Ask HN: How much did you pay for your brand identity?
Aside from the ones that hacked somethinf together themselves: how much did you pay? What did you get? Was it worth it?
The foundations should exist so that you can easily develop this into an application or web style guide as well, and make 90% of your future design decisions from this foundational work.
The typical team (in the US) would charge about $15,000 – $100,000 (depending on the size of the client and scope of work). You're getting 1 person for a few weeks @ $15k, and a small team for 3-6 months on the high end.
You're not really paying for the individual pieces here. What you're really paying for is a lot of research, experimentation, development, and refinement. When you pay $100,000 for a world-class brand/identity, 90% of what you're really paying for is for very talented people to try things, fail, and discard them for something much better.
Funded startups with customers & product-market fit tend to go to the $25k-$50k range. That's not going to get you world-class, but it's going to get you "polished & consistent". You might do this again post- Series-A.
If you don't yet have customers (to research and understand), or product-market fit, invest much less. If you have these things, investing in branding will accelerate your marketing, and reduce the cost of future design. It's definitely worth it, and you're going to pay to have it done eventually, whether you explicitly hire someone to do it, or you let your designers frustratingly "figure it out" as they go.
Not establishing branding and identity work early is like allowing your programmers, as you hire them, to each make their own decisions as to what technologies they want to use. You wouldn't seriously invest in developing a large application without architecting it, and you don't design a large application without foundational branding and identity work to support that.
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!
So the design work is an important piece when starting. But it has to be backed up by product, and just as importantly, by service. The three together make up the identity with which people will associate your brand. Don't over-invest in one, while leaving the other two behind.
$100k invested into improving the product offering to better solve problems for the customer WILL "accelerate your marketing".
Better marketing beats better products most of the time so it's hardly wasted money and in fact may be a better way to spend some of your start-ups $ than to spend it just on development.
The original comment was about "branding", not marketing, as you appear to have misread.
And don't worry, I understand completely well how many talented professionals actually make money. You are illustrating the point nicely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_management
And will - when applied properly - definitely help promote the company's sales (contrary to your original comment).
When you pay $75k to a reputable agency for a branding package, you're paying their hourly rate * a number of hours dedicated to your project, and it's not unreasonable to spend 500 hours working on a branding project for a startup that can afford it. Realistically that's 3 people working on this as their "main project" for 2 months (comparable to short branding projects I've completed, with a small internal team, at companies from 50-100 people).
Just keep in mind, there are going to be dozens of concepts that are attempted (to a reasonable extent) along the way, and never make the cut. You're not paying them to have exactly one brilliant idea, complete all the supporting work / documentation, and then "turn it in". :)
(Note: I just picked a random number somewhere in the middle of what agencies seem to be charging. You could just as easily find one talented freelancer working part-time for a month for $10k - $15k & end up with a very polished result)
For the second version of the Twitch brand (Purple!), one year out and post-series-B: we had 3 designers on the Twitch brand, not quite full-time, for about 6-8 weeks. Plus a lot of Jacob's time. I'd estimate the total cost around $50-$100k to hire a high end design firm to do the same work.
In both cases, it was the right level of investment for Twitch at the time. Something quick and dirty to get us going in the first year, and something with some depth and quality once we had enough momentum to commit to a brand direction.
You were definitely fortunate to have the in-house expertise to execute on exactly what you needed, at exactly the time you needed it!
But what would you say was the drive that made you decide to go from Step A to B?
I guess I'm asking for tips (ignoring finances for the moment) as to when business/design wise you need to be looking at a larger and more involved option? Did the old design grow stale? Were you running into more real world use cases where you needed design elements that were missing originally? Or had the original just included more and more elements over time until it no longer seemed consistent?
After about a year, we had clear product momentum, so it was worth investing in a better brand design since we understood our direction and customers at that point well enough to do a good job that we wouldn't have to change later.
Edit: If any you decide to you use it, and are concerned about archiving of your kid quotes, I'll be adding an export button, so you can dump to JSON easily.
He worked iteratively, first going through some concepts, then based on our feedback worked and delivered several logo concepts, and a brand identity manual, several versions of the logo (for use in mobile devices, inverted versions, etc...), as well as fonts and a brand manual with.
- Basic logo use
- Typography
- Security area and sizes
- Color palette
- Best practices - using the logo correctly and incorrect uses
I worked for Aflac for over five years. That was an interesting experience and informs my view of this. I got a lot of insider info on how the company was established, created value, found ways to get market advantages and so forth. I also learned a fair amount of backstory behind their branding with the Aflac duck, the decision making process involved in that and so forth.
So, while designers and what not can play an important role in packaging your identity (aka "branding"), be careful with thinking about this as "buying your identity." That idea might go bad places and that might be part of why some folks here are kind of shooting down the idea of hiring designers and what not. If there isn't really anything to package, a beautiful package doesn't really do much for your business. First, you need a real product or service to offer. After that, you can add great packaging to enhance sales and mindshare and all that.
Brand Identity is definitely a defined service offering that is sold by individuals and agencies.
As someone in early bootstrapping stages, I want to develop some basic branding (colours, logo, sample applications etc) but I need to be realistic about budget. I'm happy to pay market rate and reduce the scope of what I'm after to to make it affordable.
Does anyone have experience striking the right balance of cost and quality?
I would also help to create an RFP, request for proposal or request for estimate so you outline what you are looking for, what you have, and then see if various contacts bite at all and give a proper estimate or itemization.
You can get a lot of ideas quickly from using the 99 designs type sites. Basically logo farms kind of pull stuff from their reserves and some of them might stick. You'll get plenty of garbage but I doubt you'll say it' was a waste because you'll probably get some great baseline ideas to work from. It's really affordable, though admittedly a bit exploitative. Still it's those group's choices that they want to participate / submit so it's not like you're forcing them to submit. Find a way to pay out so not to be too exploitative, hows that.
I tried to contact the owner, but I can't because of Whois privacy.
The anonimized email address must work by ICANN rules, so if it isn't there or working you can report the domain for faulty/incomplete whois data. I suppose reporting to the registrar first would be courteous, or you can go to ICANN directly:
https://forms.icann.org/en/resources/compliance/complaints/w...
"If the registrant knowingly provides inaccurate information, fails to update information within seven days of any change, or does not respond within 15 days to an inquiry about accuracy, the domain name may be suspended or cancelled."
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You can file a complaint at
https://forms.icann.org/en/resources/compliance/complaints/w...
and ICANN will follow up with the registrar, who will follow up with the registrant or cancel the registration. I'm pretty sure this is exactly the intended use: a domain squatter can't register a name and disappear completely.
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