Just an FYI to other commenters, Branding/Identity is design work (not just a name or domain name), typically resulting in versatile logo work, writing style guides, a tagline, typefaces, colors, visual language development, business cards, comprehensive print collateral, and a set of branding style guidelines.
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.
I'd say the design work is Step One in branding, but identity is a bigger picture. Using the standard example of Kleenex as branding so strong that it became a household word, they could redesign everything, but their identity is still solid. That is your final branding and identity goal.
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.
Meh. You provide a great strategy for keeping professional branding people and agencies in business, but not for growing the product company's sales. You are just confusing people.
$100k invested into improving the product offering to better solve problems for the customer WILL "accelerate your marketing".
God forbid other talented professionals charge rates compared to the value they bring to the table. Just imagine!
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.
Stop the presses! My apologies, I thought we were talking about product companies actually making money, not "talented professionals getting paid their 'value'".
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.
Just to clarify, I'm not talking about "lol client has $3m in funding, charge them at least $75,000".
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)
The first version of the Twitch brand, space-themed, was created by Jacob Woodsey (our only designer at the time and now owner of all social features at Twitch), in approximately 4 hours spread over the course of a single day. So probably equivalent to $1500 to get a high quality designer for a single day.
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.
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?
The first design was expedient: we needed something in order to launch the website. So we did a really minimal amount of work. It was never great -- nothing done in four hours can be great -- but it sufficed to be able to launch a product.
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.
$500 for https://kidisms.com pricey, but I wanted it for a cute family, and friends side project, and that was less than half of what they started asking. That was all there was to it.
Edit: If any you decide to you use it, and are concerned about archiving of your kid quotes, I'll be adding an export button, so you can dump to JSON easily.
Off topic: I had the exact same idea for a site, except a darker version. It was going to be thisfuckingkid.com and would be a collection of quotes, just like your site, but that all had to start with "This fucking kid...". I nearly registered the domain at 3am after a few sleepless hours of bouncing on an exercise ball trying to soothe my daughter when she rewarded/tested my patience by biting me instead of falling asleep.
We paid a local designer ( Alexis, http://www.retrieverfamily.com/#/ ) for our brand identity at https://keveo.tv/en/ (we were cheap and didn't pay him for the website, so he's not to blame), about U$ 500 but that's after he gave us a discount.
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 had an idea for a survival/outdoor/science themed website years ago. Brainstormed some names, found something available and bought http://www.survivalscout.com for $13 (and http://www.srvlsct.com for another $13). Worth it so far.
Not trying to be a jerk here, but: Identity is not something you purchase. Logos and all that are intended to communicate your identity, but your identity is who you are as a company and you cannot really buy that. (If you buy that, what are you? A puppet? A charlatan? I don't know.)
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.
You can pay for a stylist to buy your clothes or cut your hair, but it won't change whether or not you are a fashionable person. That's you and your personality and you can't pay for a service to change that. The same is being said of businesses with no substance in which to create identity out of.
This is really topical for me as I'm looking for answers to this question too.
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?
shop around locally, really investigate with phone calls what you can expect roughly.
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.
Not exactly what you are asking, but I found a great name/brand that sounds like if it had to be the name of a big corporation. Strangely enough, the .com is registered but not used, and there are no companies using that name.
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:
"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."
I just tried to send an email to the "Registrant Mail" and...
* ATTENTION *
This email is being returned to you because the remote server would not
or could not accept the message. The registeredsite servers are just
reporting to you what happened and are not the source of the problem.
The address which was undeliverable is in the section labeled:
"----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----".
The reason your mail is being returned to you is in the section labeled:
"----- Transcript of Session Follows -----".
This section describes the specific reason your e-mail could not be
delivered.
Please direct further questions regarding this message to your e-mail
administrator.
Registrants are required to have a working contact address and reply to, at least, communications from their own registrar in a timely fashion. They don't have to reply to everyone from the general public, but if you got a bounce, that's a good sign the email address is legit dead.
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.
As said below, the privacy email will definitely work, that's how I've obtained domains in the past. Whether they answer or not, is a completely different story :)
I just tried to email to the Registrant Mail and...
* ATTENTION *
This email is being returned to you because the remote server would not
or could not accept the message. The registeredsite servers are just
reporting to you what happened and are not the source of the problem.
The address which was undeliverable is in the section labeled:
"----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----".
The reason your mail is being returned to you is in the section labeled:
"----- Transcript of Session Follows -----".
This section describes the specific reason your e-mail could not be
delivered.
Please direct further questions regarding this message to your e-mail
administrator.
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!