Blog: How to brand your startup

contents/blog/brand.md

@@ -0,0 +1,161 @@
+---
+date: 2024-08-28
+title: How to brand your startup so it isn't boring
+rootPage: /blog
+sidebar: Blog
+showTitle: true
+hideAnchor: true
+featuredImage: >-
+  https://res.cloudinary.com/dmukukwp6/image/upload/brand_startup_1aa2b151d6.png
+featuredImageType: full
+author:
+  - james-hawkins
+tags:
+- CEO diaries
+- Culture
+- Marketing
+- Growth
+crosspost:
+- Blog
+- Founders
+---
+
+The world would be more fun if most startups hadn't undergone a personality vasectomy.
+
+Be it the human instinct for conformity, or the inevitable groupthink of similar people solving similar problems, the majority of the world's software companies feel samey.
+
+There's no shortage of excuses for this. First, you want to get the Minimum Viable Product built and validated. Next, you need to make money; you're going to fail without it.
+
+Creating a pretty website won't help with either, right?
+
+Wrong.
+
+## "What would stop _me_ from using this thing?"
+
+This was the most important conversation [Tim](/community/profiles/27730) and I had before launching PostHog.
+
+It was going to be free on launch day, but we knew users would still be wary of wasting their time deploying a piece of software produced by a two-person startup. 
+
+Being open source helped. People could inspect the code for themselves, but we concluded the majority would turn away _at_ the website, the docs, and the readme before glancing at a line of code.
+
+That's why we set out to create a website and brand that felt both unique and intentional, including a [public handbook](/handbook) that explained what we were doing, why, and how.
+
+As a counter example, an obviously templated or one-pager style website signals:
+
+1. **The product may not be secure.** If a startup doesn't care about having their own website design, will they care about security? A lack of demonstrated competence shows a lack of attention to detail.
+
+2. **The team behind the product isn't very strong.** The product probably won't improve quickly, or become a "must use" tool. Those startup launches that everyone hears about? They've put energy into their appearance.
+
+3. **The product may not exist in a few more weeks.** Why should a potential customer invest time in a product if it's obvious the team making it threw its website together in a day, or ripped it from an existing template?
+
+So, as frustrating as it might be to spend extra time and effort on something "superficial" like a website, remember you're providing your product to human beings. Everyone judges books by their covers.
+
+## Your company needs to stand for something
+
+Take these two examples of missions for PostHog:
+
+* Open-source product analytics
+* We equip every developer to build successful products
+
+There is a trade-off between the two.
+
+The first is very clear. We started with it when this is what we had.
+
+As we became more well-known, and as we added lots of products into our platform, we shifted to the latter mission. It's a better reflection of _why_ our company exists – it's more than just a piece of software. 
+
+We introduced it because the company was getting larger, and the scope of what we were setting out to achieve had expanded. We now have 8+ products, and we produce a ton of content to help engineers build better products.
+
+Clarity and simplicity was useful in the early days, but sacrificing some of that clarity helped us stand for something broader that gives us more purpose.
+
+## You need to create your brand for someone...
+
+One of the most important things we did was to [create an Ideal Customer Profile](/newsletter/ideal-customer-profile-framework).
+
+When we launched, we weren't sure quite how focused we'd need to be on engineers versus product managers. After launching, we realized that we could go all-in on engineers and technical founders, who now make up around 80% of our users. Our brand and product has become more oriented towards these users as a result.
+
+![posthog icp](https://res.cloudinary.com/dmukukwp6/image/upload/v1710055416/posthog.com/contents/images/newsletter/icp/posthog-icp.png)
+
+Here are some ways we got more specific for this audience after we zeroed-in on it:
+
+* We added API examples to our website.
+
+* We added a "you'll hate PostHog if" section to our homepage, which calls out many pet hates that engineers have when trying to buy, install and use more traditionally-targeted software that they are made to implement.
+
+* We chose a more flexible pricing model – it's far more complex, but it's [much better value](/blog/analytics-pricing). We felt more technical people would be happier than non-technical people coping with more complexity to get a better deal. We want developers to be able to manage their spend with us across our eight products, not a "single price".
+
+* In the product, we worked on [SQL access](/docs/hogql), so technical people could get to the underlying data and debug things.
+
+* We [redesigned our entire UX](/blog/posthog-as-a-dev-tool) to have higher information density, dark mode and more flexibility.
+
+## ...but your brand must be a reflection of _you_
+
+We have often been impressed at the level of polish that others can achieve.
+
+Quoting [Cory](/community/profiles/30200), our lead designer: "We aren't the best in the world at being polished, but we can be the best in the world at being ourselves".
+
+We sometimes make business decisions based on who we are, and what we want to do – not always what may, for example, generate the most revenue growth.
+
+For instance, initially we planned to have an open core model. We'd offer open-source software, and some people in big enterprises, would self-host and pay for the party for everyone else. 
+
+![you will hate posthog if](https://res.cloudinary.com/dmukukwp6/image/upload/you_will_hate_posthog_683b1bf3ab.png)
+
+We felt this would work as there was no real competition, whereas in cloud we had lots of competitors with over $100m in annual revenue. However, we simply love shipping new features, and after our first hackathon, we wound up with session replay (i.e. a new feature big enough to be its own product), which took off, and this resulted in a multi-product approach. 
+
+As a result, we could compete in cloud by being way wider than everyone else. Eventually, we removed our paid, self-hosted offering entirely, and went all in on multi-product in cloud, focused on "getting in first" with earlier-stage companies instead of the largest enterprises. Our motivation, ambition and growth all took off as a result. 
+
+And yes we kept the open-source product, though we stress it's for hobbyists because it's cheaper and easier for companies to have us host if for them.
+
+## Your brand isn't just your website...
+
+...it's how your company is experienced by others. Your _company_ is your product and:
+
+* How much you invest in each function in your company relative to each other.
+* What you look for when you hire people, and it's the process you use to hire with.
+* How you decide what to build. Do you ship features early, or do you focus on meeting the needs of your largest customer with every new thing?
+* How much you are design vs. engineering vs. product vs. sales vs. marketing-led. How many people are in each function, but also your processes for deciding what to work done.
+* The frequency and style with which you email your customers, for marketing, product updates or your activation flow.
+* The kind of people you hire into customer success or sales.
+* The background experience of those in your marketing team.
+* The tone of voice on your website.
+* Who is on your board.
+* How your pricing works.
+* How your social media works.
+* How helpful you are to random founders that message you.
+* The marketing channels you pick.
+* What you talk about in your blog. I'm writing this piece for brand reasons (transparency / equipping developers with knowledge to build successful products), nothing else. I don't care or try to generate conversions from this post, I just want to leave an impression on people. And it's who I am – I'm writing this to pass the time on a long plane journey.
+
+## You can't 80:20 everything
+
+A lot of design or brand work has an _increasing_ marginal return. This is because a great brand's purpose is that you stand out. You do _not_ stand out by being average!
+
+So, if you're serious, go nuts on your brand. Go weirdly hard.
+
+To give you an example, we built a [merch store](/merch):
+
+* We started with me emailing users for their address and size, ordering merch and having it delivered to my house, and me then posting it internationally to them. [Do things that don't scale](https://paulgraham.com/ds.html).
+
+* Next, we set up a store on Shopify. I just threw our logo onto an amusingly wide selection of items – PostHog shower curtain, anyone? It was cool to just have merch for sale and a way of giving it.
+
+* Then we created custom components and built it into our website directly, so it's perfectly integrated.
+
+* Then we booked a photo shoot and took custom photos of our team wearing everything.
+
+* Now we're working on limited editions of certain items to create collectible series of t-shirts
+
+Who knows what happens next!
+
+This single thing is easy enough to copy, but it's just one activity among hundreds that builds a brand.
+
+![merch store](https://res.cloudinary.com/dmukukwp6/image/upload/merch_store_a97f57c226.png)
+
+## Doesn't this imply doing everything to a really high standard and a ridiculous workload?
+
+Yes. You can be iterative with it, though. Not everything was amazing on day one, but we keep improving and tweaking everything over time.
+
+So get out there, and be bold
+
+If your brand isn't going to turn off some people that _might_ have bought your product, then it isn't strong enough to stand out.
+
+Engage your best customers with your brand, and put off your worst ones.
+
+<NewsletterForm />