Startup Plays #2: Minimum Viable Brand (MVB)
This post is part of a series called Imaan’s Startup Playbook.
Each post will cover one short, impactful startup ‘play’ that can be implemented in half a day or less.
These plays are most effective in early stage startups with less than 10 employees and less than £1m in funding.
Why?
Much like your core values statements, a minimum viable brand (MVB) document will become a core decision making tool for your marketing team, ensuring that any outgoing comms are kept on-brand and focus on the right customers.
This play is for startup founders with little to no design or branding expertise, with the aim of giving you the tools to do a good job on your brand through the use of free online resources and a process I’ve honed over several years.
This brand isn’t going to win awards, but it will be more than good enough to last your first few years as a business.
For every pound you don’t spend on branding, you have more money to put towards growth, and that should be your only aim at this stage.
If you haven’t written your core values statements for your company yet, it’s worth getting those out of the way before tackling this.
Once created, this MVB doc can be treated as your publicly facing value statements. Where values statements are generally shared internally, this document can be shared with investors, new customers, potential hires and media outlets who want to quickly get to grips with who you are as a business.
Equally, it will serve as a singular point of reference for your marketing team. If any potential outgoing comms don’t fit with your MVB docs, they should not be going out.
How?
There are no design skills required here!
To start, here’s a preview of what the output of this session should look like:
We will be utilising some great free design resources to get to this point as quickly and efficiently as possible, after which you can share the options with your team and network to decide on a final direction to go in.
So let’s get started.
This is what we’re aiming to achieve today:
- Choose a colour scheme
- Choose a logo
- Choose a typeface
- Enter them into the templates I’ll share with you
Ideally you will have also completed your values statements. We can create this MVB document without them, but it won’t be quite as useful without them (jump to the bottom of the page if you want to understand why).
We will then enter all of this information into a Sketch template I have created for you, and you’ll be done!
Don’t worry if you haven’t purchased Sketch, they offer a 30 day free trial, or you can upload the Sketch file into Figma, which is a free online tool.
Want some bonus brownie points?
I‘ve tried to keep this post as short and actionable as possible, but if your startup is particularly reliant on strong branding, I can’t recommend the Google Ventures 3-hour Brand Sprint enough.
The GV Brand Sprint doesn’t replace the work we’re doing here, but it will provide another level of depth to your decision making and give you with a longer term perspective on your branding.
What?
Step 1: Choosing a colour scheme
As I mentioned above, there are no design skills required here!
We’re going to apply a simple process for coming up with our colour scheme, and the decisions we make here will inform our logo and font pairing choices.
Heads up, this section is the longest section in the ‘How’ portion of this guide, the other two will go much, much faster.
If you are in a rush, you can pick 5 pre-made colour palettes from this page, and skip to the next step, but I strongly recommend taking the time to do your own.
The questions you ask yourself during this process will give you a deeper level of insight into how you want your business to be perceived by others, and that is invaluable.
Again, the other sections are much shorter.
The first decision we need to make is about the tone of your brand, which will lead us to choose one or two core colours that we are going to use to communicate that tone.
I never try to define the tone of a brand off the top of my head, I pick a starting point that I like by scrolling through the examples listed on these three pages (1, 2, 3).
The pages are incredibly long, but you’ll quickly find yourself skimming through them at speed and picking out the images that stand out to you.
That being said, each page is broken down into sections by colour, and they all provide some notes on the emotions each colour evokes and how they can be used effectively, so it’s worth giving those a read.
Once you’ve picked at least 10 images, share them with your team and ask them which ones evoke the kind of emotions you’d like to associate with your brand.
You can make the decision yourself if you’re in a rush, but I promise the end result won’t be as good.
Once you’ve got your feedback, break out the top 5 images, and they will form the basis of the 5 colour schemes we’re going to create.
At the end of this guide we’ll apply all 5 colour schemes to the template I’ve created, and you’ll be able to share it around to make a final decision which branding to use.
To generate our colour scheme and fill out any extra colours we need we’re going to use the Coolors colour scheme generator, created by Adobe.
Be sure to read through the onboarding steps that show on screen once you click ‘Start the generator!’, it only takes a few seconds to read through and they’re very useful.
You can either manually pick out the base colours that are important to you, or use the photo upload button to import a colour scheme from the 5 images you chose earlier.
Coolors will provide you with a unique, sharable link for each colour scheme you generate, or you can create an account to save them for later.
Again, read the onboarding tutorial that shows on screen. It will explain how to use the tool in great detail, it’s very simple once you understand how.
If any of the colour schemes seem out of place to you, lock in the colours you like and randomly generate the remaining colours until you’re happy with the colour scheme.
Once you’ve done that for all 5 of your base images, you have your 5 base colour schemes 🎉
I’d recommend downloading an imageversion of each of the 5 colour schemes and saving them in a folder called ‘Brand’, it will speed things up later. You do this using the ‘Export’ button.
As promised, the other stages of this guide will go much faster. We’ll be done soon.
Step 2: Choosing a logo
Hatchful is a great resource for creating a first-try logo. Their simple app guides you through the process step by step, giving you a selection of logos to choose from. It really couldn’t be simpler.
If you don’t like the results you get, be sure to go back and change some of the things you put into the logo generator, and you’ll get a new set of logos to choose from.
If your business is heavily brand reliant, or you have a specific brand style in mind that you want someone to bring to life, you could pay someone on 99designs to design a logo for you.
There is not a lot of value in going to a logo designer and asking them to come up with any kind of logo for you at such an early stage, but if the logo part of a brand message you’re trying to convey to your customer, it’s worth having a professional bring it to life for you.
However you made your logo, save it in your ‘Brand’ folder.
If the tool you uses offers different sizes and formats to download in, download every option.
As a side-note, it’s worth creating a favicon from your logo, it’ll come in handy when we get around to building your landing page in another guide.
Step 3: Choosing a font pairing
The last step is choosing a font pairing.
There are two great tools I use for this:
FontPair is great if you have no idea what you’re doing when it comes to font choice.
They make all the choices for you, and all of the text on the page is editable so you can see what your header font and tagline look like in each font pair.
On the other hand, FontJoy takes a similar approach to Coolors.
If you know what font you want for your headline font, you nail that part down, and the app will generate great matching fonts for you.
The fonts you pick are going to be heavily influenced by the colour scheme and logos you’ve selected, so there’s going to less guidance here, but I will provide some guidelines to follow:
Here is a quick overview of different styles of font. If you’re new to fonts, you’ll need to give this a quick skim to understand rest of the guidelines.
If your colour palette is made up of cooler colours (blues, dark greens) start by checking out Sans-Serif/Sans-Serif font combinations.
Cooler colours tend to be for more professional, business-like brands, and the SS/SS combo does the same on the font side.
The opposite would be true for ‘hot’ colours like red, so I’d look for big bold fonts, maybe Slab Serifs or Stencils.
Warm colours like yellow come somewhere in between.
If you’re looking for a modern look without looking too playful, try a Serif header font with a Sans Serif font for your body text.
Finally, if you’re going for a more playful or consumer focused brand, check out some Script or Display type fonts, or even a Stencil style font.
Be careful with Stencil style fonts though, while they can look appealing, they quickly become hard to read if used heavily. Definitely for headings only!
There are just guidelines. They are not solid design principles you’ll hear from your graphic designer, they are shortcuts to making a good decision that I’ve come up with after applying this process dozens of times.
Aaaaand you’re done! 🎉
Now get your font families downloaded and installed so we can finish this off.
If you’re using FontPair, each pairing has a download link you can click on.
If you’re using FontJoy, click on the name of the font on the left hand side of the page, which will take you to a Google Fonts page where there is a ‘Download family’ button in the top right.
You can install fonts on either Mac or Windows by simply double clicking the font files, which have extensions the extensions .otf or .ttf.
Step 4: Putting it all together
You’ve done all the hard work, this is the easy bit!
All you have to do is to replace the fonts, logo and colours in this Sketch template with the ones you’ve chosen:
You’ll be left with 5 possible branding templates that you can share with your team, customers, investors and whoever else might have an opinion.
Pick one, and you’re good to go!
If you’ve also completed my values statements exercise, I’ve also created a second template where you can enter your final branding decisions, alongside your values statements.
Comprehensive MVB Sketch Template
This will leave you with a comprehensive branding document that communicates both your business values and brand values at the same time
Play #2, complete! 🎉
What next?
You might have found that the values statements you’ve written don’t feel like something you’re comfortable sharing with people outside your company.
This is completely normal as they weren’t written in that context, but this is a good opportunity to think a bit deeper into them and iterate on them.
Focusing on keeping the message the same, while making the copy more easily palatable is the best way to iteratively improve your copy.
Once you have one document that you can send without hesitation to proudly show off everything that’s great about your company, from the problems it solves to the emotions it evokes, you will feel a large weight fall from your shoulders.
Your mission is set and you have everything you need to keep a laser focus on completing it.
If you can’t get to that point, it is worth going out and getting some outside feedback on why you feel that way. It might be insecurity, or it might be that there are some holes in your plan that need addressing. Resolving either is important, it will make you a better founder and a better manager.
The next play to check out will cover how to create an effective landing page or short pitch deck that will become the foundation of your marketing materials.
Once it’s published, I’ll link it right here :)
I help founders optimise their business processes across product, sales, marketing, dev and ops, freeing up man-hours and extending runway.
If that sounds like the kind of help you need, click here.
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