How To Make Your Startup look like a million bucks

So you operate a startup in your basement, or friend basement, or maybe you even have enough money to splurge on a shared working space - great. Nothing is more challenging then creating a WHOLE business out of thin air...which is what you are doing.

While you may be scrappy, without funding, and/or generally as adept at design as a preschooler to quantum physics - here are the cliff notes to getting your company looking like its in the big leagues.

Design Consistency

This boils down to 2 things.

1. How EVERYTHING in your brand looks

2. How EVERYTHING in your brand feels

Too many founders wait too long to focus on branding. The reality is they don’t have time not to. take this step now: Invest the time to clearly articulate a set of standards for every message that leaves your office. No point is too small — even the order of the words you use in your tagline matters.

Here's what NOT to do:

• If you are not a design-oriented founder, don't throw together a logo yourself.

• think that you can wing your fundamental branding design yourself. Even if you do, you should still get a designer to review everything and/or optimize all elements needed.

• Operate without branding guidelines.

And here's what you SHOULD DO:

• Gather the foundations of the following yourself, or just hire someone to get you squared away with a logo, color palate, typefaces/fonts that can go the distance

• Put these elements into a google doc and clearly describe them, so you can send this to other people as your company grows (which is the intention!)

• Use the following guide LINK HERE for creating a Brand Book

Start With Strong Basics

Now that you have detailed out your foundational brand book, now lets think about the following:

• What's the emotion that the elements of your brand inspire — from your logo to your elevator pitch to the way you sign customer service emails?

• Turn your brand into a person - perhaps a celebrity or historical figure. The goal is to arrive at a framework and an easy shorthand that a team can use for branding gut checks as the company starts to grow rapidly.

• Eventually, your brand will be intimately familiar to you; making the right decisions will be second nature. This is also a product of strict consistency.

The majority of founders believe that their brand will grow up alongside them, so they can afford to look and speak and sound like a young, early-stage company — and that they’ll inevitably evolve. Yes, your brand is almost certain to change down the line, but if you have a strong sense of what you want to build in the world, why not stop playing small ball with your brand?

• Your Name

• Your Logo

• Your One Line Pitch

• Your Boilerplate

Need Tips on how to create the above? Check out these information resources:

Naming 101

Creating an effective logo

How to Nail your One-line Pitch

Creating a Boilerplate pitch statement that Rocks

Consider Every Touchpoint

Consider how your brand interacts with every single touchpoint, including the below:

• Your Customers

Make sure that your brand extends through every customer touchpoint, from your support responses to your error messages. Canned responses don’t have to sound canned. “Make them feel warm and human. Write a funny 404 page if that’s in line with your identity. Even dead ends should feel like you,

• Your Investors

For this audience, the goal is to show focus. To show that you know the problem you’re solving and how to solve it. You're not building a Swiss Army knife; you're building the best freaking steak knife to solve that problem. When you define your one-liner and your boilerplate, keep in mind that your investors will be a main audience for those.

• The Press

When it comes to getting all-important press coverage, the landscape is harder than ever. Tech outlets rarely cover basic funding announcements anymore, and fledgling companies may not have the cache to command a lot of attention when they launch. So, if you do get in front a reporter, that makes it even more important to know your central message and how you want to project your brand in a short amount of time — backward and forward.

• Your Employees

People underestimate how influential brand can be in the recruiting process,” Ziegler says. She cautions founders not to get lazy. Competition for top talent is fierce; make your brand an asset to help attract candidates. For starters, make your job reqs stand out. Read whoever you consider your competitors to be, read their job reqs and figure out how to be better, more fun, more human. Think of small, memorable things you can do during the hiring and onboarding process that can define your company.