Your business will fail without a brand

A “brand” is a bit hard to capture, just like a “personality” is hard to capture. But I might say that these are both the same thing, just for different entities. A brand is the energy or vibe your company or product puts out. And it’s the first thing prospective customers feel, the same way when you walk past someone on the street and lock eyes, you sort of get an immediate sense for the vibes of that person. You construct their entire life story in a fraction of a second. It may not be fully accurate, but it’s a good enough compass and mental model for you and helps you make decisions quickly.

Customers will lock eyes with your product in just the same way, whether it’s through quickly scrolling past your video after it came up in their TikTok feed by chance, whether they see your listing on Google, or even just by seeing your avatar or thumbnail in a comment on any social media platform.

And this happens much faster than you’d think. A study by Lindgaard and colleagues flashed web pages in front of people for 50 milliseconds, which is about a twentieth of a second and far too short to actually read anything, and the ratings people gave were basically the same as the ones they gave after looking at the pages ten times longer.¹ They’d already made up their minds. And the more annoying part for you is that this snap judgment about how a page looked then went on to color how they rated things like the site’s credibility and usability, which they hadn’t really tested at all. So that first impression doesn’t just come first, it ends up coloring everything the visitor thinks about you afterwards.

That is one aspect of branding. First impressions. But like personality, there is also much more depth. There are first impressions, first handshake, first small talk, first date, and finally, a long term relationship, and it’s your brand that informs how customers feel about you all throughout.

Unlike a personality, which is largely fixed, a brand is something you can design. I like to think of your company’s brand as the personality you’ve always wanted for yourself, now espoused in an entity that you design and control.

Good branding needs to be honest, in my opinion. And it starts with you, the founder. A good brand is a good story.

What do you believe about the world? What do you believe about people? Ideally this is something positive, or if it’s not, it should harbor optimism for the future. Otherwise what would be the point of building a company if not to affect progress or change in the world?

Now, if you are somewhat of a, let's say, cynical person, and you’re like, I just want to make money, I don’t care about people—well, okay. Let’s work with this.

Firstly, no judgement here. I totally understand this sentiment and I’ve felt this way before myself. But you’ll need to understand that if this is how you represented your company, you’d never make a dollar. Bare just-buy-me-bro utilities may have sold well for a brief moment in 2008 when the App Store first came out, but are today relics of a bygone era. You need a story and mission to differentiate yourself and your product.

Your company’s goal is not to let people manage their todo list. It’s to make the world more productive so your customers can spend more time with their families. Your goal is not to let people have secure cross-platform sync of their tasks in real time. It’s to bring happiness to the world—because people will be spending more time playing with their kids and less time fiddling with sync. Are you starting to get it?

Almost any technical feature your app has can be described in terms of a story as to how this feature translates to a better life for your customer.

I remember advising a company which had called out such features on their homepage like “Translate between any language.” That’s a feature. It describes apps.

“Become multi-lingual” is a much better way to describe the same feature.

Theodore Levitt taught this idea at Harvard in the sixties with a line you’ve probably heard secondhand: people don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole (as in, they want the direct solution the product brings). His argument in “Marketing Myopia” was that companies die by defining themselves as the thing they manufacture. The American railroads didn’t decline because people stopped needing to travel, they declined because they thought they were in the railroad business rather than the transportation business, so when cars and planes showed up they didn’t recognize them as competition.

If you define yourself as a todo app, then every other todo app is your competitor, and you’re now in a feature war against companies with more engineers than you. But if you define yourself as the thing that gives people their evenings back, you're going to be standing in a league of your own.

Some examples:

• “End-to-end encrypted” becomes “nobody reads this but you.”
• “Automated weekly reports” becomes “stop dreading Monday morning.”
• “Unlimited storage” becomes “never delete anything again.”

Notice that none of the right-hand versions are actually lying about the left-hand versions, and you aren’t inflating anything here. You’re just describing the very same code from where the customer happens to be standing rather than from where you’re standing.

I know it feels odd, since you think you’re selling an app. But again:

You’re selling them peace, happiness, extra time, extra money, more time with their family, more time with their hobbies, and overall, less time spent working on the mundane and more time being excited by life again! Almost every product is some variant of this.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can push this too far. If a visitor reaches the bottom of your page and still can’t tell what your software actually does, it will have the opposite effect. The lifestyle-based language is what connects with them emotionally, but somewhere on that page there still needs to be a plain sentence saying what the thing is.

Very few builders understand this, and it’s why the current proliferation of apps should not bother you in the slightest. Very few will understand the principles needed to build not just a codebase, but a business that is attractive to customers who will catch the entire vibe of your product in seconds.

AI agents are great at copywriting, if you give them the right guidance. Simply feed your chat assistant or engineering agent the following prompt:

I’m taking a course on branding. It says the following: [paste in the full transcript of this video]. Here is my current copy: [paste in the full current copy of your landing page or whatever draft you’re working with.] 

How might this copy look if it were better designed with the principles of good branding in mind?

And if you already have copy you want to go through more systematically, here's an audit prompt you can use:

Go through my landing page copy line by line. For each line, tell me whether it describes a feature of the software or an outcome in the customer’s life. We want the latter, in accordance with timeless principles of branding and copywriting. Propose alternatives as needed.