[malandrew]

I can't upvote this enough.

I know a few of the true stories behind the original logos of some of SV's unicorns and this is spot on (unfortunately, I cannot share them because they were shared in confidence). The parent comment is not wrong about the value of a great brand, but it can easily become a huge frivolous distraction after a certain point when you're should be focusing on building something useful for people in their daily lives. You can always perform a full brand refresh later once you can afford to spend a few months and lots of money to do so, and that's exactly what many unicorns eventually do.

I've seen outside designers rationalize some of these well known brands after the fact without knowing the inside and often accidental story and its comical. It's brand design. Like all the other components of a great company and great product, it's contributory like engineering and customer service, but it's not like you're solving World peace. For some products/services and target markets, the brand may be very important. For others, it could be non-consequential. "Worse is better" and "perfect is the enemy of done" apply to brand design as much as in any other aspect. Like other aspects you can always iterate and improve later.

[jiblylabs]

Totally. I think there is plenty of value in design and brand work. The types of startups that don't have the money, or need to get a professional designer to help them out aren't the types of customer any designer would want in the first place. So free resources like these simply fill the gap to make sure startups don't waste $5 on fiverr for crap, instead get something much nicer for free. WHen they have the money and are seeing their company get traction, their brand becomes important and they'll naturally shift towards designers. I think the company behind this resource understands that. bravo.