“I don’t have time for marketing” and “I’m doing enough marketing for my current needs” are two of the most common refrains heard from startup founders. It’s easy to fall into these comfort zones when you need to manage everything else (product management, tech, operations, HR, finance) day-to-day and put out the frequent fires in all of these above functions.

But amidst the maelstrom, it makes sense to set aside some time to figure out your marketing.

That’s because marketing isn’t just a function. It helps you refine your startup’s concept, its raison d’etre, its ikigai. In some cases, it doesn’t just refine it. It defines it.

I once worked with a startup that wanted a website. But what they needed was a brand narrative that defines and guides everything they do across mediums. A manifesto of what they are and are not, and the four pillars of their purpose, all articulated by an external agency (us) with a fresh pair of eyes. Once we gave them that, they took it way beyond the website task and embedded it into everything they did.

Having worked with startups and scale-ups in health tech, fintech and food tech, I’ve identified three stages in any startup’s marketing. Depending on the startup, its age, its funding, and the vision of its founders, different startups need to work in various stages of their marketing.

Also Read: How to use Twitter to market your product as a founder

Here’s my attempt to simplify and articulate these three stages. As we discuss this spectrum, feel free to ascertain where your startup is currently situated on it.

Brand fundamentals

The first stage is what I call brand fundamentals. This requires ascertaining the very essence of your brand and distilling it into a form that governs every communication ever done by your brand. Yes, your startup is a brand, however large or small.

This sometimes looks like a brand pyramid or brand house. There are many different variants of this, but they all have certain foundational concepts at the base, such as product attributes, functional benefits and emotional benefits.

As you move up the pyramid, the concepts take a loftier form, such as product personality and product positioning. At the very top would be the loftiest essence of a brand. This could be “real beauty and self-esteem” (if you’re a skincare brand) or “health and hygiene” (if you’re a hand sanitizer brand), or “helping people make connections over coffee” (if you’re a café or coffee brand)

It would be best if you weren’t plucking these from thin air to fill up an artefact such as a pyramid or a house. It would be best if you had strategists who spend a lot of time researching your company, its current users, prospective users, their pain points, competitors, and so on before sieving out your unique essence and encapsulating it succinct yet informative way.

Foundational creative outputs

The second stage is what I call foundational creative outputs. This is how your startup looks to the world.

A website that’s not just aesthetically pleasing but also high on its SEO creds. A delightful presence on the social media of your choice. Out-of-home ads or print materials if you deem fit. Or, in the light of our increasingly digital world, you might be better off investing in a podcast or an event platform.

Meanwhile, don’t neglect the bare necessities like your everyday business collaterals and how your office looks. All these things need to draw directly from the fundamentals you’ve formulated in the first stage. Your brand essence cannot just remain in your internal docs and decks.

The foundational creative outputs are how it sees the light of day and becomes visible to the wider world beyond those who work with you.

Also Read: Diversity and inclusion marketing campaigns: Everyone, everyday, forever

Advanced creative outputs

The third stage is what I call advanced creative outputs. You might want to announce your brand in a big way through a stunning video. You might attempt time-bound or market-specific social media campaigns. You might need an in-store presence, in which case your shopper marketing needs to be well thought out. You might even decide to go apeshit with an experiential AR/VR activation in a public place. This is arguably the most fun part of marketing.

Ideally, stage one (brand fundamentals) should be done once, and it should be solidly in place. Occasionally you might want to rethink it, for example, if you’re entering a new market. But if you find yourself revisiting your brand fundamentals repeatedly, chances are you’ve yet to crack it.

Stage two (foundational creative outputs) may need a regular rethink, given ever-evolving website design trends. But even that should ideally not change a whole lot. Think of your favourite brands, and chances are, they don’t drastically alter their social media voice or the aesthetics of their event pages on a whim.

Stage three (advanced creative outputs) can be in flux. In fact, to keep things fresh and exciting, I recommend that they should be in a state of flux. Have fun with unexpected and creative ways to bring your brand to life while consciously filtering against what your brand is and isn’t.

Some brands have the right to do humour. Some don’t. Some brands can talk with the authority of knowledge. Others with the familiarity of a friend. Ensure that every creative output stays true to who your brand is. Note that I said who your brand is, not what your brand is.

No startup wants to remain a startup forever. But that risk is there if you get caught up in the whirlwind of the here and now and fail to strengthen the fundamentals that’ll take you where you want to be.

The three-stage process I’ve outlined is meant to be a simple guide that can give you that bit of extra clarity you seek. I hope it helps!

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NOICE, a multi-vertical audio platform for Indonesian listeners, has secured US$22 million in its Series A funding round led by Northstar Group, with participation from existing investors Alpha JWC, Go-Ventures and Kinesys.

“We will use the funds to grow our audio content creators’ community, advance the tech platform, and double down our efforts in developing audio series. We aim to surface Indonesia’s best stories from the local writers/storyteller’s community and adapt them into an audio format. We’ve piloted this new format and found very promising engagement and retention results,” said NOICE CEO Rado Ardian.

This round comes weeks after it announced a strategic investment by RANS Entertainment, a leading content company founded by celebrity couple Raffi Ahmad and Nagita Slavina.

Launched in June 2018 as a radio streaming platform, NOICE streams local audio content, including radio, music, audiobooks and podcasts, to registered listeners across Indonesia. Mahaka Media Group, a company created by Erick Thohir, the country’s minister of state-owned enterprises, is a major investor in NOICE.

Also Read: Indonesian podcast network NOICE nets ‘7-figure USD’ funding co-led by Alpha JWC, Go-Ventures

NOICE differentiates itself from its global rival Spotify through the platform’s hyperlocal in-house content. It focuses on producing and curating local audio content across different audio verticals and hosts more than 40,000 pieces of content.

The firm works closely with the local writers’ community to launch original audio drama series.

NOICE currently serves over two million users and claims to have grown more than 4x over the past year, with its listeners spending ~80 minutes per day on the platform.

The audio platform also runs an end-to-end creator development programme to guide the creators throughout their creative journey. It also includes a proprietary audio creation SaaS platform that allows creators to build and publish content directly on NOICE.

“Users and creators are always our top priority. We want users to have NOICE as their daily companion app through various content lineups ranging from new aspiring creators and hyperlocal talents to mega influencers. While on the creators’ side, we want to invest in building Noicemaker Studio, our recently launched a creator-focused platform where creators can grow their show and unlock the potential creator-driven monetization,” Rado added.

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Ready to meet new startups to invest in? We have more than hundreds of startups ready to connect with potential investors on our platform. Create or claim your Investor profile today and turn on e27 Connect to receive requests and fundraising information from them.

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As the technology becomes more popular, we begin to see various companies and organisations using NFTs for various purposes. Earlier this week, e27 published an interview with Singapore-based Ryde to understand their ride-to-earn programme and how they aim to build an efficient and advantageous membership programme with it.

In recent months, we have also begun to see artists, activists, and institutions utilising NFTs to fundraise for their projects. Leading media companies such as Straits Times raised over S$21,000 in an NFT auction to fundraise for The Straits Times School Pocket Money Fund; in fact, during the ongoing situation in Ukraine, its DAO’s sale of a simple NFT of the country’s flag managed to secure US$6.75 million in wartime funds.

But things are not always rosy. There are certainly examples of failed fundraising projects that can serve as a lesson for the rest of us.

If you are considering using NFTs as a means to fundraise for a cause or a project, what are the factors that you need to keep in mind? What can you do to ensure success? Most importantly, what can you learn from those who have failed?

e27 speaks to David Tng, Head of Growth, TZ APAC, the leading Asia-based ecosystem adoption arm for the Tezos blockchain, to understand more about fundraising through NFTs. Considered one of the most advanced and energy-efficient blockchains at the moment, the Tezos blockchain has been a go-to for many of the world’s most prominent NFT projects, including the largest fundraisers.

Also Read: Demystifying NFTs and DeFi

Why NFTs are great for fundraising

Before we can understand how to run a fundraising project using NFTs successfully, first we need to understand what makes this so attractive. The first advantage to come to mind was cost-effectiveness, followed by transparency and security.

Apart from that, NFTs open up the opportunity for a project or a cause to connect with a passionate, global audience who are even more willing to spend generously. In our interview, Tng cites a report by The Giving Block, a crypto financial platform that works with organisations to help them set up crypto wallets. The report reveals that the average crypto donations can go as high as US$10,000 while the average traditional donations are only around US$130.

“The number of donors is also increasing rapidly, around 15 times in 2021,” he adds.

But that does not mean fundraising through NFTs is completely risk-free. Tng warns against the potential of a backlash by citing the case of a recent fundraising effort by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Earlier this year, the UK chapter of the organisation released Tokens of Nature, a series of NFTs depicting endangered species.

The controversy began when experts criticised the organisation’s decision to work with Polygon. Despite being perceived as the more environmentally friendly option, digital currency economist Alex de Vries noted that Polygon “is responsible for some of the pollution generated by the notoriously energy inefficient Ethereum” and questioned WWF’s decisions. This eventually led to WWF discontinuing the initiative.

“Brands have to assess whether their values align with the technology on blockchain that they use. That’s something that they definitely have to figure out,” Tng stresses.

The failure of WWF reminds us of the key principle of fundraising through NFTs: In order to be able to attract potential donors, first, you need to understand them well.

When it comes to understanding your audience or potential NFT buyers, according to Tng, there are several questions that you need to answer:

1. What is the purpose of NFTs in this initiative?
“Why does this initiative require the use of NFTs and not other means of fundraising?” he asks. Tng also highlights the importance to decide the role that the NFT plays here: are they meant to build awareness, or are they a form of reward mechanism?

2. What does the NFT represent for the buyer?
Tng gives the example of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, an initiative where donors can show their contributions to the cause by displaying a pink ribbon on their online and offline presences. If you are fundraising by using NFTs, you also need to figure out a symbol that can represent buyers’ contributions. It can be in the form of an artwork, a symbol, or even access to a community such as a private group on Discord and Telegram, or an invitation to dine with the artist. “So there is a compelling reason [to contribute] that you can’t find elsewhere. This is actually the reason why they’re using NFTs; so it has to be very clear what the NFTs represent,” he stresses.

Tng says, when organisations are reaching out to TZ APAC for potential collaboration in a fundraising project, these are the questions that they will always ask. As with the case of WWF, where the organisations mistakenly associate themselves with a platform that is hurting their own brand, failure to understand the needs of the potential buyers may threaten the livelihood of the project.

Also Read: ‘NFTs provide new ways to handle IP management, empower content creators’: Inmagine CEO Warren Leow

“They have to be very clear because it is all going to be on social media. It is all going to be transparent. They need to have a strategy,” he stresses.

Another important point is to understand the fundamentals of the technology itself, as it can help organisations prevents mistakes, and be responsive in correcting the mistakes that they made. The Ukrainian NFT fundraising project is also a great example of the matter. According to Tng, the Ukrainian government earlier announced that they were going to do an airdrop of tokens to any person who had donated to the cause, but this ends up creating a backlash as they were not being clear about the purpose of these tokens.

“But something that they did well is that they realised the mistake quickly and cancel this plan. They are aware that they did not do enough research and were not really clear about the purpose.

There was also the matter of choosing the right blockchain to facilitate this effort.

“It really depends on the organisation which blockchain they are most aligned with. Whether it is Ethereum, Solana, or Tezos … There are some that are more energy-efficient, but there are also others that drive other values with them as well,” Tng says.

Getting the word out

As with any novel technology, education remains an important homework that stakeholders need to work on. In the case of a decentralised platform, it becomes even more crucial as users should be able to make informed decisions on their own.

Apart from that, there is also a need for organisations to continuously update the progress of this fundraising project through social media channels, particularly whenever the fundraising has reached a new milestone.

“I think organisations have to be aware of that and uphold themselves on a similar or even greater level than the traditional means of fundraising because now every single step of the way is visible to the public … There is an increasing need for communication,” Tng stresses.

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Ready to meet new startups to invest in? We have more than hundreds of startups ready to connect with potential investors on our platform. Create or claim your Investor profile today and turn on e27 Connect to receive requests and fundraising information from them.

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In this episode, we are excited to welcome Claudia Makadristo, Head of Africa Expansion for MetaMap, a fast-growing digital trust and reputation infrastructure layer that enables other service providers. Prior, Makadristo was Head of Partnerships and Regional Manager for Seedstars.

In our conversation, Makadristo talks about the importance of building relationships in emerging markets to understand local dynamics – especially with government regulators, introducing your company the right way, why you don’t want to underestimate local competitors who fully understand the local market well, the importance of having a solid local team to navigate local nuances in a market and why it’s crucial to understand the sensitivities and differences within a market, leading with empathy so you can effectively interpret your product or service for the new market.

Also Read: Yoco head of international expansion on building trust in a new market

This episode is sponsored by our partner, ZEDRA. Learn more about how the ZEDRA team can support you in expanding to new markets here.

Find our entire podcast episode library here and learn more about our forthcoming book on global business growth here.

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The content was first published by Global Class.

Image Credit: Global Class

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Singapore-based battery recycling solutions company Green Li-ion announced today it has closed its US$11.55 million Series A funding round, led by Energy Revolution Ventures.

Cleantech investors, including EDP Ventures (the VC arm of renewable energy producer EDP), TRIREC, SOSV, Entrepreneur First, MB Energy Partners, Ilshin Holdings, Envisioning Partners, and GS Holdings also joined the round.

The funds will allow Green Li-ion to demonstrate commercial operations, expand into Europe, and for R&D. The firm looks to develop and pilot the next generation of recycling products.

Also Read: Transitioning to new energy? Here’re 5 prominent solutions for your business

Green Li-ion has developed a range of plug and play modular battery recycling technologies targetting recycling and manufacturing plants. The technology generates material profits for the recycler or manufacturer (by producing battery-grade materials directly from black mass). It also creates cost savings for companies in the battery supply chain.

Another benefit is that it enhances the overall sustainability of the end product.

Global demand for battery metals is currently at a historic high. This is anticipated to continue for the foreseeable future, with global power demands increasing and economies looking to decarbonise.

Accordingly, recycling spent and waste batteries will be an important source of battery materials. Green Li-ion claims its technology enables customers to undertake cost-effective on-site recycling of batteries.

Also Read: Green Li-ion raises US$3.45M to make Li-ion battery recycling ‘faster, profitable’

Leon Farrant, Co-Founder and CEO of Green Li-ion, said: “This is a pivotal moment in the battery markets. The world is experiencing exponential growth in the demand for sustainably sourced and manufactured batteries. We believe that our technology will help ensure that batteries can be brought to the market with minimal waste and safely recycled in an environmentally sustainable manner. We are at an inflexion point with the sourcing and development of battery metals, and we believe that Green Li-ion and its associated technologies have the potential to play an important role in making the battery sector climate positive.”

In March 2021, Green Li-ion had raised US$3.45 million in seed funding.

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