We Take Care of the Money: Parakeeto's New Positioning, Explained, With Kristen Kelly

So, yeah, let's maybe start off a little bit by talking about why we're doing this in the first place.

What was wrong with the old positioning?

Right.

I think it makes sense before we talk about, like, what was wrong with the old positioning.

It's like, how do we realize this and what did we start to do about it when we first kind of realized it was a problem? I think it kind of comes back to the word profitability that was super pervasive in our old messaging and positioning where we just kind of hung our hat on that word and really made it a prime focus of the way that we talked about what we do.

And I know many of you guys who are listening to this are kind of faithful followers of Marcel's content.

And you probably witnessed like the firsthand journey that we went through as a company where he was just exploring really what public perception is of our company in the first place and what we do.

Yeah.

Carson, talk a little bit more about what that unveiled.

I remember reading that thread and lots of people giving lots of different answers and it became really clear like, oh, people don't 100% get what we do and certainly struggle with communicating it back to telling us what they think it is.

And that was, I think, the point where we realized something needs to change and we need to get a little bit more clear.

Yeah.

And I think this is something we may have known all along, but then as a lot of companies do, you just get so close to the day in and day out of what you do that it makes perfect sense to you.

But when the question is posed outward and you get some of the responses, it's clear like, well, that clarity is not applicable to maybe the wide general public.

And I think some of the historic conversations we've had internally have been around, like, what category do we fall in, for example? And, you know, we would oftentimes talk about FinOps being the closest maybe to what we were.

And to some degree, I still think that's true today.

But it's like, does that translate to the people that we serve? Right.

And I think that there's still even though I think that term is gaining more traction with folks like Rich Brett, It's still, I think, kind of like a nebulous term.

And so through various iterations, I think we've just had conversation after conversation about what is the best way to articulate what it is that we're what we're doing.

Yeah, I think there was a point in time where we decided we were going to create our own category, which seemed like a good idea.

And for those that can accomplish that, it's, you know, you can get huge results from that.

But.

A lot of times it just creates confusion because people don't know what the new category is and how do I even need that thing? So, yeah, trying to find a new space for ourselves that was easy to convey and for easy for people to understand was going to be critical.

I think the next step that came out of those conversations on LinkedIn was we engaged with a consultant on branding.

Rich Gould, hey Rich, who, it was interesting, one of the first conversations we had with him, he mentioned the fact that outside of our website and the conversations with us, he'd never really heard the term profitability before.