235. Mission 😇
Instructions and examples for setting a compelling Mission and Vision for your brand
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What do Mission & Vision look like at startups around the world?
There is no wrong way to write your company’s mission and vision.
Or, at least that’s how it seems.
We are in the process of some mission wordsmithing at Oyster, and we’ll be publishing more about our process next month Watch this page for updates. Being in the midst of mission and vision got me thinking about how these statements are so critically important for your brand … and yet there’s seemingly no consensus on how to create them.
Here are the statements for Oyster:
Oyster’s Mission
To remove the barriers to cross-border employment so that talented people around the world can build a great career no matter where they live.
Oyster’s Vision
To build a software platform that makes it easy and convenient for thousands of companies to hire and give a great employment experience to millions of people around the world.
(Btw, if this sounds exciting to you, we’re hiring lots of folks right now.)
The best advice I can give on Mission and Vision is: have a Mission and Vision.
Make it inspirational and ambitious
Ground it in the value you deliver to your customers
Socialize it within your company so that everyone has it memorized
Put it on your website, in your media kit, on your social profiles
Tip: You can test your team’s knowledge of your mission and vision by running a monthly poll using a tool like Polly to gauge how accurately everyone recites it.
Today’s best brands have one thing in common: they know why they exist.
This comes back to purpose (explained here), mission, vision, and values.
There are lots of frameworks and guidelines for creating these statements. Here’s one that I quite like from Zingerman’s bakery (I know, I know, not exactly tech-startupy).
Create a Mission Statement
A Mission Statement, as we see it, is meant to answer four questions:
What do we do?
Why do we do it?
Who are we that’s doing it?
For whom are we doing it?
We view it like the North Star; though we can’t ever actually arrive at it, it provides a good sense of long-term direction.
Create a Company Vision
A Vision is a description of success at a particular point in time in the future, written out with a good bit of richly engaging detail and emotionally meaningful descriptions. A vision, as we see it, gets very specific about what we want to do at that point in the future; how we’ll feel about it, how others might feel about us, etc. Our vision for Zingerman’s 2020 is about nine pages long. Our mission, on the other hand, is short, just six sentences.
“The vision statement focuses on tomorrow and what the organization wants to become. The mission statement focuses on today and what the organization does.”
You can also find a bunch of advice from different spots around the web. Things like:
Mission questions:
What do we do?
Whom do we serve?
How do we serve them?
Vision questions:
What are our hopes and dreams?
What problem are we solving for the greater good?
Who and what are we inspiring to change?
And …
A Mission Statement defines the company’s business, its objectives and its approach to reach those objectives. A Vision Statement describes the desired future position of the company.
When doing this work, I often find it helpful to pull inspiration from various companies who have created mission and vision statements for their brands. It can be helpful to see what wording resonates (and what doesn’t).
Here are some examples of mission statements from some cool, early tech startups.
These are pulled from Will Reed’s report on the best 50 seed-stage startups to work for in 2021. Each founder was asked, “Why did you create your business?” Here is how several of them answered.
Our mission is to be a trusted partner to builders. Our vision is to codify the language of buildings and make construction projects programmable like software applications.
Our mission is to transform the relationships between applications, users, and data.
By building better relationships through radical collaboration, we’ll create a B2B sales experience that is as delightful as B2C is today.
Anomalo enables companies that are assembling a modern data stack to trust the data they depend upon, ensuring they can transform their businesses.
We started Arist initially as a way to teach and train students in the Yemeni conflict zone, where access to the internet (and video courses as a result) was limited. We quickly realized that text message-based courses could make learning far more accessible and effective, especially for learners with limited internet or computer access.
Our mission is to elevate hospitality wherever it exists. Our team wakes up in the morning on a mission to create a digital experience that offers as much hospitality as the traditional dining and/or retail experience.
(A personal favorite of mine.) ⭐
Buzzer’s purpose is to build community and serve as the last mile tech to connect fans to ephemeral live sports moments.
Docket exists to rid the world of ineffective meetings.
I started Fable so that all of us can fill the micro-moments in our hectic lives with stories. Our mission is to deliver the world’s best social experience with exceptional stories in service of mental wellness.
Loom (not that Loom)
We created LOOM to serve the huge, unmet need for sexual and reproductive health education for women. We believe that health education is health care, and that the right, accessible resources can help women and families thrive.
Our vision is to bring commercial real estate online. Our mission is to eliminate the complexity, uncertainty, delay, and missed opportunities inherent in an off-line process for making real estate decisions as a business. We are building the future of lease management, compliance, and decision-making for businesses with real estate portfolios.
Ox is on a mission to help retailers compete with Goliath. The dream for our company would be to be an industry thought leader, helping thousands of retailers accomplish their business goals.
We exist to create equal pay and opportunity for all. After 10 years managing compensation programs and teams, it became clear that the overwhelming tasks involved in paying a company, and the lack of tooling, made it difficult to ensure every pay decision was being consistently reviewed, and therefore that every person was being equitably paid...so we built an intelligent compensation system to change that.
Our mission at Ware is to help warehouses operate more efficiently with zen-like automation.
Workera’s mission is to help humanity measurably close the skills gap to achieve its fullest potential. Today, Workera enables individuals and organizations to assess their capabilities with a granular assessment technology and delivers personalized learning plans featuring an ocean of readily available content, starting with data and AI.
About this newsletter …
Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. If you enjoy what’s in this newsletter, you can share some love by hitting the heart button at the top or bottom.💙
About Kevan
I’m a marketing exec who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer, Polly, and Vox.
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