Ugggh, can someone please explain to me why the word "brand" here couldn't be replaced by with "companies" or "partners" or something like that?
you can. i just like to use brands because that's where the monetization will come from. all those words are interchangeable for the purposes of the post
Yeah, reading this I thought he was talking about "build your user base first, and your brand second", so it wasn't entirely clear from the title of the article.
Exactly. "Brand" is a bit of biz-marketing speak that always makes my hair stand on end anyway, but I've sort of come to terms with it as it refers to your company or organization's public face/perception. But if you're just using it to refer to external corporate partners, it's confusing, to me anyway.
Yeah, that's the challenge with biz-marketing speak in general - it's sales driven (not specifics driven or always substantive) and that frustrates me too!
We've been on the brands first, users second path for a while now. We've been trying to align the goal of the brands to be better for users. However, brands are driven by vanity metrics. And focusing on vanity metrics drives you to high churn, shallow engagements rather than deep and steady growth. I'm hoping that at some point we can leverage our experience and the number of people in our user base to help guide brands towards what's truly better for users.