Minimum Viable Branding

Getting good at ‘good enough’ and leaving perfectionism behind

Getting good at ‘good enough’ and leaving perfectionism behind

So, we have just undergone a rebrand. Cool, right?

We’re over a year into the Muslim CEO journey so we felt it’s about time.

What do you think? For us, we feel it represents us well. It represents movement, growth, change, on a global scale. There’s three of us, making up the three colours and also three parts to our proven process and methodology.

If you don’t remember the original, it was a monochrome simple icon. Black and white and bold. It cost us $10.

Yup. Ten dollars.

You see, one of the things that we hugely believe in is that money loves speed. And that it’s all about taking action quickly, as opposed to overthinking and procrastinating on things that don’t necessarily matter in the short term.

Don’t get me wrong. Branding DOES matter. A huge amount. But when you’ve just launched? The focus is on getting traction. Proving the concept.

This is one of the mistakes we see many newbies making. Spending time on the wrong things. Confused about priorities. Preferring to do the fluffy, nice stuff as opposed to the things that actually make you money.

We follow the MVP methodology from Lean Start Up in terms of creating a ‘minimum viable product’ — i.e. something that is functional, that does the job — and then iterate it from there. In our case, the $10 logo did the job — and gave us an identity which we were able to build upon.

Don’t get me wrong, the MVP still has to embody quality, after all the last thing you want to do is to destroy your credibility before you’ve even started with a really poor effort. What we are emphasising here is the power of ‘good enough’ over perfectionism, particularly in the crucial early days.

Here’s the case in point. The actual result we ended up with had had over 30 different designs or concepts. That’s before we decided on the style to go with. Then that in of itself had multiple revisions and iterations before we finalised the colours, the fonts, the shape etc.

Now imagine, we had gone to the length of doing all that, spending a lot of money before we’d made a single penny? Now imagine, we’d done all that, and the business idea was actually a flop — and was destined to fail?

Whilst we’re talking about branding specifically here, what we’re really talking is mindset.

Get good at prioritising the key things.

Use the 80/20 rule as much as you can (what 20% of activity can you do that will get you 80% of the results?).

Finally, reading the book ‘The One Thing’ (as well as the Lean Start Up, mentioned above) — will really go a long way into helping you to focus on what you SHOULD be doing versus what you WANT to do.