Why Eddie Geller Believes A Brand's Name Is A Startup's Biggest Asset

A Founder's Journey to Brand Clarity is a series of swift interviews with some of today's most intriguing founders on how they gained brand focus and clarity along their successful entrepreneurial journeys.

Eddie Geller co-founded Tinybeans, an app that reaches 20 million families, is traded on the stock exchange, yet many of you may have never heard of it because he has a very targeted appeal: Young parents and their parents.

Tell us about the idea, about how the app functions, and how you made the impossible possible, which is to get young parents away from the social networks that they’re already using to opt into something totally new, to opt into Tinybeans?

Tinybeans is this really simple app that allows new parents to capture these everyday memories and have them safely stored and then share them selectively with families all over the world. Parents loved this simple way in which they could be capturing these memories, they could selectively share with these handfuls of family members, it could be 10, 15, 20 and then they would get these emails every day. Then through that experience, these grandparents, aunts, and uncles could then comment and love and be part of that experience so there wouldn’t be a need for them to be on other social media or download an app or do anything complicated. They just wanted to experience what these babies and kids are up to and that’s really the simplest format with which we began. The millennial mom is very up to date with the latest trends and privacy is a critical thing for her and that’s really what has driven a lot of the growth in the last five, six years is this very simple way in which parents own the information. They get to control who gets to see it, and obviously, it’s very safe inside Tinybeans.

You talked about the parents, you talked about the grandparents, but you didn’t talk about the new parents’ friends and I think it really helps them too, to not suddenly see 20,000 baby photos every day on Facebook in their timelines.

Many years ago there was an app on Facebook called UnbabyMe and it solved the problem of parents oversharing their child’s photos in your feed and it would replace them with bacon and cat pictures. It’s no longer available but it was there in the very early days and it predates Tinybeans, but yeah, exactly like you say, Fabian.

How do you create a brand that speaks to young, hip moms, and yet you also need to attract grandparents? Obviously, you advertise to the moms, that’s whom you speak too in the beginning, but how do you work the brand language and the design around those two very far apart age groups?

Yeah, it’s a great question. First of all, it starts with the name. If you think about the name Tinybeans, it’s a metaphor for a child, so really it’s at the center of everything we do is your child’s life. So it’s your little tiny bean and in the early days and still, to this day, we put that language in the experience, like "hey capture another photo of your tiny bean" or "what’s your tiny bean up to today?" So we’re using that language in the experience that obviously brings the brand into reality, so it’s very important to us that the brand is integrated not just visually but also through language and the experience and that appeals to everyone. Whether you're a grandparent or a mom, it’s all about kids.

And you have an amazing target audience to actually serve up recommendations because they actually need other parents, just for advice. They read different things, they need to educate themselves about the different brands and different products that they’ve never had in their life before, so it actually really is a perfect match for you to have this online community that is all about trust and it’s all about happiness and then suddenly you serve them up what isn’t even an ad. It’s really just "hey, we know where you’re at right now in life, and here’s a product we feel might be really good for you." They’re actually going to run towards it with open arms rather than "oh God, there’s an ad, right?"

Exactly. And the brands are benefiting because they’re sort of leveraging the trust we have with our parents. If we say "hey, this is great, it is a Tiny Beans tested product, we’d highly recommend it" that is a 10x in terms of what the parent would have thought of that product if they saw it on a generic sort of social platform. So having said that, big brands haven’t quite caught up. Big brands still want big reach audiences and they haven’t quite figured out that you actually don’t want big reach random audiences. You want small targeted engaged audiences. The media and agencies haven’t quite caught up to that yet and that’s part of our journey as well.

One piece of brand advice that you may have for startup founders?

The single biggest piece of advice for branding a new startup would be to have a name that is memorable and you can integrate somehow. They have to be creative, so come up with a name and a meaningful purpose around the name and then integrate that into whatever you’re building. So if you’re creating a happy brand, that has to be personified across the entire experience. I’m not saying it’s easy, but that would be one thing I think has really helped us more than we appreciated at the time. If the names are generic, you just won’t get any cut through, we get so inundated with messaging. If you can’t have a name that makes you pause and your ears prick then it’s going to be a battle, especially for a consumer brand.

To catch my full interview with Eddie, stream this episode of Hitting The Mark – Conversations with founders and investors about the intersection of brand clarity and startup success with your host, brand strategist, and author Fabian Geyrhalter.

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*Condensed and edited. The original interview was conducted in March 2019.