271. Earning Attention for Your Startup for Beginners in 2026 | Bae HQ IncuBaetor 3/6

0:00This is all about earning attention for your startup. you've got a problem you want to solve, you've got a solution you think makes sense, now it's time to actually get customers and actually get users to start testing it properly and getting that money to hopefully rack up. First of all is really thinking about what's the point of attention and nowadays you see so many startup founders really get obsessed with how many views they've got or vanity metrics. None of that matters. It's if you're building a startup, being an influencer might help you, but it's not the point. And what you really need to consider about when you look at people and when you look at potential role models, I often think that there's no real correlation between startup founders with a ton of attention and those who are actually making lots of revenue.

0:51So you've got to remember, if you're trying to get attention, if you're trying to get press coverage, whatever you're trying to get, it should all be a means to an end. And that end is increasing your user base, increasing your revenue, or increasing your profit. And you need to keep that in mind at all times. And you need to try to make sure you don't just get lost in the hype cycles, like so many other founders whose companies no longer exist. So, okay, you can see, if you're looking at me now, you can see, okay, here's the new BHQ logo. BHQ is my company. On the slides, though, you can see here's the original logo.

1:28Less cool, I think but that was this logo for the first year and a half I want to say before we then pivoted if you look at this how long do you think that I spent on that original Bay HQ logo how much do you think I'd paid I'm not going to leave you in suspense long I spent like a few hours a half a day doing the initial branding initial colors and like the initial slogan that kind of stuff how much do you think I paid? I paid nothing. I just did it myself. And with that logo and with that basis, we were able to get off the ground. We were able to get to our first major sponsor, working with like a worldwide bank in HSBC and so much more.

2:11So you might think that the logo wasn't very good, but it didn't really matter because when looking at branding and getting that attention, it can be so easy to overestimate the importance of some factors. Once you know that you're really taking off, then you can update the logo, you can update the feel and all those kind of things. And also it does depend if you are in a design heavy industry, or let's say you're a fashion brand, then yes, it's going to matter more. But for many people, that visual brand and spending so long on it at the beginning isn't necessarily the best use of time. Okay, so you think about your name.

2:45The key things are making it easy to spell, make sure it's not too long, not too similar to a competitor and the domains and social handles are available. On the logo side, simple is better so you can work on many backgrounds. Color scheme, make sure it meets accessibility standards and you can get these quite easily. You can just search it online, put your website into it, it'll tell you does this color meet the web standards or not. If it doesn't, obviously mess around with it and find a combination that does and then the font side a readable and professional. You've been so long in these different elements of your company that you forget actually that's not the point right the point as we said is all about how do you make money and get more users and when you're looking at your positioning right so before trying to push messaging out there and work stuff it's important to think about what messaging do you send out there what do you want to be known for and a lot of people make mistakes of thinking about they want to be better they want to be this they want to be that and it's like it's all very in the and the problem is is that when you're competing on that front if your competitor can make the same claim that you can make it's an invalid differentiator right instead you want to be there only and when you're there only it's uncomfortable because you might be saying for example that you're more niche than maybe you want to be.

4:11Maybe you're saying like, okay, we don't do these things. We don't do those things. But actually, it's really important. People need to understand what it is that you're the best in the world at so that they can pick you. And it could be, for example, that maybe composition does exist. But if you're 10 times better than them, you can act like they don't. So BayHQ, so BayHQ, what we do is we have events, we have programs, we do things like this, right? And And that's quite not common, but there's lots of people who can do that. Where we niche down, say BAE stands for British Asian Entrepreneur.

4:47But we use different terminology now. So we say we're the community for Asian heritage founders and investors in the UK. There is no competition for high growth investors, for high growth founders and investors. So when there's no competition, we are the only. So when we say that, you know exactly what we stand for and you know that we're the best at it. In reality, a lot of what we do is actually useful for everybody. You don't need to be Asian to watch this video. You don't need to be Asian to get value from this video. But if we were to just say, okay, we're the biggest community or the best community for everything, we couldn't really claim that.

5:20We can claim our niche and we can go beyond that as we grow and as we scale. And there's two ways to tell, like, are you really the as opposed to a? And you want to avoid saying things like we're a-leading. Like, you should be the, not a-leading. So it's two tests, right? To tell if you're really there only. So stupid test is one. Do at least some people think your strategy is stupid? And the opposite test is the opposite of your strategy viable. With us, people think our strategy is stupid. And that's okay. Like not everybody agrees with what we're doing. And there's going to be people who have a problem with it.

5:55If nobody had a problem with it, then we weren't really standing for anything anyway. So that's totally fine. And they also have, like their thoughts are valid. what they're saying does make sense and that's totally fine. We just can't be everything for everybody. Opposite test is the opposite of your strategy viable. So for example, for us, instead of being for founders and investors, maybe we're for employees, maybe we're for the team members, that would be a very valid strategy and it could work. The other idea, for example, is it could be for other backgrounds, it could be for other countries.

6:32All of those different elements of our strategy that you change, it would still be viable. It would just be a different focus and a different company, which we can't necessarily do. So when you're thinking about your earning attention, you need to know what you're the only for so that if you don't know what you're the only for, then how is your customers and potential clientele going to know? But you also need to think about what's the point of any of it, right? So Stephen Butterfield, who founded Slack, he had this famous memo called and in part of it he says we don't sell saddles here what he means by that is if you sell saddles you could be saying okay here's the different types of saddles we do here's like how our saddles are better than everybody else's are nobody really is that excited by saddles but what he's actually selling is the experience of horse riding if he it works he doesn't actually sell saddles but if he's trying to sell saddles you're saying okay hey, these are saddles, they're going to make you the comfiest.

7:32It's going to show you, like if you're the adverts and people use their cars. Most of the time, car adverts, for example, they might be in the mountains or they might be in somewhere cool. How often are people really driving through picturesque places? They're not. What the car adverts are selling is that dream. When you use the phrase of we don't sell saddles here, you're not talking about the different, like, oh, what type of lever is it and things like that. you're showing somebody who's running horseback through some pristine valley in the middle of nowhere and you can just see like okay by buying this saddle I can do that right and you think about the same with your product is that you're not selling what you actually do you're selling what the result is and we talked about this before and it's going to be are you making their money?

8:23Are you making them richer? Are you reducing their stress? Are you increasing their joy? Are you making them live longer? Are you saving them time? And you need to think about what is the end goal and making sure your communication and your messaging to get their attention is fulfilling one of those base needs. And the best way to get attention and to earn a customer is a phrase like this, my friend kept telling me I had to check you out. That's how we mainly grow. Part of that is that when you do get customers, you need to make them so happy they tell all their friends about you. And then you're on something and then you can really scale.

8:57So we're thinking about earning attention and using marketing. You can have the best marketing in the world. If your customers don't have a good experience, you're just going to keep churning through them and none of them are going to last. Next part to look at is network effects. And this is where the more people using your product, the more valuable it is. And you need to also think about when you're trying to earn attention, are network effects an important part of this? Do you really need that scale in order to increase the customer base or is it not as important? So two types of network effects.

9:30Direct is one type of customer user and indirect is two or more types. So that's like a marketplace. So social media is a classic one, right, of the more people on Facebook, the more valuable Facebook is to each customer. Because if you're on Facebook and none of your friends are not very useful if you look at indirect two or more types if we look at a dating app for example and let's say it's a if it's a dating app and it's like for the ease of argument here's a heterosexual one so obviously a homosexual one would be a direct one right where it's men to men or women to women if you're one which is primarily targeted heterosexual relationships then you've got you need if there's like one woman on the platform but 10 000 men that's not a very good experience right if there's 10 000 of each there's more to go there right so same thing with airbnb is another example the more places to rent there are then the more valuable it is for people who are going to rent and likewise if there's those people if there's not many people going to rent, then putting your place to rent onto Airbnb isn't very useful.

10:42It's kind of a cold start problem when you have for network effects is when it's not very valuable until there's more people there, you need to then push really hard to get the attention to get enough value on that platform for people to use it. Okay, so methods of earning attention. So Paul Graham, who's one of the co-founders of Y Combinator, which is one of the world's top accelerators, if not the top accelerator, he has this phrase about doing things that don't scale so right at the very beginning how do you get attention and you won't be able to do this forever but it will get you off the ground first is direct network so talk to as many people you know in real life getting them to sign up getting their friends to sign up and really pushing hard there next is in person how can you go to events can you talk to people in the streets can you get people to manually sign up if you do that and you you get the first five customers and you make them happy, can they get five more customers?

11:37Next is online community. Then you've got cold outreach. This is just messaging people constantly. Exclusivity. So say it was Clubhouse or Revolut at the beginning, where if you can build a hype around something, because only a few people can get it, then you can sometimes build attention that way as well. Using influencers, then doing viral stunts. So with everything that doesn't scale, if you have the right system in the place, you can actually scale them when done correctly. So viral stunts, for example, is a big way that Red Bull grows. So Red Bull does these incredible different stunts all across the world, and it always gets attention.

12:14And they have a model which they're able to keep doing those kinds of things because they have systems in place that enable them to do it. On the doing things that scale upside, this is like discovery content, right? So this is short form content. So this could be your LinkedIn, it could be Twitter or X even today, like Instagram, TikTok, when you're doing things where you can get a formula, you can just keep pumping this content out and they can keep meaning that people are understanding and learning about you. You've then got deep content. So deep content is newsletters, is podcasts, is longer YouTube videos.

12:49So discovery content might be able to find out about you. Deep content gets people to like you to really build a relationship with you and can really get that loyalty engine going. Then you have SEO and Geo. So SEO is search engine optimization. Geo is GPT engine optimization. So it's the AI equivalent. So if you can get that systems in place, where you're then ranking at the top of Google and ranking at the top of ChatTBT, you can then generate a lot of attention in that way. Next, you have ads. So you can use ads on, say, Meta, Google. Now you can do it on ChatTBT and so on too, then if you get the systems in place, you can just keep pumping in money.

13:30More money you pump in, the better return you might get. And then the other thing is referral engines. So where people can recommend their friends, if they recommend their friends, maybe they get a discount, maybe they get something extra on top of that, and that enables you to scale. So rattle through that there. When you're looking to do this effectively, it's all about figuring out where your customers are, what they're looking for, what platforms they trust. If you're trying to sell something to people who are, say, of like Gen Alpha, they probably don't spend very much time with Facebook.

14:06So that's probably not the right platform. If you're trying to sell something which is worth 100k, you probably want to be looking more at LinkedIn, where maybe there's a higher value average audience there. So you need to be understanding what's your target customer, what's your target customer persona and then making sure that you're using the the different engines you have to be able to reach them effectively on the deep content side too you have podcasts so i've done 450 plus podcasts now and the key thing is like really making sure there's an end to it because you can end up doing a lot of work to try and gain attention which doesn't really consider that feedback look of is this actually getting us what we need and another consideration here too is about personal brand versus business brand so there's like thousands of billionaires there's thousands of unicorn founders you can't name most of them most people who've got successful businesses aren't necessarily famous they don't necessarily have loads and loads of followers so you don't need to do that it's just one very effective way if you are the kind of person who can do that so when you think about how to gain attention there is no one right way it's all about understanding your strengths where you stand out and then where your customers are looking and who's going to convert and who's going to become the same to that paying customer the opportunity to build whatever it is you want to build so make sure you don't just default to say TikTok or Instagram because as we've heard it before look at all these different methods and find out where is it your customers are going when they're trying to find a solution and hopefully you'll be there when they're looking.

15:44So that's all for this session. So if you don't know, this is episode three of the series about the incubator async. So you can find out the further sessions through the links. If you wanted to get assignments and get feedback on the work from this too and make this more practical, then you can either wait for the next cohort or if you want it to be done more in a timely manner and you want to get moving now, you can also pay for access to get those assignments and you get direct feedback from me and the BayHQ team on whatever is you're building. Take care till next time.