Fabian Geyrhalter:
Welcome to the show, Nichole.

Nichole Montoya:
Thank you. I’m so glad to be here. I’m excited to talk to you.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, likewise. It’s been 10 years since you founded Cheddar Up, is that correct?

Nichole Montoya:
That is correct.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing. Just to give my listeners a little bit of perspective. So Cheddar Up is a platform that helps, by now, over 100,000 groups, organizations, teams, and all kinds of other people collect payments and associated information, people’s information to support and really grow their communities. I run a hardware startup on the side. Don’t ask. It’s crazy. Everyone says, and they tell me this now that I started this a year in, they say hardware is the hardest. It’s in the name, but I feel like fintech, with all its regulations, doesn’t sound like the easiest endeavor either. Now that we talk about 10 years, take us back to maybe the first couple months, six to tweleve months. Really, from idea to complete chaos to first success, how was that beginning? What made you start Cheddar Up, and how crazy was it just to go through all of these curveballs of starting basically a financial organization?

Nichole Montoya:
Sure. Cut me off if I talk too long there.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
On day one of the six months.

Nichole Montoya:
Exactly. When I talk about the early days, the memories just flood back. There were so many funny, hard, challenging times, but I’ll adjust the fintech point that you said. I think when I started Cheddar Up 10 years ago, fintech was so different then. It was just less evolved. There was less fraud, there was less regulation. Online payments were honestly just becoming a thing. That was why I felt like the world needed a platform like Cheddar Up. I was in management consulting originally in my career, and then I moved into helping a fintech company. My brain was on fintech. At the same time, I had two young daughters who were doing all kinds of young daughter things in school, and I found myself writing a lot of checks and filling out a lot of paper forms, and I thought it was super silly.
I was like, “I’m driving this paper form across town with my check. There’s got to be a better way.” And it was that realization combined with the fact that I realized I was never the one to raise my hand to collect money from a group. Because it always got a bit tangly or awkward. I thought, “Hey, I feel like I could see this platform.” I could see it solving a lot of different problems, like this. Really, payments focused on groups and collecting payments and information. That’s what I set out to do. Naively, I think a lot of entrepreneurs do. They’re like, “Oh, let’s go solve this problem. Let’s go find some folks who know more about fintech than me and can code, and let’s go build our dream.”

Fabian Geyrhalter:
How hard could it be?

Nichole Montoya:
How hard could it be? Thank goodness you never know when you’re starting, or you wouldn’t start. That was the naive entry point. I pulled my co-founder in shortly thereafter. I was like, “We’ve got to solve this. You are brilliant at design and consumer instinct, so let’s go do this thing.” And so we did. There were some hard times. We did a couple of startup accelerators in San Francisco. If you can just imagine a mother of some young girls moving, spending months on end in San Francisco with these different business accelerators trying to raise capital, never having done that, just getting comfortable pitching and asking if-

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Wait. Not to cut you off. At this point, you already had two young daughters, right?

Nichole Montoya:
Correct.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
You’re a young mom in San Francisco at an accelerator in the boys club basically back then, I’m sure a decade ago it must have been really weird to say the least. Maybe it’s just really difficult, too, because times have changed.

Nichole Montoya:
Times have changed. They have changed. But 10 years ago, you’re exactly right. It was weird. That’s a good word. It was weird. You can get in your own way a little bit, or at least I was recognizing, I can either just be disgruntled about how weird this is or I can just get the most out of it that I can and push through. That’s what I did. But there were some weird moments, to say the least, and I didn’t necessarily feel it wasn’t like my comfy place, let’s say. But I got through it. There were funny times, and at one point Cheddar Up almost ran out of money in terms of funding. Then we raised some more, we had a lot of great supporters who helped me guide the ship. I’m trying to think if there are any really funny moments.
We started the company back in 2013. We raised our first money, very first angel amount in 2014. Then we raised a meaningful amount in 2015. It was just slow-going. Back then, it was also when Venmo was on the rise. In terms of raising capital, we had to really differentiate ourselves and explain why we weren’t like Venmo. We were really focused on groups, and the feature set that is required for groups in collecting both payments and information is really quite different. Telling that story, figuring out how to tell that story, we continued to build our platform so that we were truly solving that problem. That took a while, and it took a while to get some momentum. I’ll say in 2018, we had a little bit of a breakthrough because we had a partnership that came through, and we turned the corner revenue-wise and became a bit more sustainable. But I definitely have some PTSD from the early days.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Long story short, I used to run an agency, a brand agency, and I realized that startups and companies just don’t need that big stuff anymore. They just need focused results quickly with their brand. I basically changed to a consultancy, and in the very beginning, and that was about 10 years ago, I was only working with Silicon Valley-type startups, super early stage, and it was just a love for entrepreneurship. So I was actually at the same time you were up in Silicon Valley, I was in Silicon Valley, and I was mentoring at Plug and Play, Founder Institute, and all of that stuff. It was awkward, even for me. Being at Plug and Play, where it’s like you’re walking on a highway and you’re suddenly realizing, “Oh my God, you better really sprint to be part of this.” Because everything just goes so quickly and everyone’s speaking their own lingo, you just totally feel like an outsider for the first six months or so until you start to either figure out, “Do I fit in and want to stay here, or do I actually find different ways?” Which you did and I did.

Nichole Montoya:
Exactly. That’s totally right. I did find different ways. Once we raised our second round, I was like, “Okay, I do better not in that scene. So I’m just going to really focus on growing and operating the company.” So I just took a step back from all the startup scene, and it was productive for me.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
But you still had to raise. Did you end up raising, not in the valley but somewhere else?

Nichole Montoya:
We did end up raising in 2017, we did another round, and we were in 500 startups, so we took some money in Silicon Valley, but not much. We really took money from Utah, a couple funds in Utah who are near and dear to me. The Kickstart Seed Fund in Utah is a great fund. Foundry Group, out of Boulder, FG Angels.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yep.

Nichole Montoya:
We found some other homes on that regard.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s great. That’s fantastic. Something that you just said before made me realize something. You talked about how the first big breakthrough really was five years in and how that idea of being really, really focused because at that point, five years in, there must have already been a lot of fintechs. In the beginning, it was Venmo, and then it was suddenly everyone. Let’s talk brand positioning for a minute today. Because having a laser-sharp focus on who your audience is, the problem you’re solving for them may be functional, emotional benefits. Having that clear reason for your existence as a company are some of the core components that make for strong brand positioning, which in the beginning was definitely true because you constantly had to talk about that. This is how we differ.

Nichole Montoya:
Right.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
But after growing for 10 years and constantly innovating and constantly adding features, it must be easy to start focusing too heavily, perhaps on the latest feature, and get sidetracked from your core audience or from your reason for being. How do you walk that thin line of not turning into, let’s say, the next Patreon or the next Shopify? Because I know you can do a lot of these things, but how do you do that? Do you have guardrails internally where you say, “We have to stay focused?” And how far do you feel like you can go with new features? It’s a loaded question, I guess.

Nichole Montoya:
No, it’s such a good question, and it really resonates with me because those are things we think about all the time. You’re right, as it relates to our brand, as it relates to how we build our product, we are always focusing on our end user. That’s why we were able to, to your point, pull through during those early days. Sometimes it felt like we were beating our head against the wall. It was like, “We know who needs this platform, and they need it, and they love it, and they appreciate us.” Still, all types of people use Cheddar Up who are organizing groups, but back then they did tend to skew female, our user base. A lot of times, females, they’re definitely group organizers, and we were them quite frankly. We knew it’s the teacher gift, it’s the fun run, it’s the Girl Scout troop.
These users, there wasn’t a platform that was serving them. We have been quite vigilant. I’ll say there’s one time we veered. It was a growth hack in 2018 where we duct taped some features on to help some people who were doing direct selling, so direct sellers. But we only did it because we knew the people behind that industry were also our target market. We thought, “Hey, if we can help them with their little direct sales problem, we can channel them into using it for all the other things that they need us to use.” And while that was a brilliant growth hack, it helped us grow at the time and grew our revenue, but we’ve been very conscious about what our core capabilities are and what our intentions are in terms of problem solving. That is truly the normal group organizers of the world for clubs, HOAs, and all of those use cases.
It’s no easy task to build software that can be so flexible and versatile for all these different group cases. That is our challenge. It’s a fun challenge. I think we solve it well, but at the end of the day, we do keep really focused of, like, “Okay, this feature that group organizers need.”

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah.

Nichole Montoya:
I’ll say my scope of that was probably a little too narrow a couple of years ago. Because I was like, “We’re payments and forms. We’re payments and forms for groups.” And then I realized was there’s a whole other use case for our users. We just launched a feature set called Sign-Ups, which is just another type of form, another type of information collection. And it was like I had this aha. I was like, “Oh duh, our users need that too.” So it’s just something that we’re constantly putting under the lens of, “Does this fall into the use case of our group organizers?” But it’s always top of mind. It’s so great you asked.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s so important. Because you build features like “Hey, I can now sell t-shirts. I can now sell t-shirts in three different sizes with four different designs, and I can do all these things.” And suddenly, it’s literally, I’m on Shopify, or I can create groups in Patreon, and I can do these things. It’s so easy to start saying, “Oh, this is a new product. Let’s just launch it as its new product on the side.” And then you completely lose the brand just by that one simple thing where you have all these features and functionalities, but you have to constantly think about this one person, and you must probably have that one person or these two, three people where it’s like, “Would she like that? Would that work for her? And how important is it on her number one, number two, number three list?” It’s most probably number six. Let’s just hide it on the site as an add-on.

Nichole Montoya:
Right. No, it’s true. The other thing that we rely on that regard is our support team and our user feedback. Our users are pretty vocal, and our support team is pretty amazing. So they channel them through, and we’re always implementing new ways to get that feedback straight to our product team. It’s the same thing. If this is one of our core users and they are saying, “Wow, we love what you do. If you could add a ticketing feature.” That’s something where we’re like, “Okay, are we a ticketing platform? Can we add ticketing and still be who we are?” And usually, it’s called feature creep, and there’s where it becomes a little negative, and there’s where you just become amazing. We’re always, like you said, trying to ride that line and make sure it fits under the umbrella of who we are, which is helping groups collect payments and information.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s funny that you mentioned feature creep in that sense because, in my early career, I worked for a digital agency, and that was our number one word to use all day long. It’s scope creep, feature creep, things that goes, but I never heard it internally being used at a client, which makes sense too because basically, when your customers want all these features, that’s feature creep too. You just got to make sure what actually works for the brand, what works for the bottom line. Talking about the bottom line, without fees, where does the profit come from? And it’s funny that I ask it because everyone’s going to ask you that. I Googled Cheddar Up, and one of the first questions is, “How does Cheddar Up make money?” Is it mainly through paid plans like bigger plan, like the Pro and the Team plans?

Nichole Montoya:
It’s definitely both. We do use some marketing ease with that language. Collect on Cheddar Up for free. That’s true by and large when, let’s say, a club organizer hops on Cheddar Up, creates a collection, shares it with their community. There are convenience fees at checkout. They’re quite low, but we’d make a little bit on that, and those fees are passed by default to the person paying. If I’m an organizer, I stay on Cheddar Up free plan, I keep those fees passed on as they are by default, I’m essentially using Cheddar Up and tons of features and software for free. We do make money on that convenience fee that is about 75% of the time paid by the payer. Then we also make money, like you said, on our paid plans. We’re classic. It’s an old-school term, but it still applies to our business. We’re classic freemium. You can start on the free plan, or if, “Help, looks like I need some more features.” Or, “I really want to do recurring payments.” Then you can jump to Pro and Team.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yep.

Nichole Montoya:
But we’re growing a lot, and we do make most of our money on processing. It’s just because our processing is increasing so much, it’s hard to have the subscription side of the house catch up.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s a scale thing too. If you’ve got 100,000 of those small transactions, they start adding up.

Nichole Montoya:
That’s right.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Let’s talk about how absolutely beautiful Cheddar Up is from an experience perspective. The design is just really, really gorgeous. Every little detail is thought of. To me, it was clear when I just looked at it for a second. I’m like, “Oh my God, this is a very design-driven organization.” And you and I talked about this offline before we started hitting record, but I just learned last night that your co-founder, Molly DiCarlo, is actually a creative. She comes from a brand and design background. Suddenly, it all makes sense. How do you feel this strong design language has added to the success of the brand and maybe even to your bottom line? How important do you feel that was and still is?

Nichole Montoya:
It’s so important. I love that you figured it out. Like we said, we were talking, I was like, “Molly should be on here.” Because-

Fabian Geyrhalter:
She should have. My fault. To everyone listening, it’s my fault.

Nichole Montoya:
… we both know her.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Not Nichole’s fault.

Nichole Montoya:
No, but it’s fun to talk about how much she brings to Cheddar Up. I think it’s huge. I care a lot about brand. When I’m on platforms, I only want to be on platforms that look and feel beautiful, and we want to offer that same experience to our users. It’s because of Molly that we do. Her attention to detail, her eye. She’s responsible for everything. I really do think it’s what makes Cheddar Up stand apart. We are constantly innovating, but if it didn’t look so darn beautiful, and it’s everything from the core components of the brand to like, “Hey guys, the padding is off.”

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah.

Nichole Montoya:
Those are big deals. They make a really big difference. I can go on a platform, and I know how much brand is important to a platform, and it makes a huge difference on the user experience. I also think that Molly’s been masterful at creating a UI that is easy. Our users have such a varying level of tech fluency. Some are really savvy, others are not at all. Creating a UI that it just seems approachable and actually is really simple is another really big challenge.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s not easy. This is not easy. I thought about this when I was navigating the site, and I definitely would love everyone listening to do the same, just to really think about this. When you have groups that are being led by someone who might be older or someone who’s very not tech-savvy, and then yet you have to get the next generation sucked in, and it has to look just as cool as whatever they saw on TikTok. It’s like this thing where, how do you create a brand language around that? And then it’s not just top-level.
It’s like every button and every animation. It’s fun talking behind Molly’s back. I think it’s great that she’s not here. This is good. But very often, you come from the managing consulting world. This is not necessarily the world where you start your own company and it being a tech company, in it being in finance, and you deciding to actually have a designer, creative director as a co-founder. I think this is such a good example to see how much business sense it actually makes if you decide to do that, then if design can really, really shine.

Nichole Montoya:
No. I know maybe it’s a little non-traditional, but for me, it made just perfect sense because I just really felt like we were creating a brand. We were creating a fintech platform, but we were also creating a brand. We wanted to create something that took a task that was really laborious and irritating, quite frankly. Our goal was to flip it on its head, make it fun, make it playful. That’s what Molly’s done. I think it’s paid off in spades.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
All right. Enough about Molly, because her head is exploding when she’s listening to this. That’s it. But looking back, talking about building this brand, what was a big breakthrough moment where you felt like you know what, this little startup of ours, the startup that could, it actually now, really, feels like a brand? Something happened. We are a brand now. Was there a moment where you had that feeling where you just came home or you finished work and you just felt like, “I think that’s it.”? Cheddar Up is a brand now, or was it the minute that you came up with the name?

Nichole Montoya:
Oh, gosh. It’s such a journey. I hate pinpointing one time, but there were definitely a couple of inflection points. For sure, it was when the first logo was created, this flying cheese cube, that Molly designed. A couple of years ago, it was 2021, maybe 2020. Molly and I were like, “We need a little sparkle. We need a little injection of energy as it relates to the brand.” Because she had been designing for eight plus years, and there was some fatigue there, and she wanted a shiny new logo that was just a little bit more innovative. We did hire some outside help under her art direction, and we did a logo refresh. Now it’s just super flexible. We can make vests with embroidery and all kinds of one-color stuff. That was fun. That was a super fun unveiling. Then we also brought in just some brand consultation for a whole new look, like a refresh. We took the same playful vibe, and we actually worked with the firm out of Italy, and-

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh how fun.

Nichole Montoya:
… it was so fun.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
You’re like, “Wait a minute, who can help us with cheese? It could be either France or Italy. Let’s do Italy.”

Nichole Montoya:
Italy. That’s so cool. We feel cool. Just by having a Zoom call with them, we feel cooler. Honestly, I think it was so fun for Molly because she created storyboards, she inspired them, and they just took it and showed us some fresh stuff. It was fun. It was just so fun to make things a bit more cohesive because, over the course of eight years, you’ve got a million landing pages and you’ve got so many-

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, my God, I’m sure. You don’t even know what you have anymore at that point.

Nichole Montoya:
Yeah.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
You need a complete brand audit to just figure out what properties do we own by now.

Nichole Montoya:
Exactly. We were pretty scrappy for a number of years, still are, quite frankly. But it was fun to just be like, “Yeah, we’re going to invest in this. We’re going to put our time, energy, resources.” It was really fun to unveil that. We’re still actually cycling through. Right now, we’re creating a new trade show booth, and we haven’t-

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Cool.

Nichole Montoya:
… updated that yet. It has to funnel through.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I love that as a co-founder that there comes a time where you design so long and spend so much time on the brand that you understand, “Boy, would it be good to just get someone from the outside to help us shake this up and look at it in a different angle?” That too takes a lot from a creative to actually say that would be a good thing. It’s great when you actually revel in that and the excitement that you feel and you co-create, and you suddenly have the power of so many more. It’s wonderful. In my recent book, I wrote, “If your brand’s website has no About Us section, don’t bother launching.” I kept searching high and low, but Cheddar Up doesn’t seem to have an About Us section. How come? Where is it? I want to learn.

Nichole Montoya:
That is so funny. Your timing could not be better. I’m cracking up over here. It’s so funny. It was my own hangup. I just didn’t want an About Us page. Because I was just like, “I think I don’t like the attention.” Or something. I just didn’t want my head floating somewhere. I don’t know. But I have some that I-

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Nichole, you have one week. This episode will air on…

Nichole Montoya:
Actually, it’ll probably be up by the time this airs.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, that’s funny.

Nichole Montoya:
It’s in development. It’s been designed.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, that’s great.

Nichole Montoya:
It’s been written. It’s being developed right now, and once we got it designed and written, I was like, “Oh yeah, this is great. What the heck? Why don’t we have an About Us page? Let’s get that up.” So it is coming. It is coming.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Great. Good, good, good. Look, I can’t find anything to criticize, but I found this, but even that I can’t. So here you go. How does it work from a marketing point of view? What works well in your marketing mix and what doesn’t? I first thought, since this is the audience that you described, very heavy female users, groups, teams, organizations, I thought that you would be big on Facebook and everyone would be there, but it doesn’t seem like those are the platforms. How do people mainly find out about Cheddar Up?

Nichole Montoya:
Oh, that is such a good question. A lot of different channels. Years ago, for a long, long time, we were very scrappy grassrootsy. We’d go to state PTA events, we would sponsor events, and we still do all that, but a year ago, we brought on a chief revenue officer who is brilliant, and she’s upped our marketing game times 10 or more. But there’s no silver bullet when it comes to this channel. At least if there is, we haven’t found it yet. It’s a ton of word of mouth. We call them the untraceables, as you might imagine. We’re a group platform, and they’ve launched to a school. Hundreds of people, some of those payers go become collectors. That is just amazing. That’s gravy for us, but we can’t control it so that we appreciate it. We have other things to work on, and it’s a lot of SEO, pay per click, digital ads, some display, some retargeting, some cold emails. It’s just a lot of stuff.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s a big mix. The untraceable, that’s interesting. Because are the untraceable basically word of mouth?

Nichole Montoya:
They’re word of mouth. They’re word of mouth, or there is-

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s old-school word of mouth. Today we say untraceable.

Nichole Montoya:
I know. We have to give it a fancy term. It’s word of mouth, or it’s even people who go to an event that we’ve sponsored and have our flyer, but they don’t use the tracking that we put on the flyer or whatever. There’s no way to know where they came from.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Right.

Nichole Montoya:
Yeah.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I have to say, it is always refreshing to hear when a CRO comes in and ups the marketing spend. That’s always lovely. Usually, it’s like, “Let’s cut that.”

Nichole Montoya:
No, I was like, “Spend some money, spend some money, spend it wisely.”

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Talking about money and data, I always like, as often as I remember, to ask my guests, “Data obviously drives the maturity of decisions these days when it comes to a lot of decisions within a company.” Sometimes that can go against building a brand that’s different and stands out and doing something that’s totally off the cuff because data usually doesn’t hint at that. In those short 10 years, did you ever go against data and you just did something gutsy just based solely on your instinct where you felt like, “Okay, I know that this is what people want or I know that that’s what the data says and we should go there, but you know what, no, let’s actually go to the other side?”

Nichole Montoya:
I have a bad answer for this because all companies are driven on data. We are driven on data. But I can’t say that we’ve always been driven on data. We haven’t gotten super data smart up until the last few years, to be honest. So much of the first five years of Cheddar Up was based on instinct. For good or bad, we are where we are today, and we got here. I could give you a laundry list of things that were done based on-

Fabian Geyrhalter:
The first six years.

Nichole Montoya:
No joke. A couple of things that come to mind are the direct sales thing, which I already talked about, like, “Hey, let’s help that industry.” That doesn’t really make sense with what we’re doing, but it does, and we could grow, and that worked. We also have a lot of partnerships with big Girl Scout councils across the country, and that was pretty instinctual. It seems obvious, but it was just an idea. We give all of our Girl Scout councils free premium plans, and that was just based on like, “I think we need to do this.” We love that community for so many reasons, with female entrepreneurship.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Absolutely.

Nichole Montoya:
It just keeps growing. It makes a ton of sense with who we are as a company and founders. I wanted to support them, and I wanted them using Cheddar Up because I knew that they needed it, but I also wasn’t sure that these little troops would have a budget, and we knew that they needed some of our premium features. We have a ton of partnerships. I also was no fool. I also was like, “This is such a great community for us to grow in too, and this could be a real win-win, so let’s give them a bunch of stuff for free. Let’s start growing in different pockets of the US.” And that has certainly paid off and was not based on data in any way.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That makes tons of sense. Getting into entrepreneurial groups and enabling them and empowering them, it must feel good for you and the company to feel like the maturity of groups that must probably use Cheddar Up are these grassroots groups that just try to create a better community or even a better place in a better world, which must feel great for a financial organization to actually feel that.

Nichole Montoya:
We’re lucky we get to serve such cool communities doing cool things. These group organizers are, honestly, heroes. They’re raising their hands. They’re usually volunteers. They’re helping to grow their community, which usually has some other greater cause behind it as well. They need a platform like ours. When I’m talking to investors, or back in the day when I used to pitch, it’s like, “How are you different from Venmo?” And I’d be like, “We sit in the middle of the Venmo, which is the peer-to-peer getting money from point A to point B, and then the PayPals and the Squares, who are pretty focused on small to medium-sized businesses.” We’re that gap in the middle where these poor group organizers are like, “I don’t want this big system. Venmo’s not enough.” They are an awesome, audience and they care, and it’s great to hear how much they love us or any issues they’re having through our support team, but it is, it’s an easy thing to wake up and do every day because we’re serving such great people.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I’m sure in the beginning, when you did your pitches, there must have been the question popping up, “Why doesn’t the Venmo, a PayPal, or a Square start catering to groups overnight, and then suddenly you’re obsolete?”

Nichole Montoya:
Absolutely. Venmo did. Venmo tried to launch groups a million years ago, and it didn’t work out. It’s just not who they are.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
It’s not their bread and butter.

Nichole Montoya:
It’s just not who they are. To serve groups meaningfully. The way we do it is a ton of software, and their software is amazing, but it is just getting money from point A to point B, and they’re master’s at it. I use Venmo, I love Venmo, but I pay the babysitter and the tutor and it’s one-to-one.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah.

Nichole Montoya:
What they would have to, not that they couldn’t build it. Of course they could build it, but it’s just like that’s not the problem they’re solving. I could be wrong, but it’s just not been a focus of theirs for a good 10 plus years. I think we’ve differentiated our product enough with our features and quite honestly elbowing our way to earn these users and this brand awareness. It’s not an easy thing to build brand awareness amongst this demographic.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I’m sure.

Nichole Montoya:
It just really takes time. There’s no easy way to do it. We’re doing that hard work, which I think is a big differentiator.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
At this point, you’ve earned it and you own it. In the beginning, it must have still been like, “Can they do that?” They can, actually.

Nichole Montoya:
Sure.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing. We talked a good amount about design and branding, but now that you co-created this brand after doing all of this managing consulting, what does branding mean to you? What does that term mean to you? It’s usually a pretty misunderstood and mistreated term. What does branding mean to you?

Nichole Montoya:
I wish Molly was here. She needs to answer this.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
She is not.

Nichole Montoya:
Branding is important to me. I love a brand. I love our brand. To me, branding is who you are, and it’s the entire package of visuals and messaging that creates a feeling or an intention of what the company stands for. In turn, I think that explains what you do. It’s this feeling that you create in this presence with visuals, messaging, tone, and all those things. You’re the brand expert. How did I do? Did I describe it? Is that what it means to you?

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I give grades later. No, absolutely. That’s what it is. It is a feeling. I think that idea, I sometimes say it’s a vibe. You get a vibe from J.P. Morgan, you get a vibe from your local credit union.

Nichole Montoya:
Yeah.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That is it. Now let’s create an entire architecture around that vibe, and we can go deep into all of the reasons of what makes that. But in the end, that really is branding. I do this tough exercise with my clients at the end of my workshops, where I ask them, “What is one word that can describe your brand?” If you take your entire brand through a funnel and everything where we just said it’s that vibe, if you take all of that and then, in the end, if you were to describe that vibe in one word, what would it be? In all fairness, I gave you a heads-up that this question might come, so maybe you did have some thoughts.

Nichole Montoya:
You did. It’s funny. I’ve just been staring at that question. I’m like, “It’s so hard. It’s not really fair.” Like Coke is happiness, what? But somehow it is.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I know.

Nichole Montoya:
What’s hard about that question is the one word. I would say Cheddar Up’s brand represents easy and playful. But I think if I had to pick one, probably easy. Just simplicity.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I like it.

Nichole Montoya:
That’s it. I’m going with that.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I was thinking you go with community, but there are many possibilities that your brand can own, and that’s beautiful because there are many components to what makes Cheddar Up so successful. As we’re slowly coming down to the end of this episode, is there any piece of brand advice as the two of you were building this brand over the last decade plus? Any brand advice for founders as a takeaway, maybe in the beginning of when they create their brand or later on? Does anything come to mind?

Nichole Montoya:
The only thing that comes to mind is really just to prioritize it, that it’s important. We did that because our co-founder is a designer. I just think it can really make or break a company what that feeling is that you’re giving to. Obviously, it depends on whether you’re B2B or consumer B2B2C, but just prioritize it. For a lot of founders, especially if you’re technical, it’s just an afterthought. But find someone who you can lift up on your team and be like, “You own it. This is important.” And give them the power to make it great.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Absolutely love it. I absolutely agree too, because I’m a trained graphic designer. It’s what I studied, so, of course, I agree. Smart piece of advice. What’s coming up next for the Cheddar Up brand? What are you excited about in the next couple of months, six months?

Nichole Montoya:
Oh gosh, this is a big product year for us. We just launched signups, as I mentioned, and users are ecstatic. They love it, and we built it well. You build and launch a feature, and you’re always like, “I hope we didn’t overlook anything.”

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Of course.

Nichole Montoya:
The feedback has been phenomenal. I’m super pumped to see what our users do with that big feature set this fall. Fall is always our biggest time of year, as you might imagine with the school year kicking off. It’s just sports, and all the things start to kick off in the fall.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah.

Nichole Montoya:
I’m excited to see what our users do with that feature set. We are launching ticketing to help people produce a bit more robust events, and that’ll be done by fall too. Then we’re going to launch a template center, which I’m super pumped about, which just helps them start further down the path and just grab a template, repurpose it. It also gives them really great ideas for how to use Cheddar Up. So I’ve been telling my product team, I’m like, “You guys, we can get this done this year. This is a mic-drop moment. I’m just going to drop that mic, and we’re golden.” I’m super excited. Next year will be a different focus. But that’s what I’m excited about, and we are growing a ton, so it is so fun to just see that growth continue.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Awesome.

Nichole Montoya:
We’re excited about that.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Great. You all really deserve that. It’s wonderful seeing and hearing about how everything is progressing and the focus that you have and templates. I’m saying it’s going Shopify.

Nichole Montoya:
No, no, we’re not. I promise.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
No, it makes a ton of sense. Just enabling an easier way for people to start using the product in the ways that they really imagine and being able to just plug and play is huge anywhere.

Nichole Montoya:
Right.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
How can people follow you either personally, or how can they get to know Cheddar Up?

Nichole Montoya:
That is a great question. I don’t usually spout off my handles often.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
You don’t need to. We could just dive right into Cheddar Up.

Nichole Montoya:
I think just go to cheddarup.com is the best way. We’ve got a really active blog, and we talk about all types of cool content. That’s a great place to go. Instagram, follow Cheddar Up on Instagram, on social media, probably your best bets. But go to cheddarup.com if you need to collect from a group. We are your platform.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Wonderful. I love it. Fantastic. Nichole, thank you. Thank you so much for spending the time with all of us, sharing the story, and talking about the Cheddar Up brand.

Nichole Montoya:
Yes, this has been super fun. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
My pleasure.