Start With A Brand Strategy

Start With A Brand Strategy

Chelsea & Mitch Glaser
Devin Miller
The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
3/9/2021

The Inventive Journey

Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.

ai generated  transcription

start with a brand strategy i think a lot of people dive straight into you know trying to like get their website up there's whenever somebody has an idea there's so many steps that tend to get skipped in the early stages and what i always like to tell people is take these ideas that you have and really put them into a strategy for it's for how you want to be bringing your brand and like representing yourself and bringing it to your audience so [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that's uh grown several startups in the seven and eight figure businesses as well as a founder and ceo of miller i p law where he helps startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with your business uh feel free to reach out to us at strategymeeting.com and we're always here to help now today we have a couple great guests it's usually one i think this is our third or fourth episode where we've had a couple people on it always makes for a fun different dynamic and always mixes it up a bit so we have both mitch and chelsea and i guess i didn't ask both of your last names are glacier i would assume glaciers yes awesome glazer yep that's as close as i'm going to get to it but it's a as a quick introduction so uh mitch he was um kind of you know mitch and chelsea your brother and sister if you didn't catch that and uh mitch was uh when he was in school it wasn't school wasn't something he necessarily cared about as much or wasn't it is interested um but then he decided he wanted to go into investment banking which it was you know first a big shift investment banking has a lot of math a lot of crunching numbers and have to do better or do well in school and so when his high school he didn't do much and you know just kind of skated by but then he kind of turned things around decided he wanted to get uh go into investment banking uh put a bit more of time and effort into uh to to bring his skills up got the skills up and then went into investment banking and i think greg or once you graduated you went to deutsche bank is that right that's right deutsche bank deutsche bank i always want to call it deutsche and deutsche i never know which one it is yeah if people even at deutsche bank sometimes say deutsche like like i don't even think the people that work there even know sometimes that's right it's all the same it's kind of like complete aside i used to work at a company that was called or a law firm that was lonestein sandler and if you went to california they would say lowenstein if you went to new york it was lowenstein and it was like the same company but depending on which side of the coast you had was either lowenstein or lowenstein so always but finishing up just a quick introduction you had um so then you were working for a long period of time you know investment banking is very time intensive very demanding you're working 100 hour work weeks had no life had a period of time where you know i think he's mentioned work six weeks and working 16 hours a day for six weeks at six weeks a day and running on our fumes and so kind of got to a point where i think he actually called 9-1-1 because you said he had a buzzing in your head kind of had a change said that you had to uh you know you wanted to change your direction where you're going and so you started to look at work out get healthier take time for yourself and then kind of shifted gears and went to the more of the company that you're now working with chelsea which is more on health and wellness and kind of uh working on that uh that aspect of life so but that much is a quick introduction welcome on to the podcast mitch and chelsea thank you thank you thank you so i gave the quick 30 or maybe 45 seconds uh interview or summary of kind of where you guys are at but maybe now mitch to start out with take his back in time kind of back to high school kind of first of all not being as interested and then kind of how that will pick it up from there yeah so you know as you mentioned in in high school i definitely wasn't um a driven student i like you know i saw the the requirements to get into you know one of the top ivy league schools and it was you know a 4.4 gpa with a perfect sat score and i was like you know i was obsessed with hanging out with my friends and you know playing sports and i just knew that like i was never going to get into one of those schools like i just like i the motivation wasn't there and um and so i just kind of yeah skated by got like fees basically by doing the bare minimum um which was the grades required for you know my parents not giving me a hard time oh sorry there's my dog coming in um and and so you know i i then i get to college and i'm trying to figure out what i want to do and i really have you know no idea and then i kind of stumble upon this career path and there's a program at arizona state which is where i went chelsea went there as well um and there's a program there for investment banking and this program does a really good job of getting people into investment banking which is a really difficult thing to do from a non-iv league school and so i started thinking oh maybe i'll try to do this um and so all of a sudden it was like okay the requirements from a grade's perspective are gonna be you know i'm gonna have to get close to straight a's and so um i did have to make a very big shift and start put dumping a lot of time and effort into getting good grades which was new from me but i was you know able to figure it out really i think people always think grades are diff like getting straight a's is hard but really it's like if you do all the homework if you used all your resources if you just like understand every concept thrown at you as it comes at you like you're gonna get may on every single test and so i kind of figured that out and um and was able to then use my grades and then i did a lot of networking um you know literally sent out hundreds of emails networking emails studied my ass off for the interview process which is kind of rigorous and notorious for being so and ended up yeah getting my first job at deutsche bank which is um the biggest bank in europe at the time it was the biggest bank in the world um but now it's it's a bit uh smaller but i'll get into that but um uh so basically like for those who don't know investment banking is uh known to be a very uh time-consuming and like physically exhaustive like resource heavy just industry like you were expected to be on call 24 7 seven days a week literally um i've been called into the office at saturday night at 1 a.m and like those are those are like you have no boundaries of your personal life and so that's the way i was living for um you know seven years i started deutsche bank then i went to goldman sachs but then um there was the time that you referenced and basically you know these the this industry which had no boundaries and required so much of you to like you know literally go in in the middle of the night to work um it really started taking a toll on me and so there was this really difficult six week period of time where i pulled 16 all-nighters within six weeks and then every other night i was sleeping like on probably on average three or four hours a night and uh and so that the six weeks kind of culminated in this one night where i was getting home at 5 a.m and i was trying to get a couple hours of sleep before going back into the office which was a very usual thing and i put my head down on the pillow and my brain starts buzzing with electricity like violently and i'm like whoa what the hell was that um and then i'm like whatever i only got three hours to get of sleep here to get i can't waste any time like thinking about this so i put my head back down and then it happens again and so then i start freaking out i'm like oh i think i'm having a stroke and then the fact that i think what what made me go to stroke in the sense that usually is the the type of thing that you're gonna think of as a stroke it would be something else but i don't know what i guess i don't know what i would think if my head was buzzing so that's a fair point so yeah so i mean it was like it was buzzing but it was like electricity and like all i knew was that like my brain was feeling weird like something in my head was feeling bad and i didn't know what to think because i've never had a stroke you know knock on woods that would be horrible um and uh but you know i just didn't know what was going on and so that now i'm having a panic attack because i don't know what's going on am i having a stroke am i not i don't know whatever it is it's not normal and it's not healthy and uh and so then i like i get out of bed and i got to the living room and i'm pacing around like freaking out and i down 9-1-1 on my phone and my fingers hovering over the button and i'm like am i really going to going to um you know admit to myself that it's gotten this bad that i've neglected my own health this badly for my job like this is crazy like this is like out of control and so i ended up not calling the the ambulance and um just kind of fell asleep on the couch for two hours before going back in the office and then i was able to make some time to get some sleep for the next next couple nights and i sort of slowly battled back but um you know i started really feeling horrible like after that like i felt terrible and that one moment was when i sort of realized that like i had to make a huge change in my life or else you know what i was doing was not going to be sustainable and it was not going to work out in the long term and so that's when i kind of kicked off this sort of wellness journey where you know i started you know obviously like you know forcing the time to get the right amount of sleep i started working out a lot more i started um you know a far healthier diet i started doing things like meditation and cold showers and um and breathing techniques exercises and even things like public speaking and improv classes and so like i started doing all of these things and they all sort of one kind of question on that is uh so you know you start doing all these things but you are at this time are you still doing investment banking or still otherwise staying at that job or how did that work yes so i was still doing investment banking trying to like battle to get my health back doing that and it and it actually proved to be very successful like i started like i was doing really well at the job in the first place but i was absolutely miserable and felt like and so this actually helped me you know kind of like get my life back where i'm still doing i'm still working a shitload um but now i actually feel good on a day-to-day basis i don't feel horrible it's not just non-stop stress it's like i'm able to you know actually just kind of get my bearings and feel good on a day-to-day basis but um at the end of it i still sort of realized that you know this job which is still even though i was feeling good i was still dumping anywhere between 70 to 100 hours a week into it and so i realized that like if i was gonna be working that hard i'd rather do it for myself do something that um you know i'm more passionate about than that job and so i wanted to start a company i was always have wanted to start a company and i sort of at that time i realized you know that um what better thing to start the company around than that journey ask one question on that so i mean so you figure out first of all hey i want to live a healthier life or i don't want to feel crappy all the time and it doesn't matter how many hours i work work if i'm feeling crappy it's not worth the type of a thing you're not enjoying life but then you know was there but you still were working at the you know the investment bank for a period of time as you're kind of figuring that out so was there a tipping point or was it was it just kind of a slow build as to hey i'm going to make a shift i'm going to leave investment banking or i'm going to start looking for an alternative that i enjoy more kind of how did you make that transition or make that mental shift so that's a very good question and i think it was sort of the tipping point of where okay now i'm starting to feel good and i'm sort of like you know able to handle this job but i'm still not happy i'm still not fulfilled and so at first it was like you know oh i'm struggling to even get enough sleep like of course i'm not happy and then all of a sudden once it was like okay well my basic needs are met like i'm sleeping i'm eating i'm feeling good but i'm not feeling fulfilled and that's when i sort of like there was just a tipping point where i kind of realized that if i'm feeling really good but i'm still not feeling fulfilled like this like this probably isn't the career path for me and i should move on and try something new we climbed up maslow's hierarchy yeah that's exactly right um and so what's yeah what's that tipping point i was like you know it would be really cool to build a company around the wellness journey that i just went on because i think a lot of people who are working really hard out there probably neglect their own their health needs on a day-to-day basis and probably you know you know say i'm not gonna you know go to the gym or i'm not gonna put the time in to you know meditate um instead and instead dump that energy into work when really that's not a very sustainable thing and it's ultimately going to lead to burnout and there has to be a balance and so um you know one of the the aspects of that wellness journey which is our first product was nootropics which um are if if you're not familiar with what nootropics are they're supplements that are designed to boost your cognition basically um a lot of the different brands out there they they promote these products as sort of limitless pills like if you've seen the movie with bradley cooper and so a lot of them advertise themselves as that but when i was taking them i was like you know these absolutely don't turn me into like a goddamn genius like i don't wake up feeling like bradley cooper on these things but i think they work like three or four times better than coffee like i feel i feel like i have just as much energy but i have you know none of the negative side effects that come with coffee i feel much like clear minded and i got no no brain fluff or anything like that and so i was really surprised that like no one around me has ever really heard of them um and especially none of the women had the few people that i knew that had heard of them they were all sort of buying into this limitless pill concept which i had also bought into initially but i basically was like you know what this would be a great first product to start with and right now i think women are being kind of neglected too from a marketing standpoint in this industry and so i would and so i was like you know i want to build a brand that's more approachable to women um and so chelsea she uh she started her own branding agency called launch it girl and so she helps women launch businesses often for women and so she was like literally the perfect person to be the first you know person i reached out to to consult about this idea and so we started talking and and um i'll let chelsea take it from there because that's kind of sort of when we we merged brains and started collaborating on the uh on the idea of ready together it was so exciting when finally you know after me being uh i had taken such a dramatically different career path than mitch had taken to get to this point of just being like okay i want to start my own things i want to build a life that's actually fun i don't want to you know go the corporate route um and mr dickens is a totally opposite path and so i was so excited that he was finally going to leave banking and started his own business so that was awesome and then we started talking about this and um just kind of realized that you know rather than just building a business or a brand that's approachable to women we should be building a brand for women around this product that really speaks directly to them and empathizes with what you know kind of the modern ambitious woman goes through who is just wanting to do and be everything and have everything um all the different types of success and just has so many competing priorities um and expectations for for themselves so that's uh yeah we started talking about it mitch asked me to be his co-founder because he's like you know kind of hard to build a female focused brand as a guy and so yeah we've been building the brand together ever since and it's um it's been so much fun so our our philosophy is you know it's really really resonates with both mitch and i um it's just that success at work starts with wellness and you're really only going to be able to do your best work and bring your best self to your work when you are putting your wellness first and i think mitch and i you know in our very own very different ways both fell victim to hustle culture both found ourselves in this crazy states of burnout at one point or another and um and so we really want to highlight that experience and kind of yeah build this brand not just with our one product um but really looking at our product as one part of a holistic wellness practice that people can be bringing into their lives to help them show up as their best selves for work so now let me ask ken to know one question so yeah you know we got mitch's kind of where he's you know where he came to or came to the idea of the the company and kind of approached you at it you were doing some other things with your career at the time and you're um you know building or building up the the branding agency and whatnot when he came to you was a kind of hey well i'll help him out on the side or we'll you know this is something that you know i'll do because he's family type of a thing was it something you're excited or kind of how did you balance this with what you're already doing or decide you know how to to engage or to deter to work start working with them um it started as we were just going to do some like brand strategy work together and then as it became more and more clear what the brand could be um i got i mean it i i'll be honest i probably only agreed to do this because he's family but i was all because i was i had a lot of my hands already but you know i was really thinking about i was really passionate about the product too because it had helped me a lot mitch introduced me to nootropics it was quite a bit before that and had been i'm already trying them and already found them also really effective so it's like i know exactly what you're talking about they are amazing and there's not a single nootropics brand that sounds like something i want to buy until mitch really pitched me on trying them and so i had tried them and you know the mission was something that you know was just we we really developed the mission together but the the philosophy and like the um the kind of purpose behind the brand was really always around wellness and always around like helping you just bring your best self to work um and you know that was something that really resonated with me and um the other piece of that was you know the more we talked about it the more i kept thinking about my clients at launch a girl who are these incredibly driven women who are balancing all everything and i'm like this brand is really for them like these are women who they're like working nine to five and they're building their side business and they have families and they're just like they're doing everything and so we wanted to you know the more i was thinking about it the more i could just empathize so much with this with this audience base and because i work with them and i'm part of this as well you know i'm not a mom but um i i definitely am juggling a lot of things and so i got really excited about the brand i got really invested in the message and um and we you know it was it was there was something about you know balancing it is a different question um it's it's kind of a daily practice it's definitely gotten easier and easier as we go and we get into more of a flow and we figure out you know what's what works where to put our time where time is most valuable when it comes to the business but um i generally time block um just on most basic levels kind of like the first couple hours of my day or launch a girl the rest of my day is freddy um and it kind of depends on the day how i shift that but i just try to block out the time for that and uh it works it works well we got to a good point took a while to really to really get to the point i was pulling like 16 hour days for a long time but now we're in a good flow well that's awesome and i said that's a lot of times you know the the irony is that sometimes you work so hard in a different business okay i'm going to go do my own startup or i'm going to do my own business and say and it's going to be like the television shows where they go work for a couple hours a day then you get to relax for the rest of the day and that's never true it always see you know the joke always goes the best part of being about an entrepreneur is you're going to choose which 80 hours a week you get a work type of a thing yeah yeah exactly it's like be work work from anywhere work when you want just means you know work everywhere all the time if you're not careful yeah i know and i agree but so so now you guys have kind of built that or got that balance you kind of figured out pulled through your roles and you got things off and going kind of now you know bring that brings us up to the future now looking kind of in the next six to 12 months kind of where do you guys see things heading or what's the plan so i i think that you know right now we think we have a huge opportunity with our first product we think we're early to the game and we're targeting you know a niche and we're doing it properly and um you know so we think we can do a lot of big things with just our one product but um you know with our motto being success at work starts with wellness there's so many other things that we can roll out sort of under that umbrella that you know helps women just sort of feel their best so they can perform their best at work and so um you know that could be we have a few things in the pipeline a few additional products that we think will probably roll out after we s you know maybe say six months to a year because we kind of want to first be known for this first product um i think we're this first product is definitely you know we you can it's very easy to like go out to the market and roll out you know another we're not going to do this but like say introduce another protein powder you know like you're just one of another another product that sells whey protein but we we think we're you know so early to this market that we're kind of you know going to be viewed as market leaders in the next you know year or two and that's something we want to sort of establish before we introduce new products yeah we won't necessarily only introduce supplement products we we are really thinking of ourselves not as a supplement brand or um as a nutropix brand specifically but really more of a wellness brand and looking at you know what are all the different types of products that we could introduce that make sense for our audience no that makes perfect sense and sounds like he'll be an exciting next six to twelve months for you guys and and beyond well as we start to wrap up on the the podcast i always ask two questions at the end of each podcast so i'll let you guys decide who answers which question but i'll throw the question both of you so along your journey the first question along your journey what was the worst business decision you ever made and what did you learn from it that was so easy yeah i know just to say we we hired at the beginning this social media management company that for the bargain price of i think by the end we were paying like 3 000 a month they were going to create content for us and grow our follower base like crazy and uh that's the organic growth yeah we're like okay i mean yeah that sounds great like we don't like content creation is something we're so new at like we don't necessarily know how to just keep you know pumping out content multiple times a day every single day uh like this something i feel like we can help with and obviously we want to get followers just we didn't know what converts wow yeah we want followers because you know followers if we're if we're building our followers in the right way our potential customers and so you know obviously that's something we wanted and so they're like oh yeah of course like let's do it and you know we said obviously like we want these all to be real followers like don't buy us any followers we know that that's a very common thing they're like oh yeah of course of course and then um basically they would just like this happened this happened just one time at the very beginning um they were like okay we're getting ready for one of our big pushes we're gonna touch our partner network and and you see you're gonna see some followers join and then like all of a sudden they basically just like turn on the jets and like we just gained like 1500 followers like 20 followers a minute we got like five thousand it was like no no it wasn't that much it was what it was i don't know it was it was like 15. uh it was a lot and it was a little yeah all it was uh like if they would have done it again it would have been that but then we were like what are you doing like there's no way this is real like what is going on and the demographic of followers we're all like 13 to 17 year old boys and like that's they start like then they start getting like accusatory that like we're being ridiculous for accusing them of like saying this isn't real they're like look the these these are the only people that are going to follow you right now when you're not famous and we're just like wait so we're pushing all like female empowerment sort of like inspirational stuff very female oriented and 13 seven-year-old boys are the only ones that are going to follow us like that doesn't make any sense yeah they're saying like who or who would be willing to follow us as though it was like a favor when they're the ones making the content that's supposed to be more valuable than content we can make ourselves so you think that people would be excited to follow us and they they had sent me a message and they're like it's um because they were asking me to make a lot of video content and they they legitimately said this is in an email that the our we're not getting followers and we're not getting engagement because my videos were not like engaging enough and i need to put more makeup on and um and like that i should hire like a professional hair and makeup team and get like a videographer to come in for like little casual videos when we are trying to just be approachable to our audience and just really grow organically yeah these people were the worst terrible it was a great way to light fifteen thousand dollars on fire so that's how we'd answer that question hey that that is a that is uh a mistake to be made and one to certainly learn from but you know the the the funny thing is you know all of these is you hear a lot of you know social media i think there's some good and i know some social media people out there that are very good but it's so hard to sometimes shift between who are the great ones and who are going to do a good job and who are the ones that are just going to take you for a ride get as much money out of you can because it's not always apparent on the front end and it takes a bit of time to sometimes come to that realization so definitely a mistake that can be made and one to learn from totally i mean the other thing of that it wasn't even just the money we also had to climb our way back in the algorithm from like having terrible engagement because of the fake followers that they purchased and so we had to like really get ourselves back to a point where we were growing organically we're attracting the right people and kind of let those other people who would follow us just kind of weed themselves out and then get back to a point of okay this is actually our audience that we want to be talking to so it set us back in a lot of ways definitely get that and you know that's kind of the same thing if you do the one that i'm more familiar with is seo and kind of search engine optimization and there's kind of the same thing there are a lot of good people out there and there's some bad people out there but they can really take your score and then you have to sit there and try and fix it and it takes a lot more time and effort well now we jump to the second question which is if you're talking now to uh somebody that's just getting into a startup or a small business what would be the one piece of advice you'd give them um i i would say start with a brand strategy i think a lot of people dive straight into you know trying to like get their website up there's whenever somebody has an idea there's so many steps that tend to get skipped in the early stages and what i always like to tell people is take these ideas that you have and really put them into a strategy for it's for how you want to be bringing your brand and like representing yourself and bringing it to your audience and so i like to think of it as like your idea for your business or for your startup like even if you have some of the moving pieces in place like it's like a big bowl of spaghetti in your brain all of the noodles are tangled and trying to communicate through and build you know a really dynamic brand there's a ton of moving pieces to what needs to go into a startup and if you're not really really clear on this vision then it's really easy to let things fall through the cracks and to have things that are inconsistent in your messaging and in the way you're presenting your brand in general that's just going to make it really hard to build a super engaging brand and so i like to think of the brand strategy process as like it's so much more than just deciding you know what colors you're going to use it's really thinking through like all the big picture vision and then getting into the details of that vision of how you're going to carry those through what are the values of your brand the philosophy exactly getting really really specific with your audience like what are they going through what are they looking for um what problems are they experiencing day to day how can you really empathize with them as you're building this brand and so i like to think of this process as like detangling noodle by noodle of kind of every single idea every like every insight every everything that you have in your brain about your business laying it all out in front of you and knowing exactly what it is what you're working with down to the the tiniest details that you may never even share with anyone that you know internally and your team knows internally so that when you have that gut feeling of like that's not quite right or that feels off for my brand you'll actually have the way to describe why and you'll just be able to steer things towards the bigger picture vision a lot more easy a lot easier if you do the upfront work of doing a super in-depth brand strategy first no and i think that's a you know it's one that people often take for granted until you get into branding and you really have to build a brand think about everything from color schemes to how the look and feel is too how they'll think about it to the font type to the you know all everything that goes into a brand and there's a lot more than in there you know oftentimes you're like oh it's a brand you know and you think it looks cool but there's a lot that goes into it i think you know planning that out figuring that out and having that as kind of a holistic strategy and giving it a good amount of effort is going to make a big impact on the brand even though to the outside world they're never going to think about it if you have a nice you know good strategy and a good brand they'll definitely notice if you don't so i think that that exactly yeah i like to say like good good copywriting and good branding often goes kind of undetected um but you really notice the bad stuff and yeah um i mean obviously there are the standout brands that you're like wow this is really nice but if you if you have to overthink it or if you if they're if it's distracting you from the point then you're yeah you're in trouble i definitely agree well now as we wrap up so people want to find out more about you guys they want to be a customer they wanted to be an employee they want to be an investor they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the way the best way to reach out or find out more you can find us on instagram it's we are freddie and freddie is f-r-e-d-i um in case anyone is unsure about how to spell that um so we are freddie is instagram um mitch and i both are on instagram as well i'm chelsea glazer mitch's mitch glazer human underscore and you're somewhere is that at the end in the middle middle in the middle mitch underscore glazer is uh mitch's instagram and we're also both on clubhouse if anyone is using clubhouse um then you can check out our website we are freddie.com all right well i definitely encourage everybody to reach out check out more support there support the product and uh and live a healthier lifestyle well thank you guys now as we wrap up if you are a listener and you have your own journey to tell and you would like to be a guest on the podcast feel free to go to inventive journey or inventiveguest.com and apply to be on the podcast if your listener also make sure that one click subscribe so you get notifications as all the awesome episodes come out and to leave us a review so new people can find us as well last but not least if you ever need any help with patents and trademarks feel free to reach out to us by going to strategymeeting.com we're always here to help thank you again mitch and chelsea it's been a pleasure to have you on and wish the next leg of your journey even better than the last thanks devin thanks devon thank you for having us