Sell more than your Brand, Selling Yourself | Episode 9

It's definitely easier for me to sell myself as an entrepreneur. I saw your eyebrows raise there, so maybe that's a unique answer. 

People from the Midwest are modest—humble. They have a reputation for being hard-working and loyal. They don't put on air and don't enjoy watching others do it either. 

This is the Lunar Startups Podcast and I'm your host, Twila Dang. 

So what happens when you're an entrepreneur selling to Midwest consumers and investors? Is it more difficult to sell your product, service, or business concept to Midwestern sensibilities, or do you wind up having to sell yourself or your personal brand first to get potential relationships built? We wanted to know. In the midwest, is it harder to sell yourself or your brand? As the founder of a start-up, often the first interaction anyone has to your brand is actually an introduction to you. Networking events, investor pitches, publicity—all of these interactions occur between people. 

This is Margi Scott from Take 12. 

Scott: It's definitely easier for me to sell myself as an entrepreneur. I saw your eyebrows raised there, so maybe that's a unique answer. But for me, that's the total truth. So much of...why I built Take 12 is because my own personal story and, you know, my background is also in sales management. So, I know what sells is just connecting on the story, basically, storytelling and then also showing who you are as a person and kind of trying to establish trust just by sharing some of that. So for me, it's way easier to just get up and talk about, you know, the nitty-gritty and my past and my story and what brought me to this point. 

The business is so exciting to me, which is ultimately why I'm here. But it's more difficult to connect with people over the business for me. You know, I can show people my sales projections and I can show people where we're going and how we're going to get there. 

But where, you know, it depends on who I'm talking to whether [or not] any of that will be impactful. I think where I feel confident is walking in and just telling my story.

But sometimes Midwestern sensibilities can make the idea of selling yourself feel more like exposing yourself. This is Jasmine Russell from Monicat Data. 

Russel: My name is Jasmine Russel. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Monicot Data. For me to be able to talk about a brand, talk about what we're doing—that's easy. I can easily say what we're doing, what we're putting, and what we're executing. But if people want to get to know about me as a person, like personally, that's different. I'm like, “No I don't want to reveal everything” but then there's also like two sides to that and I think it's also my Gemini ways. 

So it's like, there's me where I'm presenting or if I'm emceeing something or I'm on a stage or talking or maybe I'm facilitating a conversation—that's totally different than my personal self at home. So I think for me, I'm always more guarded about myself than I am with the business that were building.

Lunar Startups’ Program Manager, Jeffrey Aguy, agrees.

Aguy: So that's more difficult. It's hard to talk about ourselves in the Midwest—culturally speaking. It's like, you don't want to appear immodest. 

Is selling your brand made easier when its purpose is rooted in social good?

Jamie Glover from Asiya Modest Activewear finds it easier to sell their brand because she knows their product addresses a need in the community. 

Glover: I find it rather easy to sell our brand. Our brand is built on a real true need in a community that identified the need, who wanted the product, who helped build it. That story tells itself and is of huge value to our customers. Selling myself as an entrepreneur is, you know, uncomfortable. It's new. It's, you know, it's not my background. But our brand really speaks for itself.

Lunar's Jeffrey Aguy took the concept of selling yourself one step further. For him, it's all about character. 

Aguy: I like to believe that character is greater than reputation. Because they'll be times where people—or the market—can say something about you that's not true, but your character will last the test of time. I think over time, character sells because character equals trust. So it's much easier to be myself, therefore it's much easier to sell myself.

Lunar Startups understood the importance of helping cohort one tell the stories of their businesses effectively. Choosing the right narrative was key because sometimes you only get one opportunity to make a good first impression. In the first weeks of the accelerator, the cohort worked with experts who pushed them to craft the best narrative for their businesses.

Mohammad Abdurrahmen and Aaron Free from ClutchSOS found these sessions useful, even though they had to be vulnerable during the process.

Free: It was a session from somebody who had looked at our stuff and said, ‘You know what? This sucks, throw it away. It's terrible. Do something else. Just throw away everything’. I was like, I've raised money on this deck. ‘Throw it away’. I've raised team—throw it away. It's trash. It's okay. All right, this is trash and she was right. 

She's right. I mean, it's not trash—there’s good stuff in it. That's not an exact quote. That's not an exact quote. But no, but she was like ‘You know what, this is terrible. You need to do you need to do it differently’. It’s not that I didn't know that originally. I knew—I could feel it. I knew what she was saying was true and I've known it the whole way through but it's because of the toughness of our topic that it almost forces you to try to distance yourself. For a lot of reasons. Yeah, and she was like, no you need to get closer. 

Abdurrahman: Yeah, well and understanding the power of narrative. I understand it in the immediate context, but thinking about it in pitching context. When that clicked it's like “Oh, yeah”. Our story is so important. The actual story.

Free: Storytelling is a well-established, well valued thing in a number of spaces—particularly in selling and entrepreneurship and consulting, etc. But again, you can read it. You can be told it, but it's different to do it. It's different to have an actual case where you're invested in it and actually try to do it.

For Jamie Glover, Co-founder of Asiya Modest Activewear, this session work came with surprises and unseen opportunities. 

Glover: I am Jamie Glover, Co-founder of Asiya Modest Activewear. The most surprising experience at Lunar for me was a session that we had around PR—working with the media or getting our message out. We've had some great opportunities with press coverage and great media exposure. So I thought we kind of understood it, but listening to and talking to and working with professionals in the field, really, for the first time made me realize how much more there is to know and how much more there could be to do to get our message out and opportunities I didn't know existed. So that experience surprised me or opened up my eyes to a whole new opportunity around messaging and media outreach that I previously didn't know about.

One benefit of selling in the Midwest could be boiled down to one word—resourcefulness. Bootstrapping a start-up isn't a new concept but many women founders and founders of color have to employ this method of resourcefulness to grow their business. Lunar's Jeffrey Aguy thinks that this gives the Midwest and advantage over the East and West coasts.

Aguy: While the Midwest—I think people have been trained to do more with less. 

I think that's a valued proposition for investors where you can invest into a company that you know that has work to do, that has been successful in doing so much more with less and so in the midwest $100,000 goal goes a long way. Where on the East Coast, that may not do anything for your company.

Music plays.

We'll be right back after the break. 

Welcome back to the Lunar Startups Podcast. 

While the Midwest has many positive qualities, it does have a reputation it can't seem to shake. The Midwest and its residents can be more than a little bit passive aggressive. Avoiding conflict can become a burden for an entrepreneur who is looking for action or sometimes just a direct answer.

Margi from Take 12 talks about the long road to “no”.

Scott: It is difficult to sell in the midwest because nobody wants to say “no” and that just drives me crazy. I think it should drive everyone crazy. Nobody wants to say “no” and I think it's really important to understand people's pain points and, you know, where their issues are with any product before you can actually come to a successful sale, so to speak. People really—and this is obviously a generalization—but I've experienced a lot as an entrepreneur that people will say things like, “Oh, that's so great. That's so awesome what you're doing” and then when it comes time to “So would you like to write a check?” [they say] “Yeah, yeah, I definitely—absolutely, send me some emails” and then that's the end of it. So for a lot of “yes” response, really what they're trying to say is “No that's not something that I'm interested in” and sometimes that interaction is like three months long. 

If I would have known that the answer would have just been “no” from the beginning—and I've learned to look for ways that “no” sounds like “yes” but really means “no” and that's taken a lot of time. But I'm not from the Midwest and so I've definitely experienced that it is difficult to sell here because everyone has a really great poker face and that poker face looks like a smile most of the time. So when you think you're making headway, a lot of the times you're not really getting anywhere. 

Jasmine from Monicat Data can definitely see the challenges of building a start-up in the Midwest, but she also has an understanding of the long-term potential to be found there.

Russel: What the Midwest brings is people who are a little bit more critical of what you're bringing to market. But I think that also could provide some more stick if your company is actually able to cut through some of that. So once you get anchored here, it's like, there are companies that stay here and are very well-respected here. 

And I think Minnesota really a testament of that, with all the major corporations that we have. We’re a top three state for a number of corporations. So I think there's proof with the companies that have been able to stay but it does take a lot of time to build to that point. It really comes down to “how are you serving people effectively in the Midwest?” for my opinion. 

The ability to stay and put down roots in the community can be a crucial factor in selling yourself and your business in the Midwest. That idea of being anchored within the community that Jasmine talks about can give Midwest investors the confidence to support startups long-term. These relationships can only be built with time.

Lunar Startups gave the cohort a rare opportunity to have a full year to do this community building within the accelerator. 

This is Muhammad and Aaron from ClutchSOS.

Abdurrahman: The brilliant thing about Lunar is that it lasts a year. Because it is a journey. Entrepreneurship is not a sprint. I mean it can be—you can do a sprint. But it depends on what you're trying to build. 

Free: Yeah. I mean, yeah, like it's super exciting. Part of it's like, “Oh, I can't believe it's already been so many months”, but then it's also like “We've got all this other stuff coming up”. 

Abdurrahman: Knowing where we were before we came in here and knowing where we are now and knowing what kind of struggles we went through along the way it's like, ‘Okay, well a year from now, I'd like to believe we're going to be a whole lot better’ and the last few months have demonstrated that that's actually possible. And that's great. So that’s nice.

Lunar’s Program Director, Jeffrey, captures the enthusiasm of starting this journey with cohort one.

Aguy: The first few months have been awesome. I started working—I did have some training—but I started working and helping to select the cohort within the first week and a half of working here. Danielle likes to say that it was a “work through a fire hose” or something like that. But it's been really awesome how I've been able to iterate from the first four months of the program and build on it and to create something that I think, we've built a program that has best practices from other organizations and other research practices, but also it's something that I think that is uniquely myself too. And it’s uniquely Danielle. It’s uniquely Amanda. I think that's amazing to be able to have that synergy.

 And Lunar Startups Managing Director, Danielle Steer, summed up the importance of this work and her pride with what the cohort and the Lunar team have accomplished together as year one came to a close.

Steer: Lunar Startups is important because we're really trying to help the untapped innovators and fantastic problem solvers within our community get the visibility and the support and the connection and the community that they need to really be successful. 

There are community members here locally in St. Paul, in the Twin Cities, and more broadly across the nation that have amazing solutions to real problems that our communities are facing. And they don't necessarily have the same networks or access to service providers or visibility to help them grow and scale and solve more people's problems. 

And so our main role here in the ecosystem is helping those people get access to those networks and visibility so that they can grow and scale. Because we need to shift the pendulum and the focus of the broader ecosystem to say “These highly talented professionals deserve the checks. They deserve the insight. They deserve the networks and they deserve the attention that the current classic hacker in a hoodie entrepreneur gets automatically”. There is a massive community of untapped talent that can be radically elevating and raising the game of entrepreneurship at large. I'm really proud of the development of each of our founders through the program and how they have grown in their confidence and in their own right—their power—through the process. So I don't know if I'm even allowed to be proud of how they have come through that but it's an outcome that I couldn't be more grateful to be able to see on the other end. 

Music plays.

Thank you for listening to this podcast. 

If you'd like to learn more about Lunar Startups or apply for an upcoming cohort, check out the website at lunarstartups.org. 

We'd like to extend a special thank you to the Glen Nelson Center at American Public Media, Knight Foundation, and Osborn370 for their continued support of Lunar Startups.

This podcast is a Matriarch Digital Media production. Executive Producers: Twila Dang, Brittany Arneson, and Josette Elieff.