Most startups treat brand as something that comes later. After the product. After the first customers. After the funding round. The thinking goes: we’ll figure out who we are once we’ve proven the idea works.
The problem is, by the time “later” arrives, you’ve already built a brand. You just didn’t choose it. Your early customers, your pitch deck, your website copy, your LinkedIn posts, your hiring conversations, they’ve all been telling a story. If you haven’t been deliberate about what that story is, the market has filled in the blanks for you.
Chris Bullick from Pull London put it well in a recent piece: “a startup without a brand is simply a product with no memory, no meaning, and no margin.” That’s a sharp way of saying something we see regularly at Di Marca. Businesses that skipped the brand thinking early on, then come to us two or three years in, spending money to undo the confusion that’s built up.
You probably can’t afford to do this twice
Here’s the thing about startups and brand. The budgets are small. Sometimes very small. And that’s exactly why the thinking matters more, not less.
If you’ve got 15K to spend on a website, you cannot afford to build it on a shaky foundation and rebuild it eighteen months later when it isn’t converting. If you’ve got a limited window to make an impression on investors or early customers, you cannot afford to waste it with muddled messaging that tries to say everything to everyone.
The constraint of a small budget should force clarity, not delay it. Get clear on who you are, who you’re for, and why it matters before you spend anything on design, development, or marketing. That clarity is the highest-leverage investment a startup can make.
Define your brand, or the market will do it for you
Bullick uses Tesla as an example here, and it’s a good one. Musk famously boasted that Tesla didn’t need advertising. And in terms of attention, that was probably true. But attention isn’t the same as brand clarity. Without a defined brand personality, the vacuum got filled by Musk himself. The brand and the founder became inseparable, which works brilliantly until the founder becomes polarising. Now there are people who’d love the product but won’t consider it because of what the brand represents to them.
Most startups won’t have this problem at Tesla’s scale. But the principle applies at every level. If you don’t define what your brand stands for, your audience will piece it together from whatever signals they can find. Your social media tone. Your pricing. The stock photo on your homepage. The way your sales emails read. These fragments become your brand by default, and they rarely tell a coherent story.
The fix is not a big, expensive branding exercise. At the earliest stage, it can be as simple as getting clear on four things: why you exist, what you offer that’s genuinely different, who it’s for, and how you want to come across. Write that down in plain language. Make sure the founding team agrees on it. Then let every decision, from your website copy to your investor pitch, flow from that foundation.
Be distinct, not just “better”
Startups love to compete on superiority. Faster, cheaper, smarter, more sustainable. The problem is, customers don’t make decisions that rationally. They notice what’s different far more easily than they evaluate what’s marginally better.
Who Gives A Crap is a great Australian example. They sell toilet paper. One of the lowest-interest, most commoditised categories you can think of. The incumbents all look the same: plastic packaging, soft colours, vaguely reassuring product names. Who Gives A Crap went the other way entirely. Bold, colourful wrapping. A name that’s impossible to forget (and impossible to confuse with anything else). A tone of voice that’s warm and irreverent. None of this required a massive budget. It required a deliberate decision to look and sound nothing like the category, and the discipline to commit to it.
The question worth asking is: if someone swapped your logo and name with a competitor’s, would anyone notice? If the answer is no, you don’t have a brand yet. You have a business that looks like every other business in the category.
Distinctiveness comes from making deliberate choices and committing to them. A specific tone of voice. A visual style that breaks category norms. A point of view that not everyone agrees with. These things cost very little to define. They just require the discipline to stick with them.
Don’t let performance marketing become the whole strategy
This is where a lot of startups get stuck, and it’s understandable. When every dollar matters and you need revenue now, the pull toward performance marketing is strong. Paid search, retargeting, direct response. It’s measurable, it’s immediate, and it feels productive.
The trouble is, performance marketing on its own gets more expensive over time. You saturate your early adopters, your cost per acquisition creeps up, and you become entirely dependent on paid channels. Without brand awareness working in the background, there’s no organic pull. Every customer has to be bought.
The research from Binet and Field suggests established brands should aim for roughly 60% brand building, 40% activation. For a startup, the split is naturally going to lean heavily toward activation early on, maybe 80/20 or even 90/10 while you’re finding product-market fit. That’s fine. The mistake isn’t starting there. The mistake is never shifting.
Even a small, ring-fenced investment in brand, 5% of revenue in year one, 10% in year two, compounds over time. The brand awareness you build today creates the demand you convert tomorrow. And critically, it reduces your acquisition costs over the long run.
For a startup with a tight budget, this might mean nothing more than writing one thoughtful article a month, being consistent with your visual identity, or showing up on LinkedIn with a clear point of view. It doesn’t have to be a campaign. It just has to be deliberate.
Start where you are
If you’re early stage and you haven’t done any formal brand work, that’s fine. Most startups haven’t. But the sooner you get clear on the basics, the less you’ll spend fixing them later.
You don’t need a brand agency at day one. You need honest answers to a few simple questions. Why does this business exist? What do we do that’s genuinely different? Who is this for? How do we want people to feel when they encounter us?
If you can answer those clearly and consistently, you’ve got a brand foundation. Everything else, the logo, the website, the marketing, builds on top of it.
And if the time comes when you need outside help to sharpen the thinking or bring it to life properly, you’ll get far more value from that investment because the fundamentals are already in place. You’ll be refining, not starting from scratch.
The most expensive brand work is the kind you have to do twice.
If any of this sounds like you, get in touch if you’d like to ensure you get the most from your brand and your budget from the beginning.
