Pick My Brain
Pick My Brain is a knowledge marketplace on a mission to democratize human capital. By giving people around the world easy access to exchange skills, knowledge, experiences, and stories they want to empower a new generation of open-minded and curious individuals to join a distributed economy where the quality of our success depends on the number of conversations we were willing to have with people from all walks of life.
Challenge
The start-up was growing steadily for the past 4 years and needed to adapt to the growing demands of a larger audience and attract more investment:
What is the greater cause of this established knowledge marketplace?
Align the growing internal team on vision, mission, and purpose.
Create a campaign strategy for their new product, Meet The World’s People.
Human Capital is an intangible asset stemming from a person’s talent and experience.
Knowledge capital
Social capital
Emotional capital
INSIGHT
Without a clear purpose, any business will grow aimlessly. What is its greater cause? 600 people from more than 44 countries had joined the marketplace and were exchanging skills and knowledge. But what truly brought them together was our need for connection. The more people from different backgrounds and cultures start talking to each other, the more we will start to understand each other.
At the core, a global knowledge marketplace is driving diversity: throughout history, the healthiest and most celebrated cultures have been the ones that encouraged and exploited the greatest diversity.
ADVANTAGE
What was very clear from the start, is that this global platform was not only about exchanging knowledge. Pick My Brain was the first platform to democratize access to human capital worldwide. We live in a time where one of the most important things we can do is to try and understand the perspective of someone different from ourselves. And what better way to do that than through a simple conversation? When we talk to a stranger, we not only get to exchange knowledge but also our stories and past experiences.
“Vlad helped me write a manifesto for my company, tease out the pitch deck that we ended up securing $5.3M of interest in, and is helping me figure out the next steps to unlocking even more value. Ask Vlad to do something creative for you or your company and see what his mind comes up with. His perspective and delivery are brilliant.”
STRATEGY 1 - BRAND MANIFESTO
Write a brand manifesto that can be communicated at public events and will carry the essence of what the start-up stands for.
Goal:
convey a sense of urgency and straight talk
challenge and provoke
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Welcome to the distributed economy
An economy that enables people within the network to work much more with regional/local natural resources, finances, human capital, knowledge, technology, and so on. People become more flexible to respond to the local market needs and thus generating a bigger innovation drive. By doing this, they become a better reflection of their social environment and in that way they can improve quality of life.
CHALLENGE
The platform already generated a good amount of supply: skilled individuals who were willing to share knowledge, experiences, and stories. To attract more investment, the platform needed to prove it could generate demand as well. Meet the world’s people is one of the three products the start-up offers to grow that demand. A creative campaign was needed to persuade an open-minded audience to have more conversations with strangers.
““Voicing our stories through conversation is the only path to break through the illusion of separateness and celebrate our deep sense of connectedness.””
I created a process scheme that represents the steps taken when sending out communication material to an email list of potential leads.
