Stu Clark Webinar: Build Your Brand, Grow Your Community: Building Community Around Your Startup

hello everyone and welcome welcome welcome it is a great beginning of the winter day I see a very nice snow from which is looking very nice from inside of course today you are going to have a very special guest that is going to speak to you about building your brand and using video to do it So before we jump into the main portion of this webinar today, let me just introduce you to the center, what we do, and also to go over some of the housekeeping rules with you a little bit. So please use chat to introduce yourself. We always like to learn more about people that are attending our events. who you are, what brings you in, what other topics you want us to cover, and we are listening to you and we work for you here at the end of the day. So introduce yourself, tell us what it is that you are searching to learn today. Use Q&A for questions. As we go with our webinar, you will probably have some questions. use the Q&A, put your question in. We will be able to answer all of the questions at the end of this webinar. And this webinar is going to be recorded. So if you liked what you hear, or you want to listen to it, or you want to review some of the topics, or maybe you want to share it with your friends, so the recording is going to be available for you this time around. We are going to be a little late with sending the recording. but eventually you will get it in your email and then you will be able to share it. So, Sue Clark Center for Entrepreneurship. We are on the mission to ignite entrepreneurial spirit within every university student, not only Asper School of Business, but every University of Manitoba student. And we believe that entrepreneurship can be a viable career path for each one of you. uh entrepreneurship is not something that we can teach you but you can learn by trying it and you never know if it is uh something that will uh will be a valid career path for you or not until you give it a try so uh we are here to help you we do it in a couple of different ways obviously like you are part of this webinar today and this webinar series is all about entrepreneurship we bring top-notch uh speakers to share the experiences to share their expertise with you those and dons of entrepreneurship mindset what not uh it's a great resource for you uh scroll through our previous webinars through our previous recordings you will find a lot of valid information uh to go uh to to learn and apply in your entrepreneurial journey uh we also have our flagship event uh new uh new venture championships uh that is going to be hosted in april end of april in uh fairmont hotel and it is a three-day high energy uh business speech competition one of the if not the biggest one of its kind in canada we have over 72 000 in cash prices we get students from all over across north america And why do you want to be part of it? It is your opportunity to connect with like-minded people. It is your opportunity to compete. It is your opportunity to gain access to high-profile judges that otherwise not available for you in your day-to-day life. And then at the end of this event, we are going to celebrate it at Fort White Alive. Trust me, you want to be part of it. But if you don't have an idea or you are not ready to pitch you are a little uh you know afraid of it volunteering is a great opportunity opportunity to be part of it so we are always looking for new volunteers you get to enjoy this event and get to enjoy most of the perks of being in competition without actually the stress of pitching. So if it is something that is of interest for you, please email amy.johns at humanitoba.ca and we will put you at the list and we'll find some cool job for you during this couple of days. So we spoke about the webinars already. Another offering that we have is our Side Hustle course. It is a six week online workshop that will take you through a step-by-step process of how to take your idea for a side gig into a profitable side hustle. We've teamed up with a professional site hustler from Jeff Mitchell from Lane2 to ensure that you are getting the top-notch coaching and education. Cohort 5 is already open. I invite you to check out this QR code, apply for it. It is your opportunity to make an extra couple of dollars on the site and learn the entrepreneurial career path in the light, low-risk environment. And then something that is new to the University of Manitoba, we introduced Inactus back to university. It is a student-led global entrepreneurship organization that is all about purpose-driven and real-world impacting ventures, social impact, environmental impact, whatnot. So you get to... work on your project or your idea or join somebody else's team to work on it. You can get funding to work on your ideas and on top of it, you have an opportunity to participate in local, national and international competitions. Canada is placed pretty well in this organization and it is your chance to learn and apply entrepreneurial skills into real world impact. And finally, Startup Coach program. I'm a startup coach with Stulker Center for Entrepreneurship and it is a free service for every University of Manitoba student. It can be on person, it can be online and I can pick you up at any stage of your entrepreneurial journey. If you are having an idea and you're trying to validate it and you don't know how, come and see me. If you have validated your idea and you're ready to launch the business but kind of the financials are kind of iffy and you don't know what to do about it come and see me if you are just curious about entrepreneurship it's a great point to start i can connect your passion into real uh world uh gap that we can feel and reach for uh for the for potential clients and for you to make some money of it uh i invite you to join uh join the program you can have a one-on-one with me but if you don't feel like uh one-on-one is too much for you uh fast lane coaching and every Thursday am is your way to go it can be yourself and myself or it can be us and five other students in in the virtual room check out our website and please please use this resource it is available for you it is free uh and it's too bad if you are not going to tap into it so finally let me introduce our guest today chris is a seasoned video marketing strategist and the founder of clear direction video i know chris from our many interactions on linkedin he helped a lot with my own entrepreneurial journey when it comes to building the content when it comes to creating video content that is engaging with our audiences and he is my go-to videographer and content strategist so please join me in welcoming Chris and I'm very curious to hear from him today Thank you, Ben. Thank you so much for the introduction and for having me to give this little talk here. Let me screen share and we can get going here. Awesome. So I'm turning my camera off and the stage is all yours. Okay, excellent. Can you guys all see my screen? Yes, I can. I see the screen with... the zoom and uh and now the presentation okay here we go yeah good good okay so we are talking about your brand oops let's go back let's go back uh your brand your tribe building community around your startup um and What is the goal here? It is to build brand affinity and build community engagement for your marketing. So what does that mean? Brand affinity means people like your brand. They like what you stand for. And then the idea is to build community around that so that then they get to know each other. They get to like each other. You grow a community around your company. My name, as Ben said, is Chris Weir. I'm the founder of Cleaver Creative. We do video production. We do marketing. And I'm going to be talking about a startup I founded as part of the Startup Weekend for Education in Chicago in 2013. And that company is called Watch Me Work. When you are thinking about building your brand through community, you want to think about your niche. And I don't know how many folks in this group are entrepreneurial students, but this is something that is talked about over and over again, is that you need to start with a small group if you want to conquer a large group. And the reason for that is particularly when you're building something that might be new or innovative, it's much easier to serve a small targeted group who have a very specific problem than all people in the world, even if your idea is applicable to a much, much bigger group. So in this example, we're going to be talking about Watch Me Work. which was the startup that I founded. And our niche was people who were in the creative space because that's my background. So we started with people who knew After Effects and Premiere and Adobe Photoshop and those types of applications. And what WatchMeWork was, is a live streaming app for coworking. And basically what we did was we created Twitch for creatives where you could live stream your work in photoshop and then you could automatically get paired with other people who were working in that same application so when you start working in photoshop somebody else starts working in photoshop you both start live streaming you're in the same space and you get put into the same room your chat gets merged and all of a sudden you've got a co-worker who you can observe and learn from um and share your process and share tips and tricks and how you work together um so the niche was creative professionals i knew that going into it but then i also knew like okay well maybe this has applications beyond that and maybe it could expand to people who are just generally working maybe at some point in the future somebody might want to share you know their work in excel or something like that that's much more maybe boring, but there's still a lot that can be learned and shared for people co-working together. So the value proposition was learning from people by watching them work and It allowed people to understand concepts that they wouldn't even know how to Google because you can learn just a lot by watching somebody looking over their shoulder and seeing their methods for working. The result from this was that we grew the community to over 60,000 streams, about 2,000 members, and I consider that a pretty big win considering we were bootstrapped and we did not take on any investment. So how did we do that? Mainly through one-on-one interactions. And this is a great place to start when you are building your business. It's very easy for people to get caught up in the idea of, oh, well, we'll gain our users through social media. We'll gain it through advertising. All of that is... very doable. But when you're first starting, you really do want to start with one-on-one interactions, particularly if you are working in a space that involves a lot of innovation, if it's something that hasn't really been done before. And at the time when we started WatchMeWork, live streaming was just becoming popular. Twitch was just blowing up. But at the time, there wasn't even the ability to stream anything other than video games. What I did was I spent about an hour a day going onto Twitch and interacting with live streamers, people who are just starting to stream creative applications there, interacting with them, you know, opening 10 tabs and starting 10 different conversations with 10 different people and starting to talk about what. what we were doing so the creative pitch was basically just like hey you know i'm a creative just like you and i made this space where you can do your work would you like to check it out and through that we started to learn more about these users and really what they wanted the other advantage to that is that People who use your platform or who use your service or your product get to know you personally. And they realize that they have a touch point with the owner and that they can reach out to them if they have a problem or interact with them. And that you're not just a faceless company, that this is built by people and that you genuinely care about what... what you're doing and what you're building for them. And then the last thing is that building these one-on-one interactions allows you to really understand their problems and understand what it is they want. Because generally when you're starting something new, you have an assumption about what people want. But until you make those interactions with people, you really don't know. And so if you actually have these one-on-one interactions you can actually find out like what do they think about it um what do they uh perhaps uh what are they missing like what features are they missing that they're not currently being served and how you can serve them better so that is really my recommendation on the one-on-one strategy. And then as you continue to build your community, you can introduce people to each other and they can start to learn from each other and have those interactions. So the other thing to think about as you are building your community is that even if you have your niche defined, you may not know exactly what subsets to target before you find out what's actually going to work. So before we figured out that Twitch was really the community that we wanted to go after, we experimented with a lot of different groups. We reached out individually to teachers who were teaching digital arts in art schools. We went after YouTube influencers. We used Instagram as well. But again, a lot of these interactions were one-on-one interactions. They were individual messages to people. trying to set up conversations and trying to have one-on-one conversations where you can get that feedback, you know, very clearly from individuals to build your community. So the secret weapon that I recommend people use when they want to continue to build that community is actually email. Roughly 60% of consumers say that email is the preferred way to hear from a business. Even though we have all of these other ways to interact with people and engage with people through social media, email, surprisingly, maybe to some people, is still a place that is very protected. And when you actually get emails, even if it's from a company that you like, we tend to look at those messages as very personal to us. I think that it's a very underused platform for a lot of startups, mainly because I think startups don't always know what to say. But I tend to recommend folks to attempt to write a weekly email to your users. And even if you don't have a new feature or something that you've released immediately, you can talk about what you want to build. you can have surveys in there to ask people like what do you want next you can get very quick feedback around what is working and what is not working and it's you can also track very easily who's opening these emails who's actually reading these emails and interacting with your content so you can start to see okay Of the, you know, hundred or thousand people that I have on my list, there's a small subset that are really engaged. And then you can spend more time interacting with them, sending them more custom messages, making, you know, subgroups of your emails to send to specific people. So highly, highly recommend having a weekly email that you interact with your initial users with very consistently. And they come to depend on that. They come to like, you know. Really feel like they're a valued part of your community when you interact with them in that way. So to kind of summarize the talk here, as you're getting started, you want to find your niche. You want to go one-on-one with people, define your brand, listen to what people are saying, and customize your service. to that and then obviously communicate continue to communicate through email um on a weekly basis um so that is basically the full um uh presentation here i i don't know how much time i actually spent uh talking here but i'm happy to answer questions or um interact with folks if they have specific questions or specific problems that they are really interested in in addressing here So I'm looking at our guest today. We don't have any questions yet, but I do have a question for you. So as I said at the very beginning, most of our initial interactions were coming through LinkedIn when you were engaging with your audience via videos, right? Video content is the strongest thing that you do, and I know you encourage every business owner to do it. My question... and i have a couple of different questions about that because probably that is my pain point and many people will agree with me we don't like to be on the camera right so what would be your advices for you know young entrepreneurs are just starting they just started their businesses they are not used to be on the camera right how to create videos like you know what to do what what maybe they should avoid doing yeah i would say as you're totally right yeah like we you and i interacted on linkedin through our videos way before we ever met on uh on a video call And it is a highly, highly powerful way of interacting with people because basically you get to meet them before you ever meet them. So when you finally do meet them, it's like you already have met them. They already know who you are, how you appear. They trust you. They probably like you. And you've gotten all that out of the way before you're even trying to sell anyone on anything. The question around how to get started with video, you just have to do it. You just have to start even though you don't feel comfortable. And I think it's worth basically experimenting with and folding into your communication strategy no matter where you're at. So, you know, some people take to video and they just... It's natural for them. Other people have to practice it. But I think the key is really just to start and commit yourself to some kind of cadence. It does not have to be every day. A lot of people think like, oh, if I'm going to do this, I've got to do it every day and I've got to do it now for the rest of my entire life. That is totally not true. My recommendation typically for people who are in the B2B space is one video a week is plenty, especially with a network like LinkedIn, where you're probably going to get at least 100 to 1,000 impressions for every video you put out because it's still under-practiced medium on LinkedIn. So my recommendation is you just have to start. If you're looking for content and if you're looking for what to talk about, typically what I recommend people do is put together a list of 10 FAQs. So what are the questions that people ask you the most about your business? And that's usually like, how do I get started? What is the service? What's the product? How much does it cost? When will I get it back? All these very basic things that they want to know. And then 10 FAQs. questions that you kind of wish you were asked more and uh the first video that i ever made for linkedin was why should i be making videos which is a question that people typically weren't asking me but i i really wanted to talk about that i really wanted to say like okay here's all the reasons why i think you should why you should be making videos and that got you know a great response on linkedin so um yeah video is absolutely um a must for interacting with folks um and it is scary but you just have to like pull the trigger and just say you know what i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do a video a week and put it out there and see what happens and try and improve as you go i see and uh we like i see like uh we we start to have some questions in the q a but uh a follow-up question that like on my end you know what like i i like everyone these days right we all use ai to our advantage it is a great tool uh if you use it the right way uh it was very tempting for me when i received last week an email or two weeks ago or last week like black friday deals right from revoicer for only 37 dollars to get a clone of myself that is going to be like you know to be used in my videos and everything and i like it That is tempting, right? You are getting off the hook being on the camera and you're still kind of on the camera, right? So what is your take in, and it is kind of like a twofold question, right? So first of all, creation of content when you actually, like not really you, but it is your avatar that being in the video, your pros and cons of it. And then generally speaking, if we look on content in general, right? I know like when I use AI, my content is so polished, so sleek that it's not mine anymore. Right. So it's almost like, you know, under my supervision. And I try to step away from it because this way I feel I'm losing my voice. So use of digital avatars, pros and cons, and then use of AI for your brand voice. That's kind of the question. I want to hear your opinion. I would say it's, we can sort of smell when something's been made with AI, right? Like we know it, we can't prove it, but we can kind of feel it. And that distances us from the content. Like as soon as we get that sense that AI had something to do with creating this. um usually in writing or especially like if you were to make a video avatar of yourself it distances ourselves and the the point of video is that it brings your humanity to your content so if you use a avatar of yourself you're going to end up distancing yourself from your end receiver of that content and it is fun and it's kind of cool and you can you can do some interesting things with that but in general my recommendation would be understand the trade-off that you're making if you do that there could be an advantage to it for say like okay maybe i want to have a video avatar on my website that is going to automatically respond to any faq that i get that could be a really good use of that it could add a bit of personality to what would otherwise be kind of a boring faq um but if we're talking about making a personalized message to someone in an email i've seen people try and do that they try and hack it and you know they have the intro be them or they have the intro written on a card like hey chris let me do this We so quickly, you know, get used to this technology that it just becomes kind of, you know, a little hokey. And it's better just to make a personalized message if you're going to make a personalized message. Same with writing. You know, I do the same thing, too, where I'll write something and then I'll say, hey, ChatGPT, improve this. And it goes ahead and rewrites a whole bunch of it. I say, make it. one percent better still too too many changes make it 0.01 percent better okay now it's just changed some grammar and you know corrected some spelling that version i'm going to send because you feel it it's something you feel and and you can't get around that yeah i see i see thank you so much because it's it's funny like i will agree with you uh on on smelling the ai and then having but again that was interesting to hear your opinion so we have two questions from our audience right now uh and i believe the first question came from kyle hey chris i'm wondering when you would suggest creating an email service slash newsletter in your startup journey would you strongly recommend this to come with the first release of a product or do you think this could be a post mvp add-on I would say start it as soon as you have users. Start it as soon as you have customers. Start it immediately, really, because like ultimately a lot of times your first people on your email list are going to be friends and family. And they're the ones that are going to care the most about you and your journey. And so even if it is just to say, hey. in this week's email we fixed a couple of bugs and here's the new version of it if you know anyone in your network who you think could benefit from what we're doing here please forward them this email We're so inundated with emails that the longer the email, the worse it is usually. So even if you make your email just like a couple of lines with a link to the product or a link to what you're doing and send that out every week to your 100 people of closest friends and family members and a couple of your users, that is going to benefit you. And you can continue to track and say, okay, my open rate last week was 75%. You know, this week it's only 50%. I can see it going down. What do I need to do to keep people engaged and try and keep my open rate high? But it is a practice and it's much, it's easier said than done. Like you really do have to focus and be, you know, take it seriously and say, okay i'm gonna keep updating these people every single week every friday this email is going out um and if you do you will get benefit of it but you won't see that benefit until you know a few months in so i would say start sooner than you want to or sooner than you think you can and if you force yourself to do it you will find things to talk about with with the people in your email list and you know like that's an interesting point in here especially when you say like you will find when you said right now you will find what you're going to talk to them about right so i've been taught and by no means i'm i'm a professional in the field so i'm just you know learning from everybody uh that if you want people to engage with your newsletters and not skip it and even then mark it as spam god forbid right or unsubscribe which is like the best out of these two options you need to provide them with some kind of value. So it's not going to be like buy me, me, me, me kind of email. So coming back to this question of the startup, right? So what would be the tone of the message? What kind of information me as a startup that just getting ready, I'm pre-MVP even, right? What kind of information, valuable information can I provide them with? Yeah, I think that to some extent it is that practice of creating that helps you figure that out. So for with Watch Me Work, there definitely were weeks where I'm like, I don't know what I'm going to talk about in this week's email. But we would have a weekly meeting with our super users who... who were interested in helping building community. And then we would also have certain things going on. So we would, you know, constantly be having things that where it's like, oh, this person streamed for like eight hours straight and they got, you know, like a bunch of comments or they broke the record on how many comments they've gotten this week. So you can look for these little wins. We do that with my team too. Like we usually start each meeting with like a personal win and a professional win. And I usually say like, Your personal win can be like, did you have a good cup of coffee today? Like if you force yourself to say, I'm going to try and cover a couple of different topics each week in my email. You will find little things to talk about and just say like, hey, we got one bug fix done. Or like, hey, we thought the MVP wasn't going to be done until the end of the year. We're actually going to have it out in two weeks. If you want early access, email me back. You will find these little ways to say, here's what we're working on. And sometimes it was like, if I didn't have any of those wins to talk about, I would say, hey. we're thinking about these five features that we would like to add to the app. We don't know when we're going to get to them, but like which feature is most interesting to you. So you can use it as a place to get research and interaction back as well. So those would be my tips is like, just look for small things that you can celebrate or places you can get feedback from people on. I see. Okay. No, sounds good. Thank you so much. So next question from Matthew is, Going like that. Do you have any tips on how to reach out and get your first client when you don't have an established product yet and are still in MVP product space, perhaps looking to get their involvement to help fine tune the product to meet their needs? Yes. And that's probably where it comes back to understanding who that niche is. Right. Like. if you know your niche if you know the group of people that you want to serve and you have an idea about your product then it's just about trying to have as many one-on-one conversations with as many people as you can so um uh basically that would be my my recommendation is like sometimes you don't really know what you're selling until you know what people want. So for instance, with Watch Me Work, it was a very new idea at the time. So it was kind of hard to understand what are we building even? What is interesting here? And what do people want? And when we hit on the topic of putting people together, we realized like, oh, this is actually a feature that twitch isn't doing they have no intention on doing this is kind of unique to our niche because it's about work and you know having two video games playing next to each other might be overwhelmed but having two people working next to each other makes a lot of sense and when we pitch that idea as an idea you started to see that immediate traction you just started to see this light bulb go on for people who'd be like yes i want that i want that now that would be so awesome please make that happen so um i guess the answer to the question is like even if you don't have the fully formed idea that's perfect that is still a good time to be talking to those people in that niche and say hey here's what i'm building what do you think and usually that that line of questioning is here's what i'm thinking of or here's what i'm trying to build would you use this and if they say yes then you go okay great um then you can say will you use this and if they say yes then you can say okay will you pay me to use this is that third question so if you just kind of follow that line a lot of people um will say, yes, I would use that just because they don't like saying no and they don't like rejecting people. But it's when you get to the like, will you pay me to use it? You start to find out, okay. where the rubber meets the road if they're really willing to be a customer and if they say no at that point then that gives you an opportunity to ask more questions and say okay why not well well it's missing this or i already have something similar that i'm already paying for how can i make mine better than that one so it's just a matter of you know you know having a lot of those conversations to to find out what you really need to build i i see like uh it's it's a good uh good information really so Tell me, please, persistence, right? We are not giving up. We are pushing through and we are working hard to get things done. When do you know that you need to stop what you are doing with your marketing and you need to reevaluate it and pivot? And it's not just you didn't push it hard enough. Right. Like, when do you know when to switch niches? Maybe, yeah. Maybe. Or maybe, like, you understand that, you know, the audience is not engaging with your material, right? Right. I think you want to try and iterate that relatively quickly. And for us, I think it was a... a period of a couple of weeks where we would say okay let's draft a bunch of messages towards um towards these professors at these art schools and say hey my name is chris i built this cool app i think it could be good for your students are you willing to get on a phone call percentage of those people would say yes we jump on a call i'd explain it to them i would give them early access they would test it out they would maybe mention it to their students I would follow up with them and say, what did the students say? And they say they had a hard time using it. It was hard for them to log on. It's uncomfortable for them because they're not really live streamers. And then it'd be like, OK, we've tested that over two weeks. We got some traction, but we didn't really get the traction that we wanted to as far as users. OK, let's try YouTubers. YouTubers are used to making videos. Maybe they're used to being live streamers. maybe that that's our niche let's try that let's start going after these people okay live streaming and making a video is too different for these people it's too uncomfortable for them to switch because they're used to making a polished video so that would be my recommendation is to try and have these sprints where you have a goal and define what traction is like if i can talk to 30 people and get two or three new users or two or three customers or two people saying like yes i will be a customer but i'm just not ready like right now but talk to me in a month you can measure that and call that traction and then say okay let's continue on with this communication to this group while we test maybe another couple subset groups so that would be my recommendation is try and just measure it in any way you can and define for yourself like what what success is okay okay and maybe you know what like we don't have any other questions from the audience maybe a last question for you a little more action oriented so what would be the first three steps smallest actions that our audience should take in order to get started that's a good question Well, it really depends on where you're at in your journey. But if you have an idea, I would say start trying to have conversations earlier than you want to. Ultimately, particularly if you're building something new, this was the biggest journey for me because. previously to starting the startup i had started this video production company we had been doing well i knew how to do all the ins and outs of that i knew the customers i knew the product i knew everything about it and i was building something brand new and that's exciting right because you you're you've got an opportunity to make something new and you've got all this energy and it's a lot of work but the building of the thing is actually less work than it is to market it the marketing is kind of the hardest part um and they don't always really tell you you don't really always hear that in these startup stories of facebook and all this stuff is like oh we made this great app and then everybody loved it that's pretty rare that something just goes viral like that that it's that brand new right a lot of most business stories are just pounding the pavement having a lot of conversations so even if you think you have the idea Try and start having those conversations as soon as you possibly can and have more than you think you need to because you will get more feedback and you'll be able to iterate on your idea a lot faster the more feedback you get from people going, yes, I like that, but no, I'd rather have it like this. And you can kind of incorporate that as you build rather than to try and build something, which is the fun part, and then market it and then find out like, oh, people actually want something else. Yeah. yeah i wish i could uh have this advice six seven years ago when i started with my company and i was so happy building my stuff uh finding out later that nobody really needs it but anyways it hurts that's that's the journey i mean that is that is just part of it right it's like you just have to you do a lot of tests and a lot of experiments of going like this didn't work this didn't work this didn't work just oh this worked okay we're gonna keep spinning that one and do some more tests it's just a part of the journey yeah yeah awesome advice awesome thank you so much and uh if we don't have other questions from our audience today i know it is um uh it's coming like we are we are in the oh we have one more question in here coming in so okay we'll wait for this question to come okay i know it is um uh exam season right So we may not have that many attendees today, but those who attended are actually genuinely interested in the topic. So I hope you guys and gals are taking what you wanted to take. So Kendall, let's see. We will wait for your question. And yeah. So while we are waiting for the question to be probably typed in, right? um let's chat a little about linkedin what do you see um changing changing in linkedin with ai tools emerging like what what should i avoid me personally for example with my business these days i mean in general i'm cautiously optimistic about AI and all of the abilities to use it for building businesses and innovating and creating things. I think that LinkedIn is probably, especially if you're marketing B2B, it's probably still going to be the strongest place to be creating content that you can be, as well as just for people who are looking to do professional development, networking, all of these things, it's still a place that people take you the most seriously. And so I highly recommend that people put out content on LinkedIn, partially that's because that's what a lot of our customers do, but it's a place where you will be taking the most seriously. I highly recommend people put out content on LinkedIn. It could be a video. Not everybody is totally suited for videos. It could be articles. It could be photos. We are having a lot of luck with using AI generation for photos, taking those, animating them, and then attaching those to high value business content for our clients. So one of my clients is an industrial engineering company. And that's pretty boring stuff for a lot of people. Most people don't wake up and say, oh, I want to crack open LinkedIn so I can learn about manufacturing process improvement content. But because we create really great images and really great animations that are visually interesting, that draws in a wider audience. And then they go, oh, let me learn a bit more about what this guy's talking about. So, yeah, I'm very optimistic and very excited about what you can build, what you can create with AI. You know, as we were talking about, like you just have to be strategic about it and you have to. use it in a way where you're sort of aware of how it's going to be received by people and what they're going to see immediately as being AI and is that okay in this context and where you can make it more personal and make sure that you use your own voice and people feel like it's really coming from a person. I find it to use it as a complementary content. uh works pretty well saves a lot of time as well so in in terms of decoration for the main content so we have two more questions so first one uh we are developing a product that takes manufacturing time what do you recommend for having the conversation when the product is probably six nine months out and we are developing something new so trying to balance protecting the secret in the meantime and not giving away too much versus telling people about it so that is probably an area where i don't have a ton of experience of of of building a tangible product that is brand new that's also innovative um so i'm not sure that i can give the best possible advice on that I don't really know. Honestly, I don't really know how to give the best possible advice on that. I do know that there's challenges around that that comes with that and that, yes, once you establish your product and you can prove that it is successful, you do have to be kind of ahead of the curve because people will try and copy it potentially relatively quickly. I guess my only potential advice on that, if you haven't considered it, and maybe you guys already are considering it, is potentially looking at something, if you haven't thought about it, is like a Kickstarter or Indiegogo. We did do an Indiegogo for Watch Me Work, and I did raise about $5,000 from friends and family through that method. And it was a good way to... Get some early traction and see that people do like this and see that they are willing to put up a little bit of money in order to make this thing. So I guess I would say, you know, if you haven't considered that route, you might want to think about that because it can give you an early proof of concept on your product before you spend, you know, so much time and money and effort, you know, going through different iterations to make sure that people actually do want this thing. That would be maybe my only piece of advice. I'm not a total expert. You can feel free to email me. And I do have some people who are in manufacturing spaces. One of the people that I'm in a mastermind with, she creates tech. tech packs for people who are doing things in the clothing space. So she helps people create a tech pack and then send that to China to get it manufactured and get that back and sell it. So my email is chris at cleavercreates.com. Anyone can feel free to email me if they have other questions around their product or their startup. I'd be happy to interact with folks there. Yeah, I will advise every one of you who is listening right now in live on recording, fire up your LinkedIn or as the very beginning when I introduced Chris, there is a QR code that will take you to his LinkedIn. So please follow, engage with his content. That is going to be your smallest possible way to pay back for the information that he gave us today to engage with his content, learn. share and everything so uh that is first thing on in terms of the question itself uh please reach out to us we do have a lot of resources when it comes to ip protection and it feels like you are you are in the position that you really need to look into your ip protection uh we can help you out as a very initial very like basic level and if you are beyond the basic level we do have resources available for you as well We have like our heavy, heavy artillery, high caliber IP lawyers that we can engage with and they are willing to help our clients. One of you as well. Right. So please, please reach out to us and let's see if we can get some strategy around IP protection for you. And last question for today from Sharon. Do you recommend farmers markets and vicinity event? without a lot of sales or use instagram other social media or boss what percentage so the question is getting out into the community or using instagram or something or like social media like probably yeah yeah what percentage um yes i would say in the very early stages for sure get out in the community and talk to people face to face um because When you're pitching an idea or trying to make an early sale, you will learn so much faster just by having those interactions with people. Where you mention the idea, you might get a facial expression back there where they go, oh, they kind of flinch for a minute and they go, that's the price. And that helps you understand, okay, like maybe your prices are too high. Obviously, yes, social media can allow you to expand to a much... bigger group like wider and faster but when you're first getting started definitely definitely recommend more one-on-one personal interactions so that you can get like real genuine feedback very quickly from people and then you can take that to a bigger audience through your social media okay yeah and i hope this answers the question sharon so i want to really be mindful with your time chris today you already over time for us which i greatly appreciate once again uh for the audience live for in recording please reach out to chris engage with his content share ask questions challenge him on what he's saying that is going to be amazing conversation i do it once in a while and uh and chris is a fair game and it's always fun and um and yeah and uh please engage with us as well uh we have a lot of good material coming your way And thank you for tuning in today and looking forward to here and see you again. Thank you so much. Thanks.

Your brand is more than a logo: it’s the people who believe in what you’re building.

In this practical, high-energy session, video branding expert Chris Weiher will show you how to turn customers and followers into a community that amplifies your message, fuels your growth, and builds long-term brand loyalty.

Key Takeaways:
1) What community-led branding really means
2) How to create content that resonates and engages
3) Turning early supporters into passionate brand advocates
4) Using video and storytelling to build trust and scale influence

Whether you're still shaping your startup's identity or ready to grow your following, this webinar will help you find and rally your community.

Chris Weiher is a seasoned video marketing strategist and the Founder of Cleardirection Video, where he helps entrepreneurs and executives build compelling personal brands through authentic video content. With over 20 years of experience in video production and storytelling, Chris has worked with Fortune 500 companies, startups, and thought leaders to craft impactful narratives that connect with audiences. A passionate advocate for community-driven branding, Chris empowers founders to leverage video as a tool for visibility, trust, and growth.

Learn more about our upcoming webinars: https://umanitoba.ca/asper/stu-clark-centre-for-entrepreneurship/webinars#upcoming-webinars