ADVICE: Build Your Own Name, into a Brand Name
By Steve Poland • February 28, 2007
Jeremy Kandah, MBA Candidate 2008, Mason School of Business, The College of William & Mary, writes in:
I’m very interested in startups and pretty much want to do that instead of the typical MBA internship this summer. If I can find one I like, or run with my own I definitely would. Have any advice for this web junkie?
Jeremy,
Thanks for the email. Ideas are ‘a dime a dozen’ as the old adage says. Your ideas aren’t unique — someone’s working on them somewhere. The chances of you having the next Google in your mind is as good as winning the lottery.
I’d honestly start blogging your ideas out there — possibly as guest posts on my blog (if I’m liking them). Get your name out, your insight, your knowledge — establish the ‘Jeremy Kandah’ brand on the web; in the tech industry.
Open up and share — everyone will know the originator of the idea; and I also think there’s patent law that can protect ideas for a year [don’t know this for fact]. Get people to hash the ideas out — see if there really is something there. Let people help you with your idea.
Ideas are ‘a dime a dozen’ — creating an actual business; executing on an idea … that’s the difficult part. You’re the one that will have the passion for your idea — others likely aren’t going to steal your idea.
Get out there and make a name for yourself. Recruiters these days are reaching out to me at least once a week — IBM, Microsoft, etc. Contact some start-ups — find the ones that have employees/management that blog about their company and start to network with them.
And if you’re like me — you’ll be generating more great ideas as months/years go on — the more you read/absorb, the more ideas that come to you. That’s how I’m wired at least. You’ve got plenty of time to create your grand start-up — go out and grab some experience at a start-up or two. Or, try your own start-up (I’ve fallen on my face 9 times in the past with my ideas / start-ups) — but ensure you have a steady income somehow to pay your bills. And if you have a wife/kids, definitely go work for ‘the man’, get the steady paycheck, and work on your grand idea at night.
That’s my advice.
Best of luck!
-Steve Poland
Comments
10 Responses to “ADVICE: Build Your Own Name, into a Brand Name”
Got something to say?
Firstly, great blog Steve. Been reading/subscribing for awhile. Especially enjoy reading your startup ideas. They keep me thinking.
So imagine my surprise when I read my RSS feeds today to find you talking about something I’ve been interested in and have blogged about a few times in the past. Even more serendipitous is the fact I’ve only just launched a spin-off blog (...) ranting about exactly this topic - Our Personal Identity/Name as a brand and how important it is.
Needless to say, I completely agree with what you’re saying. We need to treat ourselves as brands and get ourselves out there. At the same time, we also need to be careful what we put out there and to watch for things that may damage our brand and reputation, whether it’s our own fault of someone else making a specific effort to defame us. Not the easiest thing to manage, but educating ourselves about this is the first step.
Keep up the good work.
Related to failures…
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I think the “Jeremy Kandah” brand just went up 500%. Thanks for the post, keep in touch.
[…] When I read Jeremy Kandah’s comment on this last post: I think the “Jeremy Kandah” brand just went up 500%. Thanks for the post, keep in touch. […]
Thanks Steve for your response to Jeremy.
We’re quite a bunch of Jeremys reading your blog, I bet.
Hey JK, it’s time to trademark your name pal!
Hey Jean
Actually I do own jamesdkirk.com and have had various incarnations of it up and running over the years. For a long time I was simply using it for email purposes, with what I thought was a pretty ingenuous branding address: iAm@jamesdkirk.com. Of course, this was in the early 2000’s and before long, and before I better understood filtering, etc, that account was overrun by unwanted/unsolicited messages, so I stopped using it.
I’ve put the domain up lately as I’ve been performing my crash course with Wordpress, and found myself using it as my sand box account, which obviously isn’t all that productive from a Branding perspective (every time you would hit the site, it would have a different theme or some sort of error, etc :’( ).
My business partner and I are getting very close to getting boldlygoing.com where we want the platform to be. And getting a foundation of stability. When we are there, and have operations flowing (within the next week is my goal), then I’ll load up jdk.com again, and get some personal stuff going on again.
Which I think is a great question: how many of Steve’s readers have some form of their own name registered? I would have gotten just jameskirk.com, however, as on might imagine with that name, it was unavailable
~James
Go Boldly!
For an entertaining (fictional) take on this theme:
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Actually, ya, u have to work at night to proceed on your idea. Always, have a steady pay check be4 u start playing with ur idea.
This post rings so true. Execution is everything!
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