“Dell sells a machine, a very good machine at a great price point. And I'm appreciative of that, but they don't really have a brand. So people who are out there trying to create content, I think they fall into Dell camp. Serviceable, highly forgettable.”
The Nathan Barry Show · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · October 2026
Do is using Apple and Dell to explain what a brand is: nobody wears a Dell t-shirt or brags to friends about one. His advice to people making content is to lean into what makes them different.
Transcript
Okay. Well, I will tell you the origin of where that idea or word comes from. A friend of mine, he's a luminary in the design space. His name is Brian Collins. He has an agency, Agency of the Year kind of stuff. And he has a playful way of talking about things. He's like, you know, it's not called blending, it's branding. And he makes fun of all these other big multi-million dollar agencies who are doing very high-end brand work. And he goes, it's so boring. Blah, blah, blah. It's all the same. And he wants to inject personality, humor, fun, a point of view. And so I keep thinking about that. And then, hard stop. I look at people, how they show up online. And we're all kind of insecure about who we are in real life, even more so online. So what we do is we follow certain templates or mandates, so to speak, from people who tell us this is how we're supposed to be. There's an averageness, a sameness that we aspire towards, which is really strange to me. And so everyone is just blending in. So we need to stand out. And to summarize what branding is, is differentiation. How are you different than your competitors? Because that's the only thing people remember. An undifferentiated product in the market space is called a commodity.
Right.
If I can't tell the difference between one phone to the next, I just buy purely on specs and price at that point. And you've lost the battle. The ongoing debate, not debate, but the observation is Apple has a brand. Dell doesn't. Because for Dell, all we do is we look at the price point and the features. There's no feeling. We have no loyalty to them. We don't go and extol their virtues to everybody else. We don't wear Dell t-shirts. We don't put their stickers on our other products. We don't brag to our friends. We don't shun our friends who don't use Dell products. Dell sells a machine, a very good machine at a great price point. And I'm appreciative of that, but they don't really have a brand. So people who are out there trying to create content, I think they fall into Dell camp. Serviceable, highly forgettable. So what we have to do is we have to lean into what makes us different. We have to unbrand ourselves.
I saw someone, I saw this play out on X the other day where someone was like, look, I need a new monitor. I can buy the Apple monitor for whatever, $2,500 or something. Or I can buy the Dell monitor that's the same size, same specs. You know, there's probably some differences, but to them, you know, they're comparing specs, or I can buy this for like $700. Yeah. Which one should I buy?
Right.
And if you looked in the comments, probably a third of it was about specs. And a third, like a third or more was about like identity, brand, who you are, like, you know, that sort of thing. I was like, you know, people would say things like, well, you make lots of money in your business. Like, just buy the Apple, you know, like, and all of that. And you realize like you can afford it. All Dell has going for it is specs and price.