Early-stage founders often struggle with prioritizing and structuring their brand work – and admittedly, the feat can seem pretty overwhelming if you’re building your entire visual identity from scratch.

Color choices, fonts, and imagery can seem like petty details when you’re simultaneously building your product, fundraising, and headhunting for key roles, but overlooking your brand can be an expensive mistake for a startup with only one shot to woo a potential investor or customer.

At the same time, no matter what your investor, board member, or brand agency tells you, early-stage startups don’t need to have their ducks in a well-branded row as neatly as Coke or Apple.

Having worked with over 100 organizations on their brand, design , and visual identity, I’ve seen the sweat break on far too many founders’ foreheads as they try to prioritize their limited resources in a world of business cards, merchandise, and fancy brand videos they don’t yet need.

Here are five things every early-stage startup should do to make the most of their visual identity with limited resources:

1. Text logos are underrated (and all logos are overrated), so stop obsessing over them

Early-stage startups often give way too much weight to their logo and its inherent symbolism.

So, I’ll be frank: spending time perfecting your logo is a huge waste of time, creativity, and cash.

The world is so saturated with logos that it’s near impossible to create one that’s completely unique and identifies your startup from the moment it’s created. Much more important than trying to recreate the iconic McDonald’s or Nike symbols for your B2B startup is getting people to remember your name – and for that, simple text logos can bring some much-needed repetition.

If you don’t believe me when I say simple is beautiful, just look at companies like Burger King, Toyota, and Warner Bros who are jumping on the debranding bandwagon and simplifying their logos to their bare bones.

2. Don’t pay for staged photos that look like they’re stock

Meme accounts making fun of stock photos have made us all weary of image banks, but commissioning your own custom photo shoot isn’t always the best option.

Even real photos taken at your office using your own employees often end up looking fake – because let’s be real, no one sits five inches from their closest colleague pointing intently at the same screen.

Instead of paying for a custom photo shoot, there are great free image banks like Unsplash where you can get started, and cropping photos differently or adding colored layers can help customize them for your brand.

But a word of warning: don’t just go through the first five pages ranked by popularity, unless you’re going for the same look as your five closest competitors.

3. Only customize where it matters most

With limited resources for branding, you should focus your efforts on where your visuals can make the biggest impact.

For a SaaS company with a technical product, it’s imperative you have a high-quality image, animation, or video explanation of the real solution and how it works – not an oversimplified cartoon or artsy brand image – whereas a D2C brand will probably want to invest in packaging for the perfect unboxing experience.

And no matter what your brand agency tells you, unless you’re Coinbase or Spotify, you don’t need to pay thousands for a customizable icon bank or fonts (check out existing templates from Google , Streamline , or Fontawesome instead).

4. Buy templates instead of material production

Using an external partner to sharpen your visuals for key materials like pitch decks, your website or product packaging is often a good idea – because even if someone in your founding team speaks fluent Adobe, their limited time is likely better spent on other things.

However, when it comes to repetitive content like visuals for a social media post, paid campaign materials, or one-pagers, you can save a lot of resources and brief time by commissioning templates that someone on your team can reuse and freely modify.

Rule of thumb: if you need more than one version of something, a template is a must. If you need 20 versions of the same design, the first one might take you an hour to get right. The rest should be over in a couple of minutes, and if not, you’re doing it wrong.

5. Accept that your identity will expire in the first 2-3 years

Finally, companies are taught to fear brand renewals (“you shouldn’t change your colors now that customers are finally beginning to recognize you!”) but for startups, changing your visual identity in the first two to three years of your lifecycle often makes good business sense.

Startups tend to have limited resources to start building their brand, so it’s likely that you’ll want to amp up your brand once you have more learnings about your market-fit to do so.

More importantly, startups’ growth cycles are short, so it’s unlikely that the same visual identity will serve its purpose for over three years. As you enter new markets, broaden your focus from early adopters, or introduce new products or verticals, your brand will require a different approach.

Just think about Oura, whose entire vibe recently changed from performance-heavy biohacking to a more wholesome lifestyle approach, or Dropbox, who metamorphosed from a somewhat generic blue SaaS brand to a more consumer-centric and colorful brand .

5 ‘product market fit’ tips to make your startup successful

“We don’t have product market fit.”

The board room fell silent. How could a rapidly growing company with a $50 million revenue in a hot category not have product market fit? Yet having invested over $100 million, we as the board had just realized that lack of product market fit imperiled the business.

Product market fit (PMF) has evolved as a concept over time. Moreover, PMF requirements increase as a business matures. Here is a schematic that my team uses to assess PMF prior to investment and among our portfolio companies:

We think of PMF in three stages: Product Validation, Business Validation, and Financial Validation. In our experience, these distinctions are meaningful.

Across over 100 investments and over 50 exits at NGP Capital, we found that, unsurprisingly, company success is correlated with PMF. It was striking to observe the extent to which company success differed across these three PMF stages.

Among our exited companies, those with Product Validation when we initially investment ultimately had a 25% success rate with success defined as a positive financial outcome for investors and founders. Companies with Business Validation had a 50% success rate. Those with Financial Validation have had a 100% success rate.

Optimizing product market fit

Entrepreneurs and investors have a shared interest in optimizing company outcomes — or maximizing value for risk assumed and capital or time invested.

We have found that understanding the key elements of PMF and taking a systematic approach in validating the product, business, and unit economics at each stage can optimize company outcomes. Following are five principles that we have observed among our company successes:

1. Avoid premature scaling

A leading cause of startup death is mistaking early traction for PMF. Companies win markets by being first to PMF, not first to market. Hiring after PMF speeds up companies. Hiring before PMF slows companies down, increases burn and risks a death spiral.

As Warren Buffett observed, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” In the aftermath of the Softbank-sponsored steroid era, there will be many new nude beach postings.

2. Go deep before trying to go broad

Focus on and win a market segment. This is the fastest, most efficient way to test PMF and the business model at scale. As an example, Ganji first proved its mobile classifieds business in Beijing, then developed its expansion playbook and tested transferability of its model to a new city when launching in Shanghai.

Only after winning Shanghai did Ganji expand rapidly across China. Ganji sold for $3.6 billion in 2015, the largest tech acquisition in China at that time.

3. Iterate quickly

In biology, species that reproduce rapidly (r-selection) survive and thrive best in unstable ecologies. The same applies to startups. Rapid iteration is essential for success in any fast-changing environment. Market segmentation allows companies to run multiple carefully designed experiments in parallel to test key hypotheses and optimize business models.

For instance, UCWeb, a mobile portal that Alibaba ultimately acquired for $4.9 billion, ran A/B tests daily. Similarly, Lime opened initially in a half dozen cities of varying size and demographics to test variations on its shared bike and scooter offerings before expanding to over 100 cities.

4. Focus on revenues

This may sound obvious, yet I frequently hear companies say, “We are focusing on growing our user base before we monetize it.” Monetizing is essential to strong PMF and is often harder than anticipated.

Serving as a prime example, Moovit launched its public transit app in over 2000 cities and had over 50 million users before seriously testing revenue models. CEO Nir Erez now acknowledges that he should have started much earlier.

Though it took much longer than expected, Moovit is fortunate in finding a revenue model that scales. Too often funding runs out before a company with great traction learns how to monetize its users.

5. Measure product market fit

NGP Capital benchmarks companies using key metrics for each of the nine categories identified in the above schematic.  While entrepreneurs are understandably focused on their business, peer group comparisons help them see where their companies must improve or course correct. Growth efficiency — a ratio of revenue growth to burn rate — should improve over time if a company has PMF.

High-performing companies tend to be early adopters of Net Promoter Scores. Phil Koen converted Intermedia, a cloud services business, to NPS early in his tenure and reported it in his CEO report at each board meeting signaling his focus on customer service. Intermedia thrived under Phil’s watch and ultimately sold for about $500 million.

While varied in nature, startups follow a common path to success. Buzz around unicorns and large funding rounds easily distract founders from the mundane, but more vital, task of achieving PMF. Product market fit accelerates revenue momentum, shortens sales cycles, lowers customer acquisition costs and produces more lucrative outcomes. Ultimately, as the points above suggest, you may be pleasantly surprised to find that success is the accumulation of small things done well.

Re:Brand : Did you know we have an online conference about digital marketing coming up? Re:Brand will share strategies on how brands can still succeed in these unprecedented times.

How startups can take advantage of the currency market to fight financial uncertainty

Coronavirus has spread alarmingly quickly across the world in just a matter of months, dramatically changing the way we all live and work.

Currency markets have been particularly affected by the outbreak, with significant volatility seen in all major currencies. The pound, for example, dropped to thirty-five year lows against the US dollar in March, while the Aussie dollar and other commodity currencies have had a tough time due to close economic ties with China.

As some markets begin to ease lockdown measures, certain currencies are starting to lurch back upwards. Things are changing rapidly, and just the slightest change in sentiment is having dramatic effects on the value of currency.

Why currency matters

Currency might not be something you think about every day, but its impact on your business can be profound.

The most obvious effect is for startups trading across borders. Whether that means an international payroll, global supply chain, or overseas customers, currency swings can be a real problem for you if they’re not properly managed.

That’s because your business relies on a constant international flow of cash, and with every cross-border transfer comes the risk of an unfavorable exchange rate eating into your margins.

Given all the other uncertainties we face today, that’s just not a problem you want to have.

Luckily, there are ways startups can protect themselves and find at least some financial certainty in these difficult times.

1. Pay attention to exchange rates

Running a startup means your attention is always being pulled in a thousand directions. In recent weeks, the news has been moving so quickly that keeping an eye on the market response is just one more demand on your time. It’s important to watch exchange rates, but it needn’t be you that does it.

A good currency partner will help you to keep your focus on the bigger picture, and can even help you set up a limit order to ensure your money is automatically transferred when the market reaches a target exchange rate.

I’ve recently seen a notable increase in startups booking pound to dollar limit orders in an effort to capitalize immediately on any currency swings in their favor.

2. Lock in some currency certainty

A currency plan is one of the best ways to take control of costs and limit your exposure to currency shocks. Even if you’ve already felt the impact of exchange rates since the outbreak, it’s not too late to protect your business against future volatility.

A forward contract, for example, lets you lock in today’s exchange rate for a fixed period, so you can more easily plan your international costs.

Forward contracts are more valuable now than ever, and I’ve seen many businesses coming to us to ask about this approach since the beginning of the pandemic. Hedging a portion of your overseas earnings in this way will reduce your vulnerability to exchange rates, protecting your business from any unexpected changes in the market.

3. Get on top of your global payments

In some cases, you might be unnecessarily moving money back and forward across borders when a more rationalized approach would reduce your exposure to exchange rates.

Besides simplifying your supply chain, you could look into the option of a global currency account which lets you hold multiple currencies in one place. To take an example, that means you could pay your Hong Kong dollar-denominated payroll directly from Hong Kong-dollar revenues, without having to transfer in and out of your home currency.

This saves you the need to transfer money once, only to have to transfer it back again. Put simply, the fewer international transfers you make, the less exposed your business will be to volatile exchange rates.

Although there is still a lot that we can’t foresee right now, getting a hold of currency exposure is one way to help shield your startup from external pressures, so you’re in a stronger position to bounce back at the other side of the crisis.