Looking Good for Fun & Profit: When Does Your Company’s Identity Matter?

Speaker: Robert Moore (@RobertJMoore)

What happens when you grow as a company?

-> Everything breaks.

What breaks?

• Communication
• Management Style
• Recruiting
• Compensation
• Workflows
• Office Space
• Identity –> focus of today’s talk

Initial identity centered around frugality…to a fault:

• Made poor tradeoffs, such as between time to make the decision and cost of the decision (paperclips)
• Got office in Camden

Style was not in the company DNA. What do you do if style is not in your DNA?

Act I: Outsourcing

Buy it. Use third party services like Elance, 99 Designs, etc.

A/B Tested Want Ads

• Had 10x the applicants when said location was Philly vs Camden
• Few job hunters are as risk-seeking as startup founders
• Frugality gave way to convenience and security

Act II. Hired Guns

Hire a dedicated outside firm to help with web and logo design.

Raised $23M in 3 rounds.

Act III. Identity

Frugality turned into efficiency. Hired an internal designer Zack. Started doing hackathons. New identity came from Zack during a hackathon.

New identity because centered around “patterns”.

Google Consumer Surveys

– Let’s you inject survey questions into Google Ads.

RJ Metrics Pipeline: Underpants Blog Post

• 0.1% visit to sales qualified lead – 50,000 unique visits
• 19.8% rate for sales qualified lead to paying customer – 10 paying clients
• $20K average ARR per customer -> $200K new ARR
• Valuation was at 15x ARR
• $3M additional value during funding round

Identity Is Part of Culture

Inputs:

• How people treat each other
• Your core values

Outputs:

• Perks
• Identity

Doubling every year means than half your team will have been with your company for less than a year. These people bring their own culture with them.

RJ Metrics created a Team Guidebook that includes the historical context of the business: decisions made, stories, etc.

Employees can customize the logo on their business cards–example of the hybridization of individual identity of employees and the corporate brand identity.

Internally, RJ Metrics uses their own product throughout the company:

• ARR (annual recurring revenue) / CAC (customer acquisition cost)
• Best marketing channels

They also use:

• ZenDesk
• Mixpanel
• Jazz – recruiting
• Salesforce
• Slack

Big proponents of buying instead of building software.