Why I think you need to grow your personal brand to grow your business

hey guys welcome to Silicon Valley girl and welcome to San Mateo today I'm giving a talk at Draper University I'm taking you with me I'm gonna talk about personal brand business all the stuff that you love interested continue watching let's go [Music] thank you so much for this warm and energetic welcome that's amazing thank you guys back in 2015 were sitting at her small place back in st. Petersburg Russia and we're trying to grow this startup we just started Kalinga trip it's a booking platform for study abroad courses like when you go to a country to learn a language and things were not going well because we were paying our developers a lot of money in Russia's like $1,000 a month but it was a lot for us I lived up like 300 dollars a month we're trying to raise money and I had like maybe 50 meetings in Russia and one of the meetings ended up I was standing on the stage like this in front of maybe like 40 investors and I present linguae trip and the guy stands up and says hey do you know the best thing you can do with the company right now is shut it down because you know we had a similar startup people don't really travel to learn languages there are so many apps and I was spending there nearly crying because we had so many meetings we couldn't raise money I didn't know where was going but then after like maybe another ten meetings we met a guy came from Silicon Valley he was just mentoring startups he introduced us to 500 startups and Y Combinator and it was an amazing day so on Friday he introduced us I think on Friday night I had an interview with 500 because they were already closing the batch and I had an interview with a girl who just came back from Chile where she was studying Spanish and she was like you know in order to book a school I had to go to TripAdvisor I had to look for schools that had to contact them directly and I'm so excited you're actually doing a platform work and book all of that Tuesday morning will wake up I check my email and there is this letter from five hundred you guys are getting a hundred thousand dollars in investment welcome to Lacan Valley but we need you there in like two days and well I'm calling our CTO and I'm like hey we've got accepted and he's like do you know what date is it today I'm like what he's like April 1st like April Fool's Day I'm like no no this is serious it's a real document to my email and then we had maybe like 12 hours to book the super expensive fly to San Francisco we came here started the program the program was four months and then at the end of the program because sometimes you think oh I got this investment I got in this amazing accelerator and you think the life is amazing everything is gonna grow but the problem is we saw that a lot of startups here just rely on investment injections and we realized that if we don't start to make enough money would just eat through that money where is the money from angels as well but we realized that the way for a company to go was to generate profits so we spent four months here then two moments fundraising and I applied for my own visa which is like an extraordinary yeah I see you know what I'm talking about so played with that visa and I went back to Russia because we decided to minimize their costs and game profitability so what happened later I had an interview at the Embassy in the US so my Olin visa was approved here then there's a second step where you go to the embassy in your own country and I go to the embassy and I was twenty five year old back then and I look like a teenager and I come to talk to that guy and he's looking at me he's like so what is your special ability and because he was talking to me in that way I'm like I I built a company you know which is God investment it was like a usual really and I'm standing there with this pile of documents and his next question was like are you sure you're applying for the right type of visa and I'm like oh yeah you know I've paid my lawyer like what was six thousand dollars or something and he's like you know what I can't find your visa number in our system right now so I'm gonna give you this paper which which says your visa is denied and just you know go home and we'll figure it out and I got I realized that our company's not registered in the States we have a bank account here we have whole of our investors and I don't even have a right to come back so cold my Lauri he said Marina don't worry I've been in practice for ten years we've had only one case on that I like that it took a year to resolve everything but in the end he got his visa I'm like okay awesome one year without going to the US it took him two months to solve the problem they found the number they approved everything so I got my visa and then in November 2016 I think we reached profitability summer 2016 in November 2016 Dimitri I and our CTO were moved to the US I wanted to focus a little more on how I actually gain profitability because I think we're gonna in the unique position here where I started blogging during my entrepreneurial journey so basically back in 2014 we bought a first ad from an influencer and she had think 60,000 followers on YouTube and I was like oh my god she's a superstar let's send her to the UK I get her free trip and she said yes she went on that trip and the next day and she was this fashion blogger like now I wouldn't invest in fashion bloggers in terms of like education because they have a different kind of crowd but what happened she went to London and the next day she released her video we had a line of girls with like Louie Vuitton taxes tough in front of our office willing to book that trip and like oh my god influencer marketing is so powerful and then we got another ad from an influencer and another and I was like maybe I should also start talking YouTube because you know they're getting all this free stuff but basically what drove me back then is that I was also applying to an for an MBA program in the US because you know when getting all the notes from the investors when struggling with money you're thinking of other ways to grow your company internationally and I thought if I get an MBA in the US and somehow I heard that some universities give full financial aid to international students that maybe I would try and I tried it took my gmail i took my TOEFL that was end of 2014 what happened is that in March we got an offer from 500 and I also got two offers from local university I got an offer from Johns Hopkins University to do my Master's with a full-ride and an offer from the University of Florida but I had to decline them because it was talking to me to hear a lot about that and he was like come on you know growing your startup is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity so I declined the MBA offers and the started working on a start-up but going through that journey gave me amazing content for my blog and I was like I just want to share it and it wasn't something fancy I just had my iPhone and I put it like my window to get better lie and it started talking about that experience and I didn't have any expectations about YouTube I just floated the video and I waited for a month and then in a month I'm checking and there is a thousand views in my video and I'm like hey mom I have a thousand views in my video can you imagine that and she's like oh yeah if we collect all of those people's like a small stadium and I'm like wow this is so powerful and when I came here to the US we had like two thousand dollars to get a car at first we try to move around on bikes but then we realize it's impossible especially if you want to get some food and stuff and I made a video about getting every Thai police card because that was the only car we could buy like a decent car we could buy with two thousand dollars and that video went viral on YouTube I think we got like five hundred thousand views and I realized that people are certainly starting to come into linguae trip and booked their trips because I'm talking about the u.s. I'm showing them what we're doing and then I realized that I also have to invest my time and building this personal brand and talking to people and I know for some companies you're maybe thinking I hate being in front of the camera I don't know what I'm gonna talk about but you know even like hiring somebody who would talk and give content to your customers is really really crucial these days because if we're just invested in ads if we invested in like Facebook as Google s who would spend so much money if you're trying to build your marketing strategy on a very limited budget just talking about where you do just showing the face behind the company is really really powerful so right now I have three channels lingo marina is my largest Cheung with teach people languages 1.5 million followers Silicon Valley girl 240 thousand followers there I focused more on like entrepreneurial stuff third channels and Russian that was my first channel almost 1 million followers and I think what's happening right now is Instagram is a huge platform for making sales because you have this 24 hours so if you're like giving your customers a splash offer that really works with the timer and stuff this is where we see a lot of sales coming from especially if your product is like 50 to $100 this is a perfect platform so yeah this is my story in in short and I wanted to focus more on your questions guys because you know maybe some of you are just starting to build a company and you have questions about your company or maybe about building personal brands so I think would open up to Q&A and I would try to work on your questions I'm just wondering did you just find yourself blowing to eat Oregon yeah it's it's actually both I think when you start doing something when you start putting content out there like my best content is the content that I don't have to prepare for like if you find yourself researching a different articles putting together a script I think this is not the best place to start because you already have a lot of barriers so you're afraid of the camera so your first time putting something in YouTube you kinda have to figure out how to edit your video so try to make it as easy as possible what I found is that people come to YouTube for your experience because we have all the TV shows we have amazing TV channels that in-vessel in production but people actually want to hear people's stories and my first story was like how I pass TOEFL my second story was how I passed GMAT so just talking about my own experience no script nothing now I do some scripted videos but just because I can invest in production know how it works but then I'm going to the second part of your question yes you delete a lot you add it out a lot because my speech was completely different my voice was really silent I was making a lot of mistakes especially when I just heard it in English because first I said in Russian that was easier this is my native language but then with English you know cutting out stuff but then you just get tired of editing one video for six hours because you have to cut out so much and you're like maybe I should work on the way I talk to my camera and those topics you would never discuss with your friends like you wouldn't talk to them talk to your friends on a daily basis about this topics so yeah but I encourage like everyone this helps a lot with being confidence helps a lot with presenting your startup just record a video maybe like put it out like unlisted on YouTube just get this experience I think it's super powerful with everything like even when you talk to people sometimes you feel that you're explaining your idea in 20 sentences and it could be explained in one when you're creating a video you're like oh maybe I could shorten that really helps yeah I think I haven't pivoted a lot what happened in the beginning I selected a very niche topic so like trying to get into an American University being a foreign students like a really niche market then I realized yes I can continue producing content there but I also want to get larger audience and the next step was the logical step was English language and I just started talking about English and then you know once you start talking about English people like oh who else is interested in in English people who are motivated who want to grow their you know knowledge who want to travel and then you just grow from smaller topic to a bigger topic I had like a crisis on my lingual marina channel I think it was November 2017 when I realized that my videos are not getting enough views I have maybe like a hundred thousand followers and my videos were getting like 8,000 views and I realized less than 10% engagement I was like how do I figure out what I talked about and one strategy was to reduce content drastically like reduce one video a month and see how it performs another strategy was just to start producing videos on all the topics that I could think of so I made a video on actually took a film in a filmmaking course in LA I made a video about that and made a video about raising money in Silicon Valley I made a video about English and I just looked at them and that happened within two weeks and I realized my English language videos actually performing really well and I was like okay lingua Marina should be the channel for English language videos but I still wanted to talk about entrepreneurship so I started Silicon Valley girl because sometimes mixing two topics in one channel doesn't really work especially if you already have an audience that's interested in something particular so yeah I did that I know that you have come things with your business and your channels mhmmm experience the conflict with your friends and your company and like I think what we're trying to do now is actually separate my personal brand the company's brand because you know a bigger company cannot depend on just one person if you're thinking of like Airbnb booking comm they're not connected with like their founders they have their founders but it's not just a company being dependent on the on the brand so we're working a lot on building linguae trips presence as well so we have three channels that belong to language Reb we work with local influencers we pay them money we give them topics because we already know how YouTube works so we know how to create content that's gonna get noticed on YouTube so we pay them they create content for us and it's all branded by language and I'm not there so yeah we try to separate that yeah looking at your transition on Russia you coming into the States I think a lot of us want to be here and then we want to move our businesses here and our personal lives but it comes to the price because it's not that easy making that transition leaving your friends with family behind them you know coming in here what advice would you give to those that are thinking I'm moving to the US and starting a business and you know moving Silicon Valley I'm working at about the about your trip your personal trip as well I mean where are the feelings that you've got and how was the transition and the whole process but yeah I think the transition itself was easier for me because in st. Petersburg Russia we didn't have a lot of like things like entrepreneurial of things and business stuff and when I came here I finally realized that Silicon Valley is a place where I can meet people and actually talk to people because in Russia I would only hang out with like Dmitry in our employees notice it because I had no one to talk about business and when I came here I'm like oh my god you meet people in the street and they talk about business you go some people get tired of it really fast for me I think it's really important to have this motivating environment around me and sometimes when I feel like I'm drowned like I got it took me a year to get a green card you know I'm paying a lot for my apartment it was tax problem and this this and that yeah there are so many things you could encounter here and so many things that are different from your country but then in the end I sit down and I tell myself this is the place where it grow the fastest and at my age like I'm 29 all I want to do is you know invest in my own growth I can always go to Bali when I'm 50 and you know and retire and go to museums and theaters but right now when I have all this energy and all this opportunities I don't want to miss it I just want to stay here and I'm okay with you know different food and and 40% tax thank you so much all right there it is thank you thank you so much oh me too love it love it [Laughter] yes it's the best by the way yeah Seattle thank you so much thank you so much thank you how did you go from just being like my average YouTube video person to any uh yeah I I don't know if there is like a - like average YouTube person you just you just go on YouTube and you start posting content and I think you took this amazing platform because it gives you a organic reach and if people come to your video and they continue watching YouTube will promote you organically and this doesn't happen overnight well it happened overnight for my silicon valley girl channel because the first video that I made was titled getting a Lambo after selling a company to Microsoft but this is kind of clickbait because it wasn't me getting a Lambo it was a guy who I filmed in that video but I know this is what works for YouTube you don't have to do that like some people are uncomfortable with doing like clickbait kind of stuff if you're doing like really useful content it's gonna take a while for it to gain the views for linguae marina channel it took maybe like half a year to get to like first thousand followers so it's very gradual but YouTube is working a lot on promoting new creators if they're creating cool content so I didn't do any ads I didn't do any you know paid promotion just put the content out there and I think the key here is just to enjoy what you're doing because even if you're in the beginning I got like 20 views 100 views 150 views I just wanted to share what I was passionate about and I think this is what works no training before no it took me a while to figure everything out so with my first channel I think it took me like nine months to get to first ten thousand four hours so it was really I try to post my videos on different forums I try to post them on Quora like answering to people's questions with my video like hey actually took GMAT and here are my tips or like GMAT club and stuff but yeah you just figure it out while you go you figure out what kind of content you want to create and that's the key like if you want to create this content if you love it you're gonna create like KC and ace that like every single day and then he became popular just be just because he started posting every day before that he had less than 1 million in half a year of posting every day I think he got to like 8 million because people just loved his content so yeah making a business but my main goal is just trying to get more users the content is centered around teaching students like me in fine the new generation savings and everything and I've been having some trouble trying to create that following just because our site is it's new but I also want to get you know followers we have a lot of content already mm-hmm what are you what's your advice on finding columns like that and just growing so is it written content but there's also a podcast that I'm doing with it it's just kind of like this we're trying to make it like though like a Wall Street Journal except Taylor exported stocks mm-hmm I would I would try and do some collapse this is what also helped me at the beginning so I was looking for youtubers who had a little more followers than I did and we did some collab so inviting them then well SEO I think you're doing that right also try some click baby stuff so maybe if you see something in the news like somebody bought a car for 20 million dollars and you're like okay if you want to do the same these are some tips and then refer to that news article because again for me I do clickbait these stuff sometimes when I feel that my subscriber count' it's kind of you know staggering not going up I would be like Oh what are people talking about let's try and comment on that but make sure you're commenting from a professional point of view not like just trying to catch that hype but getting some of your insights like I did a video on top 20 professions of the future I just took Forbes article that was performing really well I took their information and for every profession I just gave my own inside I'm like hey I'm in Silicon Valley oh yeah robots are replacing everyone we have this room with coffee machine we have my Amazon go with with no people in it I think this is what people also like so you're giving them value your based on some research that you know Forbes has done but you're also giving them your own opinion that should help with growth it definitely helped me because I got like a million views in a month and over 200,000 new followers in a month just because of that video there was like a tremendous growth it was December 2018 we're like the debris to take everybody yeah and as relatives mmm-hmm I was wondering how your management relationship it's been the investors and we channel like sociology and doesn't affect your relationships with the investors and I really want to have a manager yeah yeah that's it that's a great question we actually already have a big team we have 80 people and I think so I was really involved in the operational stuff last year and I would like spend eight hours a day working on language rep and then on the weekend I would do my videos but we also realize this when when I produce really good content we got a lot of money influx in Tlingit rib because customers were buying and I think in October 2018 at meteor and I sat down and we talked about me just not being that involved into daily operations because we already have a CEO who manages employees and if I focus my energy on what I'm doing the past is actually creating content talking to people that would be better for the company and actually just recorded a video yesterday it's like I've learned so much this year about delegating because sometimes you feel like oh my god no no I'm gonna do it the best because they won't be able to do this and then you delegate they make their mistakes but then they learn and in the end of the day you have the time to invest your superpower and this is I think this is the goal for everyone's life to find your superpower first and that means trying a lot of things especially in your twenties like work 12 hours a day and then second thing once you figure out what you see a superpower learn to delegate so you can focus on the superpower and basically this is what happened we now have a team of 80 people no in operational staff so I could concentrate on creating content for the company as well and I think investors are ok with that as long as they see our monthly updates with rising revenue they're ok yeah I'm still the one who sends all the reports and stuff so I'm always there for them so my question you know social media is great you know over the last last year's been really pivotal the important part of a lot company's growth right but a lot of the founders here are early-stage founders and it's you know I try to do how do you they choose will you spend your time on basically like if you're spending six hours editing a video how's ease for your timely and the goal is to build a company make money that not to have you know million subscribers on it's a honey how do you honey manage your time Akane how do you know how you know that you know what you're doing is actually very salsa business yeah I think for any business I know all businesses are different but what I figure it out for the businesses that we have we have lingo trip we also have like balloon Express which is a editing tool for text we have like smaller stuff that we're always launching think coming up with the product that's really easy to launch and then creating some content around it to see how it goes like try to sell it I think this is key because then you're not diving too deep into you know coding and stuff and in a year you release a product you realize people don't need it and you need another ten thousand dollars to invest and Facebook Ads in order to test the idea so I would say like if you created a product like trial with a small small product try some creating some videos around it explaining what kind of product that is like for example like the latest thing that I've done I've launched a course how to start a YouTube channel and I made some videos around it and we made some Facebook ads and we did some twists and it gave us a lot of feedback and then we just launched it and after that I invested in creating the actual course you know hiring people and stuff so being able to test your ideas by creating some content is really crucial these days and I think it helped a lot help our company a lot with launching new products and always try to you know if you don't want to edit a video yourself try to find interns or like I know that there's a arts academy in San Francisco and there are a lot of students who want to just volunteer in editing and you don't need a super professional editor you don't need an animator you just need a guy who's gonna crop and put it out and they're willing to do it for free yeah I think first we already had some traction I think we were making twenty thousand dollars a month in gross revenue but we only took 20% of that so it's four thousand dollars that helped a lot second we already had a platform that we could show it wasn't really functioning so we were talking about automation but then the real life so we told that we would have it in a year but at the time when we applied everything was manual like the booking came through but then we had to do everything manually even the payment system wasn't there which is you know send people the bank the sorry invoice and yes I think having some experience in the area having some revenue in our case what was really powerful is that I was the product of the company because I travelled to learn languages myself I told investors that I know exactly what the problems are because I've been a student a language student myself four times before that and I know how hard it is to book a language ship I know how hard it is when you see the pictures on the school's website you come to the school and everything is completely different I think that also helped a lot and you know having a great team Demitri and our CTO they're really really cool professionals so Dimitri we started a business with him together back in 2011 we were 21 years old in our CTO had an eight year experience in encoding thank you very much oh thank you feels like I actually stole my channel before this yay thank you guys thank you so i love you about now are using kappa have you thought about it they have some video thank you some video youtube I actually filmed it yesterday but I filmed a video I sent a video about minimalism on your schedule like having only three goals that you're working on for a week second having less than three tasks on your schedule every day because you still end up with 20 by the end of the day because they pile up delegating getting rid of stuff that you don't don't like in your closet like all of that yes it's gonna be in the video I just send it to my editor so it's gonna be out next week I'm from Taiwan and I also have a YouTube channel Oh amazing maybe we should like to question what is pretty specific it's because I'm still like starting I started last year but I had to stop I have a year ago mm-hmm because first like like you said spending six hours one on one video and then you know if you don't gonna get enough traction like you just kind of lose and lose a little more motivation mm-hmm for that but is there like a benchmark on like how how much time to spend on a video okay traction I like you said you test a lot of topics yeah and they're like what's what's the mind like is there like is a metric boy yeah there's there's just one metric if you're enjoying it or not like with YouTube if you give yourself a metric on me I need 1,000 followers and two months it's not gonna work cuz it takes a while for some shows especially with education yes you could film kittens and you know funny dogs and you will get millions of views but the audience that you want to get is the one who would come to a meeting like this but if you're just producing viral content like BuzzFeed they're amazing but if they did a meet-up on with a guy who did like Mentos and coca-cola experiment would you go to that Meetup probably not so I think focusing on the audience that you like and it's okay if it's just 50 people maybe it's a hundred people but it's a thousand in a year so that's the only metric do you like the content that you produce if you're enjoying if you're producing it if you feel that it's taking too much time try to film with your iPhone and then editing in iMovie it took me all together maybe like three to four hours if it's just a talking head you know you're just talking to your phone and just editing on your phone then maybe four hours is enough but yeah just enjoy what you're doing in a quick second question cuz because like it's our English focus which I know no one so like I also have that I created enough just trying to build other social media flopping around like the same content like what do you have tips on like how Josh approach like different like podcasts or yeah content how do you collaborate between you compatible you don't that's the answer the thing is with Instagram if you guys trying to start on Instagram Instagram only grows if you pay for ads that's the thing there is no organic growth on Instagram maybe with IG TV I know that they're giving the last push to IG TV because it didn't perform the way they wanted to but still if you've reduced like a really bad video it's still gonna get a lot of views because they would try to push it but yeah growing on Instagram I invest a lot and as I just started it and I buy ads from other bloggers so they could could endorse my profile and talk about it when I try to post my video on Instagram and tell people like hey swipe up I get less than 5 percent conversion rate people don't like switching platforms so they might come to Instagram from YouTube if they're your true followers but I would suggest building audiences separately on every platform unfortunately that's a lot of work but this is what I figured out yeah how much you success to date YouTube to starting a social media any like opportunities you that came out of notion and investors or and or like that they like you know could your business be where this name about no of course it helps a lot like the first thing that helped a lot it was actually getting into 500 because I didn't have a huge channel back then but we got some press we got some money and were able to drive some experiments second our initial like boost and growth was thanks to the channel but now I think it's mostly team effort so if we look at our Google ecommerce right now my channel would be number 8 source of revenue because we already have organic search we created a lot of companies content but in this growth stage like going from you know 20k a month to 500k a month that was a lot thanks to my social media am i right yes yeah [Laughter] morning every village not this homie yeah I think it's me I think you always need to strive for qualities less lush quantity ratio I would say once a week is great especially if you're running a company and you still want to invest some time and actually produce a good video because when KC and they said posted every day he spent 20 hours every day filming and editing so he's left for like four or five hours he didn't see his family and I don't think that's healthy yes he gained this momentum and gained his growth this is not for me for example so I decided to post once a week for each channel which is now three three times a week maybe sometimes less this ratio is very important and YouTube doesn't really care how often you pause post it looks at every video individually so if it's a good piece of content and maybe you had a hundred videos before that that didn't perform at all but this video is like really good and people stay on YouTube just to watch it it's gonna promote it anyways so it doesn't care about your prior history it doesn't care about you schedule it doesn't care about anything only cares about particular video all right guys yay [Applause] [Music] thank you guys so much is amazing thank you thank you thank you so much for coming to hear me talk I am so excited just say it once again my followers are the best my crowd is the most motivated crowd that I've ever seen I'm really proud that you're coming from all over the world to different places to the u.s. to Silicon Valley to build your startups to grow your personal brand and the most amazing thing that unites us is that we have our goals and we're willing to work and I am so proud that you're all watching my videos thank you again so much really enjoy the talk a lot of positive energy got a lot of energy to create more stuff for you guys so here know yet subscribe to this channel hit subscribe and more content is coming you know deep inside like I'm a kid who's jumping like crazy alright [Music]

Channel: Silicon Valley Girl

Views: 96,114

Keywords: silicon valley girl, marina mogilko, linguamarina, life of an entrepreneur, how to get into 500 startups, how to start youtube channel, how to start business, gary vee, how to grow on youtube, how to grow on instagram, how to grow business, how to grow personal instagram account 2019, how to be successful, how to start a personal brand, Gary Vaynerchuk, Garyvee business, business, success, personal brand, how to grow a personal brand, How to Build Your Brand, personal branding

Id: JSjFygDVvYE

Length: 35min 19sec (2119 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 03 2019