Startups and Brand Staging

Minimum Viable Brands and making the right impression on the fundraising trail

This is for all you startup founders out there, building your first (or fifth) idea into something meaty, something crafted and fund-able. Your world is moving fast, and there are a thousand things to focus on every day. Brand identity is just one of them, but it’s wonderfully visual and tangible, and it’s fun to dress up your baby.

But how important is it really, at least here in the early days? This is a look at the realities of what you do/don’t need as you gear up to go raise that cash. How important is your startup’s brand identity, really?

MVB — The Minimum Viable Brand

Lots of people have talked about process and specific steps for the creation of an MVB, a Minimum Viable Brand, which is meant to give you exactly and only what you need to get started — but most of those constructs feel narrow and inflexible. There’s never a one-size-fits-all answer in business, or in design. Instead of a set of instructions to follow, I like to think about this early brand development as “Brand Staging”, and it can take many forms in many scenarios.

There isn’t one correct way to accomplish it, but there is a mindset that can help guide you towards the right version of a v1 brand/MVB for your unique set of circumstances as a startup. Stay flexible, ask questions of your designer along the way to make sure the things you’re creating are solving a problem for you, and weed out any effort that isn’t tightly tied to your fundraising strategy.

Everything should have a reason for existing at this stage. If it doesn’t, it’s superfluous and will likely distract from more important things, like convincing VCs that your concept is overflowing with the potential for huge returns.

Startups and Brand Identity — What do you actually need?

It’s important to think strategically about what’s important, versus what’s exciting. A two month branding engagement, even if you line it up for cheap (or for free, which is more doable than you might think), is a two month distraction from more important things. Less exciting, more important things. Ask yourself if this big logo and launch campaign project is really critical now, pre-funding, pre-revenue. Or is it something that feels startup-y and founder-y and fun, but is really a hiding place for an otherwise unresolved concept or business model?

This is primarily about focus. There will be a time for a full-on branding project, but it’s not now. Not before your concept is vetted, and the VC world has shown confidence that there’s money to be made. So then, what are the core branding assets that you actually need, and how can you check those boxes without over-indexing on their importance?

In my experience, startups on their way into a round of fundraising need just a handful of brand components from their designer or agency partner:

01 A name
Your name is your primary identifier. It’s how you’ll be remembered, with or without anything else that follows on his list below. It should be woven throughout your pitch, and when someone says your name in the VC office after you’ve left, the rest of the team should instantly connect it to you and your concept. It should be short (4 or fewer syllables, 1–2 if possible — if it’s 5 or more, the market will force a nickname or acronym), and it’d be nice if you can find a not-awful URL.

But I’m guessing you haven’t gone through the USPTO and trademarking process yet, and if not (which is fine), I’d encourage you to be 100% ready for your name to evolve in the future. Come up with something good for now — something memorable in front of VCs, and with a conceptual tie to what you do — but know that the naming process is complicated and will need to include experts and lawyers before your go-to-market name is settled.

02 A simple logo or logotype
As a designer, I want your logo to be world class and remembered for all time. But VCs don’t care. Whatever you show them instantly falls into the ‘we can change/fix that later’ category, especially considering your name is likely to change. Your first logo should be simple, memorable, and maybe just a logotype (text-only, no fancy graphics).

I tell startup founders all the time that a contemporary font (see Google fonts for a huge free library of fonts) with Initial Caps is probably all they need. Choose a color that you can lean into, and you’re done. This is all you need today. It won’t take you far, but it’ll get you to the next stage. You have a lot to learn about the role your logo will play in your brand, and the coolest concept on day 1 will likely not hold up strategically in the future. And that’s OK. None of this is critical yet.

03 Key imagery explaining your concept
This is far more important than your visual identity, especially if your startup concept is technical, scientific, complex in any way. Your quest for funding relies on your ability to clearly explain your idea, how it works, and why it’ll matter to customers. If it takes you 5 slides to explain your idea, it’s either too complicated, or you don’t understand it yourself just yet.

If you work with a designer on one thing, I’d recommend it be this — a single graphic, well crafted and clear, that shows the heart of your concept and how it works. This could be a product schematic, a user journey, a rendering, a cause/effect tied to the industry you’ll serve. If you’re an engineer, your diagrams probably aren’t clear enough, even if they’re accurate. Work with a designer to make this key asset clear as day.

04 Consistent use of fonts
The consistent use of fonts really communicates a single thing: that you’ve bothered to craft your pitch deck because you appreciate order and the viewing experience of your audience. More fonts = less cohesion. Pick one font, something clean and contemporary, not too stylized (this will be a distraction), and set all text in your deck in that font. Play with scale, accent colors, all-caps, bold/thin, but shoot for 3–4 overall styles, and don’t go crazy.

There’s nothing that looks less designed than an explosion of font combinations and typographic variety. It feels disjointed and scattered, and communicates a lack of confidence in the ideas you’re presenting, even if just subconsciously.

05 Consistent use of color
At this stage, you should have a very simple color palette that functions for your needs. This too will change going forward, but for now, think about color personality and minimalism. More than a few colors, and you’ve got the jelly bean effect — and just like the too-many-fonts issue, you can look unsure and unsophisticated if you pack too many colors into too many things. Minimalism and restraint in color communicates confidence.

Pick a black or very dark color for all of your longer form text — anything more than a sentence, and put it on white backgrounds. Contrast is key here. Yellow on white is never effectively legible. Green on red is also very hard to read, and will shout “Christmas!” (there are lots of these little watch-outs, which will be instinctual to your designer).

I recommend that you look at your top 5 competitors (don’t say you don’t have any because your idea is so new), jot down the main brand colors they’re using, and pick something different. We see everything by contrast — black text on white is easy to read, and a blue brand stands out in an industry where all of the competitors’ brands are red.

06 A well-crafted pitch deck
There are thousands of resources for how best to put together your pitch deck. Content and storytelling are critical in this meeting — make sure your idea has value, then make sure the value is clear in your deck. You can work with your team to figure out how to present your financial projections (these are also largely ignored by VCs), and you can write the perfect team slide and show how well you know your audience and on and on. Maybe you have an external copywriter or a good writer on your team to make sure language is used efficiently. All of these things need to be strong on a content level before design comes into the equation.

But once you’re there, work with a presentation designer to ensure that the content is well organized visually, your fonts and colors and layout details are clean and consistent, and please let them clean up the graphics and photos that you’ve dropped into your draft! Your designer will turn your pile of messy brilliance into something that VCs can quickly and easily understand. A poorly designed deck can torpedo your meeting, even when your idea is solid, and you can’t let a messy presentation be the thing that ends your startup journey. If VCs get confused or distracted or annoyed during your pitch, they’ll tune out and you’ve lost them.

You’re not working with a designer to make an art project, you’re working with them to nail the communication of your concept. Their design should get out of the way of your ideas, and if they’re good, they’ll have an amazing impact on the end result. Also, pick a platform like Google Slides, Powerpoint or Keynote that you’re comfortable in, and plan for the process of future edits up front. A perfectly crafted deck that you can’t edit is just a useless old deck once the next meeting is set, and you need to make changes.

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All of the above should be well-considered and executed at a high level, but with the understanding that these will all be replaced by something smarter and more strategic in the near future. These things need to help you to get to the next level, but they don’t need to last very long.

What can wait?

Your website, your launch campaign, press releases, your positioning and messaging platforms, the brand book, video content, working tech demos, social media channels and followers, extensions off of your core idea… all of those things are distractions in the very early days, and a lot of them cost money that you don’t yet have to spend. Priority numero uno is your concept and its viability in the marketplace. Can this idea generate revenue? Do we see a pathway to or towards scalable revenue and profit? Nail that down first, secure some funding, then get strategic about which bells and whistles (including your brand) are needed to get you to the next stage in your startup journey.

An aside — your company values and mission should be thought through early on. They may not end up in the deck, but they’re likely to at least come up in conversation. VCs are vetting your concept, but they’re also (primarily) vetting you as a founder. They want to know what you stand for, why you’re doing this in the first place. You don’t need to whip up some fluff about saving the world, unless you’re really saving the world — but you should have some core values that will be transposed into your business, and your brand, in the future. VCs want to know what makes you tick. This is your personal brand, in a way, and it’s very important that you’re not stumped by these questions at the conference table.

What v1 of your brand actually identity communicates to investors

They’re not looking for something ready for prime time. In some ways, if you’re too fancied up with your branding, it could come off as misguided or a distracted effort. Why does your brand look so amazing before you’ve figured out what you’re selling, and how/where people will find you? The best logo and visual identity system ever created is useless if your concept is a me-too and carries zero potential. But that doesn’t mean branding holds no weight in the process — it just needs to be flying at the right altitude for the stage you’re in.

Consider if this is a brand-forward concept, or if branding will be secondary? Does your success with VCs rely on your ability to show brand sophistication? That probably depends on the space you’re in. Branding plays wildly different roles in ingredient tech vs consumer product or digital platform concepts. Know where your concept falls, and how branding plays into your planning.

Safe to say, they’ll look at your branding in that first pitch deck and they’ll know it’s destined for a redesign. It’s not THE brand identity. It’s not THE logo. It’s an expression of where you are now, and how you think about brand and visual identity as a founder.

At the very least, your handling of your startup brand communicates your level of sophistication. Do you appreciate the importance of aesthetics? Of clarity in design, messaging, overall communication? Can you talk about how your brand will contribute to your business’ future success? Can you articulate how it will evolve over time? Do you understand your audiences, and how they respond to other brands in your competitor set? Preparing to answer these questions about branding is more valuable than the actual v1 branding you put on screen for your startup.

Your brand will evolve

So will your product, your business plan, your name, your go-to-market strategy. If you’re expecting anything in the pre-seed days to stick, get ready to let go and loosen up. VCs know it, and you probably do too, if you’ve been through anything like this before. Whatever you bring to that first table, don’t let it be precious to you. You’re not there yet. Neither were these guys (all real!):

Staging your brand

The housing metaphor: this is like staging an empty house with furniture and decor when you’re getting ready to put it on the market. You don’t want it to be empty or lifeless, because you want potential buyers to be able to imagine themselves living in that space. There’s some risk involved in taking a position on style and decor — it may or may not be perfectly aligned with the potential buyer’s aesthetics, but it will communicate your level of taste and standards of quality. They know it will change, and you know it will change, but we’re painting a picture of a potential future state, and we need it to capture the right vibe at this stage in the process.

Through your initial design work and branding elements, you’re painting a picture of what your startup could be in the (funded) future. It’s a jump forward in time, a preview, of what this business could be in the marketplace when it’s up and humming. Style is important — it should feel right for the style of your industry (the construction and style of the house, in this metaphor), but it should feel fresh and progressive. It should be aspirational, and it should inspire.

In some ways, your v1 branding is just a sales tool — and what you’re selling in the early days is your concept, and yourself as an entrepreneur. By thinking of branding as ‘staging’, you can make some smart decisions based on your audience (VCs, not your eventual end users) — what is it that they’re buying? What picture can you paint for them, through design and branding, that gets them excited about the potential of the startup you’re building/pitching? Nobody thinks this will be the final brand, but the right aesthetics, and the right sophistication, can work wonders.

For Designers

Can you play the long game with pre-seed startups? If they only need a few things, and we know those assets are not going to last particularly long, we can do the work quickly. Delayed compensation? Commitments on future work? If you don’t need extra cash for your design business right now, this is an opportunity to help people step-up to the next level—where they will eventually need more robust branding work, and they will also have the funding to afford it (you).

For Startups

Stay focused on what’s important, and use branding and design to show what this could become. It’s not precious (yet), and it will evolve over time — like all strategic assets — as the landscapes shift and your concept evolves and expands. Good luck!