Sett had a landing page, a placeholder logo, and a CEO who gave their new Head of Marketing four weeks to fix it. A year later, they’d grown ARR by 20X — every dollar of it from inbound, with nothing spent on ads or outbound sales.
In this episode of The Debrief, Focus Lab CEO Bill Kenney sits down with Jonathan Fishman, Head of Marketing at Sett, and Daniela Szwarc, Brand & Content Lead, to walk through how a brand built in ten weeks became their biggest growth lever. The conversation covers what most brands get wrong before they even contact an agency, why a Duolingo-inspired meerkat became Sett’s most recognizable asset, and the one mistake that kills brand projects before they find their footing.
Do the homework before you hire anyone
When Jonathan joined Sett, the company was exiting stealth and closing a Series A. Nobody — including Daniela, who joined around the same time — could clearly explain what the business did. Even the website was opaque. Before reaching out to any agency, the two of them ran an intensive internal brand sprint: weeks of workshops, interviews with the CEO, CTO, and department heads, writing with pen and paper, and deliberately keeping AI out of the process entirely.
Jonathan’s take: starting a brand project without first understanding your positioning, your audience, and why anyone should care is “a very bad idea.” Most agencies won’t tell you that. They’ll just start the engagement.
How to actually find the right agency
Jonathan had been through five brand projects before this one. He knew what he was looking for: creative thinking that didn’t feel templated, and a defined process with a clear start and finish. He’d seen projects drag for months as leadership pulled in different directions and the whole thing lost momentum.
He couldn’t find those qualities by looking at portfolios or websites. So he went to Exit Five, the B2B marketing community, posted his criteria, and asked for recommendations. Twenty people pointed him to the same place.
The moment every brand project scares you
Round one of the mood boards landed flat. Out of 20 slides, Sett found exactly one image they connected with. Daniela describes the feeling plainly: “We were a bit hopeless at that moment.” It’s a more common experience than most agencies admit — and the right response isn’t to panic, it’s to trust that one image and see where it leads. The Focus Lab team took it and moved in a direction that surprised them.
A mascot nobody planned for
The meerkat wasn’t in the original brief. It emerged during the project when Jonathan and Daniela started looking at brands they genuinely admired — many of them B2C — and landed on Duolingo as a reference. What they wanted wasn’t just a visual asset. They wanted a character with its own voice: something that could express personality, roll its eyes, say things the brand itself couldn’t. A mechanism, as Jonathan put it, for people to emotionally connect with the company.
The harder question was whether they could actually execute it. A highly detailed 3D mascot looks great in a brand book and becomes a maintenance nightmare the moment you need it in a new pose, at a new size, for a new campaign. Focus Lab designer Stetson Finch pushed back on that path and landed on a 2D system — distinctive, modular, and something a small internal team could actually maintain and extend over time. He also named the meerkat. It stuck.
“You didn’t let us make a mistake,” Jonathan says. “It was very easy to tell us, ‘All right, do this mascot — it looks great on a deck.’ And then we’d be stuck with it and abandon it pretty fast.”
The results, and how they measured them
Sett’s brand has been live for just under a year. Their ARR has grown by a factor of 20. Every bit of that growth came from inbound — no advertising spend, no outbound sales motion. Because of that clean signal, Jonathan could do something most marketers can’t: ask every new lead how they heard about Sett and actually trust the answer.
A lot of them mentioned the brand. Some cited content. But many just said they remembered “the thing that’s different.” Nobody called it a meerkat. They called it the cat company. The animal on the backpack. The brand that stood out when everything else looked the same.
The meerkat also showed up in recruiting. Nearly every candidate who came in for an interview mentioned the brand as something that caught their eye.
Why founders poll — and why it destroys brand
One of the sharpest insights in the conversation comes from Jonathan’s observation about founder behavior. Founders spend years running a discovery process: testing product features, gathering customer feedback, validating decisions through data. That muscle is valuable. It’s also exactly the wrong instinct to bring into a brand project.
“The first thing they say is, ‘I want to get 20 opinions on this mood board,’” Jonathan says. The result is a brand shaped by committee — one that offends no one, stands for nothing, and ends up in the same sea of blue gradients and copy that reads “increase revenue, decrease costs.”
Brand is not a polling exercise. It requires a strong point of view, which means it will not land with everyone — and that’s the whole point. As Jonathan puts it: “Find people with taste that you can trust. And then let go.”
AI is a flattening machine
Sett ran their entire brand sprint without AI. No generated copy, no AI mood boards, pen and paper in a room for weeks. Jonathan is direct about why: when everyone uses the same tools to generate the same outputs, everyone looks the same. The brands that think for themselves are the ones that stand out — and right now, there are fewer of them than there used to be.
“It becomes easier to stand out,” Jonathan says, “when everybody looks like the same template.”
The Debrief is a Focus Lab series where CEO Bill Kenney sits down with clients to hear what the brand-building process actually looked like from the other side — what was hard, what surprised them, and what they’d tell someone just starting out.
