Sho.ai seeks to put branding power in hands of small businesses

Sho Rust, co-founder of Sho.ai, an agency that helps businesses with branding, believes Cape Girardeau has what his business needs to succeed.

Why Cape Girardeau? He has family here, but he also finds the city to be a great place for a tech startup business.

Rust grew up in Osaka, Japan, but attended Franklin Elementary when he moved to Cape Girardeau around age 10, before leaving for high school. Prior to coming to Cape Girardeau, he was living in Venice Beach, California, where the rent was very high. One of the other co-founders of Sho.ai was living in Santa Monica, California, and also had high overhead.

“We decided to just get together and build the company in Cape Girardeau,” Rust said. “One reason why we chose Cape was because of family support — I’ve loved Cape since I was kid, growing up visiting Cape all the time. And also, we heard about programs like Codefi.”

Sho.ai was a 2018 recipient of a program Codefi sponsors called 1ST50K, awarding $50,000 to the winners in addition to providing business mentoring and support for startup companies.

Sho.ai helps small- and medium-sized businesses build brand strategies to help them communicate with consumers.Submitted

In addition to family and business support and lower operating expenses, Rust enjoys Cape Girardeau’s jiujitsu and yoga studios, as well as local pho and street tacos.

“In Cape, we have everything we would typically need at a much lower overhead. As a tech company, you need good internet. You need good food. And if our team is purchasing property, we would have never been able to consider doing that in Los Angeles. So there are a lot of pros, but I guess, to put it really simply, there’s a lot of bang for your buck here,” he noted.

Rust comes to Cape Girardeau from a career working with Boston Consulting Group, which helps big clients such as GoPro and Nike build brand systems, which are a set of rules and guidelines on how to operate a business successfully. Rust began seeing small- and medium-sized businesses in rural areas such as Cape Girardeau don’t have those tools available to them.

Sho.ai was created to bridge that gap by providing brand strategy tools that were only available to the top companies and making them available to smaller ones through automation.

In addition, their brand system process is built and completed within eight hours versus the six months to a year the large branding consultants can take.

Sho.ai has worked on many companies' and events' brand strategies.Submitted

“We took a look at that process and found a ton of repetitious, kind of mind-numbing tasks that the agency had to do over and over again. And then automated a lot of those things,” Rust said.

Sho.ai has worked on many companies' and events' brand strategies.Submitted

What exactly is branding? Many people are familiar with advertising design, company stationery, website, email campaigns, etc. And in 2020, businesses should factor in all the social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, etc. A brand strategy encompasses all those — it’s the way a business communicates with a consumer.

Sho.ai has worked on many companies' and events' brand strategies.Submitted

Sho.ai works with clients to tailor their “brand DNA” — how the business speaks to the customers, or the type of imagery that’s used. And, more importantly, it includes the identity system — the company logo and name, spanning everything from corporate colors, typography, even small things such as buttons styles on the company website.

Sho.ai has worked on many companies' and events' brand strategies.Submitted

“We’re essentially leveling the playing field between these big tech companies and the small mom-and-pop shops, because now, these mom-and-pop shops can execute and communicate their product and service just as well, if not even better, than these larger companies.”

Rust said he feels it’s the role of Sho.ai to make brand strategy available to all, not just the companies that can afford to spend large amounts with large consulting firms.

In addition to the $50,000 from the 1ST50K competition, Sho.ai received $250,000 from the Center on Rural Innovation (CORI). According to its website, CORI uses progressive public, private and philanthropic partnerships and strategies to achieve sustainable economic success in rural America. The investment from CORI came from CORI’s opportunity zone fund. An opportunity zone is an economically-distressed community where investments may be eligible for tax advantages. James Stapleton, founder of Codefi, said CORI’s investment in Sho.ai was only the second investment from the fund. Codefi referred the CORI fund to Sho.ai and assisted in the funding opportunity. With funding from the organizations, Rust has the backing and assistance needed to forge ahead.

Currently, Sho.ai is targeting branding agencies as clients, in an effort to help other brand builders do an even better job. Rust said the agencies are having a hard time competing.

“We see ourselves as a tool for brand builders, and right now, the biggest brand owners are agencies. We really want to help them automate their day-to-day tasks and do very well.”

Looking to the future, Sho.ai hopes to eventually provide a free version of the branding software so any business can utilize the tools and not have to be a marketing genius or devote a huge portion of the business revenue to marketing.

Located at 240 S. Plaza Way, Sho.ai has nine employees; the three founders live in Cape Girardeau (Rust, Thomas Belhacene and Michael Machiah), as well as six employees in the local office.

Rust added, “We have an extremely robust piece of software that we’re extremely proud about and we want to control costs to enable any business to compete in sharing their story.”

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