Student to Master: A Story About Brand Building
Inspired by my conversation with Rehgan Avon, founder of Women in Analytics and leading expert in data analytics. Watch it on YouTube.
Starting a conference is no easy task, let alone starting one of the largest analytics conferences in the world. That’s what Rehgan Avon did from her college dorm room in 2016 when she started the Women in Analytics Conference. The community, which is now over 6,000 women, started as a way to grow her network and learn more about data analytics. It has now transformed Rehgan’s personal brand, from student to master, in a mere five years.
Start with solving your own problem. Rehgan’s decision to start a conference wasn’t a grand idea to get rich or take over the world but arose from a problem she had. She wanted to meet more people in the data analytics space and help support women’s participation in the industry. She realized that by building this, she would be helping solve other women engineers’ problems besides her own. It would be an excellent way for them to expand their network and learn.
Surround yourself with connectors. Optics matter just as much as quality when launching a brand. The best brands can be completely overlooked if they lack distribution. Connectors add distribution by accelerating word of mouth marketing for a brand. Rehgan knew this better than anyone. She realized that if she didn’t have “connectors” to promote and, more importantly, lend their name to add legitimacy to the conference, it would fail. Thus, she enlisted two heavyweight names in the Columbus tech scene, Dave Cherry and Ben Blanquera, to vouch for her conference and show people that it was more than just an idea from a student in a college dorm. Her first event had a goal of 25 people. However, her strategy paid off and she ended up with 125 people in attendance. For better or worse, there is legitimacy in affiliations.
Network effects are the gift that keeps on giving. The best part about building a community is the power of network effects. When you start, there is little incentive for people to participate in a community. You need to be solving an immediate problem for them to join. However, as you grow, others will join not only because they are interested in the topic but also because their friends are there. Think about a social network like Facebook. Yes, there are some technical challenges in building a product like that, but for the most part, you use it because your friends use it. Women in Analytics has gotten to the point where they are the de facto conference for women in the data analytics space. If you are interested in the topic, it’s your first choice.
The student becomes the master. When you build a successful brand, you also become an industry leader. For example, Mark Zuckerberg is considered one of the foremost social media experts because he built the largest social platform in the world. Well, Rehgan is now considered one of the foremost leaders in the data analytics space because she created one of the largest data analytics conferences. Going back to the concept of network effects, the more successful people you have affiliated with your brand, the more influential your personal brand becomes. This leverage has allowed Rehgan to leave her day job and start her own consulting brand, where she works with leading startups and corporations.
Building a brand from scratch is difficult, whether it’s your personal brand or a corporate brand. In Rehgan's case, she didn’t have a master plan, but she knew she was solving a problem. She surrounded herself with experts to legitimize the brand. She ultimately created a platform that continues to scale not only for Women in Analytics but also for herself.