 Wooden Clutch Purse from Sumsaara Watch a short video clip here on our work with Sumsaara
Today, I want to share my story about a young woman entrepreneur whose work impressed me from the day we met. Jannat Saxena studied art and design innovation at San Jose University. She graduates in 2017 and along with her mother, Mini Bansal, set out with an audacious goal of making accessory and consumer products which redefine their ordinary use, transforming them from chic, wearable items to displayable work of art.
Their company is called Sumsaara, which is a Sanskrit word for “cycle of life.” Hence, their products echo functionality and aesthetics, assembled with renewable and recycled materials as far as possible.
I took on this project to help Sumsaara craft their story through a visual brand booklet, where we defined key messages that they can consistently use and apply in their marketing collateral, video and social media assets. Sumsaara was able to reinforce their positioning, key messages, and storytelling on their website, as well as in displayed materials that they distribute at event showcases over the country.
To date, Sumsaara has been growing and expanding their portfolio to include exciting new items such as reversible cork-fabric belts and coaster markers, in addition to their wood clutch purse and the cork-fabric card wallets — which they had made a stunning debut into the fashion accessories market.
Their product expansion allows them to fill your home and accessory space with items that are beautiful and versatile, while being environmentally responsible. Each of your purchase contributes directly in reducing the overall carbon footprint that is impacting our world today.
The COVID19 pandemic has affected many small businesses, including Sumsaara. If you like their story and are intrigued by their products, hop over to www.sumsaara.com and make your purchase online.
Special Call to Action: Followers and their friends will be offered free shipping with their online purchases. Use code Jenny’20. Expires May 31, 2020.
As you are planning out your marketing and getting ready to execute on some? Remember to incorporate great storytelling in your strategy.
Why storytelling should be considered an important component of your marketing strategy? We are living a “culture first” decade where job seekers are looking for culture in companies, and consumers are looking for culture too when they decide to buy. Companies can no longer use their elevator pitch as a one-size-fits-all type of marketing messages. They need to focus on storytelling to convince consumers, employees, or stakeholders so their audience remains engaged, interested and loyal.
Storytelling is about sharing marketing content that draws your audience in, connects with their emotions, makes them pause about what you’ve said. It’s a powerful way to engage your audience, winning hearts and minds.
For young companies, storytelling means everything about your product and brand. Founders need to find ways to explain the “Why’s” that customers should invest in them.
Storytelling comes in many different forms: in blogs, videos, success stories, and even your social media posts.
Feeling overwhelmed in getting your storytelling and marketing narratives in order?
We’ve written a variety of storytelling narratives, ranging from technology/marketing columns to success stories and trustee endorsement for crowdfunding campaigns.
Let us know how we can help you. Give us a call at 650-248-3990 or jenny@jennyhuangmarketing.com to set up an appointment. Together, we can figure out how to elevate your brand and product through great storytelling.
 Startup Grind Conference 2020, Downtown Redwood City, CA This is my first year attending the Startup Grind Conference held in Redwood City, CA. I’ve heard of this conference before but it did not register at the time. What drew me to it were the CXO speakers and an opportunity to be my curious-self and learn about new products out there helping businesses and consumers.
The conference turned downtown Redwood city into a university-like experience, where attendees sat and listened in to talks in theater style (literally sitting in a theatre) as if we were watching our James Bond or Star Wars movie, with long lines getting into each talk. The two-day agenda had layers of topics catered to every audience segment, from marketing, storytelling to entrepreneurship and VC funding.
I attended a few talks and wanted to share out my David Letterman’s TOP 10.. If you prefer a short version, watch this clip. Or, read the long version below.
1) Heidi Zak, CEO, ThirdLove: The reason her company is called “ThirdLove” is because she wants to give women a third option for love.
2) Jaya Kolhatkar, Chief Data Officer, Hulu: Define your business purpose first, then decide on the data that you want to gather and build around it. You don’t collect data for data sake.
3) Amazon’s Building Product the Amazon Way: Most start-up companies go out and build their MVP first before they get enough feedback from customers. Amazon does the opposite before they build their MVPs. They put out a press release talking about what the product is so consumers can respond to it. By getting feedback from customers before their MVP build out, they have a better idea of what they are building, and this could shorten the MVP development cycle.
4) Jennifer Tejada, CEO, PagerDuty: In addition to investing in technology, to make it, your company should invest in your people. When you have highly-engaged people who build, sell, and market your product, you have it made. People problems are harder to solve than technology problems.
5) Daniel Seigel, MeetUP CEO: Tesla uses their employee community to learn about their products very effectively.
6) Andrew Dudum, CEO, Hims and Hers: Experiment with your product early on, e.g., on product naming. Hims and Hers reviewed 33 names for their company before they settled down with “Hims and Hers.” When choosing your company name or things that are important, don’t rush into it. Make sure it feels right and means something to you.
7) Andrew Dudum Continued: Every touch point builds trust. Consumers don’t want to be told to feel good about your product. They want to experience it through their senses, such as Hm…it smells good when they sniff it. Hm…It feels heavy when they put it in their hands.
8) Kirsten Green, Investor, Forerunner Ventures: Building an emotionally-resonate brand is multi-dimensional. It takes more than marketing. It’s the experience and everything around that’s going to make your brand resonate with your customers and develop affinity with it over time.
9) Amy Elisa Jackson, Head of Content Marketing, Glassdoor: When you do a post, you are telling a story. Storytelling can take many different forms, such as blogs, success stories, emails, podcasts, etc.
10) Jory Des Jardins, Head of Global Startup Marketing, Amazon Web Services (AWS): As an early-stage startup, your vision needs to mean to a few who will embrace it. Once you have early traction, then broaden it to include other relevant customer segments.
These bullets sum up my David Letterman’s TOP 10! Hope you’ve enjoyed them?
 Rettex Co-Founders (left to right): Chris Moris, CEO; John Bradley, CTO Over the last few decades since the 1970’s, it has been increasingly challenging in the Bay Area for average Americans to save enough money to buy a home. For most Americans, home purchase is one of the largest equity investments they can make, and barriers to ownership can hurt their ability to build long-term wealth. In recent years, home ownership has been further exacerbated by the lack of housing in California. While there are other alternative equity investments that average Americans can tap into to build wealth, nothing could compare to private equity syndicates, which offer high returns on professionally-managed commercial real estate. To date, these fractional ownership opportunities are available only to some of the wealthiest people in America.
Transforming the Private Equity Investment Experience
Rettex, a young start-up based in Mountain View, led by Chris Moris and John Bradley, is changing the game of private equity investment in multi-folds. “We are working with a team of high-caliber developers and hatching an online, commercial real estate investment platform that automates the end-to-end investing process — from identifying deals and finding investors to managing the investor’s portfolio. These online syndicates offer lucrative annual returns which often exceed 15%,” said Moris. “Real estate syndication is an effective way for investors to pool their financial and intellectual resources to invest in properties much more valuable than they could afford or manage on their own. It’s a simple transaction between a sponsor and a group of investors.”
 Investment portfolio management at your fingertips. Goodbye pencil and paper! According to Moris, the typical select-invest-manage process of a private equity syndicate often involves general partners (also known as sponsors) and limited partners (passive investors), with lots of pencil-and-paper work in between: from identifying and selecting the buy, ensuring investor suitability, fundraising to get multiple fractional investors on board, and obtaining exorbitant subscription to access and invest in deals. “The process can be time-consuming and overwhelming. Competitors such as Juniper Square and CrowdStreet are offering expensive enterprise investment management tools which require website integrations and setup fees. Rettex is seeing a larger opportunity which benefits the majority of the market: local, small businesses managing real estate in the community, as its target today,” said Moris. “Rettex eliminates the hassles and headaches for general partners and investors by moving them away from a set of disparate and antiquated tools and onto an integrated, efficient, and accessible system.” Over time, their platform will leverage machine learning and AI to tap into local market information and past deal performance, to predict return potentials on future private equity investments.
Accessing Real Estate Wealth Now Made Easier
“Through working with general partners of private equity syndicate, the platform now allows accredited investors with $200K in salary to be invited to invest in “on-market” deals. For those who already know of a real estate sponsor, Rettex also offers access to online investment for “off-market” deals, enabling individuals or families with disposable income of less than $200K to invest as well,” said Moris. “Millennials are one targeted demographic who can benefit from using Rettex,” where Moris believes that the company can democratize commercial real estate investment, so that millennials can invest $5 to $10K of their savings to start building equity as an alternative to the purchase of a single family home that may be out of their price range. This could lead millennials and future Gen Z’s to change their first property purchase to income-producing real estate as a tool to getting to a first home, by investing in commercial real estate in- and out-side of the Bay Area, thereby helping them build and realize wealth by staying closer to their roots and families.
Rettex currently has general partners as initial users in the South Bay including some in Mountain View and Palo Alto. The website is free for investors. Real estate businesses pay a nominal annual subscription fee to access the platform. They launched their Beta in December 2019 and are expecting incremental uses continuing into early 2020. Once they reach solid user adoption, Rettex aims to bring their platform to scale and get to Series A funding before year end. For more information on Rettex, visit www.rettex.com
An edited version of this article has also been published in my business column of the Los Altos Town Crier
“Personal branding has become an effective and powerful way to differentiate yourself in this constant, noisy world”
As a consumer, we all know about “corporate branding.” That’s when companies invest monies to make their brands known.
Personal branding, similar to what businesses are doing in making their brands relatable, has become an effective and powerful way to differentiate yourself in this constant, noisy world.
With the proliferation of social media, the gig economy, and the wider network that we get in touch with on a daily basis, personal branding is becoming more important than ever to take control of your own image, and moderate your narratives so you won’t become a victim of others who could be branding you.
Defining Personal Branding
According to Karen Kang, author of “Branding Pays,” a personal brand is your image and reputation. 
Whether you know or not, you already have a personal brand. Your personal brand consists of the “whole you” — your wear, gesture, voice, values and presence. It’s up to you on how you want to manage your perception and take action to cultivate and evolve how you want to be thought of and positioned.
Jeff Bezos, Founder of Amazon, is widely quoted as saying, “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.” In other words, your personal brand stands for values and how you are positioned in people’s minds. Those values define your core as a person, that people can relate to and appreciate.
Your personal brand also means the experiences and emotions that you’ve created when people interact with you, whether through online or offline conversations.
Why It’s Important
Cultivating a strong personal brand is important because you want to be seen and remembered as the person whom you want to project in public and private setting. These days, recruiters, hiring managers, or business colleagues can easily learn about you via social media before they interview you, or meet with you for the first time.
If you are a participant in the gig economy, it’s even more important to develop a personal brand so prospective customers would seek you out to do work for them. Seth Godin, author, speaker, and marketing guru says in his book, “Purple Cow,” that you are either a Purple Cow or you are not; you are either remarkable or invisible.
Tips on a Solid Approach
Here are some guideposts that you can use to help manage your personal brand:
 Be Authentic. Being authentic means that you don’t need to develop two different personas: business and personal; they are “one.” It means that you don’t need to be afraid to share your struggles, talk about your fears, and articulate what motivates you to pursue your work or dream.
It’s okay to take a stand on what you believe and don’t believe in, and makes it mean something instead of nothing. Because people like to work with like-minded people who are genuine and with good intentions, not someone who is pompous, in-sincere, or have an agenda.
Be purposeful. In work and in life, people like you when you show that you have given thoughts to the type of work that you do, or the projects that you have taken on. It demonstrates things you value; if those values resonate with your prospective clients or customers, you’ve already established a common ground before you even begin working together.
Being purposeful also means that you look for meaning in what you do, that you bring substance and a sense of purpose to your work and when you contribute. People value that you care, and the impact that you create for them from your work or voluntary responsibilities, not how much you know.
Be humble and kind. You can choose to be boastful, live with hate, or lead with fear. Or, you can choose to be humble, kind, and responsible in owning your voice. Being humble does not mean that you cannot talk up about what you do; it’s about how you celebrate others when you talk up about yourself. Being kind means that you are a bigger person and forgive others; it shows your human spirit in that not everything is always good, but that you can see good in everything.
Building a personal brand that is remarkable and worth noticing takes years of hard work; it does not happen overnight. You have to work on it daily, showing up online and being there face-to-face. Don’t be afraid to be your version of Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, or Justin Trudeau.
By consistently living and breathing the values of your personal brand and being the “whole” you, you will keep it fresh, interesting, and relatable.
Photo credits: Artem Ivanchencko, Pawel Czerwinski, and Roland Denes of Unsplash
(This article also appeared in the Los Altos Town Crier’s online edition Dec 18, 2019)
  
I am writing this post because I have had great successes with a business column that I have started out at beginning of this year in 2019.
If you are looking to start a column with a news outlet, you are in for a GREAT TREAT!
Here are some of my tips in approaching a news outlet to get your column going. Whether it’s a local newspaper or an online outlet, the general process is about the same.
TIPS:
#1 — Identify which local news outlet that you want to write for. Study their content and see if there is a good fit.
#2 — Reach out to the select news outlet and pitch to them why you want to write for them. What you will bring to the table, what topic areas that you think they are missing for their readers, and how you can contribute and add value.
#3 — Develop your pitch and share your past writing work.
#4 — Call them directly after an email intro, and meet with the editor to deliver your final pitch.
#5 — Develop a proposed schedule and topics and present to them to get early approval
#6 — Work with the news outlet to get edits done or approval of your article.
#7 — Stick with your schedule and provide quality deliverable that will make them shine, you shine, and your content contributors shine.
#8 — Promote your column in all your social media channels, and enjoy the goodwill that will come with your work!
Watch our column content clip here! Let us know how we can help you put together a story to use with news outlets.
SPECIAL Call to Actions:
Crowdservice: Visit www.crowdserviceinc.com/downloads and use the app to tap into the Crowd so you can free up time by unloading chores that others can do for you, ranging from grocery shopping to food delivery and ride share. Professionals, small businesses, and amateurs join for free, and get access to local consumers who would love your help in getting things done — just like being their personal assistants! Use JEN1838 promo code to get a sweet discount when you post a new job!
R Community: Visit www.r.community and download the app to see everything local. Businesses, nonprofit or government organizations can create a free profile for your company, promote your brand and specials to local consumers in R Community.
In the past 2 months, we’ve implemented a series of Instagram Content Pillars with the goal of shifting user engagement from “Likes” to encourage more engagement in conversations by “Commenting” on our post. We’ve some early learning that we thought would be beneficial to share out. So you can use some of these best practices and try it on your own posts.
Here’s a few tidbits:
- Video with people and appealing visuals tend to do far better than those with still photo or product shots
- The “How” posts on how we helped our clients with storytelling did far better in terms of views and “comment” engagement than others that don’t.
- Putting up an Insta story (within the first 24-hours) right after you post alerts people to pay attention to your new post, and allowing you to find interesting people to follow and increase your network.
- Following up an Insta story (after 24 hours) with a Highlight of your cover keeps your post in visibility after the first 24 hours.
- During the first 24-hours, explore individual Instagram posts whose target audiences are similar to yours and “comment” on their posts, or “like” comments of their followers would draw attention from people to visit your new post.
- Extend your post shelf life after a couple days by reposting it in other social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest as appropriate.
If you follow these basic guidelines, you should get a hang when you create a new post, to get the most out from people viewing it, and also making meaningful conversations that trigger Instagram search engine algorithm to think that you are making valuable connection; therefore, your post would rank higher and be more visible in the public feed.
Hope you’ll find our key learning helpful. Drop us a line if you have additional ideas to share with us and others. We are always here to help! Follow us on Instagram @brandgoddess.
*All brands and logos are properties and trademarks of respective companies.
“I have these 3 business ideas in my head for the longest time. Now I have attended your Lean Canvas session, I get clarity in my direction, and realize that I have 3 different businesses that I would like to launch using my skill set, my passion, and the will to be my own boss.” — Lean Canvas workshop attendee
“I didn’t know that there is so much depth from a one-pager business plan.” — Lean Canvas workshop attendee
“You are amazing! I admire how much you know about launching and marketing a business.” — Lean Canvas workshop attendee
People who attended my workshop are full-time employees turned entrepreneurs, and young people who have dreams and want to lead more successful, happier lives.
What idea do you have that you want to put into action and build a business from it?
 A successful idea that has been able to turn into a real profitable business often comes from a good idea, that’s been thoughtfully researched, put onto paper, built into a prototype, tested for product-market fit, gained market traction, and earned first revenues.
A Lean Canvas can help you do just that — a mini business blueprint that’s the gold standard which many of the businesses that I have worked with turned their dreams into a reality.
I embrace it, believe in it, and hope some of you will adopt it and use it to turn your ideas into a viable business.
 Check out our Fall Special! You will get to spend 4-6 weeks of 1:1 time with me, to get your idea baked and your business off the ground. The good part is that it’s 50% off from our full price (General full price~$1,500). Sign up (put “Fall Special” in subject headline of our contact form) by December 15, 2019, to take advantage of this Special which you can work start working on it in December and have a plan ready after the New Year!
What is one idea that you want to turn into a business in the coming year? I love to work on it with you!
YES, SIGN ME UP!
This is the fourth in a series of Instagram content pillar that we want to share out!
With the rise of digital voice such as Alexa and Siri, it’s more important than ever for your business to own your voice. Voice is an audio element of your brand, together with the contextual and visual elements, it makes your brand whole, believable and relatable.
Make the audio part of your brand visible and integrate it into your marketing plan, be it your own voice in your marketing video, doing public speaking on topics of interest, or being in podcast where you are a host or a guest.
Follow and read our Instagram post @brandgoddess and watch this clip to learn how to get started.
We are thrilled to share out the third in a series of our Instagram Content Pillar. This post focuses on our favorite work. We want to showcase clients whose work that we love, how the work came about and why we took on this project.
Crowdservice, a local Mountain View start-up company, was referred to me through a business colleague. Founder Michael Duran is a physician, and also a serial entrepreneur who has started a few companies on his own. Michael has invested his own monies and developed the Crowdservice platform to do good for all users.
 It works on your handy smartphone and uses technology to organize and simplify your life, delegating small to large chores that could take up your day, from doing important things that you need to tend to, for yourself, your business, family, or friends.
I took on this project because Crowdservice’s mission resonates with me: by “putting a personal assistant in everyone’s pocket.” Busy small business owners like myself, professionals and parents can use helping hands on demand, from a personal assistant who can unload and do tasks that we don’t have time for, to trusted professionals who can do bigger projects for you quickly and affordably.
 Crowdservice, unlike other platforms, looks after its people. Not only does the platform commits to doing social good for its customers and providers, everyone gets to pitch in and help the elderly, by offering free service and earning karma points that can strengthen your ranking as a user in the Crowdservice community.
There’s more to why we love Crowdservice. Watch the clip!
Visit www.crowdserviceinc.com/downloads and see what they can do for you!
Like this? Leaves us comments below. We love to hear from you!
Follow us on Instagram @brandgoddess
Photo courtesy: Apostolos Vamvouras of UnSplash, #regram @canafornian
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