A Branding & Marketing Roadmap for Startups

Intro:

Welcome to Startup Success, the podcast for startup founders and investors. Here, you’ll find stories of success from others in the trenches as they work to scale some of the fastest-growing startups in the world, stories that will help you in your own journey. Startup Success starts now.

Kate Adams:

Welcome to Startup Success. Today we have Chris Kirsch, who is co-founder and CEO of runZero with us today. Hi, Chris, it’s great to see you.

Chris Kirsch:

Hi Kate, thanks for having me.

Kate Adams:

Thank you. I’m excited for this conversation. I’ll share with the audience that it took us a while to get this going with the SBV crisis and some other things. So I’m really looking forward to our conversation. I want to get started if you could walk us through runZero and how it came to be.

Chris Kirsch:

Sure, absolutely. So we’re a cyber asset management vendor. So basically that means we tell people what’s connected to their network for security purposes. And that includes IT and OT. So things like manufacturing floors and utilities and hospital biomedical systems. Also cloud environments and remotes, really the full breadth. Because if you don’t know what you have, you really don’t know what you’re protecting. And so the whole thing started out basically by hearing from customers when my co-founder and I were at Rapid7 and also afterwards. hearing from customers that they didn’t even know what they had on their network and that they were really struggling with that. And so I have to credit my co-founder because he had the idea of how to solve it. He was looking into it and saying, okay, how are people doing this and why are they frustrated? The reason why they were frustrated was not because they weren’t able to see the managed devices. Those are often relatively easy, but because they weren’t able to see the unmanaged devices. And then when you looked into how people are doing it, they were usually using either a software agent on the device or an authenticated scan. For both of those, you need to know that an asset exists and you need to have a password to actually inventory the device. So that doesn’t work. And so my co-founder is starting out from a point of view of an ethical hacker. He said, all right, let’s take a different approach and take an unauthenticated network scan where you don’t need to know anything about the environment. You scan it and you just discover more and more and more. And then we added API integrations with cloud, with EDR, with MVM solutions, and a whole bunch of other systems. And so now we have a complete picture across the entire enterprise environment across many different industries.

Kate Adams:

That’s fantastic. It sounds extremely thorough, like you get the full picture, right?

Chris Kirsch:

Well, I’m German with a Swiss education, so I think that… That’s probably why.

Kate Adams:

So that explains it. Okay, because wow, you’ve covered it all. And what a great way to come to that solution, right? That’s why I love hearing these stories. It’s like you thought of things in a different way and then put it together. Congratulations, that’s great. And so I wanted to get into first your whole fundraising, bootstrapping, that whole situation, because I want to share with the audience you had a very successful Series A raise. So many people listening are trying to do that. If you could walk us through that whole part of the journey, I think that would be really helpful and interesting.

Chris Kirsch:

Absolutely, yeah. So my co-founder, HD Moore, he’s the, for folks that are familiar with cybersecurity, he’s the creator of Metasploit as well, which is a penetration testing tool. So a lot of people might know him from that, in that industry. So he started out, he had the idea, and he just started, founded the company, but then also created a prototype. Did this as a part-time job, by the way, while still working as a penetration tester, and built a product and the first parts of a business in the first two years. So that was from 2018 to 2020. And he really got to product-market fit in that time. He bootstrapped the whole thing himself, wrote a loan to himself, paid himself back, then was actually profitable, but was thinking about growing the company. And when you’re trying to grow the company, if you don’t take on money, you can grow, but you grow very slowly. And sometimes you miss the market, you miss the window compared to other better-funded competitors. But his mindset and also my mindset is to be very financially conservative in terms of what we’re spending money on and how we’re growing the company and so on. Just before I joined, so this was around August-September of 2020, he had a bunch of inbound interests from VCs. And one of them stood out to him as folks that he’d actually love to work with. And that was a company called Decibel. They took their, a lot of their funds came from Cisco to start with. I think they now have other LPs as well. And we started working with them. I came on board around December 2020, January 2021. And we already had $5 million in Seed funding. We already had, I think it was close to 100 customers at that point. And so that was a really good way to start out. A lot of small ones, but also some blue-chip names. So it was a really good way to start out and grow a company. And I think if we’re speaking to other people here that are founding companies, try to get to product-market fit as cheaply as possible. Because you don’t know if it’s going to work out and you can do that on the side. You can do all sorts of things. And only start scaling up once you have product-market fit. It doesn’t have to be a fully baked product with everything in it, everything that you ever wished for and planned for because that’s never going to happen. The moment you see, all right, I’ve got traction. I’m getting not just one or two, but dozens of customers responding to this and buying, putting their money down in exchange for the value. That’s a good sign that you’re ready to scale. And so we first scaled sales because we had a lot of inbound, HD is quite well known in the industry. So just through social postings and so on and going on podcasts like these, we had a lot of inbound. Then we started scaling marketing a little bit later. And now we’re at just over 80 people.

Kate Adams:

Great story. And it really hones in again on product-market fit, which we hear over and over again on this show, how important it is. And I like how you talked about, you know, it doesn’t have to be perfect, but get there, get the interest and start that way. Really good example of that. And then the next thing I want to get into and have you share is something that a lot of founders grapple with. And that is they get going and you have to change your name. You have to re-brand for whatever reason. And it’s a big deal. And we see this all the time on the show for various reasons. You went through a very successful change. And if you could go through that, that would be really interesting.

Chris Kirsch:

Oh yeah, absolutely. So we were in a position where we had a branding problem with another company that we thought wasn’t overlapping with us. It wasn’t a legal issue. It was more of a branding issue where the other company was getting so big that even though they were in another space, there was kind of like this halo effect that was leading to confusion. So we decided to re-brand. And I have rebranded a lot of products and companies in the past. And also I have the hubris that I can figure out everything. I would do my own dental work if I could. So I make the crazy decision of doing this all in-house. So you can take an agency for the graphics, for the naming, for all of these things. We were on a really tight timeline because we wanted to re-brand by Black Hat, which is a big conference in our space. We had about, I think, four months or so, and I thought, by the time we find an agency and we brief them on what we need and so on, we have some really good talent in-house. Some folks had done rebranding before. We just decided to do it in-house. We started with a creative brief, because if you don’t have a creative brief for the new name, once you come up with a brainstorming list, you have no objective criteria to apply against anything, right? So you need to know what you’re looking for and what the criteria are first. And so we wrote that down. One thing, if you’re new to that topic, I highly recommend a book called “Hello, My Name is Awesome” by Alexandra Watkins. And she has two different tests that you apply in addition to whatever your company-specific things are. One she calls a smile test, and the other one a scratch test. The smile test are all the positive things about a brand, right, about a name. We’re only talking about the name right now. It should be, and it’s an acronym, so be suggestive, be memorable, evoke imagery, because it’s easier to remember, have legs. and be emotional, right? So all of these things that make a name really come alive. And the scratch test is, these are all the negative things. Is it spelling challenged? It should not look like a typo. There are a lot of companies out there that spell things like one letter off, you know, Fiverr with an extra R, and like a vowel changed or vowel missing, you know, those kinds of things. It makes it really hard because it doesn’t pass what I call the phone test, right? If I tell you a name over the phone, if I tell you runZero, which is our new name, you can spell it and you can spell runzero.com. I don’t have to spell it out. It shouldn’t be a copycat. So if it’s like Pinkberry, like you shouldn’t call it PinkRaspberry because that’s just weak branding. It shouldn’t be too restrictive. My husband wanted to call his company Cambridge Terrorist Technology when he started out. They’re no longer in Cambridge and they no longer do—they still do terror huts, but it’s a lot broader, right? So you don’t want to be too limiting on where you start out, you don’t want it to be annoying or tame or have the curse of knowledge where only people who are really deep inside your material understand what the name means, and it shouldn’t be hard to pronounce. So those are some of the tests. So we did a brainstorming, then we did a trademark search. Also make sure you check Google because there was one late candidate that we had. They had no trademarks registered. And just before we decided to go ahead with that name, we Googled it and we figured out that there was another company in a very similar space that had just come out of stealth, I think it was 11 days prior, and they shared a common investor with us.

Kate Adams:

Oh wow, good catch. What a great catch.

Chris Kirsch:

So also do Google. Yes. Don’t just do trademark searches, right? Right. and then also figure out what is important to you. We had originally had rumble.run, but we didn’t have rumble.com. And a lot of naming people tell you like, oh, that’s fine. You’re like, whatever the top level domain is, doesn’t matter as long as you don’t have a conflict within your area of expertise. For us because we had gotten burned by not having the dot com and that dot com causing us to rebrand, we said all right we absolutely must have the dot com. So then you, so that means when you name the company, the name becomes less important, the domain becomes really important. Availability of the domain becomes really important. And so when you look at the market, there are a few different ones. Like there’s domains that are available, just go and register. Getting very rare for new names. There are buy-now domains. They have a price tag on them, a couple of thousand dollars, and you can click and buy them right now. Then you have the curated buy now. Those are websites that already come with like a logo and all of that stuff, and they’re a little bit more focused on just brandable terms. So with the buy-nows, you have to search for different names, whereas the curated ones give you like, tell me are you a tech company or a consumer company, and they will try to suggest names and so on. So it’s a little bit easier to find stuff. And there’s the private market. So the super high end domain names, like something like hotels.com, diapers.com, you know, like, or just very, very good domain names, those can go a hundred thousand dollars into the millions of dollars. And that is a very close-knit community with domain brokers. You need to, oftentimes they take a retainer, they negotiate with people and so on. It’s not a very transparent market. And then there are the passive owners, people who have a domain and sit on it. Like there was one domain that we were considering that I really liked and it belonged to this one guy who had a band of that name. was no longer really using the website. And so I tried to really get in touch with them like all sorts of ways, whatever way I could, and I didn’t get a response. So it’s those kind of things. So it’s a journey. And so you need to try and unmask the domain owners if it’s a passive owner. And then, so it was quite a journey.

Kate Adams:

Sounds like it.

Chris Kirsch:

To even research this area, right?

Kate Adams:

Right. This is very helpful too, just for those starting out with a name, right? To go through the process for founders listening who are deciding a name, follow this process as well.

Chris Kirsch:

It’s really hard and depending on, let’s say you have a domain, there is a domain that you’re interested in. You can do just visit the website to figure out who it belongs to, but that often isn’t enough, right? Sometimes the Internet Archive, I think it’s archive.org, the Way Back Machine.

Kate Adams:

Oh, right, that’s a fun one, yes.

Chris Kirsch:

You go back and see like, who did it belong to? So maybe you can figure that out, you can Google it and so on. One time we found a domain, the seller was willing to sell, and then we did some background research and we figured out they’re in Iran, and we probably can’t sell to them for sanction issues. Oh, wow. So there’s like all sorts of reasons why deals fall through, like what would have been illegal for us to pay the money. Right. Yeah, so crazy, crazy journeys. And then once you have that, we had one domain name that we had all agreed on. And that was actually, I’ll say it here, I don’t think it hurts. It was neonray.com. We provide visibility into networks. So the concept of light and so on was something that really worked for us. And we thought we’d aligned all the stakeholders. We bought the name. It was not that expensive. And we thought we’d build a brand around it. There’s cool visuals that you can do. You can play with the language and so on. So build a whole brand around it. And then Monday morning, I get a call from my VP of Sales and he says, hey, I slept on it and I can’t live with the name and neither can the head of branding. And I thought, damn. Right, right. And we’re back to square one.

Kate Adams:

But you know, I like your name better, I have to say. And good for that employee for speaking up, right? And good for you as a founder for taking that feedback from somebody on your team. I mean, that’s a story right there of why you surround yourself with these people.

Chris Kirsch: Yeah, absolutely. And one person you can maybe convince and you’re never going to find a name that everybody loves. Right. But if your head of sales and your head of branding come to you and say like, Hey, I can’t live with that name. I can’t, you know, my VP of Sales basically said like, I have a meeting with a big government agency. I can’t imagine going into the room and saying, Hi, I’m with NeonRay.

Kate Adam:

Yeah, I agree. I agree.

Chris Kirsch:

I think I’m a little more edgy. Yeah. I would have been comfortable with it. But that’s why you have a team, right?

Kate Adams:

Yes. Different perspectives. Yes. I think that’s a great testament to that right there for the founders listening. So tell us about coming to runZero and then what you did from there.

Chris Kirsch:

Yeah. So I am a politics student and I have a marketing degree. So I always think like we can get into a room, talk to each other, do brainstormings, have methodologies and so on. My co-founder is somebody who comes from the technology side and he says, this seems like a problem that software can solve.

Kate Adams:

Oh, okay. You two really balance each other, yeah.

Chris Kirsch:

So what he did is he said, give me all the terms that he came up with in brainstorming. Not full names, but English words, because we knew that it was probably a combination of English words. Because if you wanted to pass the phone test, it has to be a word that people recognize. Run and zero are two English words. RunZero, not so much as one word, but the two components are. And so he said, all right, I’m going to feed all of these into a CSV file, and I’m going to add a dictionary of all the positive words that are out there in the English language, like words under a certain letter count, so simple words, right? You don’t want to have something too complicated. And then he ran all of the combinations of all of those words and checked them against an offline version of the .com and .biz and .net and so on domain, what are they called? Domain transfer files, I think. Right. So he basically pulled an offline copy as if you do it online, you can do it online, but it takes a very long time. So then basically I got lists of thousands of names that were available. I was reading text files for days.

Kate Adams:

What a process, yes.

Chris Kirsch: Yeah, and you find some really funny ones in there and some really offensive ones too. So if you’re going that route, be careful.

Kate Adams:

I bet. Yes.

Chris Kirsch: And so we found something around runZero. It wasn’t quite runZero, but we had, you know, like that other name led us to think about this, about the name runZero. We checked and the .com, .net, et cetera were reserved. Some of them, others were free, but the ones that were reserved were buy-now domains. So we knew exactly what the price was. And so in the end, we bought about 20 domains, or so, 15, 20 domains. runzero.com, .net, .org, .cloud, .code, .dev, .info, .io, I’ve got them in front of me, .run, right? Then run0.com, .net, .org, and so on, zerorun.org, like zero.run, all of those, so that we wouldn’t have those adjacency problems. And we got the whole thing for, I think it was around $10,000, which is not bad when you’re looking at domain name prices, right? Especially if you have something in there that’s short, memorable, and also completely clean of trademark issues. So then we hired a trademark attorney, our law firm that we use for corporate law, contract law, labor law, didn’t do trademark law, they don’t do IP law. And quite honestly, I just went to upwork.com because I didn’t have any strong recommendations. I went to upwork.com. I found somebody who’s a registered trademark and patent attorney in the US, who had a good review rating and worked with them. And they did our national, our domestic, and our international registrations.

Kate Adams:

What a great tactical piece of advice right there.

Chris Kirsch:

Yeah, because you know, it’s really hard to know if a lawyer is any good. The recommendation I got from our law firm was like, hey, we know this guy, but it wasn’t like a really strong recommendation. On Upwork, you have… It was a transactional kind of relationship. It wasn’t a law firm that we’re working with long term. I mean, they’re probably going to do our renewals and so on. But having feedback from other people who’d worked with them as a star rating and with short descriptions for a lawyer, I thought was pretty good and that worked pretty well.

Kate Adams:

No, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Okay.

Chris Kirsch:

And then we went into the logo design and the visual brand and all of that.

Kate Adams:

And with the logo design and visual brand, was that, did you have an in-house resource for that? Somebody on your team or did you? Okay, okay.

Chris Kirsch:

We had a few people. We had one person in marketing, one UX designer, and myself. I also started my career as a graphic designer.

Kate Adams:

Oh, OK. That helps.

Chris Kirsch: So once we had the name, we came up with a few concepts for the type part of the logo and then for the glyph, which is kind of like the, some people call it icon or whatever.

Kate Adams:

Right.

Chris Kirsch: And our UX designer brought us the design for the type that we’re using today. And I brought us the glyph that we’re using today. And it was always, we had hundreds of designs that we were proposing and then getting votes on and refining and so on. And then we had to go through the colors. When you choose the colors, make sure that they have the right contrast for, I forgot what the right term is, but basically for accessibility for people who can’t see well on the web, so that in the UX, on the website and so on, that you have the right level of contrast for buttons and so on.

Kate Adams:

So that’s helpful. Yes. I also find, you know, you also have to think about when your logo is used in other places, right? Like a T-shirt, vest or a mug for swag. Yes, yes. So you all were very thorough, obviously, in that.

Chris Kirsch:

Yes, your logo should not be too detailed. If it’s too detailed, it becomes very difficult to print on mugs and shirts and so on. If you have too many colors, it can get very expensive. So it should work in black and white. So these are all things like logo designs I’ve done in the past and plenty of them and worked in pre-production and ad agencies. So I kind of know what kind of things work and what doesn’t work. And so we kept it pretty, in terms of design, I think the design works and the colors are distinctive in the industry, but it’s a very kind of traditional logo in the sense of being fairly chunky and bold, right?

Kate Adams:

I think it turned out great. And I really appreciate you walking us through the whole process, because as I mentioned, it’s not just helpful for those going through a re-brand, but those founders going for their first brand, right? I mean, as somebody who’s worked with a lot of startups, a problematic logo, name, just keeps coming up. It doesn’t go away, right? It’s not something you really do have to address, but it’s expensive and it’s time consuming, so founders don’t want to.

Chris Kirsch:

And it’s so hard to do it. I think it took us over four months. We did get it done in time for the trade show. I would recommend not trying to get the logo done in time for a trade show. I mean, we didn’t want to show up with the old name, but that created a lot of problems because some of our, let’s say channel partners wanted to organize a party, right? And we sponsored the party and they said like six weeks before the show or four weeks before the show, can you send us your logo? Like, sorry, we can’t.

Kate Adams:

Yeah, you’re like, that’s a really tough question. It should be an easy ask, but not right now, right?

Chris Kirsch:

And also, we didn’t have a booth there. We only had a suite in a hotel. So there were fewer graphics needs, but if you have a booth, you have lead time. You have six to eight weeks for the banners to get created, all that stuff. And maybe if you have the luxury, don’t pick a major industry event, do it a little bit earlier so that you have time after you come up with a design and relaunch your website so that you can then design your banners and all of the other stuff that you need to do to actually show up at the event.

Kate Adams:

Great advice. Seriously, there’s so many people listening who run into problems around this. So as we wrap up, I always end our show with this, and I’m definitely very interested to hear what you will say. Just some general advice for founders listening. You’re on a successful path. You’ve had a successful fundraise. You’ve scaled, all of that. If you could share something to help those going through the journey.

Chris Kirsch:

I think apply common sense and don’t always do it exactly the same way others do it. You can be guided by how other people do it, but it doesn’t mean that you have to do it the same way. I know that’s dangerous advice because there are good reasons why other people have done it like this before. But for example, we decided to be a completely 100% remote company during COVID, which now in retrospect doesn’t sound like it’s like, oh, you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that out. Right. We thought about it and this was in late 2020. So the pandemic was still in full swing. And I thought through it and I thought about, okay, let’s fast forward a little bit. Like right now, of course, being remote is the right option because we can’t meet up anyway, right? It doesn’t work. But going forward, what’s going to happen is I could see a lot of companies invested in office space. And a lot of managers believe in getting people into the same room. And so when the pandemic’s over, these companies and managers are going to ask people to come back, which turned out to be true. And some of these people will enjoy being remote. Others will be happily going back to the office and prefer that mode. But some people will prefer to work remotely. And I thought, OK, that’s a great opportunity for us to pick up more people that are going to be shaken loose, right? So it was a super competitive hiring market. I mean, now we’re in a different economic time, right?

Kate Adams:

Right, but back then it was.

Chris Kirsch:

Back then it was super competitive. And so that made it easier for us to hire. Not being limited to one city for our talent was easier to hire. HD and I are in two different cities anyway. So one of us would have been remote or it would have been hybrid. And hybrid is the worst of both worlds because if you’ve ever been remote with other people in a conference room, it sucks.

Kate Adams:

It does. You got to go one or the other. I agree. Yes.

Chris Kirsch:

And the last thing is it’s a little cheaper. If you don’t have to pay for the real estate, it’s cheaper.

Kate Adams:

Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Yep.

Chris Kirsch:

So think about: Are the conditions under which other people made those decisions still valid or not?

Kate Adams:

Right, right. Excellent advice. So for those listening, how do they find out more information about runZero, more information about you, where do they go?

Chris Kirsch:

Sure. So runZero is easy. It’s runzero.com. You did it. You did it well. Yes. And so you should be able to see a lot on that website. You can also get a free trial. So if you’re a tech enthusiast and you like playing with tech at home, try it out at home. If you think you need asset inventory in your company, you can use the same trial and try it out. The trial that we have on the website is the fully blown enterprise version, but it downgrades to a forever free version that you can use at home or in a small business. And yeah, for myself, you can find me on LinkedIn as ChrisKirsch, that’s K-I-R-S-C-H. And same name on Twitter and on Mastodon where I’m Chris_Kirsch and on Mastodon it’s at @infosec.exchange.

Kate Adams:

Excellent. Thank you so much, Chris, for today. I’m really happy we made it happen. You shared a lot of great insights. So it was a really fun conversation. Thank you.

Outro:

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