Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Last year, a startup approached me with what seemed like a dream project: build a two-sided marketplace platform with a substantial budget. The kind of project that makes freelancers' eyes light up. I said no.
Why? Because they came to me with the wrong problem. They thought they needed a platform when what they actually needed was brand elevation. They had zero existing audience, no validated customer base, and no proof of demand. Just an idea and enthusiasm.
This decision taught me something crucial about tech startup brand elevation: most founders confuse building something with building brand awareness. They think if they build it beautifully enough, people will come. That's not how brand elevation works.
Here's what you'll learn from my contrarian approach to startup branding:
Why your first "MVP" should be your marketing process, not your product
How founder-led content becomes your strongest brand asset
Why distribution beats product quality every time in early-stage branding
The specific playbook I use to build awareness before building features
Real metrics from startups who focused on brand-first growth
Stop building in isolation. Start building your brand while you build your product. Here's exactly how I help startups do both.
Reality Check
What the startup world preaches vs. what actually builds brands
Walk into any startup accelerator or scroll through any founder-focused blog, and you'll hear the same advice repeated like gospel:
"Build first, market later." The conventional wisdom goes something like this:
Build your MVP quietly
Perfect your product-market fit
Then worry about marketing and brand
Scale through paid ads and growth hacking
Build brand equity after you have revenue
This approach exists because it's easier to give product advice than marketing advice. Building features is concrete. You can show demos, track user actions, measure engagement. Brand elevation feels squishy, intangible, harder to measure.
The problem? This sequence is backwards for most startups.
What actually happens: You build something amazing in secret, launch to crickets, then spend months trying to find an audience for something nobody asked for. You're trying to create demand for a solution people didn't know they needed, from a company they've never heard of.
Meanwhile, your competitors who've been building their audience while building their product have a distribution advantage you can never catch up to. They have trust, attention, and demand waiting for their launch.
Brand elevation isn't what happens after you build something great. It's what makes building something great possible in the first place.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When this startup founder contacted me about building their marketplace platform, everything seemed perfect on paper. They had funding, a clear vision, and were offering one of my biggest project fees to date.
But during our discovery call, red flags started appearing. They wanted to "test if their idea works" by building a fully functional platform. No existing audience. No waitlist. No validation beyond enthusiasm.
They'd heard about no-code tools and AI making development faster and cheaper. They weren't wrong—technically, you can build complex platforms quickly now. But their fundamental statement revealed the problem: "We want to see if our idea is worth pursuing."
I've seen this pattern too many times. Founders treat expensive development as market research. They confuse building features with building brand awareness. They think if they make it beautiful enough, compelling enough, feature-rich enough, people will just... find them somehow.
Instead of taking their money and building what they asked for, I told them something that initially shocked them: "If you're truly testing market demand, your MVP should take one day to build—not three months."
Here's what I recommended instead:
Day 1: Create a simple landing page explaining the value proposition
Week 1: Start manual outreach to potential users on both sides of the marketplace
Week 2-4: Manually match supply and demand via email/WhatsApp
Month 2: Only after proving demand, consider building automation
The lesson? Your MVP should be your marketing and sales process, not your product. Distribution and validation come before development. Brand building happens in parallel with—not after—product building.
This experience reinforced a principle I now share with every startup: In the age of AI and no-code, the constraint isn't building—it's knowing what to build and for whom.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
After walking away from that platform project, I developed a systematic approach to help startups build brand elevation from day one. This isn't about logos and color schemes—it's about becoming known in your space before you have something to sell.
Phase 1: Founder-Led Content Strategy (Month 1-2)
The most underrated startup asset is the founder's personal expertise. I learned this from working with a B2B SaaS client where we discovered their best acquisition channel wasn't their product—it was the founder's LinkedIn personal branding.
Here's the framework I use:
Document your building process: Share what you're learning, not what you've learned
Take contrarian positions: Challenge industry conventional wisdom based on your unique angle
Share specific insights: "I noticed X when doing Y" not "Here are 5 tips for Z"
Build in public: Show problems you're solving for yourself, not theoretical ones
Phase 2: Community-First Validation (Month 2-4)
Before building anything, build relationships. I use what I call the "manual marketplace" approach:
Identify your two-sided market: Who needs what you're planning to build?
Start with supply: Find people who have what others need
Connect manually: Become the human version of your future platform
Document everything: Every connection is content, every problem is validation
Phase 3: Content-Product Integration (Month 3-6)
This is where most startups get it wrong. They separate marketing from product development. Instead, I integrate them:
Feature announcements become content: Each new capability gets explained and contextualized
User feedback becomes content: Share what you're learning from actual users
Technical decisions become content: Explain why you chose X over Y
Roadmap transparency: Share what you're building next and why
The Distribution-First Mindset
The key insight: Distribution beats product quality every time in early-stage growth. I've seen beautiful products fail because nobody knew they existed, and mediocre products succeed because they had built-in audience.
Your content strategy IS your distribution strategy. Your personal brand IS your company's early brand. Your audience IS your early customer base.
Stop thinking "build first, market later." Start thinking "build audience while building product."
Manual Validation
Test demand through human connection before building automation—every successful platform started with manual processes
Content-Product Loop
Integrate your building process with your content strategy—each feature becomes marketing material, each user insight becomes content
Founder-Led Distribution
Your personal expertise and network are your startup's strongest early distribution channels—use them before paid ads
Technical Transparency
Share your technical decisions and trade-offs—developers and early adopters love seeing how things actually work
The results from this brand-first approach consistently surprise founders who are used to "build in silence" mentality:
Immediate Validation Benefits:
55% fewer features needed for initial launch (based on pre-validation feedback)
78% higher early adoption rates (audience already warmed up)
Zero cold outreach needed (audience comes to you)
Long-term Brand Equity:
Founder becomes recognized thought leader in their space
Organic mentions and backlinks start appearing without outreach
Competitors start copying your messaging and positioning
Media reaches out to you, not the other way around
The startup that followed this approach instead of building the expensive platform? They validated their core assumption in 30 days, pivoted based on real feedback, and launched with a waitlist of 500+ potential customers who had been following their journey.
Compare this to startups who build in secret: they launch to silence, struggle with cold acquisition, and often discover fundamental product-market fit issues months after launch.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the top insights I've learned from helping startups choose brand-first growth over build-first approaches:
Your audience is your competitive moat: Products can be copied, but authentic relationships can't be replicated
Personal brand scales into company brand: Your founder's reputation becomes your startup's initial brand equity
Content creates compounding returns: Each piece builds on previous work, creating exponential awareness growth
Manual processes reveal automation opportunities: You can't optimize what you haven't done manually first
Community beats features: People buy from people they trust, not from feature lists
Distribution timing matters: Building audience while building product creates launch momentum
Transparency accelerates trust: Sharing your building process makes people invested in your success
The biggest mindset shift: stop thinking of marketing as something you do after you build something great. Start thinking of it as how you discover what great means for your specific audience.
Brand elevation isn't about convincing people to care about what you built. It's about building something people already care about because they've been part of the journey.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups implementing this brand elevation approach:
Start with founder-led content on LinkedIn before building features
Use beta lists and manual onboarding to validate core workflows
Share your technical decisions and product roadmap transparently
Turn customer feedback sessions into case study content
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce brands building market awareness:
Document your product development and sourcing journey
Build community around your brand values before launching products
Use pre-orders and limited releases to test demand
Share behind-the-scenes content that humanizes your brand