Jessica Hische: evaluation

Transcript context

…Sure. Yeah, of course. Everybody that starts a company knows that they need a logo. That is a big thing. Some people start a company and think the logo is going to drive the culture of the company, which I don't think that that is true. I think that the product itself, and the team you build, and the people you put together are the thing that should be driving things forward, but I do think the logo and the brand assets can generate a lot of both internal and external excitement and just tell people what to expect from the thing that they're about to engage with. Some people say don't judge a book by its cover. I'm the opposite, where any book... The cover of the book should be giving you incredible insight into what is on the interior of the book and setting the tone and setting the vibe so that when you open the book and read the book, it's a symbiotic thing where you're like, "Oh, I understand what I was getting into. This got me excited about starting it," and whatever. It keeps that ball rolling. But with the refresh work that I do, a lot of people start companies and they have a certain amount of money. If they're bootstrapping it, they have less. If they get venture money, they have a little bit more. But what they don't want to do is spend venture money on a massive brand exploration when you're still in the hiring process, you're still trying to get early stage engineers, and all that kind of stuff, and so I am sort of a weird contrarian in this way in the brand world where brand people are like, "Brand is everything. You need to take a significant investment in brand because that guides the vision of the product or whatever." But I think being a bit more of an insider within the tech world, I understand that sometimes people start companies and have an intention to do something. While they're doing that, they're building the team, they're doing cool stuff, but then the company has to pivot for one reason or another, whether a competitor immediately comes out with a thing that you're doing or the technology that you're doing gets postponed, whatever's going to feed into it, and so if you invest super heavily on the whole brand vision from the jump, sometimes it's like throwing away money if you have to pivot. What I love about the work that I do is that I understand that a lot of people have to just have something to put on decks and have something to put on a holding page or whatever, and internal teams are totally capable of doing that early work. But then if it does become successful, you don't want to get locked into whatever it is that you had to throw together before an investor meeting or something. I come in then to take the existing vibe and smooth it out, address any of the concerns that came up. A lot of times, it's really utilitarian stuff like this doesn't scale well, or this thing falls apart in this context, or we never had a good avatar version of it, or whatever. concerns that came up. A lot of times, it's really utilitarian stuff like this doesn't scale well, or this thing falls apart in this context, or we never had a good avatar version of it, or whatever. Sometimes it's really specific utilitarian fixes, and sometimes it's just about growing it up and sophisticated it without losing what was there in the first place that people got excited about. To give people maybe a couple more tactical piece of advice here, what's a sign that it's maybe time to do something with your logo and brand from you took a first pass, it's good enough, your wife made one, your husband made you a logo, it's like, "Well, this is great. Let's just go with this"? What's a sign that maybe it's time to, "Okay, we should actually at least uplevel this, not necessarily hire studio but takes something to make it better"?…

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