Kim Than Podcast Transcript
Kim Than joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to the Coruzant Technologies. Home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Do you work in emerging tech, working on something innovative? Maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.coruzant.com/brand.
Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Kim Than. Kim Than is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and communication strategist with the focus on scaling Web3 and emerging tech companies.
He is the founder and CEO of The PR genius, a global public relations and media agency that has worked with over 300 companies across Web3, AI, FinTech, and enterprise technology. Kim built The PR genius after spending years working directly with venture-backed founders and fast scaling teams identifying a recurring problem.
Technically, strong companies often fail, not because of product or talent, but ’cause they’re struggle to articulate value, credibility, and timing to the market. His work focuses on how narrative, positioning, and trust compound into real business outcomes, customer acquisition, partnerships, fundraising, momentum, and category leadership.
Well, good afternoon, Kim. Welcome to the show.
Kim Than: Hey, Brian, how you doing?
Brian Thomas: Awesome, man. I appreciate it. Making the time. I know you’re generally out of Dubai, but you travel a lot. You’re in Hong Kong today, which is amazing. I’m in Kansas City, so we’ve got at least 12 hours, probably 13. Plus hours different. So, I appreciate you making the time.
And Kim, I’m gonna jump right into your first question, if you don’t mind. As founder and CEO of The PR genius, how do you help early stage and growth stage founders articulate value in a way that resonates with customers, partners, and investors simultaneously?
Kim Than: Yeah, so basically we are The PR genius.
We actually reran it recently to Genius PR, and we basically have been working with early stage founders projects, companies and institutions in the past five years. We basically provide PR and media services, but specifically to help them grow, to help them with news announcements, to help them on brand awareness, to help them on everything that relates to their personal brand branding in, their space and in the media itself.
And the reason why it’s so important is because today when it comes to consumers or. Let’s say institutional partners or even stakeholders, they usually choose on what they see, what they hear about when it comes to conviction. And this is where we come into play, people don’t realize it, but when it comes to choosing who to work with, also choosing to buy something, a lot of your intuition is down to trust and authority, and that’s what we help build with our clients at a very early stage, all the way down to a later stage.
And the way we do that is we translate that into specific channels that help build authority and credibility. What does that look like? So that’s being cited in big media outlets that have authority and credibility already. The likes of tier ones and Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Forbes, being present on specific podcasts like yourself.
Another big podcast that have a good renowned name. Also talking at specific events where you can be seen in public, having a very strong opinion on this matter. Which will then be translated and then pushed towards the audience, have the same opinion, which eventually will make, make them buy your product, join your community, whatever it is.
Right? We have seen every sort of company throughout the years, but we mainly specialize in ai, crypto slash Web3 companies. And there. Then we work with like a few infopreneurs entrepreneurs, agency owners as well. But mainly what we do, mainly what we do is crypto and ai.
Brian Thomas: That’s amazing. The message I took away from it is essentially that trust, right? Building that trust. People can relate with people when they start to see founders out there, as you said in that AI, Web3 space getting out on some podcasts or being featured in some of those tier one pubs. It’s a game changer and I know you guys have a unique method about doing that, so thank you. So, Kim, you’ve worked with more than 300 companies across Web3, AI, FinTech, and enterprise tech. What is the most common reason technically strong companies fail to gain traction in the market?
Kim Than: The biggest problem is that a lot of like technical founders believe in like product led growth and part led growth is, it makes sense.
If your product is good enough, people talk to you, talk about you, they use you, and then therefore you will gain traction. But park led growth. Is capitalized too much all the time by literally timing. The biggest problem that we’ve seen with timing is that, and this is like actually what people have said to me, the biggest failure with product is sometimes it’s too early or too late.
Right? And most of the times it’s actually, they’re too early. First Move advantage is great because you can, figure out what went wrong. So being too. Late to the market is not that back of it compared by being too early. And the problem is, is if you’re too early and you just do product that growth, you don’t know if people are actually use your product and you don’t know if you have a minimum viable product, let alone product market fit.
Right. Whereas with a company that’s more later stage, that’s first advantage. If you come and copy what they do, you can still win. Right. And there’s loads of examples, like, like, like this, for example, rocket Internet, you know, the Sawyer Brothers, they did that. They just took, US companies that were great and they replicated in, in the European market, having that late mover advantage.
And the problem is the end of the day is that like, if you think about it that way, if you have late mover advantage, the brand already, like the brand of the company that’s already established in terms of first group of advantage is already there. So, you’ve gotta kind of copy it, but just localize it in the market you’re owning.
If a company’s very early and all the care is, specifically driven by product led growth, but there’s no validation of their market, they will not get customers. And whether you like it or not, you are even able to build up demands if you build a brands. The best, use case of this in the past was, for example, I think it was a story about toothpaste, where people didn’t know what toothpaste was, and then there was commercials talking about the use of toothpaste and people actually started using it when a tooth toothpaste actually works or not, they were using it, you know, and novelly, these companies are making money from the buying of it.
So with a sensitization around marketing, but specifically around branding, you can really move markets. That can lead to product market fit as much as, a as much as product led growth if you do position it properly. And I think a lot of founders kind of like, don’t look at this until it’s too late.
And that’s the reality of it. You might launch something that could work or doesn’t work, let’s say that it does work. You got product market fit and so on. A comparer comes and they copy what you do, but their branding is much better than yours. They will get more clients, so technical founders all the time.
Oversee this. They just think if our technology is good enough, we will get the market. But that is not the case. And the end of the day, if you read Peter Till’s book from zero to one, one of the four pillars he says, apart from proprietary technology, is to have extremely good brands. Right? And that’s the reality that I’ve seen.
Technical founders, it’s hard to explain all the time. I can give a thousand of examples. They won’t go with me until it’s kind of too late where they see that the other competitors capturing the market. And that’s the reality of it.
Brian Thomas: I appreciate that and you’re so right about that, being in this business you and I right, we’re, we do a little bit different things, but at the end of the day, the brand is so, so important and you talked about that and I liked how you teased apart, getting into the market too early versus too late, and how you can actually dominate the market even when you do come in late.
So, I appreciate those insights. And Kim Web3 and AI are crowded, noisy spaces with constant hype cycles. What separates companies that build long-term credibility from those that burn attention, but fail to convert it into trust?
Kim Than: So, the thing is, the performance in the market right now, as you mentioned before, it’s an extremely crowded.
And with the use of ai, things can be copied extremely fast, whether you like it or not. If, if a technology works, you can copy it. In fact, I’ll be honest with you, all these companies are growing right now. Like these, uh, these so-called AI agencies that help automate things. If they don’t keep up with how fast, chat GBT colleges is evolving.
They will lose a lot market share. Now the end of the day, what we see is that like, and because how fast AI is evolving, how crypto is evolving, right? To build genuine trust with your customers, you need to basically take a position and stay in that position in terms of narrative. No matter what happens in the market, no matter what happens with your customers, right?
And that’s where you build trust on the long term. On top of that as well, it’s important to have a consistent brand. When you do speak in the media, when you speak to the press. So that the consistent brand doesn’t dilute over time, no matter how big you become. Remember, there’s something that’s very, very important.
AI can replicate anything you can do. The only thing it, it can’t replicate is your personal brand and your company brand. So building a moat with your brand, whether it’s colors, whether it’s, your positioning statement, whether it’s how you treat your customers, is extremely important.
And it also has to be evolving over time as you become bigger as well. Brand is a thing that is very hard to quantify. That’s why a lot of people don’t wanna spend a lot of money into it ’cause it’s something that takes time to grow. They’re like SEO, but the reality is, is that the perc, the perception of the way you are, translates into much faster business over time.
Most companies in my eyes, don’t understand how to maneuver that in their best interest. How do you apply that if you were a company today going like, where would I start with a personal brand in the long term, rather in the short term? Right. People in the short term, what they care about is, let’s go make a logo.
Let’s copy what this guy is doing ’cause it’s working. Let’s talk about that. Let’s just, let’s basically communicate like Gen Z is doing, oh, you know, Gen Z is using these social media platforms. Let’s do that. That’s the short term. The short term also is basically, jumping on and again, capturing the most latest trends that are happening.
The long term is so much more different from that. The long term is. Who’s your ideal customer person? That’s what you, you have to remember who is buying your product. How do I reverse engineer who’s buying my product to understand what their consumer habits are? What is the trail of thought when they do buy my product?
Where they, where do they hear me? They see me first. Where do they hear me? What do they convert? And this leads also to the marketing funnel, which is the awareness, the consideration and conversion phase. Awareness space where they hear me first. How do I adapt my messaging to that, but not extremely fast, but the next five, 10 years to come.
Then in terms of conversion, when, when they basically want to make a, an option to buy or like, you know, use my services, where do they go? Do they type my, my name on Google? Do they go on YouTube and stuff like that? Right? In the longer term, what do I want in the next five to 10 years? Where, where do I want to appear on which podcast and represent my brand to the people that are buying from me?
And the third thing is the acquisition channel. Why? What type of offers and stuff like that stay prominent to my brand? Do you know? Is it buy one get one free? Gonna tanish like my brand just to make a profit? Or maybe something else that’s more exclusive. We keep it down the long term than that. That’s how I see it from long-term branding compared to short-term branding.
The importance of starting now. You have to start now, because if you don’t start now, that person is just gonna be making 50 times more content than you will win. I’ll tell you something, we all consume, we have basically the internet in front of us, right? I’m a big fan of Alex from Mozy.
He’s a great guy, right? But what tells me that he isn’t he’s just not, not great. Maybe he’s like really bad. How do I know, because the fact he can, he creates so much content, it makes him as an expert. So what I’m trying to tell you today is if you don’t start, someone could be even the worst service person than you are the worst technology.
But because they are so good at their brand and they, they, they’re pushing so much content out, they will be perceived as the better one. And that’s the reality today. So short term, do your content long term. Think about your customers and the customer journey to make the right content.
Brian Thomas: Thank you, I appreciate that. Gosh, there’s so much about that. And you’re absolutely right is about being that consistency and just getting out there and doing it. You don’t have to be pretty at first, as a lot of people say. And I like what I heard you said, AI can’t replace the human as far as building your brand, your personal brand, your company brand.
I think that’s important, and I’m glad you high highlighted that for us. And Kim, the last question of the day, as we look ahead into the future, what skills will founders and leaders need most to stand out in the mar next generation of emerging tech? Companies, especially as AI accelerates competition and compresses time to market the like.
Kim Than: I’ll be honest with you, right? So, in terms of what, where everyone has to start now, if they want to basically compress their time to get the most value at everything they do, they go understand how people consume content and how they can build a personal brand on that. Right now, I’ll tell you how it works.
This is the pers. There’s two differences here. There’s the, the company branding and the personal branding, right? Company branding is mainly based on how you treat your customers and how they trust your product, right? It’s how you are on social media, how you respond back to them, and how you cater your product in terms of branding to them as well, whether it’s the messaging, the pricing, whatever it is in general, right?
Company branding is a reverse engineer methodology, which I explained to you earlier about I ideal customer profile and how they buy from you, right? You evaluate that, you build it up, you keep the same positioning statement, you keep the same strategy, you keep doing that, and it’s just a level of consistency, and that’s literally it.
In terms of strategy. Personal branding, if you wanna start now, is very, very much different. Okay? Now today, the crazy thing about personal brand is that personal brand is so strong that. Some companies, they don’t marketing. They don’t do marketing anymore. Like their founder is the person is the brand.
You can see the likes of Elon Musk. You can see the like of like Jeff Bezos. I mean, these are really big examples, but even other small companies, I know even SMEs as well, you know, if the founder is very eloquent, he is vocal, he is very, very opinionated on things. People wanna work with him, right? So the reality is with personal brand is very much different to company branding, personal brand.
You wanna start now? Basically take advantage of that. You gotta figure out what, how you want to be positioned in the market. There’s two things about personal branding. The first thing is you either educate from a PR standpoint and people implement the things that you say and they get results. A bit like Alex Moey and all these other guys on the internet, or even like tech founders that give people some advice on how to implement things.
Like for example, the, the CEO of Instagram. He explains all the updates from Instagram, how to use him properly and stuff like that. He’s influenced himself, ’cause he is a content and educator. And the other side as personal branding is just be yourself. The reality personal brand is that people like a personal brand, they’re like, oh, that guy is speaking very well.
His company’s doing millions. I’m gonna copy his personal brand. But that is never gonna work ’cause you’re not authentic. You need to be authentic. You need to be authentic. Like you need to. People need to feel on the other side of the camera. They can feel who you are. They can feel they can be part of your journey, right?
If, if it’s like building the business, the ups and downs, it could be, for example, choosing the client. It could be anything. It could be documenting the journey as what I’m doing at the moment, which right now. But the most important thing is just to start. I am the biggest loser when it comes to these things.
I preach and work with my clients and I do this to ’em, but I didn’t do it for myself. I was always so busy. And a lot, I’ve lost a lot of market share compared to my competitors. That’s not happening anymore. I’m just gonna do so much content, push that out and whatever happens, it comes out of it, but the most important thing is to start to figure out reverse engineer what you wanna do, your personal brand to re reverse engineer who your customers are, how they find you, and just do content for that purpose. When people always ask people, the first thing they ask is always ask, you know, what’s your end goal?
What’s your north star metric with your content? Right? If it’s to get customers, you have to do a specific way in terms of content. If it’s to build up, to get mos of followers because that creates new authority and trust and enables you to go on the podcast, then that’s a very much different way as well.
So that’s a very long answer to your question in terms of like, what be the easiest way to start. But that would be my response to that. And I do believe that everyone has a capability of doing it today. We’ve got cameras extremely strong. We’ve got, iPhones that are insane mics and everything, so anyone can start for the cheapest way possible and we have the broadcasting technology to do that.
So if you guys need any advice on that, obviously let us know. What’s do we do here at the PR Genius slash Genius pr? And we’re always very happy to like, triple we, how we’ve done this with like multi-billion dollar companies as well as small million dollar companies as well.
Brian Thomas: Thank you, Kim. I appreciate that. And I love how you talk about the authenticity with the personal branding piece of it that’s so important. Obviously but you did tease apart again company branding versus personal branding. And I think both are important, but they are totally different as you mentioned. And I just like your energy.
You get out there and, uh, as you talked about, it’s time to get out there and just really go to town with your. Personal brand and I really appreciate that. So thank you and Kim, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Kim Than: A hundred percent. Thank you so much for having me on.
I appreciate it. Hopefully your audience got a lot of value from what I said. If you guys wanna find me on socials, it’s at Kim PR Genius on Twitter. And then at, I’m Kim Than, Than on Instagram. My LinkedIn is Kim Than as well. Also, if anyone wants to connect to talk about. PR media, personal branding company, Brian, I’m here to do that. And again, Brian really admire what you do as well. Uh, bring us, onto the mic and explain our journeys and how our opinions are when it comes to our work. So really appreciate that and I hope you have a good week.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Kim Than Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
