Building a Brand as a First Time Founder with Anj Fayemi

Introduction: Welcome to the Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, the co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Anj Fayemi. Anj is an active recording artist and performing musician, which is very cool, and you don't find that all the time in a CEO and founder. He's also the founder and CEO of Rivet. Rivet is an AI- driven platform that helps artists and creators understand their top fans and build community- driven businesses. Anj good to see you.

Anj Fayemi: Good to see you as well, Matt. How are you doing?

Matt Blumberg: I'm good. I'm good. And I'm excited to talk to you because I know one of the things that you've really focused on as you've been a first time founder and building Rivet is your personal brand as a founder and CEO. It's kind of interesting, given that you are in your own market a little bit, which I guess is true of a lot of CEOs. It's probably true of me too at Bolster. But my question for you is, what are your kind of top three tips for building a personal brand as a first time founder?

Anj Fayemi: Yeah, thanks for the question, Matt. I think that's been really important for our space, for me to think about how being a founder and a CEO is, how I can apply the fact that I'm an artist to being a founder and a CEO in our space. And so, the three things that I think have been most helpful, I'll start with one, is Consistent internal stakeholder updates. So what I mean by that is, before any traction, before any product, we were coached to do this in Techstars, to just send out, while we're in Techstars, weekly, and now it's become monthly, but updates to everyone, from my parents, to friends, to advisors, mentors, people that have been contributed on the journey, investors. That has become more focused and more tailored, but early on was just, this is who we talked to this week. This is what happened. This is some good news, some bad news. Here's where we need help. But that consistency has helped us have people make serendipitous introductions, because they just remember us at the start of their month, or people just have some insight into an ask that we put in there. So that's a very easy low list way for us to ask people, and for people to now associate that consistency with me as part of my personal brand. So that's definitely one thing that's been really helpful.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, I love that. I mean, it gets your business's brand in front of people, but it also gives you the opportunity to really build your voice and get your voice in front of people every week.

Anj Fayemi: Yeah, people always mention that they feel like they can hear me talking to them because I write in a certain way that's pretty energetic. So I think that definitely helps.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, that's great. Okay. What's number two?

Anj Fayemi: Number two, I'd say it's social media has been really huge for me in terms of building out my brand. So for our space, social media is huge, very important for getting in front of users, but also for partners to see that we really are embodying what that vision is that we're putting out there. So for me, that's been everything from some semi- viral videos that I've made that helped us get investors that look at it as, oh, he is a creator, he's creating content and he is reaching out to me in a way that's different than just a cold email, to me interviewing important figures in our space and posting content about that, and just giving sometimes my take on what industry trends are and making sure that I'm consistently in front of people. Our podcast is coming next week. So things like that on social media definitely been huge for me.

Matt Blumberg: Got it. And so, what are your platforms of choice?

Anj Fayemi: So in order, I would definitely say now LinkedIn, which is surprising, but definitely Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.

Matt Blumberg: And TikTok. Yeah, I mean, your audience would make sense on TikTok. And obviously, we record these at a different time, these podcasts at a different time than when they release, so this will be released in the fall, but yesterday was the launch of Facebook's new social platform, Trends. So are you already on and all over Trends 24 hours later? Are you...

Anj Fayemi: We had a strategy meeting yesterday for how we wanted to make some moves on Threads early.

Matt Blumberg: Threads, not Trends. Sorry.

Anj Fayemi: Yeah, Threads. Some early adopter followers, and reach out to some people on there. So definitely on that right now.

Matt Blumberg: Good to be at the front end of a curve.

Anj Fayemi: Yeah.

Matt Blumberg: Okay, so consistent internal and stakeholder updates. Be all over social media in a relevant way. And what's your final one?

Anj Fayemi: The last thing I think is, it gets underrated, and I think when Covid happened, it died down a little bit, but for me it's been memorable in- person interactions. So that's everything from how I'm dressed at an interactions at an event, whether that's the pants that I'm wearing that I used to pitch, that people remember that, oh, he was the guy that had those pants, or closing out our demo day pitch with a rap, and they're like, oh, he works in creator tech, music tech. He rapped at the end of his pitch. That was memorable. We want to talk to him afterwards. Or just the energy that I bring to every interaction and conversation that I have at those. A lot of the time I find that people don't even remember what we talked about or what the company is, but they remember that, and that's our in when we have the next conversation, and then we can have more detailed conversations about actually what we're working on, what we've built so far. So definitely in person, I try to maximize. I try to push to have more in- person interactions because I know that those help me a lot, but I try to maximize them when I'm there.

Matt Blumberg: I love it. Three great suggestions on building your personal brand as a first time founder. Thanks, Anj. Glad to have you here.

Anj Fayemi: Thanks, Matt. Loved it.