Liva Judic is a financial journalist turned entrepreneur. Born in Madagascar, she was educated in Europe and has lived and worked across 4 continents. As a StartupYard mentor, Liva stresses efficient communication, and connecting emotionally across cultures by telling compelling stories that resonate with all audiences. She works individually each year with our startups to open up new avenues of storytelling.
In 2010, Liva founded Merrybubbles Communications to help fuel the fire for technology startups wanting to expand internationally. She lives in Miami Beach and shuttles between there, New York, San Francisco, London, Paris and Berlin.

I caught up with Liva  after her latest mentoring session with the StartupYard 2016 teams, to talk about her views on the industry, startups, and storytelling. Here’s what she had to say: 

Hi Liva, welcome to our blog. Is there anything you’d really like people to know about you, that they can’t find out by reading about you on LinkedIn?

Hi! What’s not showing through my LinkedIn… a lot of things, actually. The thing that I really want to share and is connected to what I do with StartupYard is that I’m passionate about design, aesthetics, especially minimalistic approaches. You can see it through my Instagram account, mostly, and my personal site LivaJudic.com. In terms of work, it transpires in the way I approach things, notably how I structure my interactions with businesses and startups. Short and laser-focused with the goal to make a lasting impact on their progress.

You founded Merrybubbles (the branding and communications firm) in 2011. What was the original vision for the firm? How has that evolved?

At the beginning, the idea was to provide my international experience and journalistic background to companies needing to open their outreach to foreign markets, notably English-speaking ones and mostly the U.S. Our first client was GDF Suez Trading and from there on, we started working with startups with ambitions to move to the U.S. in general. We pivoted, as per startup language, last year from an all-marcoms approach to a strictly branding offer, both strategy (which precludes all communications for any company) and implementation. And instead of purely startups, we have both narrowed and widened (I know, sounds contradictory but you’ll see what I mean) our focus to change makers/game changers. It means first, recognizing that small businesses and startups with women or minorities at their helm are a force to be reckoned with: they are innovators, just because of that leadership choice. It also means that we want to find businesses/startups with technologies or products that are making an impact on their ecosystems, improving quality of life, one way or another.

What makes Merrybubbles different from a typical branding and communications agency?

We only offer one product now (see, the narrowing down is surfacing…) Our approach is very streamlined to ensure maximal impact and ROI for our clients: we only sell one product. Yes, really. We work in a two-step process: we first lead a discovery and analysis of the business/startup in order to put together their brand identity and give the client the one-pager blueprint at the end of the very same day. That’s what we call Primer. Then, we narrow it down with them to execute on it: we ask specifically that the client has access to a screen (phone, tablet or computer) during business hours so we can communicate with them seamlessly for the following four days after Primer. At the end of that fourth day, they will leave with a logo, website, 4 social media profiles or pages of their choices, business card design and a one pager or a landing page for their specific need. In five business days, they are ready to launch.

You emphasize that Merrybubbles is focused on women and minority led organizations, yet you also mentor at the very male, very European StartupYard. Women make up a huge part of the market for emerging tech products, but we’ve struggled to attract women entrepreneurs to our program since the beginning. What could we be doing better, from your perspective?

Bear in mind that I’ve always worked (and thrived because it never bothered me) in male-dominated industries: financial journalism, diplomacy and government, tech startups. So being with StartupYard is not something out of the blue. I’m always happy to represent women in areas where there are so few of us, and it’s part of my thinking to actually organically integrate where women are scarce, a bit like a statement that we can do it: if I can do it, we all can.  

What I would say is that StartupYard has three points of leverage. One, you can onboard more female mentors. There are a lot of women with incredible track records out there who would be amazing adds to your roster of mentors. Number two, encourage applicants who have women in their teams or at the helm of those teams. How you do that is by communicating your awareness and support for more diverse teams. I know there are great diverse teams in Eastern Europe. I have met a few, especially when I am in Berlin, where I spend a fair amount of time. One was from Croatia and is now doing quite well for themselves, as they went through YC.

And of course, what you’re doing now, by giving me this opportunity to speak, is a great first step! Let’s keep doing more such things, I’ll be happy to support your efforts.

You emphasize storytelling in your startup mentorship. What does good storytelling mean to you? Why is it so important

Let’s see. You meet a stranger and s/he tells you a story, random conversation. It’s really not bad. You part ways. Then, on the same day, you meet another stranger. S/He also tells you a story. But this time, it actually makes you laugh, or it reminds you of this one adventure you went on with friends a while ago where you had felt so empowered, or it made you shiver… you part ways. A week after, you are telling a friend about that weird day where you had random conversations with two complete strangers. You can’t remember their names. Not really. But the one thing that you will remember is how that second stranger made you feel. That will stick with you. And you are able to tell the story s/he shared with you that day. The first story? Maybe vague details.

Now, apply that to startups and pitches. Instead of you, the recipient of the stories are investors or users. That’s why it’s so important. You weave your story to make an emotional impact and that’s how you relate to your audience. That’s why it’s crucial to nail your branding: it’s not just the logo and marketing collaterals, it’s the unsaid, what is between the lines that will make your story the best — it’s what is invisible but can only be perceived emotionally.

We hear quite a lot about “branding” these days. What does branding really mean to you, and what should it mean to startups in Central Europe?

I think my previous response gives you a good idea of what branding should be. Don’t focus just on your logo or website as objects. Focus on them as a medium to convey the full experience of what you offer. This is why, for instance, we offer the Primer phase: we find out everything about the startup, its team, its values, its mission, its goals, but also the story of how the team member got together, what glues them together. We want to find out what makes them tick, what they hate. Of course, we want to see their vision. I always tell clients that we are exploring their full universe in order to be able to activate all 5 senses. Touch, feel, smell, see, taste. That’s how we are able to then build a brand identity that aligns with the startups’ values and culture. As regards startups and businesses from Central/Eastern Europe, this is how they can be authentic and genuine — and that, in turn, will allow them to be universal, go to foreign markets.

We often hear that European startups are “behind” those in the US or in Britain, particularly as it concerns marketing principles and communication skills. Of course the real picture is more subtle. Do you think there are mistakes in the overall narrative that US startups are “ahead” of others around the world?

It is a reality that the level of maturity of startup ecosystems around the world are different. It’s like with electronics. Do you remember the beginning, when the U.S. was making calculators, fax machines and even computers? What was the economic phase in Asia? It was copying. Then comes innovation, they started iterating faster, then took over: look at what happened with Samsung, for instance. You can’t burn through the stages, it takes time. It’s not just the startups, it’s also investors. In a place like Berlin, investors are still very shy and the startups are still used to presenting perfect solutions instead of MVPs to those investors. So their development phase is slowed down by a lack of funding. In the meantime, investors in the U.S. have had quite some time to become familiar with the startup ecosystems. They are bold and bet very early on, even at the stage of ideas, with no product yet. I’m not saying it’s better, it’s just different paradigms.

One thing that is VERY important to be aware of, however is this: regardless of the maturity of the market, developers in Europe, and more specifically in Central/Eastern Europe, are extremely skilled. Proof is, some of the most successful startups in Silicon Valley have gone through the process of working with remote teams from the region.

It’s important to look at the whole ecosystem, not just one side.

You met with the StartupYard startups recently. What did you learn from the experience?

This is my second year mentoring at StartupYard. As you asked me before about startups in Europe vs the U.S., I have to say that the level of maturity of this cohort is striking. Last year, they were good, and this year, they are even better. I’m not bashing on last year, no, that’s not what I mean. On average, the level of readiness overall, for seed stage startups, was pretty damn good. I am still involved with some of last year’s batch. You know, it’s also about who you click with. I believe a few of them will do really well. And this year is no exception. I’m very happy to be a mentor for StartupYard and very grateful for this opportunity too.

Last week, I sat down with Founder and CEO of StartupYard 2014’s SentiSquare, Josef Steinberger, to talk about how the company took 3rd place among 72 challengers at the UPC: Ignite innovation competition, and what SentiSquare has been working on since leaving the accelerator last year.

 Hi Josef, how have things been going with SentiSquare since you left StartupYard in 2014?

Wow, has it been 18 months already? We have been quite busy, and we’ve signed a few really high-profile clients, including Nestle and T-Mobile in the Czech Republic.

Our most exciting recent news is that we took 3rd place in the UPC competition: Project Ignite, which is for the best tech entrepreneurs in the country. We took 100,000 CZK (about 4,000 Euro), which we plan to use on further development of the SentiSquare service.

How did you get involved with the UPC contest?

Stanislav Rejthar, our financial director, is quite well connected to business in Prague, and he found out about the competition, so we decided to enter. There were 72 projects in the 1st round, with 30 semi-finalists, and 11 finalists. Five finalists passed to finals from the Facebook voting and 6 were selected by jury. And we took third place overall.

The first place winner, this is a bit funny, but they are actually working on turning pig-dung into water and other nutrients. So we got beat by pig shit :laughs:. But we were really happy with the results, and the upside is that UPC has expressed a lot of interest in working with us going forward.

Can you talk a bit about how you can help companies like Nestle, T-Mobile, or UPC, without talking about the specifics of those clients?

Sure. What we do, as you know, is a sentiment analysis across the whole web. This means that we are able to tell our clients in good detail, what their customers are talking about, and how they feel about those topics and specific things they discuss. We get this info from social media, forums, websites, and comment sections that number in the 100s of thousands and more.

So, for example, we are able to tell a large name brand that is about to launch a marketing campaign based on a specific topic, what people are already saying about that topic, and the feelings of consumers related to that topic. And we can give this analysis in much more detail than simply: “good or bad.”

In fact, one of the reasons we start working with the brands even before the campaign starts, is that we can help them to shape the nature of the campaign to get a better response. We can tell them what their consumers are likely to respond to, and it works.

Can you give me an example of how that works?

Yes. For one client, we worked with them on launching their company blog. This was a pretty large brand. They wanted to launch their blog in the new year, attracting people who were interested in new year’s resolutions and this kind of thing.

So, the company had a list of topics that they thought people would be searching for on Google, which they could take advantage of by writing about those topics, in relation to their own products. What we found, though, was that there were a number of topics being discussed quite a lot related to new year’s resolutions, but involving topics that were not included in the campaign’s key word targets. It happened, however, that these topics were very relevant to the company, and that PPC prices for these search terms were a very good value for the price.

So we were able to identify, among the company’s core demographic, a topic that was not being served, and allowed them to have a very good search position for those terms.

We did more than just help the company understand what people liked and didn’t like, but also things that the company had no idea they were talking about at all. That was a big advantage for them and they saw the results in their search traffic and ROI for that campaign.

Click to learn more about SentiSquare

Are big brands surprised by what you tell them?

All the time! Marketers and managers like to have very clear and precise information, that they can sort of divide into yes/no decision processes. So, for example, they want a clear yes/no answer to the question: “is my campaign working?” But what we are always showing them is that these questions are more complicated than they want to make them. And in that complexity lies a lot of opportunities that are not being taking advantage of.

For example, a big brand might say that a campaign is a “success,” if people are talking more about their brand after the campaign than before. That is easier to measure also. But campaign managers can’t tell whether people are talking about the actual messaging of the campaign. They have to assume that more people talking about the brand or product means the messaging is working, but it might not be. Even if they use simple positive/negative sentiment analysis, they can’t tell why people feel positively or negatively. They can’t tell if the message is working as intended.

We can help brands determine if people are talking about the messaging that the brand is using, and this can give a much better sense of whether the campaign is a success. We can also do pre-analysis to understand whether the intended audience will be receptive to that message, and if not, to what messages they might be more receptive.

How do big brands currently determine what their campaign messages should be?

It’s mostly about intuition. Some big companies literally have someone going through thousands of customer posts on social media and forums, and trying to glean some kind of insight about what customers are interested in. So it is possible to get a subjective, intuitive sense of what is important to your customers. But it is very difficult to get an objective, provable figure to support that intuition.

On the other side, it is relatively easy to analyze the sentiment of your brand’s audience in positive/negative terms, but that doesn’t help you at all to understand what your messaging should be. Even positive/negative terms are super-subjective. They are down to culture, to context, to the type of person talking, and the person they are talking to. A human can recognize sentiment when we see it, but it is much more complicated to see sentiment in the aggregate. It is very easy to think you understand it, when you really don’t.

We are providing a kind of intuition engine. It has the reach of a large scale data tool, but it can provide the subtlety in insights of a human.

So you help companies to avoid false positives in sentiment analysis?

False positives or also completely wrong assumptions about data.

There is a really funny example we experienced recently. We were doing analysis of the wine industry. The customer had already had another company scrape a large amount of data including basic search terms, such as the word “wine” and its variants in Czech. They wanted to see what kinds of wine people were talking about in a one month period. So far so good.

Now, you can do a broad sentiment analysis based on positive or negative keywords, and give some impression of whether people have good or bad associations with certain types of wine, right? Well, not in this case. Our analysis was able to show that a huge amount of this data (about 80% actually) was totally useless. Why? Because it wasn’t about wine! It was about cars.

Cars?

Yeah, cars. The data scraping had caught a lot of information about VIN numbers (vehicle identification numbers). It had also scraped a lot of information about Vin Diesel, the actor. Wine, in Czech, is written as vino, or vin, or some variation. So without our analysis of what the subjects actually being discussed really were, the client might have made a lot of really wrong assumptions about what people feel about different wines. You think a lot of people like red wine, but they really like red cars! Or maybe they say they love wine, but they are really fans of Vin Diesel movies.

The data would be worse than useless. It would cause you to make all kinds of wrong assumptions about your audience.

But we were able to pre-process that data, and make the final data set much more valuable for analysis.

You said earlier that you can give more than a black and white look at customer sentiments? How do you do that?

There are a few ways.

One of the problems with sentiment analysis for large amounts of written text, is that there are a lot of positive and negative keywords mixed together. It doesn’t make sense just to count them up, because the actual construction of thoughts is not so binary.

So what we can do is to provide a sense of the intensity of sentiments overall. Is a customer generally happy, or generally unhappy? A customer can use a lot of negative words, but still be mostly satisfied with a product. Some people just enjoy complaining, and a brand shouldn’t count that person as an unsatisfied customer. So we can provide this shading of sentiment by intensity.

There is also aspect based sentiment analysis. This is the analysis of not just a brand as a whole, but as related to specific aspects of the brand and its products. Maybe people love a brand, but they have negative sentiments about its prices. Or the opposite can happen. Maybe they love the functionalities, but hate the color. By combining these insights, we can present a much more realistic picture of a customer than simply: like/dislike.

How are you different from other monitoring services like BrandEmbassy (also a StartupYard Alum)?

BrandEmbassy provides monitoring of keywords, which allows service representatives to see live conversations on social media and elsewhere. The big advantage for them is that they can route those conversations to the appropriate person on their team and engage directly with the customers.

What we do is the eagle eye view of all those conversations- we can tell companies what the totality of all those conversations really means. So it has a bigger effect on a company’s overall communication and branding strategies, whereas a company like BrandEmbassy helps a company to improve its small-scale interactions with individuals.

What are your plans for the near future?

A big request is for our system to be available in real time. This is something that we really want to develop more in the near term. Having the ability to see the conversation changing online at every moment, and being able to understand how people feel about things from day to day, is an important thing for big brands.

As conversations online get only more numerous and also more specific, the job of keeping up with that volume is getting unmanagable for the biggest brands. SentiSquare can provide a pulse of conversation that really provides valuable insights, even in the day to day. Brands can use SentiSquare to get an evolving list of important keywords that are related to their brands.

That list changes every day, but currently it takes a long time for that information to filter into a brand’s messaging. Given the prioritization on the topic or opinion level, brands can quickly get a gist about the actual situation The speed is important, because all the brand managers are busy people. We can make them more responsive to the conversation of today.

We want to change the way people look at sentiment analysis. Things are not black and white, positive and negative. Somebody says something is “big.” What does that mean? It’s not good or bad in all cases. Nothing in discourse is cut and dried, and all sentiments have levels of intensity.

Our clients usually want black and white answers. We have to educate our customers about the danger of viewing their brands in this way. The magic answers that big data is supposed to provide can easily be very wrong. And we can help companies identify opportunities they are ignoring, because they have been addicted to this positive/negative polarity.