I have been thinking about the ideas in this essay for a while, and deliberately waited to write them down. The idea was that this would serve as a backgrounder of sorts for the last two essays, which were more practical and immediately usable frameworks (I’ll share links below if you want to go back to them, keep reading for now).

Why is this backgrounder important, though? Because I think we seem to have forgotten what a real brand actually is. and why we actually set about constructing one in the first place. And regular readers know that it’s a bit of a theme of our newsletter, and something I believe in, that the answer is usually in the fundamentals, the basics.

Let’s get to it then. So what is a brand, and what does it do? The word comes from Old Norse, brandr, referring to the mark that horse and cattle owners used to burn onto their livestock so they could distinguish one pack from another and verify ownership. And the traditional industry definition, the one the American Marketing Association gives us, is something that identifies one seller’s goods or services as distinct and different from another’s. Simple enough. But what does a brand do in our context? Like with the horses, it clarifies ownership, and therefore helps make a decision. For us, that’s usually a buying decision.

This is what we are trying to do as startups as well, aren’t we? We want to construct an identity and manufacture a certain credibility, one that comes from looking and feeling a certain way. Why? So that customers can trust us to do the job they are hiring us for. And in an age of AI, our brand, they way we look and feel, the way we are perceived, the way that the product feels recommend-able, cool, become extremely important. They are the only way to gain an upper hand in a world where the barriers to entry have fallen, and the cost of build, though not zero, has become stupidly accessible to every developer.

It is with this understanding that we have to go back to the basics and actually ask ourselves what brand means for us in our category and industry. And because this is different for different founders and marketers, there is no specific answer. You have to find it for yourself.

What I can do is show you my mental model as a template.

1. When I was a young boy, I realised that my father, when ready to go to work, always smelled of Old Spice. It is the scent, to me, of what it means to be a man. And therefore it is the aftershave I have always used. Will it be easy to break this association? No, it will be almost impossible. But if this is the insight across a lot of Old Spice’s user demographic, it gives Old Spice the idea of how to keep me as a customer, and how to pass it on to the next generation. But the insight could also help new startups (like The Man Company or Beardo) attack Old Spice, or choose to win a different demographic, like Gen Z.

2. In the 2010s at Freshworks, when we were considering whether we should buy a tool for social media scheduling, I immediately chose Buffer. And I stuck to that choice even though there were other, even cheaper alternatives. Buffer as a brand, their superiority in content marketing, their design: All of this told me that I was the kind of marketer who would choose Buffer. And I did. Later, in Seth Godin’s book This is Marketing, I read one of the most important lessons of my career: People like us do things like this. I understood it immediately because that was how I was making decisions. Your job as a founder and marketer is to make your product the exact solution your kind of customer will choose.

3. One of the earliest brand plays I remember was when Pepsi, during the 1996 Cricket World Cup, were outbid by Coca-Cola for official sponsorship rights. And they responded with the Nothing Official About It campaign featuring a boyish Sachin. The ads instantly turned heads and put Pepsi on the map that season. It is a touchstone in modern Indian marketing and also lives rent-free in the heads of a certain kind of millennial, including me. It taught me how to be seen as a rebel brand, something startups understand. It’s a learning I use often.

Why did I tell you these stories? Because these explain how I as a marketer think about brand. And because I feel we have been overthinking brand and brand-building.

As marketers, we are probably the only department that’s closer to art than science in the modern org chart. And where does most good art come from? It comes from the personal. This is also what I’m saying here. I think we have to unwrap the jargon and other bubble wrap around branding as founders/marketers, and ask ourselves over and over again, what is the insight here, what is the story, who are we telling it to. And finally, the most important question: Are we building the kind of brand we actually want to be?

If we attempt to answer these questions, I think we will build better, greater, and much more effective brands.

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I would encourage you to read the previous two essays that I wrote here, both of which deal with different aspects of startup branding.

1. The Rapid-Fire Brand framework for startups (a 5 step system for startup branding)

2. 4 hard questions on brand building for startups (how to make sure your ideas survive organisational realities)

And finally, a quiet milestone. It is now 6 years since I’ve started writing this newsletter. There is a bit of a celebration on the way, but I’ll wait until next month to share it with you all. :)

Until then, read on, and if you are new here, do join 5,200+ marketers who choose to get The CMO Journal in their inbox every week. Subscribe!

Last week, I wrote about my Rapid-Fire Brand framework, an 18–24 month system for building your startup brand, and making your startup feel much bigger than it is.

As I shared it on Linkedin, the post received a few great questions on the operational aspects of such an effort within organisations. This is incredibly important, but sometimes we don’t address it in our frameworks and models. Because any plans you make have to survive inefficient, poorly aligned orgs, and mixed-up incentives, to actually be successful.

I answered them briefly on LinkedIn, but I immediately felt they deserved more space. Hence, here they are, properly:

1. How do you manage internal pressure for short-term pipeline, even as you build the brand?

This is the most important question of the four, and the honest answer is: you can’t fix this from the marketing seat alone.

If your founder or leadership team is watching and asking only about pipeline metrics, you will spend all your time gathering and addressing existing demand. You will never create new demand. Those are two completely different games, and as a startup, you choose to play only one of them, you will win only one of them.

As a marketer, it is almost impossible for you to make everyone understand this. The only way to make it work is if the founder, your boss, is aligned before you start. If they’re not, no amount of explaining will get you there. I was lucky: Vijay, my CEO at Atomicwork, was clear from day one that we were building for the enterprise, and enterprises require trust before they will get on a demo. That alignment is what made everything else possible.

If your leadership only cares about short-term growth, they are setting the company up for future trouble. That’s not something you and I as marketers can fix from where we sit.

2. How do you decide which IPs are actually worth doubling down on?

Standard metrics will not help you here. Traffic, follower counts, downloads, subscribes - these numbers tell you almost nothing about whether an IP is doing what you need it to do.

The lens you have to use is conversion. Not from the general audience (this is what standard metrics give you), but from the right kind of person to the right kind of customer. Don’t think traffic, think high-paying customer. Are the people engaging with this IP those you actually want to sell to? Are they your ICP? Are they at the seniority level that signs contracts?

It takes time to figure this out. You have to run the IP long enough to see who it attracts, watch the patterns, and decide. After that, the IPs that pull in the right people should get more investment. The ones that don’t, even if they get engagement, should get cut or deprioritised.

3. What early signals to look for before clear traction?

The simple answer: Engagement and validation from the ICP communities you are trying to reach.

Not vanity metrics. Not likes on LinkedIn from people who would never buy your product. You have to look for actual signals: Are the right people commenting, sharing, or reaching out? Are you getting invited to speak in communities and forums where your buyers are? Are people in those communities citing you or sharing your content without being prompted?

That kind of validation is hard to measure, and harder to explain to a board. But it’s the signal that tells you that you are building something that will eventually compound.

4. Does this framework hold for companies with long trust cycles and high vendor scrutiny?

This is actually the exact situation the framework was built for.

Atomicwork sells to enterprise IT buyers. Trust cycles are long. Vendor scrutiny is high. These buyers are careful, deliberate, and slow. And that is precisely why a brand-first approach is the only approach that works.

If you don’t seem trustworthy and credible before the first conversation, why would they even take the meeting? You are not selling a $49 tool. You are asking someone to hand you a core workflow, and trust that you will own it, improve it and not break it. Therefore, your brand has to do a lot of work before your sales team even shows up.

For companies with shorter trust cycles or lower ticket sizes, you might be able to get away with less brand investment and more performance spend. But if your sale is complex, your buyer is senior, and the stakes are high, this is the the only framework that will give your startup its right to win.

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Sharing last week’s essay here again, as I think it has important ideas you should have in your arsenal, and it will add more context to this week’s dispatch.

The Rapid-Fire Brand framework for startups

Sairam Krishnan

·

May 1

A few days ago, a senior HR leader in the Indian ecosystem was talking to me about marketing leadership and founder attitudes. The one point that came up repeatedly in our conversation was how we were still making the same mistakes that we made last decade: Not investing early in brand.

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And finally, as I wrote last week, we will be talking a lot more about startup branding in the next couple of newsletters. So if you are new here, please subscribe and join 5200 other marketers who read this newsletter every week! :)

A few days ago, a senior HR leader in the Indian ecosystem was talking to me about marketing leadership and founder attitudes. The one point that came up repeatedly in our conversation was how we were still making the same mistakes that we made last decade: Not investing early in brand.

This is a fundamental problem we have in our startups, especially as they start to scale. Literally every founder I have ever spoken to about this regrets not investing in brand early. But when do they realise this? When they start to run up against a few prospect questions: Who are you folks, how can we trust you with this core workflow, the board has never heard of you, and so on.

But most early stage founders and startups wait until it’s too late, or feel they can only invest in brand after they have made it to a certain number or a certain scale.

At Atomicwork, we were determined not to make this mistake. My CEO Vijay Rayapati was clear from day one: We were going to sell to enterprise customers, and we would have no business without a recognisable brand.

So we went at this goal from the beginning, and learnt a ton of stuff on how to do it from India for a US audience. This was exactly why I was hired as well. That clarity allowed us to execute on this immediately.

Today, almost 4 years later, I can happily say that we have definitely had success on that front. We have forced our way into the consideration set, we have had international search and advisory firms recommend us to CIOs, we have built a social following that enables us to keep talking to our audience, we are good at getting organically ranked via content. The result of all of this is that more than 60% of our monthly leads come from inbound, and that our sales folks go into a meeting expecting prospects to at least know about us, if not more than that.

How we did all of this in a period of 2 years is what I’m breaking down in this post.

I call it the Rapid-Fire Brand framework: an 18–24 month system designed to make your startup and product feel much bigger than it is.

There are five steps, and they follow a deliberate sequence:

1. Build credibility with a high-trust front door

2. Control the narrative, and state your right to win

3. Scale attention through a portfolio of discoverable IPs

4. Amplify perception with clear signals of scale

5. Convert the attention into a single, high-intent action

Let’s dive in.

1: Build a high-trust front door

Start with your website, because the world will too. Your website is your front door, and it has to look and feel like a brand people want to work with. It is very much a credibility test, and most visitors make their judgment in under eight seconds.

So how should you build your website? First, invest in great design. If your site looks like it was built on a free template in a weekend, that’s the story prospects tell themselves about your product. Don’t let that happen. Second, state the problem with precision. Be specific about what you are doing, and for whom. Vague positioning statements will get you nowhere. Third, show proof of work: Logos, case studies, metrics, testimonials, whatever you have. If you don’t have these yet, take them to your story, where they should read why they should trust you to solve this problem for them. Social proof doesn’t need to be perfect to be effective, it needs to be specific.

2. Establish your right to win

Every crowded category has incumbents, VC-backed competitors, and cheaper alternatives. Why should your startup own this space? Why should the prospect spend time with you? You have to state your right to win.

Your right to win is a specific, defensible claim about why you, and not anyone else, are best positioned to solve this problem. It could be:

• A founding team with lived experience the problem demands (Rippling, Deel)

• A contrarian insight the market hasn’t priced in yet, and which underlies the product (Notion, Substack)

• A structural wedge in to the market that compounds over time (Shopify, Carta)

This is your strategic moat articulated as a narrative. When you can say clearly why you will win this category, prospects, investors, and potential hires start believing it too.

Only if you have both these elements carefully nailed down can you continue building your rapid-fire brand.

3. Build a portfolio of discoverable IPs

Now that you know who you are talking to, and what about, it’s time to create content. Most startups treat content as a checkbox: Post on LinkedIn. Send a newsletter. Maybe start a podcast. But none of it connects to each other or back to your brand.

The more effective approach is to build IPs, each one engineered to be a specific on-ramp for your ICP to discover your product.

Think of each IP as a different door into the same building:

• A blog that becomes the go-to read for your ICP’s professional identity

• A research report or data study that gets cited and shared

• A community that your ICP joins for the relationships and stays for the product

• A newsletter that has industry news that your ICP wants to read

The key principle here is that each IP should stand on its own merit. It should be genuinely useful without the product. But it should also lead back to why the product exists.

This is how you build content now, through intellectual ownership of the conversation about the problem and about your brand’s solving for it.

Additional reading: How we built a small media empire of IPs for Atomicwork.

4. Show signals of scale

Only when a prospect sees your brand everywhere will they start to believe you’re bigger than you are. And in brand, belief precedes reality.

So show up: In the newsletters they read, at the conferences they attend, in the communities they’re part of, in a podcast recommendation from a peer.

The goal of this step is to manufacture inevitability. When someone in your ICP asks their network about this problem, your name should come up, and that should not be because you paid for it or forced your name, but because you already own the conversation around it.

5. Build the conversion layer

Everything above is worthless without a single, focused action that converts all this attention you’ve earned into pipeline. That’s the final step.

The conversion layer means collapsing all of your brand energy into one high-intent action that matches the trust level you’ve built.

This might be:

• A flagship program or event, or a cohort with limited spots

• A specific offer tied to an IP (Got the audit? Now book a call)

• A community that gates access and drives demand

This also helps you frame everything: Every piece of content, every community touchpoint, every thought leadership piece, should have a gravitational pull toward this single action.

The only caveat here is not to get greedy about this step, and not try to do it too soon. You are accelerating brand-building, sure, but it still takes time to earn attention and respect.

Remember: This is a 18–24 month process

This framework isn’t a campaign, and I use that word for a reason. It’s a system, and systems take time to compound. If you start doing this, it will take you an easy 6 months to a year to start seeing results, and about 2 years before you establish your brand.

By the end of this 18–24 month arc, your startup should be one of the brands that defines its category, if not the only one.

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I’d been wanting to write this one for a while, but had some work travel last week, and got sidetracked.

We will stay on the brand side for a bit in the next couple of newsletters, so if you are new here, please subscribe and join 5200 other marketers who read this newsletter every week!

Magi’s Marketing After Hours on May 4th in Koramangala, Bangalore

Folks, this coming Monday, I will be joining Srikrishna of Factors.ai, Rohit of Petavue, and Bhavana of Magi, to talk about AI and marketing at Magi’s Marketing After Hours event.

It’s limited-seating, so do sign up here. I’ll love to see you there!

AI and knowledge work

Last month, I was thinking about AI and our collective response to it as the white-collar class, and this is what I wrote on Linkedin:

There are only two rational responses to the AI revolution in knowledge work:

1. To lean in entirely, to start tracking every small advancement, and be on the frontiers with how you can use it to level up. The inefficiencies in AI dissemination through the world means that you give yourself a huge chance of outsize success, however you define success.

2. To lean out completely, to quit, go to a small town, and start a butcher shop, or a bakery. Or more in reach, start a small consulting business with a few side quests that can make you money and might compound into a meaningful non-tech small business.

Both these responses are valid, and we will see a lot of variations of the above two categories. Those in the middle, however, not leaning in entirely or not leaning out completely, will struggle the most. And I don’t mean just financially.

I stand by the above.

AI and what it will accelerate

In the same vein, I’ve been thinking about AI and marketing and the kind of companies it will help accelerate. Let me also make it clear that this is me trying to think from first principles and from the experience and career I have had. So what I have arrived at may be diametrically opposed to what you think, and that’s fine.

So I think 3 kinds of technology companies stand to gain the most from the marketing acceleration we are seeing:

1. Bootstrapped companies: Funded startups, especially those scaling up or just beginning, are going to be under immense pressure to adopt AI in every aspect of their processes, and show fast growth. This expectation of rapid growth, irrespective of the domain you are in, or the GTM motion you are executing, is going to burn out quite a few good startups in the next few years. And this will happen for no fault of their own.
   
   However, for the bootstrapped company selling to SMBs, AI represents a huge opportunity. Because leaders and builders in companies will now be gunning for the $2 million enterprise software they are using, aiming to build an in-house alternative customised for themselves. This may work or not work, but literally no one will aim to save the $2000 or $5000 being spent on smaller, niche software. The time and effort just won’t be worth it. This is why bootstrapped companies, who adopt AI and execute faster with less resources on their own terms, and follow, without interruption, their own long-term vision, are going to be quietly rewarded.
   

2. Companies who have got to PMF, and have a significant amount of momentum in their GTM motions, now have a killer triple: Usable data from the hard work that got them where they are, AI as an acceleration engine, and intimate knowledge of the kind of customer they were acquiring. I’m contrasting the true traction-ready startup with those still finding their feet on the GTM side. The data these PMF-ready startups now have should feed into their momentum: Knowing which customers converted and why, what language worked to convince customers and why, what the objections were, and so on. If they feed all of this into AI and empower their sales engines, they can unleash the perfect storm

3. Market-owning companies: In a confusing set of new alternatives and a rush of new technology and capabilities, companies which own a particular category will always remain a safe bet. And people will take that bet, especially if these companies have been trusted partners for a while. There might be near-term shocks as these behemoths adopt AI across their slow-moving organisations, but I don’t think that is the risk. At that scale, the real risk is that these companies will be pushed into different directions by conflicting priorities (especially in responding to the market), and lose the focus needed to keep on the path. The good news, however, is they have cash, and time. Their accrued brand value and trust will give them enough of a lead to reorient themselves to a new set of AI-savvy customers. They just need to execute well.

In my estimation, these companies are also the kinds of places where marketing roles will remain relatively stable. So if you are looking for a role, or are planning to switch, these might be good principles to keep in mind.

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As most of you know already, Marketers United, our private community is live on WhatsApp.

And yesterday, we had my friend Rohit Srivastav, head of marketing of Petavue, and as AI-forward a marketer as I know, take the community through his workflows and AI hacks to get faster and better at doing what he does. Thanks, Rohit!

It was a wonderful session, and kickstarted a few of our folks on their AI journey. We hope to keep this going as well, so that’s one thing you are immediately missing by not being part of the community.

If you’d like to join, just email me at sairamkrishnan@outlook.com and I’ll send you an invite.

And if you’re not subscribed to this newsletter yet, you’re definitely missing out. :) 5,200+ marketers get practical marketing breakdowns in their inbox every Monday. It’s time you joined them.

Okay, I’ll tell you this straight out, the "in 2026" in the title is just a hook. My career has been built on doing the basics right, and regular readers know that most of this newsletter is just me imploring you to do the same. This post is similar.

Over the last almost 4 years at Atomicwork, as we used social media to build our brand and attract relevant attention, we learnt a few things. And I was able to boil those down to a few fundamentals. Please be aware that these are not trends or hacks: These are more durable, the non-negotiable basics. And the idea is that you can apply them immediately, whether you are a two-person SaaS startup or a consumer brand.

Here they are:

1. Clarity beats cleverness, especially for B2B

On social media, you have seconds before the finger scrolls and the next post comes up. The fastest way to lose attention on LinkedIn or Twitter is to sound impressive but unclear.

Take Gong on LinkedIn. Their posts rarely try to sound sophisticated. You’ll see things like: "Sales reps who talk more than 65% of the time are less likely to close." That’s it. No jargon, no abstraction, just a clear, specific insight. It stops the scroll because you instantly understand it, and you either agree, disagree, or get curious. That clarity is what drives engagement.

Another strong example is Lavender, the sales email coaching startup. Their social posts are blunt and direct too: "Stop starting emails with 'Hope you’re well.'" That line alone has sparked thousands of comments and shares across LinkedIn and Twitter. Why? Because it is clear and specific. You know exactly who it is for. And it attracts that audience.

2. You need repetition to build recall

Startup founders are terrified of repeating themselves. They think their audience will get bored. But your audience is not paying as much attention as you think. They aren’t interested in what you are doing. You have to turn up and make the play.

Take Chris Walker and his agency Refine Labs. For years now, Walker has repeated the same core idea on LinkedIn: B2B companies should stop over-relying on lead forms and MQLs, and focus on demand creation. He does not change the thesis every week, because his agency wants you to buy into the idea and use them to solve the problem. So he uses different angles to tell you the same thing: Data, screenshots, breakdowns, rants, commentary on bad ads, on attribution. Except the core message stays the same. Over time, "demand gen over lead gen" has become inseparable from the Refine Labs brand. Social media rewards brands (and ideas, and people) that are patient enough to keep showing up. That is recall built through repetition.

3. Teach first, sell never

If you lead with 'buy this' on social media, you are going to fail, and fail fast. People are not going to make quick buying decisions, especially for B2B software, and even for some FMCG categories. You have to earn trust before you earn the right to ask for money. And the best way to earn trust is by teaching your audience something useful to them.

Take Ahrefs. Their YouTube channel and social presence are built around teaching SEO in public. There are detailed walkthroughs, transparent data, and real examples. You always walk away with something useful. And from time to time, they will talk about the product, but they never shove it in your face. This teaching builds trust, and it is trust that translates to sales. Similarly, Canva has invested heavily in educational content across social platforms. Their feeds are full of tutorials, templates, and design tips. They are making the effort to help people look better at their jobs. And buying the product or advocating for it becomes the natural next step.

So don’t think of social media as a marketplace in the traditional sense. Think of it as a classroom, a conference hallway, or a shared conversation. The brands that help everyone, and show up repeatedly in such conversations, will win.

4. Consistency is the only secret

There is no shortcut. The startups that win on social media are the ones that keep showing up.

Look at Duolingo on Instagram. The account did not explode overnight. It is a catchy consumer app, and yet it took consistent posting, experimentation, and leaning into a distinct tone before it became one of the most followed brand accounts on the platform. And once it found its voice, it stuck to it relentlessly. Or consider Morning Brew in its early days. It grew through consistent, disciplined distribution and social presence. The product was simple, and they kept doing the same thing so people could discover and follow them, every day with the same tone to the same audience with the same promise.

This kind of consistency compounds quietly. You will not notice it week to week. But over a year, it will change the trajectory of your brand.

5. Never lose sight of your ICP

This one sounds obvious, but is not. I hope it was. As soon as something starts getting traction, startups are tempted to chase reach and forget about why they are on social media in the first place. You are there to build a brand, recall, a following, and then, lightly, to sell. The engagement is a means to an end. If you start to chase engagement for engagement’s sake, it will lead to an irrelevant audience.

Take Notion. In its early growth phase, much of its social and community strategy focused tightly on creators, builders, and productivity enthusiasts. They were constantly talking about templates, workflows, and dashboards. Everything was hyper-relevant to only the people who were already inclined to care. That’s why the product became a movement among those early users.

Or consider Figma in its early years. Its content and social presence were deeply embedded in the design community. Tutorials, community files, design showcases, the Figma social media accounts spoke the language of designers first. And that’s how they won their following and trust.

When you speak directly to your ICP, even at the cost of alienating others, you will build depth. And that depth is more powerful than breadth.

If you internalise all of these and execute, what you will have is a system that builds a trusted, followed brand on social media. And that is the goal, isn’t it?

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By the way, Marketers United, our private community, launched last month!

It’s been a month of our WhatsApp community where we discuss everything startup marketing, and lean on each other’s expertise and connections. If you’d like to join, just email me at sairamkrishnan@outlook.com and I’ll send you an invite.

And if you’re not subscribed to this newsletter yet, you’re definitely missing out. 5,000+ marketers choose to get this newsletter in their inbox every Monday. All of them can’t be wrong, can they? :)