Episode 56 // Imprisoned Inside of Your Product’s Branding

Matt Johnston:
In the world of agile software development, you can iterate quickly and it’s “Oh, it’s okay if it’s not quite ready.” In the world of a rebrand, everything has to.

David Cosand:
That’s not quite… yeah.

Matt Johnston:
It is the Steve Jobs, unveil it to the world. It all has to be seamless and perfect that day.

Introduction Voice:
You’re listening to the Remarkabrand Podcast where authentic brands win. With your hosts, Mike Jones and David Cosand.

Mike Jones:
If you’re an avid listener of our podcast, I want to apologize right now. Because this episode will not satisfy the cliffhanger from the last episode because we’re going to have to solve that a different day. That’s a different podcast episode. I’m sorry, y’all. But today, we’re going to be talking about something that you probably see almost every day, even if you don’t recognize it, and that is when a company’s identity is imprisoned inside of their product’s brand.

David Cosand:
Whoa!

Mike Jones:
Imprisoned.

David Cosand:
Scary.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. We get to talk today to Matt Johnston, CEO of GitKraken, who recently rebranded out of that exact scenario. A real world example of a business that thrived after a successful rebrand. I’m really excited to talk to him about that. But before we get to that, David and I are going to do a little improv.

David Cosand:
That’s right.

Sam Pagel:
And by now everybody should know what Name 10 Things are, so we’re going to get right into it.

Mike Jones:
Let’s do it.

Sam Pagel:
All right, David.

Mike Jones:
What is it, Sam?

Sam Pagel:
David and Mike. Name 10 products that are actually companies.

David Cosand:
Kleenex.

Sam Pagel:
One.

Mike Jones:
Daily Wire Soda.

Sam Pagel:
Two.

David Cosand:
Alf.

Sam Pagel:
Three.

Mike Jones:
Dwayne The Rock Johnson.

Sam Pagel:
Four.

David Cosand:
That’s a good one. I’m gonna go with Crocs.

Sam Pagel:
Ooh, Crocs. It’s five.

Mike Jones:
Grandpa’s see through underwear.

David Cosand:
Ooh!

Sam Pagel:
Ouch!

David Cosand:
Wow!

Sam Pagel:
What’s that total now? Six.

David Cosand:
Hey, bird. Those shoes that have a bird in the name.

Sam Pagel:
Allbirds.

Mike Jones:
Allbirds.

David Cosand:
There you go.

Sam Pagel:
Seven.

Mike Jones:
Flightless Eagles.

Sam Pagel:
Eight.

Mike Jones:
The sports team.

Sam Pagel:
It’s a good product.

David Cosand:
Oh, man.

Sam Pagel:
Two more.

David Cosand:
iPad phone.

Sam Pagel:
iPad phone. That’s it, yep.

David Cosand:
No, I think the company’s called Apple. Dang. I screwed that one up. No wrong answers, go.

Sam Pagel:
One more.

Mike Jones:
Elon Musk’s nostrils.

Sam Pagel:
Oh, yeah. That’s a terrific product, that’s also a brand.

Mike Jones:
It’s been selling like hotcakes lately.

David Cosand:
Hot cakes. It’s a product. It’s a brand.

Mike Jones:
Oh, man.
All right.

Sam Pagel:
That’d be 11.

Mike Jones:
Oh, 11. We went all the way to 11.

David Cosand:
Oh, we got 11, really?

Sam Pagel:
You took it to 11.

David Cosand:
Wow!

Mike Jones:
That’s great.

David Cosand:
We did, we did. I like to execute this much quicker than last time.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. That was good.

Sam Pagel:
That was great.

Introduction Voice:
Find your frequency.

Mike Jones:
All right guys. Product branding versus organizational branding. That’s what today is all about. We’re going to hear from Matt Johnston in a little bit. But before we do, I think David, you and I, probably Sam too, need to unpack this a little bit. Give our perspective on what’s the difference really, between when a company has a product, they are the product, versus the brand is the whole organization. So why is that a problem?

Sam Pagel:
Maybe, Mike, David too, probably, maybe throw out what are a couple real world examples that we probably have heard of that have fallen into that trap.

Mike Jones:
I think it was last episode, but we mentioned Taser, right? I think that’s the easy example. A company that branded all around one product. The short story is they tapped out their market selling tasers. There was no one else to sell it to. They did have other products with brands of their own, namely Axon. And they had to pivot into that product, which required them to rebrand the entire organization as Axon, when it was Taser before. And that’s a costly experience to go through. There’s a process to go through. There’s also, you got to roll that out. I think that is a good case study of an example of why maybe establishing your organizational brand earlier on, once you kind of have a sense of where do we want to go beyond one product.
Let’s create a brand that can house all these things you want to think of, like the Apples and the Nikes of the world that have this organizational brand that really actually drives a lot of the demand for their products and holds most of the equity. The products themselves have their own brands, they have their own unique identities, but they’re all subservient. They’re all part of a family. And the family has that surname, that last name.
Almost like a, I don’t want to get too medieval here, but like dynasties of Kings and Queens, you think about the different families that ruled England. Sorry, I was doing a big Wikipedia search the other day on all this random stuff. And each family had their own crest. They had their own name.

Sam Pagel:
Sure.

Mike Jones:
Funny enough one of them had to rebrand, actually. The Windsors were not originally the Windsors. They were… I’m going to butcher. I don’t remember what it was. It was a German based family name because their family had roots back in Germany. And in World War I, if you’re ruling England, probably don’t want to use a family name that’s German. Probably not going to work out well. So yes, they rebranded their own family name.

David Cosand:
And actually, that brings up another example that I had in mind where the product is a person.

Mike Jones:
Ooh!

David Cosand:
So to speak. So you guys probably have heard of Dave Ramsey.

Mike Jones:
Sure. Yeah.

David Cosand:
Financial guy, Financial Peace University. He’s got a show about getting out of debt. This is his thing. He’s been doing this for a long time, but he started other products and other services. He wanted to get other speakers involved. He wanted to not have it just be about him. So the identity was very much, “Oh, this is Dave Ramsey.”

Mike Jones:
Yeah. His name’s on it.

David Cosand:
Right. His company this whole time, I think has been called Lampo Group. So it had another name, but nobody knew what Lampo Group is. In fact, I don’t even know if it’s still called that. But I think if you have a brand that starts around a person, and everybody knows that person, but then you want to grow and not just be about that one human, what are you going to do? Where are you going to go with that?

Mike Jones:
Well, we work in an industry that has that problem with almost every firm.

David Cosand:
I would assume that’s accounting.

Mike Jones:
Accounting. And even in law firms, in the legal world, that’s another big issue where firms are established around maybe one or two or three people. And their last names become the brand. And over time, you think about a law firm or an accounting firm that’s been around 60, 70 years, the original founders are gone. They’re out of the business at the very least. And that business has to carry on with their name on it? That can be very awkward and that can leave a lot of issues, not only to the marketplace, of like, “Wait, who are you? And why are you named that?” And that’s why you also see a lot of acronyms.

David Cosand:
Yeah. Our grandpas did business together or something.

Mike Jones:
But also I think it does a disservice to your team. You have new leaders in your organization who then have to take on the mantle of someone else’s name. And maybe over time it kind of gets institutionalized and that name doesn’t really mean anything about the people, but at some level, two, three generations out, you’re still going to reference those particular people. And there’s also a reverse flip issue with that. And this goes to product brands that are, if your company is the whole product, there’s another issue, which is, if anything wrong happens with your product, your whole brand goes down.
And you can think of individuals who have really strong brands, and maybe even have businesses built around those brands, Dave Ramsey’s not a good example. I think he’s done a good job protecting his own reputation. But imagine if Dave Ramsey got in financial trouble. Comes out, “Oh, he’s the guy that says never have any debt. And he’s got loads and loads of debt.” Let’s say that happened. Even if his company was really good and it could continue going, his name is going to hold it back. And so that’s the danger.
Even KFC I think went through this. For a while, the Colonel was like, this is a bad thing. We can’t have the Colonel because it’s got this weird dark history. There’s bad things that he did, or things we don’t agree with, or things that are not politically correct. And then given enough time, people kind of forgive and forget, and we move on.

David Cosand:
Yeah, I think part of how we get into this, how companies might be getting into this situation is they’re so, rightly so, they’re concerned about product market fit. You want to get that first product to work, and you get so excited, and then you’re touting the success of this product, and this becomes our whole business. I mean that’s natural. But I think it would make a lot of sense for companies, for us to be thinking about, “Hey, what else is here? What more, besides this one product that serves our customers well, what are we all about?” And so if you have that forethought, and you’re thinking ahead, “Hey, let’s not just fall into this trap of once we get our first big win that defines who we are.” No, we’re so much more than that. And let’s make sure that we’re intentional about that before we find that product market fit.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. Or at least dual track that.

David Cosand:
Sure.

Mike Jones:
We’ve got to find the product market fit, we’re going to build a brand around this product, we’re going to find the right market for it, we’re going to make that work. Because that is, at the beginning, that’s the business. You got to get that figured out. But I think it does a disservice if you say, “Oh, we’ll figure out the corporate organizational identity later.”
And it’s like, to your point about Dave Ramsey, maybe all the time was spent on the Dave Ramsey brand, and there was this other brand that they could use. But because no energy was put into it, no real development of that brand in the marketplace was put in place, so by the time you’re like, “Oh, we really need somewhere to house the Dave Ramsey brand. We need a larger kind of container, a larger family brand to put it into that means something to people.” Well now you’re going to have to spend a lot of time and probably money to build an awareness and a meaning behind that larger brand.
And I think that’s why you’ll often see product brands kind of go the Taser route, where they try to turn the product brand into an organizational brand. I think there’s dangers in that, in and of itself, in that if you wait long enough, that product brand really means something very, very specific. And to try to make it mean a lot more things actually makes it really convoluted. It makes it really hard for people to understand that. I think you lose clarity and you lose people in the process.

David Cosand:
We’ve seen the big tech giants do this too where they… it was Google. Now it’s Alphabet?

Mike Jones:
Yeah.

David Cosand:
Facebook and Meta.

Mike Jones:
Google’s still there. It’s a brand but…

David Cosand:
Right. But it’s also a product.

Mike Jones:
But yeah, there’s this larger, a larger organization. Or Meta.

David Cosand:
It is a search engine.

Mike Jones:
Meta with Facebook.

David Cosand:
Yes.

Mike Jones:
Oh my goodness.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. But even with Meta, it’s like they want Meta to be a product. It’s-

David Cosand:
The metaverse.

Mike Jones:
Yeah.

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
It’s like, well wait, is Meta the company or is it the new product? I’m so confused. Oh man!

David Cosand:
So good example. We’re confused.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. We’re confused.

David Cosand:
Let’s hammer that out during while, like you’re saying while we’re figuring out product market fit. Let’s make sure we’re intentional about the brand being bigger than this product.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. So I think that begs the question. What is the remedy? Right. I know I need to do this. I need to be thinking organizationally, not just product, I’m either dual tracking it or I’m putting a lot of forethought into my organizational identity. Is that it? What else is there? What’s the remedy to make sure I don’t fall into that trap?

Sam Pagel:
You’re 10 years down the road. You have this brand that is a product and it’s successful, people like it, but then something happens. Maybe you acquire another product or you create another product. Like you said, now, what do you do? How do you fix that?

Mike Jones:
I think that’s really hard.
You hire a branding agency. All right. Good episode. It’s a wrap.
No, I don’t think that’s the immediate remedy. I think. Sure. Some outside help might be helpful. Right? Some outside perspective, whether that’s you go hire an agency or you go talk to your customers, go talk to the team that you’re acquiring for that other product. I would hope that you’re already thinking that through even before you make the acquisition. There’s maybe the inkling of a plan for that. I think there’s opportunity to look at your current brand and go, can we leverage this as our organizational identity? Can we ladder it up? Then you have some really hard work to change people’s perception of the product itself and what it’s called. There’s some tactics in that, that I think are easier. One is take what’s functional about your product, differentiating functional or who it’s positioned for an industry or a type of business and create kind of a non-trademarked name for it.
So a good example would be if we were Resound was going to spin up, we’re going to go target tech companies with our services for branding. We might have Resound tech branding. Tech branding in and of itself is not really ownable. It’s not really a trademarkable thing, but reemphasizing Resound as the organizational brand. And then we have these different sub services or products that fall into that. Salesforce is a really good example of that. They have, if you kind of go to their solutions list, they have all these icons with names under each one and they’re like marketing, and one is sales. They’re very application focused. There’s a couple that are not, which are their acquisitions. So Slack, Tableau. And then I can’t remember. There’s another one. That’s an acquisition that hasn’t been kind of formalized into this more homogenous cloud of services, but they’re really emphasizing Salesforce. All the equity is put into the Salesforce name.

David Cosand:
Well, and we see that with Amazon, Amazon music, Amazon Prime.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. That’s a good example.

David Cosand:
They bought Audible and I think they’ve kept the Audible brand, but most of the other things are Amazon fill in the blank. Yeah. It’s interesting. So, I mean, if you have a brand that has a ton of equity and now you’re starting to make acquisitions, then you have to be strategic about, are we a multi-brand family of brands, company.

Mike Jones:
General Mills.

David Cosand:
Yeah. Right. Crack a little brand. Favorite cereal.

Mike Jones:
Yeah.

Sam Pagel:
If General mills, what’s one of their cereals, Cheerios?

David Cosand:
Cheerios, Cheerios.

Sam Pagel:
What if General Mills name was just Cheerios? And then it’s like, “Well, now we need to do cornflakes and rice crispies?

David Cosand:
Well, that’s Kelloggs. Oh wait, are they all the same company?

Mike Jones:
Yeah. In this universe they are.

Sam Pagel:
So then, you have a real issue there. And I think there is a necessity at that point, whether you’re a tech company or a food company, whatever, there’s probably a point where you’re like, “We have to rebrand now because we are no longer just our product and you never really were. But now your hand is kind of forced to figure out, okay, now we need to really become an organization, not just a product from a branding standpoint.”

David Cosand:
Yeah.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. And I think if you think about brands that really stand the test of time, most of them are branded that way. The product is subservient to the organizational brand. I think Apple, Nike, you think even like an AT&T or GE, a lot of the car brands out there, Honda, Toyota, the organization is really what drives a lot of the value at the product level because they’ve done such a great job over a long period of time of building the trust with the organization, not just with that single product.
And there’s a real advantage to that in that every product that you put out into the marketplace, that’s new, carries some of that value with it. When Nike comes into the golf market, a market they had never played in before, had no credibility, up against brands like Ping, who have decades of credibility in that market, within I think, what, 15, 20 years Nike outsold Ping in that market. I mean, just nuts to me, but that’s the power of their brand and that, “Hey, I like Nike. I trust them. They have ton, obviously they have tons of marketing power that they can enter into a market they have no expertise in and just dominate,” because they carry over all that equity with their organizational brand.

Introduction Voice:
You are remarkable.

Mike Jones:
All right. So we have the immense joy of hearing from Matt Johnston, CEO of GitKraken, a leading provider of Git tools for software developers. Matt joined GitKraken in late 2021, and he’s already made a significant impact on the company, leading them through a successful rebrand in a very short amount of time. Prior to GitKraken, Matt led marketing efforts for a number of other fast growing software companies, including Mautic, now a part of Aquia, as well as Applause. Matt, thank you so much for joining the show today. You actually have firsthand experience of being stuck inside of a product brand and recently went through a rebrand to break out of that. I’m really excited to hear about that. First, tell us a little bit about GitKraken on a high level.

Matt Johnston:
Sure. So GitKraken is a 100 person company based here in Scottsdale. We have employees all across the US as well as an R&D office in Alicante, Spain. So we’ve gone from kind of single location, everyone in the same room and in the past year and a half have exploded, both in terms of size, number of products, amount of revenue, but also in terms of just kind of geographic reach. And then when we talk about creating, Git tools for developers, Git is the ubiquitous standard when it comes to managing version control. So if you’ve ever shared a spreadsheet with someone and they made an edit and messed up your formula, you kind of understand what Git does. And so we make tools that help developers build their company’s software, and that could be their company’s websites, mobile apps, integrations, back office, really any type of software that that company is building, our tools enable their developers to go further, faster.
And so we have more than 10 million developers from a 100,000 companies around the world using our products every day for every sprint and every new release and that’s companies like Netflix to NASA to Nestle. So all sorts of really pure technical companies, young companies, well established older brands.

Mike Jones:
That’s really cool. So you came on board late 2021, and I think pretty quickly there was a need for a bit of a rebrand. Is that right?

Matt Johnston:
Yeah. So right around the time I was joining, we had made our first acquisition of a product called Git Integration for JIRA. And right after I joined, we made a second acquisition of a company called GitLens. And so you can see, can start to see a branding and phonetic trend here. And so at the time we were called Axosoft and that was our original flagship product and was still the name of the company up until December 8th of 2021. And the decision was easy because we knew that the future of the company was not in those legacy products. It was in these kind of developer tools that were really built around the Git ecosystem and other ecosystems like JIRA that are so important to software developers and just companies at this point.
And so we made the decision that we wanted to move forward and recognize that our new flagship product has evolved as GitKraken. And we wanted to build a brand umbrella that was big enough, not only for our three products that are developer focused and in the Git ecosystem, we also wanted to make sure that it was a big enough, scalable enough brand umbrella for the fourth product or the fifth product or the 10th product that we might build or buy in the future.

Mike Jones:
That’s cool. Yeah, that’s definitely an interesting challenge to be thinking through is multiple products, you’re merging in these existing brands, but also wanting to maintain that large enough umbrella that you’re not getting pigeonholed down the road.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah. You have to think about scale the same way a technologist thinks about scale or somebody who’s building a home thinks about, “What is this going to look like? How is it going to operate two years, two decades from now?” And so you want to make sure that there’s ample room for the things that you can’t even envision today.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. What did that process look like a little bit? I think that’s sometimes really helpful for people as they’re thinking through the similar types of challenges.

Matt Johnston:
Some people think the word rebrand and they think new logo, or they think a new website and there’s an entire gradient, or entire range. When I was at Applause, our original company name was UTest. And so we about were six, seven years in and really successful in growing. And not only did we want to change the name of the brand name that the public sees, we wanted to change the legal entity, the cap table, the paychecks come from. And so it was a company wide effort from IT to legal, to accounting, to everyone. The 401k plan had to change its name in addition to all of the marketing and product work when we went from UTest to Applause.
Here, in the case of going from Axosoft to GitKraken, it was certainly more than a new logo and certainly more than a new website, but we didn’t go as far as changing the legal name.So that was great because it meant we didn’t have all the back office functions. We didn’t have to change the name on the paycheck or change the name on the 401k plan, but it also introduced some interesting tension between what was back office and what was public facing. So you’d sit there and say like, “Well, HR, okay, that’s back office.” Well, what about when you’re posting the job? What about when you’re building that recruit or that candidate pipeline focused brand? And so the team did a phenomenal job and it was everything from marketing to product, to IT, to HR, just going through and inventorying every brand touchpoint from email templates to social, the team can now tell you all sorts of stories about how you transition a company name in the world of LinkedIn.

Mike Jones:
Yes.

Matt Johnston:
Where Axosoft went from the company and GitKraken was the product and then we inverted those two. And to me, the most magical thing about that is, in the world of agile software development, you can iterate quickly and it’s, “Oh, it’s okay. If it’s not quite ready.” In the world of a rebrand, everything has to-

Mike Jones:
That’s a quite… yeah.

Matt Johnston:
It is the Steve Jobs unveil it to the world and it all has to be seamless and perfect that day. And so the team did a phenomenal job of coordinating a thousand different touchpoints and bringing them to the finish line together, which was really cool. And ultimately, one of my favorite things about that, the former marketer in me loves a clean, thoughtful, well done rebrand, but the CEO in me loves the fact that it can be such a bonding experience for a team that you get to rally around this new and revised north star. And everyone’s kind of pitching in, everyone’s doing their part. There’s a lot of dependencies, there’s a mountain of communication and a lot of hard work, but at the end of it it’s incredibly rewarding. And if you get it right, it can propel a company forward.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. That’s such an interesting point that there’s not just a benefit. I mean, there’s almost like a PR benefit to a rebrand. Kind of makes a big splash, gives you an opportunity to get some media attention and have some conversations, but also that internal, maybe not PR is not the right word, but that internal kind of cultural focus that we’re all pushing forward on one thing all at the same time. And we’re really getting focused on what it is we stand for and who we are.

Matt Johnston:
And getting to a place where you almost have to explain to any human being, what’s in it for them. How do you get HR to care about, how do you get accounting to care about, how do you get IT to care about it? And so it can’t be a marketing driven rebrand. And I think one of the things that the GitKraken team got was not making it about any one function. It was about the company. It was about our north star and we were all kind of rowing in the same direction.

Mike Jones:
That’s great. Talk to me a little bit about how core values played into that. We’re big fans of core values. So I always want to ask, as people talk about brand, I don’t know if they always make that connection point, but I just know how intrinsically powerful the values are to really undergirding the brand and giving it a sense of a purpose and direction.

Matt Johnston:
First of all, if you don’t have well articulated values as a company, as a team and as a leader, then you’re building on a house of sand. You don’t have that solid foundation. And then secondly, you can have the most sizzly, interesting, cool brand in the world. But if it’s detached from your values and your vision, then it’s empty. And so I think GitKraken, I was lucky enough to inherit from the founding, the founder who had built the company had really built it on this kind of foundation of innovation and being healthily dissatisfied with the status quo. So even the get GitKraken client, which is our flagship product, was born out of a 30 day kind of hackathon sprint. And it was built by some engineers that wanted to solve that problem for themselves. And so there was this kind of healthy dissatisfaction with, “We could make that better.”
And so that’s a great foundation to build atop. From my perspective, as the CEO, coming in and inheriting this team and inheriting this company and brand, my job isn’t to rip up that playbook. It’s to write new chapters that build upon it so we can go further, faster. And for me personally, my first kind of value in anything is take care of employees. If you get that right, then there’s somebody there who will happily, eagerly take good care of your customers, take good care of your partners. And if you get that right, then your investors are well taken care of. If you get that wrong, then it’s a house of cards and it’ll crumble. Beyond that, I’ll say that the five principles I have for leading any team, the first one is go fast. The second one is with focus. Third is end trust. Fourth is to deliver value. And fifth is as a team.
And each one of those, I mean, it’s one sentence. It’s go fast with focus and trust, deliver value as a team. But every one of those has these kind of underpinnings that are so important to get right. On the go fast side of things, having a bias towards action means that you’re overcoming the very human condition of, “I’ll decide later. We can figure that out next week. Oh, we can wait. And we can launch that, or it’s not ready to publish.” Just overcoming that and having this bias where you’re leaning in towards action. I saw a quote from another CEO recently that said, “Fast is as slow as we go.” And I love that. And I said, that’s again, you’re just fighting against that very natural, very human tendency to slow down. It’s not ready. We don’t have to decide until next week. So we won’t.
With focus, that second one about having focus while you’re trying to go fast. It’s so important that, first of all, if you want to go fast, you can’t try to boil the ocean. You can’t try to do 10 things at once. And so ultimately the things we say yes to get all the attention, but the things we say no to are just as important. And you have to say no 90% of the time, otherwise you’re scattered and your efforts are diffused. Having trust within the team, that one’s meaningful to me. I think we’ve all been around people and teams where promises are made not kept. And so I like to think a lot about the say, do ratio. And we want to have a really high say, do ratio with each other, with our board, with our customers, which means you’re making the right promises.And then you’re moving heaven and earth to keep those promises.
And then delivering value, it’s something we talk about a lot at GitKraken. There are a lot of companies out there that create nice to have solutions and that’s wonderful, and that works great in a booming economy. But when you get into tougher times, when you get into more competition, that’s when you have to graduate from nice to have to need to have. And then lastly, as a team, doing it together as a team, first of all, and I didn’t always believe this, but I’m a firm believer now that attitude trumps aptitude. Some people call it the no jerks rule, but getting to a place where everyone understands, we win and lose together. There’s no such thing as a month or a quarter or a year where marketing had a great showing and product didn’t. Like we win and lose together. We have the same record at the end of it. And when you get to a place like that with a team it’s really impactful because you start to recognize that we all agree we’re at point A, we all agree we’re trying to get to point B.
So the only thing we might disagree about is what’s the best path to get from A to B. And as soon as you put it in that context, you realize you’re on the same side of the table. You’re competing with the status quo, you’re competing with a competitor, but you’re never competing with each other. And that’s, to me, such a healthy foundation and part of the kind of principled foundation that I like to bring to any team.

Mike Jones:
That’s great. I think that’s really interesting to have those underlying core values. And then this leadership level of this is what we’re aiming for. And this is what it should look like when the rubber hits the road. That’s really cool. Back to the GitKraken brand. I always like to ask everybody, how do you define the GitKraken brand? What you talk about the north star, or maybe that focus, how do you summarize that?

Matt Johnston:
Yeah, it’s a great question because the brand is so ethereal, right?

Mike Jones:
Yes, it is.

Matt Johnston:
And it’s very subjective too. You might look at a brand and say, “Wow, they nailed it.” And I might look at it and say, “What are you talking about?

Mike Jones:
I don’t get it.

Matt Johnston:
“I don’t get it. Doesn’t land for me.” And so, one of the things I think about is, I don’t know any company or brand or business that really cuts through and resonates without being wildly authentic to itself, to itself, its vision, its users. If you can’t look yourself in the mirror and say, “Yeah, no, even when it causes a little bit of trouble or confusion or costs more, we’re going to go that extra mile.” If you’re not doing that, then it becomes diluted and you start to look and sound like everyone else, right? “Oh, yeah. We’re a SaaS platform that does this. Oh, yeah. Fascinating.”

Mike Jones:
The Uber of film.

Matt Johnston:
Yeah, exactly. The Uber of, the eBay of. And so, I think one of the things that really drew me to the company and I can’t take any credit for this, but they were always just laser focused, very intuitively focused on this brand voice. And it was a brand voice that, “Yeah, we do really serious work for serious developers who work at serious companies, but we don’t take ourself seriously at all.” And so even having a mascot, we have Keith the Kraken and he’s helpful and playful and clever, and it’s just the right amount of goofy and the right amount of weird. And it really resonates with the developer audience.
And I remember having conversations with the VP of marketing right around the time I joined and uncomfortable for her I’m sure to say, “Oh, I have a new boss and he’s a former CMO and he’s probably got all these ideas.” And she said, “Hey, one of the things, a hill that I will die on is maintaining this brand voice that is very human, very authentic and focused on the developer, not the developer’s boss. We’re not going to be corporate. We’re not going to be this kind of enterprise focused message.” And she was a hundred percent right. And it’s one of the strengths of the company is that they found that voice and they’ve done a really good job of staying true to it and being like I said, kind of wildly true to themselves.

Mike Jones:
And that’s so interesting that, I mean, part of that is being really true to yourselves. This is who we are. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. But on the flip side, is this laser focus on who you’re delivering value to, which is that, I think what you just said was really interesting. That’s why I’m going to say it again for anyone that’s listening and missed it. You said you’re not for the developer’s boss. And so having that laser focus on the developer themselves, what really delivers value to them beyond probably even the product itself, even that comes out in the brand of, “Hey, developers are very serious people and they’re doing very serious work, but they tend to also be creative and enjoy a little bit of expression of that kind of creativity and interesting.” The idea, whole idea of playing with words in your name, GitKraken and obviously having a mascot that isn’t just some talking head CEO.

Matt Johnston:
Right. It’s not Clippy.

Mike Jones:
Yeah. Clippy. Yeah. I mean just full little bit of kudos for me, at least on those things like that. That takes guts. There’s a lot of companies, I think that struggle with those things because they see, “Oh, our clients, our customers are really serious people and they’re doing really serious work. And so we have to be really serious too.”

Matt Johnston:
Or we won’t be credible.

Mike Jones:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think there’s a counter argument to that.

Matt Johnston:
There is, and you have to understand who is the core audience and it’s not just a brand question for us. Our entire business model is predicated upon this notion of kind of bottom up adoption. We don’t go to the director of engineering and try to sell a hundred licenses. John finds our product and tells Jane and Stephanie tells Steve, and eventually we might get introduced to their boss, but we’re there to serve the developer. And we can’t lose sight of that.
Now I appreciate the kudos, what I would say. I actually think the real kudos, it’s easy to do that when you’re starting from scratch and you’re the upstart and you’re just like, “We’re just here to serve developers. It’s a lot to be playful about it.” But as you start to grow and as you start to get big customers with thousands of seats, and these are big brand names, it’s super easy then to just regress to the mean and say, “Hey, why don’t we start playing it safe?”
And again, throughout not only the founding team, but the team who has kind of nurtured this brand along has just never lost sight of the fact that our audience is demanding and smart, but they’re also creative and they don’t want to be sold to, they don’t want to be marketed to, they want you to build an amazing product and then they want you to be yourself. They want you to be human. And so they’ve done a really good job just maintaining that authenticity.

Mike Jones:
That’s really cool. That’s really cool. If you had to put a category on GitKraken, what category would you put yourselves in? And total to full disclosure, I think this is just such an interesting question to ask because I love companies that are thinking deeply about the category, what they’re creating, if they’re creating a category and where they position themselves in it.

Matt Johnston:
So in its simplest terms, if you went and talked to Gartner or Forrester, we’d be in the developer tools or the DevOps tools space. And I think that’s fine. I think that’s the very two dimensional black and white version of that. To me, I look at it and I say, if you subscribe to Marc Andreessen’s old maxim that software is eating the world, then the people that are authoring software are authoring our future, whether it’s self-driving cars, whether it’s remote education, whether it’s digital security, physical security. And so I tend to look at the category we’re in as, say, we are here to help those authors of our future be more productive, be safer in the products they build and then collaborate with each other better. So ultimately, I look at us as the paint brush or the marker that they use to paint this bold picture in the future.

Mike Jones:
Yep. Love it. Well, Matt, thank you so much for joining us. This was super helpful to hear from a real person what a real rebrand did for your organization and really how it benefited everyone that connected to it. So we’ve talked about the right way to brand your company. Next, we’re going to talk about elements of branding your products and services, and we’re actually going to have Matt join us again to talk through one really important model of product branding.

Sam Pagel:
The Remarkabrand podcast is a project of Resound and is recorded in Tempe, Arizona with host Mike Jones and David Cosand. It’s produced and edited by Sam Pagel. You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and @remarkablecast.com. If you’d like more episodes, subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever you prefer to get your podcasts. To contact the show, find out more about the Remarkabrand podcast or to join our newsletter list to make sure you never miss another episode, check out our website @remarkablecast.com. Copyright Resound Creative Media, LLC, 2022.