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When I started my entrepreneurial journey in 2016 and started Chili Piper I was not equipped to build a brand. I had spent my entire career working with engineering teams building products. Company branding was an abstract concept to me at that point.
But personal branding played a huge role in my progress in a corporate career. Whatever was said in a room about me when I was not there was my brand. So I focused on that.
I took on the task of making sure that whatever was said about Chili Piper within the “dark funnel” was what mattered.
The name came quickly to Nicolas, my co-founder: Chili (Hot) + Piper (Pipeline), representing the mission-critical platform we were building for revenue teams.
There was this beautiful ad for Piper Heidsieck champagne about a couple in a concert hall with the tagline “he who pays the Piper calls the tune”, so we thought of using “Piper” instead of “Pipeline”.
The logo didn’t come easy. I had done 100 sketches of it. All of them looked like a restaurant logo. Eventually, I felt this variation felt right and with the help of a designer from Ukraine we made it a reality within a few days.
The naive mistake people make about brand is assuming you have one when you have your logo is ready. A brand isn’t just about your colors and your name — it’s how “you feel” about “an organization”. Especially when the organization is not in the room.
That’s why we started with our people — building a company I would want to work for. The kind where my career progression is clear. Where everyone is cheering on my growth. It’s a long journey with complex problems we are still working to solve, but creating the kind of environment where people are thriving is paramount to me.
The values on our site are not empty words we put our site to have some. They are important values that came from my own career journey, where I had a hard time navigating the political structure of large companies to grow my career. I learned that promotions were unfair. Budgets were artificial. People weren’t leaving companies, they were leaving bosses.
One important value for us is being able to celebrate. Because we think life is too short to regret not doing it. By now our annual get togethers as a remote company have become legendary on social media. Oftentimes I meet people and they tell me “Oh you’re that crazy company that took all their employees to [insert unexpected location with unexpected outcome here] “. We even have our own anthem.
There are other values that we weaved through our building of Chili Piper that I will cover more below. But the conclusion is simple: if your people aren’t thriving, neither will your brand.
We reached our first $1M in ARR through 1:1 interaction with our customers.
Nicolas and I were attending every possible sales event you can think of. In doing so, we became synonymous with our company name. We were Chili Piper, and Chili Piper was us.
Nicolas would be closing on our prospect interest at industry events by getting them interested on a demo. We’d book the demo on the spot. Then he’d show them on zoom what we did. Most of them were excited and would close on an annual contract. I would be the one onboarding the customers, answering their support questions, trying to unlock upsell opportunities and mostly learning from them how to build a better product.
Through my interactions with our customers I wouldn’t just focus on our product, I focused on figuring out if I can help them outside of it as well. Share some tips from others in their role on things they could be doing differently. Or put them in touch with other peers when they had questions on tech stack. Invite them to special events.
Through these early interactions I learned it meant a lot to me to help our customers beyond our product. And the value of help was something that I deeply cultivated in everyone we hired after that.
As we brought it more business the value of help grew a lot bigger. We realized we had the power to make a positive impact early on on a grander scale. Not only for our customers but for the world. That’s why when we raised our first big round we immediately put $1M aside to our foundation.
If all startups did this, there would be billions of dollars we could use to help the world. So we decided to lead by example.
Our foundation is based on something that’s very important for me. It has the goal of stopping violence in the world. We already donated most of those funds to war in Ukraine, Afghanistan and conflicts in between minorities. We believe in a world that can solve more critical problems instead of spending energy fighting.
We also take stances on other issues in the world outside of the foundation - more on things that can help the voice of our brand to make a difference. For example when the US went on to abolish reproductive rights we put immediately a policy in place to help those in need of them.
I think founders have a duty to use their voice to make a positive change.
But brand isn’t only one thing you do at one moment in time. It’s the sum of so many other things that we continuously weave in together now at scale.
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I never expected I would find myself having to measure the impact of our brand. But now that I’ve taken the role of our acting CMO I realized I can’t justify spending money on brand without measuring most effective channels to reach our potential customers.
So after lots of research we found a way to start tracking our reach.
We call our model a “first engagement” model. One that tracks how well we’re doing in activating our best accounts to see us and interact with us.
As our model evolves so does our brand.
But even more important: The more we learn as a business to be most effective in our work, the better our product becomes as well. Because it touches thousands of marketers who, like me, are responsible in building brands that last.
When I started my entrepreneurial journey in 2016 and started Chili Piper I was not equipped to build a brand. I had spent my entire career working with engineering teams building products. Company branding was an abstract concept to me at that point.
But personal branding played a huge role in my progress in a corporate career. Whatever was said in a room about me when I was not there was my brand. So I focused on that.
I took on the task of making sure that whatever was said about Chili Piper within the “dark funnel” was what mattered.
The name came quickly to Nicolas, my co-founder: Chili (Hot) + Piper (Pipeline), representing the mission-critical platform we were building for revenue teams.
There was this beautiful ad for Piper Heidsieck champagne about a couple in a concert hall with the tagline “he who pays the Piper calls the tune”, so we thought of using “Piper” instead of “Pipeline”.
The logo didn’t come easy. I had done 100 sketches of it. All of them looked like a restaurant logo. Eventually, I felt this variation felt right and with the help of a designer from Ukraine we made it a reality within a few days.
The naive mistake people make about brand is assuming you have one when you have your logo is ready. A brand isn’t just about your colors and your name — it’s how “you feel” about “an organization”. Especially when the organization is not in the room.
That’s why we started with our people — building a company I would want to work for. The kind where my career progression is clear. Where everyone is cheering on my growth. It’s a long journey with complex problems we are still working to solve, but creating the kind of environment where people are thriving is paramount to me.
The values on our site are not empty words we put our site to have some. They are important values that came from my own career journey, where I had a hard time navigating the political structure of large companies to grow my career. I learned that promotions were unfair. Budgets were artificial. People weren’t leaving companies, they were leaving bosses.
One important value for us is being able to celebrate. Because we think life is too short to regret not doing it. By now our annual get togethers as a remote company have become legendary on social media. Oftentimes I meet people and they tell me “Oh you’re that crazy company that took all their employees to [insert unexpected location with unexpected outcome here] “. We even have our own anthem.
There are other values that we weaved through our building of Chili Piper that I will cover more below. But the conclusion is simple: if your people aren’t thriving, neither will your brand.
We reached our first $1M in ARR through 1:1 interaction with our customers.
Nicolas and I were attending every possible sales event you can think of. In doing so, we became synonymous with our company name. We were Chili Piper, and Chili Piper was us.
Nicolas would be closing on our prospect interest at industry events by getting them interested on a demo. We’d book the demo on the spot. Then he’d show them on zoom what we did. Most of them were excited and would close on an annual contract. I would be the one onboarding the customers, answering their support questions, trying to unlock upsell opportunities and mostly learning from them how to build a better product.
Through my interactions with our customers I wouldn’t just focus on our product, I focused on figuring out if I can help them outside of it as well. Share some tips from others in their role on things they could be doing differently. Or put them in touch with other peers when they had questions on tech stack. Invite them to special events.
Through these early interactions I learned it meant a lot to me to help our customers beyond our product. And the value of help was something that I deeply cultivated in everyone we hired after that.
As we brought it more business the value of help grew a lot bigger. We realized we had the power to make a positive impact early on on a grander scale. Not only for our customers but for the world. That’s why when we raised our first big round we immediately put $1M aside to our foundation.
If all startups did this, there would be billions of dollars we could use to help the world. So we decided to lead by example.
Our foundation is based on something that’s very important for me. It has the goal of stopping violence in the world. We already donated most of those funds to war in Ukraine, Afghanistan and conflicts in between minorities. We believe in a world that can solve more critical problems instead of spending energy fighting.
We also take stances on other issues in the world outside of the foundation - more on things that can help the voice of our brand to make a difference. For example when the US went on to abolish reproductive rights we put immediately a policy in place to help those in need of them.
I think founders have a duty to use their voice to make a positive change.
But brand isn’t only one thing you do at one moment in time. It’s the sum of so many other things that we continuously weave in together now at scale.
I never expected I would find myself having to measure the impact of our brand. But now that I’ve taken the role of our acting CMO I realized I can’t justify spending money on brand without measuring most effective channels to reach our potential customers.
So after lots of research we found a way to start tracking our reach.
We call our model a “first engagement” model. One that tracks how well we’re doing in activating our best accounts to see us and interact with us.
As our model evolves so does our brand.
But even more important: The more we learn as a business to be most effective in our work, the better our product becomes as well. Because it touches thousands of marketers who, like me, are responsible in building brands that last.
Alina Vandenberghe is Co-Founder & Co-CEO at Chili Piper. She’s passionate about building fun SaaS products to solve hard problems and a company where employees thrive. Today, the Romania native and her husband are on their way to IPO — all while giving back to the community through our Citizens Of Our Planet foundation. Alina earned a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from the Polytechnic University in Bucharest, Romania. She currently resides in New York City. Connect with Alina on LinkedIn.
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