands out. The superhero theme is memorable. I’m reminded of my favorite comic books where remarkable characters save the day. Perhaps their offering can do just that for my business.

Source

Source

As a startup, you should already have competitive features. Your offering needs to be just as good or better than what’s already in the market. And, when the product holds its own, your vibe, story, and the platforms you use set you apart. You’ll resonate with customers who are authentically on the same wavelength. That’s essential for growing your business.

How to Build a Brand as a Startup Founder or CMO

So, how do you build a brand from scratch? Let me break down what I think you should prioritize.

Build your strategic narrative first, no exceptions.

Number one: Build a strategic narrative.

That means having a strong point of view about why your company exists and the problem that you help people solve.

In my experience, when we talk about brand, we get too obsessed with colors, fonts, and websites. It’s ultimately the story that matters. That’s the reason you exist.

When I was a young marketer coming up in my career, Hubspot was a brand that I religiously followed, because they came out with this thing called inbound marketing. In the 2010s, the brand focused on marketers who made content to attract people to their company.

The tactic resonated because my background was not in paid. I realized, “Oh, that’s me! That’s what I do. I write. I make social media content. I have a newsletter.” Sure, I like orange, and the events look fun, but the inbound marketing narrative pulled me in.

The lesson here? As a new startup, you may not have market share. But, you do have a unique angle — the problem that you solve or the story that makes you unique. You also have a founder to evangelize that strong point of view. These are assets, and you need to make the most of them.

Test your message on social media immediately.

So, you have a narrative. Now, you get to have fun with the design, the tactics, and the execution. I recommend jumping right in. You can test different brand elements and iterate.

If I were a founder, I would want to be on social media right now. Even if I only have seven followers, I could test my messaging to see what works. I’m also sending 10 DMs or cold outbound emails to my ideal customer, hoping to book sales meetings.

But, if none of those messages land, that’s amazing feedback and data. I know that this message clearly doesn’t resonate with people.

When I was at Drift, our product was a chatbot. I interviewed our CEO, who ranted about why lead gen was broken. With a chatbot, forms would be obsolete, and Drift was going to lead the new way.

That message was clear. So, we took a bet.

We turned the interview into an article for our blog. We posted it on social media. We sent it out to our email list. We DM’d it to people. And within days, the idea took off. It was getting more comments than anything we had written before, getting more shares, getting more inbound.

That’s the signal we needed. Now, we could double down. We came up with #NoForms. We made stickers, and it was a whole content campaign.

The enemy here is waiting for that perfect message. Riffing and experimenting help you move faster.

Find where your audience already hangs out.

You need to truly understand where your customers hang out online, who influences those people, and what podcasts they listen to. This is just marketing 101, but happening digitally.

In the past, trade groups, analyst firms, and conferences had the power. Now, that’s all happening on X, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit. My focus groups every day are comments in our community. I’m analyzing the responses to our newsletter and the audience sentiment of my LinkedIn comments.

If you have no audience in those existing channels, you’ll need to get creative. Let’s say I want to start a new juice box brand for kids. I would be going to subreddits and Instagram pages for parents. I’d meet up with other parent friends, gut-checking my message in smaller ways before I expand.

When you‘re doing this kind of testing, you don’t need a massive research budget. You don’t need a fancy agency. You just need to get in front of the people who might buy your product. You can then see what resonates.

Brand Building Is a Long Game — Play Accordingly

The biggest mistake I see? Expecting your brand to deliver overnight results.

Founders will say, “We launched a podcast and posted on social, but we didn’t get any new leads after a month.” That’s not how this works.

What if you kept at it?

With Exit Five, I’ve published a podcast episode every week for three years. And guess what? Of our members, 75-80% say they found us through the podcast. If I’d quit after 90 days, we’d have missed all of that.

Source

Building great content and real chemistry with my co-host slowly earned us an audience. I started hearing, “Hey, I’m a fan of your podcast.” That’s the win. That’s my signal that my brand is working.

The same idea goes for social. If someone sees a great post, remembers your name, and checks out your company weeks later — that’s a win, even without a UTM tag.

Yes, you still need sales, outbound, and direct response. But when you invest in brand early, everything else works better. Ads hit harder. Cold emails convert. Warm intros happen naturally.

The Biggest Brand Mistake: Playing It Safe

I think the biggest mistake is really just being like everybody else.

The typical B2B SaaS website looks like Stripe. Think blue-and-white branding with lots of product shots. I‘m not saying that can’t work, but it’s boring. Why try to fit the mold when you can forge your own path?

If I were going to start a company or lead a brand today, I‘d want to play a different game. Look at Malbon in golf. They’ve taken a very traditional, stuffy industry by storm, bringing a streetwear vibe to golf. The brand is fundamentally different, so it stands out.

Source

I want to play that game — not the game where every CRM website looks the same, or where everyone has that black-and-white, simple feeling like Notion. I want to go and bet on something different. That is the biggest strategic decision you can make.

Your Brand Is Your Ultimate Competitive Advantage

When you strip away all the noise, your brand is simply this: Your reputation and your point of view. It’s not just your logo, your colors, or your fancy website, though those things matter too.

We live in an AI-saturated, feature-parity world. The way you talk about the problems you solve and the distinctive personality you bring to your market is what will make customers choose you over the sea of options.

The companies that win today aren‘t just technologically superior. They’re the ones who understand that humans buy from other humans. And, we buy from the ones whose vibe matches our own. That connection between your company and your customer is what brand building is all about.