Eggs pass over a light as they are checked for defects.
When I started my entrepreneurial journey, I really didn't know myself.
I thought I was a numbers person, an image that evolved from excelling at math in high school, completing an economics degree, and having a Chartered Accountant for a mother.
Today, as the founder of TalentEgg.ca, my most despised day-to-day duties involve 'math:' bookkeeping, payroll, invoicing, even business projections.
What I gravitate toward most is marketing, or branding, or whatever "building the TalentEgg brand" would be called.
My first branding test was naming the company. In the business planning phase, I reached out to people for advice on the industry I was entering, and the act of launching. One of these people, a journalist who frequently writes about entrepreneurship, agreed to speak with me for an hour one evening.
I appreciated his generosity, in terms of his time and the advice he was willing to provide. But one of his suggestions was to rethink naming the new company TalentEgg. He argued that, while it was catchy and unique, it would be impossible to create a new brand with the limited dollars I had as a bootstrapped entrepreneur.
He told me I should consider a more descriptive name, something like CareersforGrads.
There was merit to his argument. If you consider the Google algorithm and its weighting toward domain names with related searchs terms in them, a brand like TalentEgg – which in effect means nothing – is at a serious disadvantage.
Without any other information, a person being introduced to the brand by its name would have no reason to think it was a career resource for students and recent grads. The implication was that if I went forward with TalentEgg, I would have to invest in building the brand to the point where people knew what it was.
Kind of like Kleenex or Febreeze. I would probably need cash. Lots of it.
Luckily, I'm stubborn. I liked the name – and the domain name availability – and I decided to go with my gut.
Today, more than 50 per cent of our online traffic comes from people searching for "TalentEgg." While we're not quite ubiquitous, we've managed to build a brand by hustling, and focusing on grassroots efforts that target the people who influence our core demographic.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Lauren Friese is the founder of TalentEgg.ca , an online career resource for Canadian students and recent graduates.