• Owning the dotcom version of your name is ideal. Launching with a ‘national’ domain (such ) is fine if you have small ambitions but won’t cut it if you’re serious about billion-dollar status. • Get as close as you can to the pure version of your domain. Starting with variants is perfectly fine: Twitter operated on twittr for many years before having the money to purchase twitter; similarly Facebook was thefacebook for many years; and Uber had ubercab before it acquired the sleek uber domain. • Starting out with a domain name like ‘[companyname]app’ is great strategy if you’re focused just on the mobile side of things. • Other alternatives such as ‘get[companyname]’ and ‘get[companyname]app’ are also good ideas to get the ball rolling (ideally, you’ll be able to purchase a cleaner version down the line). • And, if you’re serious, start the process of communicating with the person who owns your ‘dream domain’ – it may take months, or even years, to eventually acquire it. It used to be true that you could find a great domain name for $10,000, but that’s frankly pretty hard. Fred Wilson, a very seasoned investor behind companies such as Twitter, Tumblr and Etsy (he also invested in Hailo), has revised his guidance to startups about how much they should commit to finding a good domain. In today’s market, he thinks it’s appropriate to fork out up to $50,000.1

Concrete Branding Strategies Once you’ve settled on a name, it’s time to start thinking about details such as your strapline, logo, colour scheme, tone of voice and style, which, when wrapped together, deliver what is called your brand. There’s no single tried and proven way to get this in place, and every company approaches it differently. The simplest approach is to get a basic logo and colour scheme in place, and then work through all the additional elements as needed, which are likely to change a lot in the early days. The website 99designs is a great place to start. It is the biggest2 marketplace for logos and identities – at a pretty reasonable price, too. You can browse loads of designs, and then launch your own competition to have designers craft you a logo and visual identity for a few hundred dollars. Another approach is engaging a branding agency – but you might as well go

I don’t think there is a short cut to coming up with a good name and developing that into a great brand

Internet dating. Finding an agency that will provide you with something you’re happy with is pure luck. I’ve run a creative process a number of times in the hope that an agency will deliver something killer. And while it’s possible – Albion in London delivered the logo and branding for Skype (and I think it’s pretty killer) – it will cost you an arm and a leg. You won’t get much change out of $25,000 – and that’s just for a logo, visual design and a branding presentation. Not great when you’re bootstrapping. It takes a lot of time – and during the early days it is an evolving process. That said, it does need constant attention and it’s possible to achieve great results. Branding stories SQUARE. This payment app was originally called Squirrel. On the road trip I

Dorsey envisioned an acorn-shaped piece of hardware that would plug into the earphone jack of an iPhone, which would serve as the swipe mechanism to read a credit card

mentioned earlier, Jack Dorsey got thinking. Squirrels dart around and collect acorns and those acorns serve as a type of currency for them online payday loans Nebraska. And, in keeping with one of the ‘ideal requirements’ for a company name, the word ‘squirrel’ can also be used as a verb: people often squirrel away their money for a rainy day. He also wanted to design it so that the sound when a card was swiped resembled the squeak of a squirrel. Unfortunately, they hit on a not-so-small problem: there was already a payment system out there named Squirrel. Undeterred, they grabbed a dictionary and started scanning. Eventually they found a word that they thought would work: a square is a fundamental shape that suggests heft. A square deal is a fair one. And, when two parties settle a deal, they square up. They were able to purchase squareup without too much negotiation. HAILO. The Hailo name and brand were created by a former agency branding