Janis Verzemnieks- Partner, Creative Director Of Corebook- Online Brandbook Mindset Tool

Janis Verzemnieks is the Partner and Creative Director at Corebook.

In 2010, he founded a graphic design and music marketing studio, JVeart . In 2014 he set out for a digital nomad designer lifestyle and traveled the world. In 2017, he joined pan-Baltic advertising agency as a Creative Director. He founded the Latvian sound designers association to develop an audio branding industry in 2018.
Corebook was launched beta on February 28th, 2020, and right now, all of his attention goes to gathering early users’ feedback to improve the product, creating content, and leading the overall creative direction of the product and marketing.

Corebook is an online brand book platform where branding begins in every team. It’s a new technology assistant that brings together brand creators with guidelines + assets + data.

So the easiest way to understand it is that Corebook replaces static PDF brand books across your company marketing team and partners.

In an exclusive interview with AsiaTechDaily, Janis says:

If you can change your mindset about how to serve people and manage to create the best experience for them, you will never have to fight for a successful launch and price again.

Do not trust a business partner who has never failed or gone bankrupt and lost their business in the past. Because then you do not know whether he can work in a crisis when it gets hardcore. When everything is good, it’s very easy to be committed, motivated, and a lovely person in general. Truth only illuminates when you can see that he is a man who can rise again after failing. I wish I would have learned to distinguish it earlier.

Read on to know more about Janis Verzemnieks and his journey.

What motivated you to get started with your company?

Janis Verzemnieks: Growing up, I was always into the music scene, and Rock Stars in general. They were my superheroes. They fill stadiums with screaming fans, and somehow they turned their passion into millions of dollars worth careers, which leaves a legacy into other people’s lives.

I always saw the music industry bands as a great template for traditional business brands. (So I’ll warn you, going deeper with your questions, I will most probably use a lot of rock’n’roll analogies.)

Music as a product provides something meaningful, and who doesn’t look for more meaning in their lives?

That very insight led me to use my passion for branding, design, and business to build a meaningful tool as Corebook to empower brand designers’ careers, and raising enterprises value with brand style guides consistency.

How have you attracted users and grown your company from the start?

Janis Verzemnieks: We are building a community around our company’s core mission, and since all of our team comes from the creative industry, we are “speaking in our user’s language.” For example, we are producing micro-blogs on Instagram and a podcast on Spotify.

What’s your business model, and how have you grown your revenue? What strategy worked best?

Janis Verzemnieks: We’re going for a SaaS business model. It gives a clear cash flow structure to plan the future of the company.

How much money (funding) have you raised in total so far? When was the recent funding round? (Additionally, any plan for the future?)

Janis Verzemnieks: At the moment, we’re proud to still be independent and bootstrapped, but for the Corebook 2.0 future development plans, we are considering joining with investors now. However, we are very cautious of the stakeholders we bring in. An investor must understand the value of branding and must not jeopardize our vision because when stakeholders come first, not customers, product meaning decreases, and so do users’ perception of the company.

What are some marketing tips to help maximize the success of a product launch?

Janis Verzemnieks: Let’s take AC/DC as an example. They don’t have customers or clients. They have fans.

And AC/DC give their fans an experience, not a product or service.

If you can change your mindset about how to serve people and manage to create the best experience for them, you will never have to fight for a successful launch and price again.

What is a good product launch checklist?

Janis Verzemnieks:

• Be mentally prepared for everything that it may take to reach the goal — relationship management with your team, anger management with your inner demons, reaction management to focus on solutions, not problems
• Set a clear motivation to your family members to support you in this sprint
• Invest in creativity to come up with ideas on how to get organic feedback not paid reviews;
• Don’t underestimate the power of producthunt.com
• Consider the timing context and be flexible to shape the message. For example, we accidentally launch when the COVID-19 outbreak overwhelmed the world, and all industries faced the importance of digital transformation. We created special offers and followed the development of the situation worldwide.

What’s the hardest thing about product launches?

Janis Verzemnieks: There I see two mindset traps-

• Aspiring to be perfect by compromising time

You must accept that the final product version will simply not be perfect yet. It’s a trap to grind the product to the brilliance and ending up perfecting it for 3 years without real feedback. The team is losing motivation and money.

• It is growing fast by compromising quality

We all want to grow fast, but if you’re still only 3 or 5 people in the team, when you launch, you will crash with customer service, etc. For us getting 600 registered users in the first month was fine. Still, if we had got 6k users in the first week, we would be gone crazy before we even managed to figure out how to scale so fast and how to take care of relationships with these early users which will play an important role in company evolution.

What are the most common mistakes founders make when they start a company? (or What should all first-time startup founders know before they start their business?)

Janis Verzemnieks: Just accept that you inevitably will make some mistakes. The trick is to integrate your mistakes into the process and sometimes even in the final product.

Let me tell you a story of “Sting’s ass-note.” For starters, listen to this song “The Roxanne” by The Police:

Now pay attention to the first seconds of the song. To be exact at timing 0:04, there are a strange piano note and laughter afterward. It didn’t sound like anything in the song, right? Maybe you’ve heard it thousands of times, but you’ve never thought twice. The actual story behind that sound is that leading vocalist and bassist Sting, taking a break in the studio session, accidentally sat down on the open piano and played the note with his butt. In a moment, everyone was laughing at what he did, and in the end, they decided to leave this strange note in the final song.

If you don’t make a mistake as famous “Sting’s ass-note,” you experiment too little, and if you experiment too little, you will never build a company with a legacy.

What do most startups get wrong about marketing?

Janis Verzemnieks: Customers often choose a product based on a criterion they can easily understand – price. That’s what customers do. But fans are different. They have a strong relationship with your brand and are not tempted to save a few dollars.

Customers are looking for the best price. Fans are looking for the best experience. So be consistent. If your marketing isn’t a consistent experience, people will never know what to expect from you.

Just like AC/DC, every album has the same iconic font. Every picture of the band has guitarist Angus wearing a schoolboy outfit. And they never sing about starving children in the third world or broken hearts. Instead, you always know that if they put out a new album, at least one of the song titles will include “Rock,” there will be plenty of songs with super-simple 4-chord progressions, and most of the song will be about drinking ‘, rocking,’ partying. ‘ And that’s how you build a fan base who are becoming your marketing voice.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? And What advice do you have for someone who is interested in doing similar things like yours or in a similar direction?

Janis Verzemnieks: “Don’t waste other people’s time”— I don’t know who is the original author of this quote, but I heard that when I was very young, and it stuck with me and became my mantra.

But if you still find yourself in a situation where you wasted other people’s time, then just make sure to don’t waste that twice, and you’ll be fine.

What are the one or two things that you would do differently if you could go back to 10 years ago?

Janis Verzemnieks: Do not trust a business partner who has never failed or gone bankrupt and lost their business in the past. Because then you do not know whether he can work in a crisis when it gets hardcore. When everything is good, it’s very easy to be committed, motivated, and a lovely person in general. Truth only illuminates when you can see that he is a man who can rise again after failing. I wish I would have learned to distinguish it earlier.

You can follow Janis Verzemnieks here.

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