Open Sourced Our Internal Brand Book
by Sahil LavingiaWe put a lot of thought and care into our "brand" at Gumroad.
As a product-first person, it took me a while to wrap my head around what that even meant. But we do a great job now, and I'm excited to open source our internal brand book in an effort to help others!
There are three major parts I'd like to share here, and the rest is linked to at the end of this post:
- Why we exist
- How we talk
- How we act
Why we exist
The through line that aligns everything that we spend our time, money, and stress on.
How we talk
Striking the right balance between the tone that makes us unique and the credibility we need to convey.
(10 examples of each tip linked to at the end!)
How we act
Guiding principles for how we work on a day to day basis that will help build a strong brand in the long run.
I hope that was helpful! It was something I learned from Travis Nichols and the many other Gumroadians who worked on it. I've even used it to help refine my own message. There's more strategy than you may think!
View our Gumroad Brandbook
View the original Twitter thread
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This is really useful for indie businesses as they grow/mature.
I passed it onto the team Ministry of Testing as I know this is something they haven't really had the chance to tackle in detail yet.
One of the biggest challenges I've had growing Ministry of Testing is communicating and transferring over the culture and the guidelines of who I was trying to be towards a team of 10 staff (+ other freelancers). I've found it pretty crucial for our growth and to maintain our ethos and brand. It's hard moving everything from the founder's brain over towards the team.
We've lacked on many things, which I've regretted in hindsight. I wish I had spent more time trying to be clear and strict in who the company is. This is especially hard with new people and freelancers.
I'm always looking at how others are doing things, it helps me learn and generate ideas. I copy where appropriate and appreciate it when people just openly share things for the benefit of all.
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Wow! This is really great. Thanks for sharing, always a pleasure hearing from entrepreneurs who are running a company with a big team.
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Thanks for sharing!
I think there is a small part missing about openness and sharing publicly information about the roadmap.
For me, as an author, would be nice to know if and when specific features are coming. For example at the moment the only withdrawal method worldwide is PayPal, I would prefer to know, when reading the gumroad documentation, why, when and if swift bank withdrawals will be available.
Currently I don't know how open Gumroad is when it comes to the product itself (I know it's open when it comes to earnings and other numbers).
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That falls outside of our brand book. We do open up our roadmap and board meetings but those decisions were made more recently so we haven’t had a chance to update the brand book to include those decisions.
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Cool, always like this openness. Also, I plan to use Gumroad for selling my upcoming book ;).
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Love it @sahil. Can I leave my 2 cents here (unsolicited advice, sry) -> Can you have someone from the team compress those images (tinypng.com or similar) on notion? It takes ages to load :D :D
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Apologies for being anal here but as far as I can see you haven't "open sourced" your internal brand book as I can see no "source" in any of your links.
You appear to have just published your internal brand book!?
Please correct me if I am wrong.
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It’s a PDF so there’s not really any “source” beyond the images. Would you like the illustrator file?
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"Open sourcing" code for a product and "publishing" code for a product are identical, no? Seems like a distinction without a difference. Of course this isn't literally code, but I believe the point is that an internal brand book itself is the source of a company's brand.
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Not to be too pedantic, but from the first sentence on Wikipedia: "Open source products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product," and I believe you have permission to use this document.
I get that you would like this to be more interactive, or on GitHub, which is fine. But when people take the time to share their internal documents on IH, let's be supportive instead of discouraging them by complaining that it's not enough or nitpicking the definition of open source. I'd prefer IH not turn into Hacker News…
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@csallen apologies if it came across that way, that was certainly NOT my intent. I wholeheartedly agree that we need more sharing and openness in the world which is exactly why i was trying to gently show the distinction.
The same wiki article states... "Confusion persists about this completely unrestricted definition because the "Free", also known as "Libre", refers to the freedom or the product not the price, expense, cost, or charge. For example, "being free to speak" is not the same as "free beer"."
I was just trying to make this point :-)-
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Again, Indie Hackers is not and will not become a place for "calling people out," getting upset about the fact that popular posts receive traffic, or making nitpicky complaints about titles. You can go to Hacker News for that. It's not helpful or constructive at all, and only serves to discourage sharing.
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