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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Do you work in emerging tech? Working on something innovative? Maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corazon.com brand welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Kim Than. Kim Than is an entrepreneur, angel investor and communication strateg with a focus on scaling Web3 and emerging tech companies. He is the founder and CEO of the PR Genius, a global public relations and media agency that has worked with over 300 companies across Web3, AI, FinTech and Enterprise Technology. Kim built the PR Genius after spending years working directly with venture backed founders and fast scaling teams. Identifying a recurring problem Technically strong companies often fail not because of product or talent, but because they struggle to articulate value, credibility and timing to the market. His work focuses on how narrative positioning and trust compound into real business outcomes, customer acquisition, partnerships, fundraising momentum and category leadership. Well, good afternoon Kim. Welcome to the show.
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B
Hey Brian, how you doing?
- [01:19]
A
Awesome man. I appreciate it. Making the time. I know you're generally out of Dubai, but you travel a lot. You're in Hong Kong today, which is amazing. I'm in Kansas City, so we've got at least 12 hours, probably 13 plus hours difference. So I appreciate you making the time. And Kim, I'm going to jump right into your first question if you don't mind. As founder and CEO of the PR Genius, how do you help early Stage and Growth stage founders articulate value in a way that resonates with customers, partners and investors simultaneously?
- [01:50]
B
Yeah, so basically we are the PR Genius. We actually rebranded recently into Genius PR and we basically have been working with early stage founders, projects, companies, institutions in the past five years. We basically provide PR and media services, but specifically to help them grow, to help them with news announcements, to help them on brand awareness, to help them on everything that relates to their personal brand branding in their space and in the media itself. The reason why it's so important is because today when it comes to consumers or let's say institutional partners or even stakeholders, they usually choose on what they see, what they hear about. When it comes to conviction. And this is where we come into play, people don't realize it, but when it comes to choosing who to work with, also choosing to buy something, a lot of your intuition is down to trust and authority. And that's what we help build with our clients at a very early stage, all the way down to a later stage. And the way we do that is we translate that into specific channels that help build authority and credibility. What does that look like so that's being cited in big media outlets that have authority and credibility already. The likes of tier ones and Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, being present on specific podcasts like yourself, another big podcast that have a good renowned name, also talking at specific events where you can be seen in public, having a very strong opinion on this matter which will then be translated and then pushed towards the audience, have the same opinion which eventually will make them buy your product, join your community, whatever it is, right? We have seen every sort of company throughout the years, but we mainly specialize in AI crypto, web three companies and there and then we work with like a few infopreneurs, entrepreneurs, agency owners as well. But mainly what we do, mainly what we do is crypto and AI.
- [03:50]
A
That's amazing. The message I took away from it is essentially that trust, right? Building that trust. People can relate with people when they start to see founders out there, as you said in that AI Web3 space, getting out on some podcasts or being featured in some of those tier one pubs, it's a game changer. And I know you is have a unique method about doing that. So thank you. So Kim, you've worked with more than 300 companies across web 3 AI, FinTech and Enterprise tech. What is the most common reason technically strong companies fail to gain traction in the market?
- [04:25]
B
The good problem is that a lot of like technical founders believe in like product led growth. And product led growth is it makes sense if your product is good enough, people talk to you, talk about you, they use you and then therefore you will gain traction. But product led growth is capitalized too much all the time by literally timing. The biggest problem that we've seen with timing is that, and this is like actually what people said to me, the biggest failure with product is sometimes it's too early or too late, right? And most of the times it's actually that too early. First movement managers is great because you can figure out what went wrong. So being too late in the market is not that bad compared by being too early. And the problem is if you're too early and you just do park led growth, you don't know if people use your product and you don't know if you have a minimum viable product, let alone product market fit, right? Whereas with a company that's more later stage, that's first move advantage. If you come and copy what they do, you can still win, right? And there's loads of examples like, like this for example, Rocket Internet, you know, Sawyer brothers, they did that, they just took us Companies that were great and replicated in the European market having that late mover advantage. And the problem is, end of the day is that like if you think about that way, if you have late mover advantage, the brand already like the brand of the company that's already established in terms of first movement advantage, it is already there. So you got to kind of copy it. But just localizing the market you're owning. If a company is very early and all the care is specifically driven by public led growth, but there's no validation of their market, they will not get customers. And whether you like it or not, you are even able to build a demand if you build the brands. The best use case of this in the past was for example, there was a story about toothpaste where people didn't know what toothpaste was. And then there was commercials talking about the use of toothpaste. People actually started using it. When a toothpick toothpaste actually works or not they were using it, you know, people and all these companies are making money for the buying of it. So with an incentivization around marketing, but specifically around branding, you can really move markets that can lead to market fit as much as, as much as growth if you do position it properly. And I think a lot of founders kind of like don't look at this until it's too late. And that's the reality of it. You might launch something that could work or doesn't work, let's say that it does work. You got prime market fit and so on. A competitor comes and they copy what you do, but their branding is much better than yours, they will get more clients. So technical founders all the time oversee this. They just think if our technology is good enough, we will get the market. But that is not the case. And the end of the day, if you read Peter T's book From Zero to One, one of the four pillars he says apart from propriety technology is to have extremely good brand. Right? And that's the reality that I've seen technical founders, there's arctic to all the time. I can give a thousand examples. They won't go with me until it's kind of too late. Where they see that the other competitors couching the market. And that's the reality of it.
- [07:33]
A
Right. I appreciate that and you're so right about that. Being in this business, you and I, right, we do a little bit different things. But at the end of the day the brand is so, so important. And you talked about that and I liked how you teased apart getting into the market too early versus too late, and how you can actually dominate the market even when you do come in late. So I appreciate those insights. And Kim, Web3 and AI are crowded, noisy spaces with constant hype cycles. What separates companies that build long term credibility from those that burn attention but fail to convert it into trust?
- [08:06]
B
So the thing is, the problem is in the market right now, as you mentioned before, it's extremely crowded, right? And with the use of AI, things can be copied extremely fast. Whether you like it or not, if a technology works, we can copy it. In fact, I'll be honest with you, all these companies are growing right now, like these so called AI agencies that help automate things. If they don't keep up with how fast ChatGPT is evolving, they will lose a lot of market share. Now, the end of the day, what we see is that and because how fast AI is evolving, how crypto is evolving, right? To build genuine trust with your customers, you need to basically take a position and stay in that position. There's a narrative, no matter what happens in the market, no matter what happens to your customers, right? And that's where you build trust on the long term. On top of that as well, it's important to have a consistent brand when you do speak in the media, when you speak to the press, that the consistent brand doesn't dilute over time, no matter how big you become. Remember something that's very, very important. I can replicate anything you can do. The only thing it can replicate is your personal brand and your company brand. So building a moat with your brand, whether it's colors, whether it's your positioning statement, whether it's how you treat your customers, is extremely important. And it also has to be evolving over time as you become bigger as well. Brand is a thing that is very hard to quantify. That's why a lot of people don't want to spend a lot of money into it, because it's something that takes time to grow a bit like SEO. But the reality is, is that the perception of the way you are translates into much faster business over time. And most companies in my eyes, don't understand how to maneuver that in their best interest. How do you apply that if you're a company today going like, where would I start with a personal brand in the long term rather than the short term, Right? People in the short term, what they care about is let's go and make a logo, let's copy what this guy is doing because it's working. Let's talk like that. Let's just, let's basically communicate like Gen Z is doing. Oh look, you know, Gen Z is using these social media platforms. Let's do that. That's a short term. The short term also is basically jumping on and again capturing the most latest trends that are happening. The long term is so much more different from that. The long term is who's your ideal customer profile? That's what you have to remember. Who is buying your product? How do I reverse engineer who's buying my product to understand what their consumer habits are. What is the trail of thought when they do buy my product, where they do, where do they hear me? They see me first, where did they hear me, where did they convert? And this leads on to the marketing funnel which is the awareness, the consideration and conversion phase. The awareness phase, where they hear me first. How do I adapt my messaging to that? But not extremely fast. But in the next five, ten years to come. Then in terms of conversion, when they basically want to make an option to buy or use my services, where do they go? Do they type my name on Google? Do they go on YouTube and stuff like that? Right. In the longer term, what do I want the next five to 10 years? Why do I want to appear on which podcast and represent my brand to the people that are buying from me? And the third thing is the acquisition channel. Why? What type of offers and stuff like that stay prominent to my brand? Do you know there's a buy one, get one free gonna tennis like my brand just to make a little profit or maybe something else that's more exclusive. We keep it down the long term. That's how I see it from long term branding compared to short term branding and the importance of starting now, you have to start now because if you don't start now, that person who's gonna be making 50 times more content than you will win. I'll tell you something, we all consume. We have basically the Internet in front of us, right? I'm a big fan of Alex from Mosey. He's a great guy, right? But what tells me that he isn't, he's just not that great. Maybe he's like really bad. How do I know? Because the fact he can, he creates so much content it makes him as an expert. So what I'm trying to tell you today is if you don't start, someone could be even the worst service partner than you are the worst technology. But because they are so good at their brand and they're pushing so much content out, they will be perceived as the better one and that's the reality today. So short term, do your content. Long term, think about your customers and the customer journey to make the right content.
- [12:37]
A
Thank you, I appreciate that. Gosh, there's so much about that and you're absolutely right about being that consistency and just getting out there and doing it. You don't have to be pretty at first. As a lot of people say. And I like what I heard you said, AI can't replace the human. As far as building your brand, your personal brand, your company brand, I think that's important and I'm glad you highlighted that for us. And Kim, the last question of the day, as we look ahead in the future, what skills will founders and leaders need most to stand out in the next generation of emerging tech companies? Especially as AI accelerates competition and compresses time to market.
- [13:12]
B
I'll be honest with you. Right? So in terms of where everyone has to start now, if they want to basically compress the time to get the most value at everything they do, they got understand how people consume content and how they can build a personal brand on that. Right now, I'll tell you how it works. This is the person. There's two differences there. There's the company branding and the personal branding. Right. Company branding is mainly based on how you treat your customers and how they trust your product. Right. It's how you are in social media, how you respond back to them and how you cater your product in terms of branding to them as well, whether it's the messaging, the pricing, whatever it is. In general, right. Company branding is a reverse engineer methodology which I explained to you earlier about ideal customer profile and how they buy from you. Right? You validate that, you build up, you keep the same positioning statement, you keep the same strategy, you keep doing that and it's just a level of consistency and that's literally in terms of strategy. Personal branding, if you want to start now, is very, very much different. Okay? Now, today, the crazy thing about personal brand is that for us, the brand is so strong that some companies, they do it in marketing, they didn't marketing anymore. Like their founder is the person is the brand. You can see the lines of Elon Musk, you see the like of like Jeff Bezos. I mean these are really big examples. But even other small companies, I know, even SMBs as well, you know, the founder is very eloquent, he's vocal, he's very, very opinionated on things. People want to work with him, right? So the reality is with personal brand is very much different to company branding. Personal Branding, you want to start now and basically take advantage of that. You got to figure out what, how you want to position the market. And there's two things about personal branding. The first thing is you either educate PR standpoint and people implement the things that you say and they get results. I feel like Alex Ramosi and all these other guys on the Internet or even like tech founders that give people some advice on how to implement things. Like, for example, the. The CEO of Instagram, he explains all the updates from Instagram, how to use them properly and stuff like that. He's an influence himself because he's a content educator. And the other side, as personal branding is just be yourself. The reality personal brand is that people like a personal brand. They're like, oh, that guy is speaking very well, his company using millions. I'm going to copy his personal brand. But that is never going to work because you're not authentic. You need to be authentic. You need to be authentic. You need to. People need to film the other side of the camera. They can feel who you are. They can feel they can be part of your journey, right? If it's like building the business, the ups and downs, it could be, for example, choosing a client, it could be anything. Could be documenting the journey as why I'm doing at the moment right now. But the most important thing is just to start. I am the biggest loser when it comes to these things. I preach and work with my clients and I do this one, but I didn't do it for myself. I was always so busy, you know, and a lot. I've lost a lot of market share compared to my competitors. That's not happening anymore. I'm just going to do so much content, push that out, and whatever happens comes out of it. But the most important thing is to start to figure out, reverse engineer what you want to do, your personal brand to reverse engineer who your customers are, how they find you, and just do content for that purpose. When people always ask people, the first thing they ask is always that, you know, what's your end goal? What's your North Star metric with your content? Right? If it's to get customers, you have to do a specific way in terms of content. If it's to build up, to get loads of followers because that creates new authority and trust, enables you to go on a podcast, then that's a very much different way as well. So that's a very long answer to your question in terms of what would be the easiest way to start. But that'll be my response to that. And I do believe that everyone has a capability of doing it. Today we've got cameras that are extremely strong, we've got iPhones that are insane mics and everything. So anyone can start for the cheapest way possible. And we have the broadcasting technology to do that. So if you guys need advice on that, obviously let us know. But some of you here, the PR genius, that's genius pr and we're always very happy to like show people how we've done this with like multi billion dollar companies as well as small million dollar companies as well.
- [17:17]
A
Thank you Kim. I appreciate that and I love how you talk about the authenticity with the personal branding piece of it that's so important obviously. But you did tease apart again company branding versus personal branding and I think both are important but they are totally different as you mentioned. And I just like your energy. You get out there and as you talked about, it's time to get out there and just really go to town with your personal brand. And I really appreciate that. So thank you. And Kim, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
- [17:49]
B
100%. Thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it. Hopefully your audience got a lot of value from what I said. If you guys want to find me on socials is at Kim Kim PR genius on Twitter and then at I am Kim than T H A n on Instagram. I'm a link to this Kim Dan as well. Also I've been honest to connect to talk about pr, media, personal branding company. Right now I'm here to do that. And again Brian, really admire what you do as well. Bring us onto the mic and explain our journeys and how our opinions are when it comes to our work. So we appreciate that and I hope you have a good week.
- [18:20]
A
Bye for now.