How to build a brand (and a portfolio): An interview with Sophia O'Neal

Indie Hacker: Sophia O’Neal (@sophia_oneal on IH)
Founder of: Ignore No More, Startup Goodness
Monthly revenue: $3K
Zone of Genius: SaaS branding

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Sophia O'Neal of Ignore No More and Startup Goodness. Below, she goes into loneliness, building a portfolio from nothing, the importance of branding, and much much more. I hope you enjoy!

On her business

I own a B2B SaaS branding agency called Ignore No More that builds un-ignorable brands rooted in conversational copy and scalable marketing strategies.

I’m also building a library of step-by-step branding and marketing guides for B2B SaaS founders, starting with a landing page copywriting worksheet. I went full-time with the agency in November, and am committing to launching a new tool every month. By next year, I’d like to turn the most successful tool into a SaaS!

My goal is to build tools that make marketing painless, simple, and successful for tech founders who hate marketing or for whom English is a second language.

Branding and marketing are the aspects of business I’ve most enjoyed since I started my first company with my sister when I was 7 years old. It took several internships and failed startups in college, but over time I realized that branding and marketing strategy was where I shined. After college, I worked in multiple in-house roles at marketing agencies, a $MM Chick-fil-A franchise, and a $MM Enterprise SaaS company while always having a side project going. In the end, working for someone else lost all its appeal. SaaS is the next business revolution the way D2C was after the Great Recession and I want to lead the branding charge! I also run a monthly newsletter for my local startup community called Startup Goodness. It has just shy of 80 subscribers, all from word-of-mouth. I launched SG a year ago this month!

My hometown has a lot of fantastic startups, but no consolidated source for metrics, success stories, or resources. Most founders feel like islands and the current business support systems are very much archaic old white men clubs.
But a small, diverse group of founders, myself among them, is committed to creating a founder-led ecosystem for the area for everyone. We’re keeping things quiet to avoid stepping on toes until we have more of our frameworks built out. It feels delightfully clandestine!

For Startup Goodness, that means I’m committing to really building out the site, including:

• a dashboard of all the successful startups in the region with stats on funding, founder backgrounds, diversity of hires
• directory of all the startup resources and orgs in the area
• regular interviews with founders - the local news coverage is practically nonexistent in this regard
• a local startup job board
• moving from monthly to weekly issues

Not to mention actually doing some marketing for it!

I’m also working with the larger group to create a hyperlocal version of Y Combinator’s Startup School. I’m heading up the curriculum building part and we’re hoping to have it ready for “August enrollment”.

Startup Goodness is my first true passion project - everything else was about the money in one way or another - and I’m really excited about taking it into Year 2 and bringing it to its full potential!

On growing the business

I’m following Ben Issen’s Hyper Freelancer model, so the tools library and my newsletter side project also drive traffic and interest to my agency. I’m also a frequent speaker at local startup incubators and accelerators. This helps me see founder frustrations and confusion with branding and marketing in real-time, and forces me to streamline my processes. If it doesn’t fit into an hour-long workshop, then I probably need to simplify it.

For my agency and tools, I’m working on sticking to a very focused three-channel marketing strategy with Twitter being my main channel.

As much as I love marketing (and I jump out of bed THRILLED that I get to do branding and marketing for a living!) it can be exhausting to do it for myself, so sticking to just 3 channels with content repurposing keeps me sane.

I tweet about very concrete ways to brand and market an early-stage B2B SaaS in a customer desire - and brand-centric way. I’ve gotten quite a few leads from Twitter through DM’s, and my landing page worksheet launch was a financial success (AKA I made $200 on launch day), with all of my conversions coming from Twitter.

My other two main channels are IndieHackers and referrals. All my agency clients have come from referrals so far, and I have become much more active on IndieHackers in the past 2 months.

In the next 2 months, I’m going to be focusing on SEO and LinkedIn with using content repurposed from Twitter. I wrote out how I plan on using my Tweets for blog content on, (where else?), Twitter.

On loneliness

Loneliness has proven to be my latest challenge! I’m 95% extrovert, but for most of COVID, I was either living with family or going into an office, which really helped mitigate the strongest of isolation feelings.

Now that I WFH, live alone, and am a solopreneur I’m having to be exceptionally purposeful about seeing people through weekly pre-scheduled activities like rock climbing, run club, and friend hangouts planned weeks ahead of time. Otherwise,I will just miserably chain myself to my laptop.

I developed an unhealthy level of work ethic young and kept it through college.

I devoured every issue of Inc., Fortune, Fast Company, and Entrepreneur magazine and was sure that 60-80hr workweeks were the only way I could live my dreams of owning a successful startup. Up until recently (we’re talking last August!) have I truly come to grips with how unhealthy that “hustle culture” approach is.

My friends joke that my laptop is my safety blanket. They’re not wrong.

Now that I control my career - and those workweeks! - I am working on being very intentional about replacing those lies with repeated prayers and meditations; “Productivity =/= number of hours worked.”, “Rest is good, godly, and allows me to do my best work.” It’s made a huge difference in how I approach my to-do list.

Putting my phone on Focus Mode during the day in the other room at night whenever possible is helping too.

On building a portfolio from nothing

When I launched the agency I couldn’t use most of the work I’d done in-house for my portfolio, it was all under NDA or hadn’t been publicly released yet.

So I offered to build 4 brands in one week each for free on IndieHackers, complete with a brand identity, landing page, and 3-channel marketing strategy.

Two of the brands that took me up on the offer ended up being a good fit. Building Legendsverse and Growform in public was a huge learning experience in SOP’s, audience building, and shipping fast. It really put me through the paces the way a traditional client-agency relationship wouldn’t have.

But by the beginning of week three, I realized that one week was completely unrealistic for all those deliverables. Although I hated doing it, I let the founders know that their projects would take longer than expected, but that they’d be done right and that worked for them. Neither was upset and it took the pressure off so I could create.

The final products are much higher quality than a rush job would have allowed and gave me a good estimate on how long projects take from start to finish. Now I quote closer to 3-4 weeks minimum for a project that size.

My brand process BIP tweets also led to the first five DMs from founders thanking me for the step-by-step transparency. They all mentioned how badly SaaS startups needed branding help and seeing how I linked branding to marketing clearly showed the value. It confirmed that this was a good space to be in and my positioning was solid.

I’m also following Joe Krug’s steps on how he built F’insweet, which he gave at the 2021 Webflow No-Code Conference.

1. Don't worry about the money
2. Focused on consistently bigger, better projects
3. Hire the expert
4. THEN make a badass website that shows what you can do (mine will be SaaS + website)
5. Repeat steps 2-4

His talk is what convinced me to build in public and do 4 Brands in 4 Weeks. I launched the agency in a caffeine-fueled 5 days after the conference, two days before Thanksgiving.

Fortunately, I already had the basic copy and agency site structure done from a previously failed website launch, so I reused that.

Then I;

• Decided the core customer type I wanted to work with (B2B SaaS)
• Built my own brand
• Narrowed my services to only the ones I knew I could pull off without a team
• Built a basic SOP for each of those services
• Researched exactly who those customers were and how to reach them (that’s where #BuildinPublic and 4 Brands in 4 Weeks came in)
• Rebuilt the website
• Built the content to launch
• Posted on IH!

Right now I’m at step 2 and am keeping my eyes out for Webflow developers, graphic and UI/UX designers, and illustrators for step 3. I have a sneaky suspicion that I’m going to get the great project and need the expert teammates simultaneously.

On branding

Branding will make your marketing/sales/investor outreach work better, easier, and faster. It’s not pretty colors and shapes to tack on later.

Branding is your differentiation framework and should be part of your positioning. Because authentic branding is rooted in relating to customers the way they want to be related to, NOT clearly saying what the founder wants to say. I think that’s often confused.

A strong brand is a clear definition of your

• Personality - who you are
• Voice - how you speak
• Visuals - how you look

All rooted in how your product speaks to customers’ core desires and/or core fears.

Nail them and customers will think you're a mind reader.

Anyone who’s used Figma or Webflow knows their branding is far beyond “pretty”. It’s the reason people use words like “love, adore, and has redefined X” when they talk about those tools. (Okay, when I talk about those tools).

On emotional purchases

Business customers make emotional decisions just like consumers do.

They want to see personality and humanity when they’re software shopping. Knowing that your product does what it promises is table stakes.

A myopic focus on features (even features-as-benefits) without an understanding of the emotional benefit a product provides makes every product sound the same.

Your product should grip them because it solves their problems on an emotional level, with the features and numbers to prove it.

On avoiding Twitter

For a long time, I avoided Twitter because I perceived it as full of blathering politics and culture wars.

With the launch of the Ignore No More I decided to go ahead and jump into the Twitterverse. Now it’s my favorite place on the internet (sorry Pinterest and Reddit). It’s like I’ve finally found the room with all the other side-project-obsessed builders, doers, and creatives!

Where to find more

You can find me on Twitter @HeyItsSophiaO tweeting about ways to build an un-ignorable startup. DM’s are open, so slide in with branding or marketing questions!

You can purchase my landing page copywriting worksheet on Gumroad. I built it specifically for tech founders who hate marketing and/or for whom English is a second language.

Book me to brand your SaaS at ignorenomore.agency. I have one February slot left and am booking for March.

If you happen to want to get to know the Hampton Roads, VA, USA startup ecosystem up close and personal, you can subscribe to Startup Goodness.