Bryan Kujawski on marketing a boring product in a dull category

Bryan Kujawski

Thank you so much. Nice to be here, thank you so much for taking the time and coming to this podcast.

Bryan Kujawski 00:32

My name is Bryan Kujawski. I have been a longtime entrepreneur, I call myself a recovering entrepreneur. As Etgar kindly said, I was a co-founder of an ad agency that is now part of a large public network called Dentsu. I then moved on to build an e-commerce platform, co-founded that, and that got acquired as well. I did a number of other things, but I don't want to get into too much granularity. I've been on all sides of the table: I've been an entrepreneur, I've raised capital, I've been an investor myself, and most recently an advisor and mentor and participant in the companies that I either invest in or participate in via tech accelerators. That's what I do. And more formally now I've started writing for founders and doing support for their pitch presentations and other related business writing, that I know as a founder was difficult in many ways, to spend the time and be able to position it correctly. So hopefully I can continue to be an asset to founders going forward, as the one who uses your services as an advisor, I can definitely recommend this.

Bryan Kujawski

Yes. It wasn't that much of a departure from what I was doing. In the ad agency world we worked with a lot of e-commerce companies, a lot of marketers that were trying to figure out all the challenges that you know very well in bringing a product online. So when we exited the ad agency, I had an opportunity to help build an e-commerce platform, working with a founder who had created a really interesting technology that wasn't in market yet. I looked at the efficiency of the platform, how it worked to acquire customers, and particularly its search-engine friendliness, and all of those features of this early tool were very exciting to me, and very parallel to knowing the digital space, knowing the challenges around e-commerce and the competition, and the ways that e-commerce platforms served both the sellers and the buyers. So that's how I transitioned to it, that's how I knew to go after it. I had the lens and the appropriate repertoire to be able to assess and appraise the opportunity from my e-commerce days.

Bryan Kujawski 03:42

There are a number of ways to do this, but it's a great question. KPIs first and foremost need to be aligned with the overall business objectives, and the business objectives can be so different depending on the business. For example, if the objective is to get as many users as possible, let's say a company has raised capital specifically to grow, or there's a strategy of winning customers early with the assumption that switching costs may be higher and it'll be a sticky environment for them to stick around, and you can cross-sell and upsell these customers later, then the KPI may not be revenue focused, and rather customer-acquisition focused at any cost. That's a unique KPI. A similar situation can occur where there's a branding mandate to generate awareness, and in that manner revenue is once again maybe secondary, and it's simply engagement with these customers, and that's a specific KPI. But if the business goal is to increase revenue by some percentage, which is much more common and normal, then the KPI still includes customer acquisition, but in a much more disciplined and strict manner, focusing on the efficiency, the cost of customer acquisition, conversion rate, and importantly, revenue.

Bryan Kujawski

These are just some examples, and I know each case is different, just depending on the business model.

Bryan Kujawski

I guess one way to communicate this is with very specific, measurable goals and timelines for each KPI. For example, to grow the number of leads, or website traffic, or media engagement numbers, there should be an absolute specific timeline and target. For example, you need to grow traffic by this date. Then create a calendar of these goals to keep measuring along the way, starting in the earliest period. The short-term goals, call them milestones, then end up mapping to a long-term plan.

Bryan Kujawski

Another great question. Each company's data will actually be very unique regarding this, but it's essential, basically, to measure based on two things that I think are important. You have goals set at the inception of the marketing plan, and you're always tracking against those goals. And secondly, and even perhaps more importantly, you map against what's comparable in the market. As much relativity as possible: are there benchmarks for the promotion you're doing, what are other people or groups or companies doing similar things doing relative to this, and how do you compare. That way you're measuring against what you feel you should be doing, as important goals, and also what the industry is doing, and you can police one another with those two perspectives.

Bryan Kujawski

I have simple guidelines that I've learned as a founder and an investor. One is: spend less whenever possible, except when it comes to sales, always be closing, ABC. Have a goal that makes your sales people the highest paid people in your organization, and when that's the case, everyone is doing well. So I've learned, being on both sides of the table: raise more money than you think you need. Hire accounting and legal professionals as early as possible, don't think you're an accounting expert or a legal expert even though we all try to do that and save money, I've been through it and I've seen it. Get smart people sitting around the table with you, as much as you can and as soon as you can, these are mentors, board members, people that are investors that have really relevant experience, and participate with mentor organizations if possible, they really do help, and they're very inexpensive, because typically the mentors are volunteers.

07:48 Set very specific timeline goals that force you to compare assumptions and forecasts with actual performance, there's always a need for that, and that helps you ask tough questions at these various points, when you're looking at what you thought was going to happen and what actually happened. There's always a wide space between those, and this is much more than just budgets, and it'll help you ensure that aspects of your business are still viable and worthy of continued investment, because as you meander down the path with a business, what you think might be the best thing gets proven wrong to you along the way, and you have to listen to that. And then always internally check your ego, or sense of arrogance about being right. In my experience, founders and co-founders that I've worked with, if you think you're right and too smart, it's a killer. It's okay to be smart, it's okay to have strong opinions, but always be willing to review and think about that, the same as in life in general, especially marriages. So I guess the whole process is: let's put money after good processes, let's not waste money. That's the biggest thing I think needs to be heard by every founder.

Bryan Kujawski

There's lots of things that obviously make a team successful. What I've found is that you sort of back into it a little bit, and I really have this theme that is all about communication with your market. If a marketing team is really smart, and they're relying on all their processes based on their experience, their previous companies, what they've done, I think all that is super valuable, as long as you are also speaking to and listening to your specific customers and prospects at that moment. No matter how smart and experienced the marketing team is, their assumptions about how to address their customers will, in almost every case, be refined and better informed when listening first. Sometimes you're affirming what you already knew.

Bryan Kujawski

It kind of refers back to the previous question. I think feedback is not a specific metric, and there are so many quantified metrics, but you can almost create a grid: I take my biggest questions and I ask my most important customers and prospects, and I create a metric out of that. It's a critical, subjective assessment that you can almost quantitatively analyze based on that sort of feedback.

Bryan Kujawski

I think there's a lot. I've been thinking about this, there's the idea that a founder, or people contributing in the core of a new venture, perhaps assumes, based on previous experience, that this version of whatever they're doing, this new business, is going to be the same as the last one. If a founder was successful, they might think they're going to be successful again just because they're very smart, and the idea is good, the team is good, the investors are good, but that absolutely is not the case. So that's one. But the biggest mistake, I think, I'll illustrate it with a quote that I heard at a conference and I've never forgotten: "be in love with your customers, and not your product." If you look at what that is actually suggesting, it's quite simple and obvious, but really profound.

Founders love their products so much that their view becomes distorted of how truly viable or adopted or well-matched their product-market fit actually is. We're not disciplined in really looking at this, and really listening to what the customers think about your product. Founders can make huge mistakes, and when a product or service is your creation, you obviously view it with rose-colored lenses, that's another way of looking at this quote, but that may not be the way that the most important customers view it. Again, it's tying back to my communication piece: we learn so much by talking to our customers, we are informed so critically, and in such a valuable way, by speaking to our customers, not making assumptions. And making sure there's a distinction between me loving my product because I've just spent six months or six years working on it, versus the reality of the circumstances that you can only get externally sometimes.

Bryan Kujawski

Yes, so definitely, I endorse this one, and I have seen how crucial it is when you super focus on the client's needs and the client's pains, and I believe this is the only way to build the big[gest companies].

Bryan Kujawski 13:26

When I think about this question, there's one that really resonates with me, and I think it's such a fun, interesting concept, and so simple. The founder also happened to attend the same university that I went to, Emory University, so I really appreciate him, and he's even more memorable because of that. This is the company: Dollar Shave Club. There's a whole bunch of really interesting attributes associated with this, how the founder approached it, the marketing spin here, it's a true marketing gem, as you would probably agree, Etgar, and just appreciating what they've created there.

13:56 They spent very little. I'll give you some highlights: they provided a clear and simple, easy-to-understand value proposition, high-quality razors delivered to your door at a low price. Simple, boom, I don't have to be technical to understand that. Strong branding: fun, irreverent and memorable, so interesting and so unique, with a product that you would have never thought to be fun, irreverent and memorable. Really good use of blogs and social media, even in the earlier days, this was a few years ago, and one of the best viral marketing campaigns you could think of that would apply, especially in an industry like this: the encouragement to generate user-generated content for those participating in the stories that came out of this. It's so unique and special what they did, and we could speak about this brilliant effort for a long time. There's a lot to unpack here, but here are some other interesting things I loved about the product as well, just a couple, because I really thought about this product a lot.

14:56 Huge market size, and I think all founders should look at this as they consider bringing a product to market: are you chasing after a really small, hard-to-win market, or are you chasing a market that's very broad and obvious and easy to find? If you think about that in terms of long term, how expensive is it going to be to reach my customer? If my customer base is massive, and this is a product they definitely need, that's a very nice attribute to have in thinking about creating a business.

15:26 A category dominated by old, lazy brands, non-innovative and not creative, low-cost marketing and customer acquisition, especially because they were very successful with viral. And the product is inexpensive to produce, so this was an industry where there were high margins on products that are notoriously inexpensive to produce. They saw this opportunity, came in and disrupted it, and still made a healthy margin even when selling the product for a lot less. So the product I love, I use their razors today, and I'll continue to use their products. I love supporting products that are connected to business models and founders that I really relate with.

Bryan Kujawski 16:28

What they did, and I'm a fan of what they've built, was the real pioneering marketing approach. I don't remember a lot of companies that did what they have done at this scale, and I love this reference.

Bryan Kujawski 16:59

I think there's so much advice I would give my younger self, I could write books and books on it. They say youth is wasted on the young, and it's too true, and I know this now, being a little bit older. From a business standpoint though, staying focused, one of the clearest statements I know as an investor and as an advisor is: make assumptions, but be prepared to prove every assumption first before you proceed, and spend as little as possible on the first and early versions of your product, and only invest more heavily when you have truly validated this with the market.

17:30 I've made this mistake personally, in my own ventures. I was on a very successful run with businesses that I created, and I really felt like whatever I did would be successful. So when I bring these topics up, it's because I truly suffered the pain and the loss associated with making these mistakes. I hope that encapsulates some of the learning I've had. And if I'm able to sit around the table with somebody who's twenty-five years younger and going through this, I always think about a quote I heard from somebody early on: "I've been where you're going." So if you can find those people who have been where you're going, as a founder, strategically, those people could be your biggest assets, and create the biggest impact and driver of success in your business, along with your idea, your innovation, and the team you build.

Bryan Kujawski

You didn't ask me what time I need to hit the water and go do some wind surfing. I'll tell you, that's happening in about an hour.

Bryan Kujawski

Bye-bye, thank you.