Notes from Founders: Steph Mui

We chatted with one of our clients Steph Mui to share her insights on content marketing and community building at PIN (Power in Numbers). She is now building a platform that makes it easy for people to pool their money together & invest in startups.

As a second-time founder what have you learned about brand-building going from company 1 (Mulu) to company 2(PIN)?

I've always known investing in brand-building is important, but I have an extra appreciation for it now going into company two. Especially now that we're in an industry with a lot of old-school incumbents who have 10+ years of name recognition behind them, investing in brand is extra important. It's the first and sometimes only impression for net-new people, and their decision to engage further with you is heavily influenced by the feelings your brand elicits. I also appreciate how working with Yung for Mulu forced us to think about the values and feelings we wanted to have associated with the brand; the aesthetics of your brand are important, but you need strong alignment on company values as the foundation, first.

Love all your thoughtful content at PIN, what have you learned about building content playbooks to drive brand-building?

I was always scared to post content, out of fear of what people would think about me or what I wrote, but building PIN (and the success we've had with content) has changed my view on content and its importance. I hope that anyone out there who has an inclination to start posting does! Inbound from content was our biggest source of leads for a long time, only eclipsed now slightly by word of mouth, now that we've grown more. A few things that come to mind:

1) Posting content about how you/your company views the world is beneficial because it either a) educates people who might not know anything about the space you're in, and you have the chance to influence that, or b) you give people who share the same values as you the opportunity to reach out/become a company advocate. Besides attracting users, we've made some of our best hires this way, too.

2) Working backwards from the person you're trying to attract is helpful in generating content ideas and making sure you're putting time/resources into the best type of content. In the beginning, we experimented with a lot of formats and because we saw some initial success with funny meme posts, we doubled down. Although it worked at getting impressions and was highly effective in the beginning, we noticed when we started putting out more educational content or content specific to PIN (i.e. our mafia series), it had less impressions but was highly effective at generating higher-quality leads.

We imagine it's important to activate the community at PIN – what are your insights and learnings about authentically community-building around your brand and offering?

Yes! PIN is built around the belief that communities make the best investors, especially when you give individuals an opportunity to be active builders of the community. What this means for PIN is that our product not only does all the boring admin associated with facilitating startup investments, but we've invested heavily into products that enable individuals to contribute to their communities - whether that's by bringing awesome potential investments to the table or helping founders they're invested in with important things like hiring. Our most successful communities are ones where every individual feels like a part-owner and true contributor, and we're proud to be further enabling that with our product!

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Notes from Founders is where Yung Studio talks to founders about all things brand as they launch, grow, or pivot their businesses.