How to define your startup’s brand identity

When launching a new project, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is spending too much time defining your brand identity.

As a founder, one of your first tasks is to find a company name. But don't worry too much about defining your brand identity right away, because when you're just starting out, your company is just an idea.

What's important at this stage is figuring out if your idea is viable, and if it actually solves a problem people have. Until you reach that point, don’t bother working on your brand identity more thoroughly.

Brand identity is different from positioning. A clear positioning is crucial for potential customers to understand what you do and how you can help them. But your logo and name aren’t as important at this stage.

Here's the process we used to create our first identity:

• We wanted a unique name, with a .com extension that was available, so that we didn’t spend thousands of dollars to buy it back in case of success.
• We used a few domain name generators with keywords related to our tool: “Document”, “Doc”, “Docu”, and “File”.
• We looked for names that would help people understand what we do. After shortlisting a few names in the list, we quickly polled our friends, and they chose Superdocu.com -
• We defined a color palette for our tool using a palette generator as well.
• For the logo and font - it was just a quick photoshop. I don't think you need one right away. You can always design it later when your company has gained more traction and you have a better understanding of the problem you want to solve and your audience. If you still want one, I’ll list resources in the comments.

Lesson: positioning is essential, but brand identity isn't as important at first.

Here are a few tools to find your own domain name:
→ https://cunningbot.com
→ https://instantdomainsearch.com/domain/generator
→ https://www.godaddy.com/domains/domain-name-generator
→ https://www.shopify.com/tools/domain-name-generator/

To define a color palette:
→ Coolors (https://coolors.co/ - my fave)
→ https://mycolor.space/
→ http://colormind.io/
→ https://huemint.com/

To create your logo:
→ Logology (https://www.logology.co/) is great, as it bridges the gap between automatically generated logos and manual work by a professional designer.
→ You could also use Fiverr, ComeUp, or other outsourcing platforms, but in my experience, results are disappointing (you pay for what you get!)
→ “AI” logo generators also yield disappointing results

Font pairing:
→ https://fontjoy.com/