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Great Startups Deserve Great Brands — Build a Strong Foundation by Avoiding These Mistakes
After working with hundreds of startups on brand strategy, Arielle Jackson knows exactly where founders stumble early on. From clarifying your company’s purpose and articulating your product’s benefits to injecting personality into your brand and launching with confidence, she’s seen it all—and she’s here to break it down.
Why Arielle Jackson Matters
As First Round’s Marketing Expert in Residence and a seasoned consultant, Jackson has helped shape hundreds of startup brands. Not exaggerating: in 2021 alone, she worked with 71 companies. She’s spent the past seven years honing this craft, helping names you know—Patreon, Loom, Front, Bowery, eero—figure out how to position themselves and launch brands from scratch. And before that? Google and Square, where she helped grow products like Google Books, AdWords, Gmail, and Square Stand.
Over time, Jackson has distilled this experience into frameworks, exercises, and now a cohort-based course on Maven, designed to help early-stage founders avoid costly branding missteps. And she’s generous enough to share those lessons here.
“Working with hundreds of brands has cemented the importance of focusing on the fundamentals—purpose, positioning, personality—early on. Get these right, and everything else flows. Your messaging cuts through. Your website writes itself. You’re not constantly chasing competitors.”
Below, Jackson walks through the seven most common early marketing mistakes, sharing the exercises and frameworks she uses to help founders launch brands that actually work.
Mistake #1: Skipping the Fundamentals and Jumping Straight to Tactics
Early-stage marketing can feel chaotic. A landing page here, a logo there, copy thrown together—sound familiar? Jackson warns against skipping the basics.
“There’s a tendency to think, ‘Brand can wait.’ But once your purpose and product positioning are clear, everything else—pricing, copy, visuals—falls into place.”
Her “minimum viable brand strategy” focuses on three essentials:
- Define your company purpose – Why do you exist, and why should anyone care?
- Plot your product positioning – Your purpose is a 10-year horizon; positioning is 18 months. What’s the thing coming to market, what does it do, who’s it for, and why does it matter? Then define differentiation: the unique points that give people a reason to believe in you.
- Cultivate your brand personality – If your company were a person, what would it be like? This guides tone, visual identity, and consistent messaging.
Start here, or risk reinventing the wheel with every marketing touchpoint.
Mistake #2: Overcomplicating Your Purpose
Purpose statements, mission lines, taglines—founders love them. But Jackson sees too many that are just a jumble of catchphrases.
“You need one statement that actually guides behavior internally and gives people something to root for externally.”
Purpose isn’t about your bottom line—it’s about the impact you want to make.
Examples:
- Square: “To make commerce easy.”
- Nike: “To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete (If you have a body, you are an athlete).
- Stripe: “To increase the GDP of the internet.”
Litmus test: Can everyone on your team say the same purpose in three months? If not, you’re not there yet.
How to use purpose: Decision-making, intros, recruiting, onboarding, your website. If it can’t guide choices, it’s not a real purpose.
Mistake #3: Not Thinking About Your Category
Positioning isn’t just product benefits—it’s the arena you play in.
“You need to be able to say, ‘Company X is a Y that does Z.’ If you leave it undefined, your audience will define it for you, often incorrectly.”
Jackson outlines three approaches:
- Take an existing category – Gmail entered free webmail dominated by Yahoo! and Hotmail.
- Modify a category – Nest created “learning thermostats” instead of fighting all thermostats.
- Create a new category – Expensive and time-consuming. Uber with ridesharing, Gainsight with customer success.
Pick thoughtfully, be consistent, and cement your category with every message.
Mistake #4: Focusing on the Wrong Foil
Most founders obsess over competitors—other startups—but they’re often irrelevant early on.
“The real enemy is the status quo, the way people are doing things today.”
Google Calendar didn’t fight iCal—it went after paper calendars. Mirror wasn’t competing with Peloton; it was combating lonely at-home workouts. Your messaging should focus on the old way, not the other startup.
Mistake #5: Leading with Emotional, Not Functional Benefits
Everyone wants to channel Nike or Apple with a slogan that sparks feelings. Problem: you’re not Nike or Apple (yet).
“Startups need to be crystal clear about what the product does. Functional benefits first, emotional benefits later.”
Exercises:
- Cinderella spectrum: List functional, emotional, and in-between benefits. Focus early on functional.
- The bar test: Explain your product to a smart, bored teenager. If they get it, your messaging is working.
Tips:
- Drop jargon. Words like leveraging and enabling kill clarity.
- Lead with the problem, then the product.
- Make sure your audience immediately understands the value.
Mistake #6: Forgetting Brand Personality
Your style guide isn’t just fonts and colors. Jackson emphasizes tone, voice, and personality.
She uses the five dimensions of brand personality: sincerity, competence, ruggedness, sophistication, and excitement. Strong brands spike in two areas.
Example: Harley Davidson = rugged + exciting. Rolex = competent + sophisticated.
Next, pick five attributes that define your brand personally, with some tension.
Startup examples:
- Woolf: traditional + modern (education sector)
- Lemon.io: sincere + exciting (outsourced dev shop)
Personality gives your brand consistency and makes it memorable.
Mistake #7: Skipping Prep Work for Press
Launch day is where everything comes together, but PR is tricky. Jackson sees the same mistakes repeatedly:
- Time crunch: Three days isn’t enough.
- Dreaming too big: Big outlets want trends, not tiny startups.
- Content confusion: What’s the story? Funding, product launch, momentum?
- Unclear goals: Coverage alone isn’t enough—know what you want to achieve.
Winning strategies:
- Build relationships with reporters early.
- DIY PR works if you’re organized: identify reporters, explain relevance, and pitch smartly.
- Plan beyond launch. Coverage is your starting line, not your finish line.
“Building a startup brand isn’t about a logo—it’s an aggregate of consistent, tactical actions that shape what people think of you over time.”
