The art of building legendary brands | Arielle Jackson (Google, Square, Marketer in Residence at First Round Capital)

**Arielle Jackson** (0:00)
So, over time, a word can come to mean something that is beyond what that actual word means. Like Disney means magic today, you know. Volvo means safety.
Those names are not good. Like, if I just put it in a spreadsheet or one of those lists, no one would pick it. So, that's kind of what I mean, that like the name is just part of the overall marketing, the overall brand, and a bad name with a really great company, something that's gonna happen to you with great company strategy, great marketing, is gonna be great over time. And a good name is just gonna help you, but I don't think a bad name is gonna kill a good company.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:42)
Arielle Jackson spent nine years at Google where she helped grow Gmail in its early days, taking it from just a side project to a product that is now used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. Then she went on to Square, where she was one of the first marketers and helped launch and scale the growth of Square Reader. She's also worked with over 100 early stage companies, helping them nail their brand and marketing efforts, including Patreon, Bloom, Front, Eurow, Maven, Sprake, just to name a few. These days, she teaches a super popular course on startup brand strategy, and she's a marketer in residence at First Round Capital.
In our chat, we cover primarily three things.
Naming strategies for your startup or your product, a framework for developing your brand that includes your purpose, your positioning, and your personality, and also getting PR for your startup. I can't wait for you to listen to this conversation with Arielle. And so with that, I bring you Arielle Jackson.
Hey Ashley, head of marketing at Flatfile. How many B2B SaaS companies would you estimate need to import CSV files from their customers?

**Ashley** (1:49)
At least 40%.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:50)
And how many of them screw that up, and what happens when they do?

**Ashley** (1:53)
Well, based on our data, about a third of people will consider switching to another company after just one bad experience during onboarding. So if your CSV importer doesn't work right, which is super common considering customer files are chock full of unexpected data and formatting, they'll leave.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:13)
I am 0% surprised to hear that. I've consistently seen that improving onboarding is one of the highest leverage opportunities for both sign-up conversion and increasing long-term retention.
Getting people to your aha moment more quickly and reliably is so incredibly important. Totally.

**Ashley** (2:28)
It's incredible to see how our customers like Square, Spotify and Zura are able to grow their businesses on top of Flatfile. It's because flawless data onboarding acts like a catalyst to get them and their customers where they need to go faster.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (2:44)
If you'd like to learn more or get started, check out Flatfile at flatfile.com/lenny.
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Welcome to the podcast, Arielle.

**Arielle Jackson** (4:00)
Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:03)
It's absolutely my pleasure.
I've read so much of your writing online. You've done a lot of writing, which I found really helpful. And so I'm really jazzed to be digging into all kinds of really good stuff. Before we get into some of the meat, just a couple of questions that I had in my mind. You've worked with so many amazing companies. Google, Square, Loom, Patreon, Front, so many others. I'm like, I don't want to keep going.
What's been either your favorite or most unusual project that you've worked on?

**Arielle Jackson** (4:35)
Gosh, it's like asking me to choose like my favorite son. I'm like, gosh, I can't really like pick one.