Let’s build your brand.
These questions help uncover the thinking behind your company so we can shape a clear brand strategy. Take your time and answer thoughtfully.
Which project are you completing?
This determines whether the strategy focuses on core brand clarity or category leadership and narrative strategy.
Quick logistics first.
A few practical questions before we get into the thinking. This helps us manage the project smoothly from day one.
Who is the primary contact for this project?
The person we should default to for questions, feedback, and approvals.
e.g. Sarah Chen, Co-founder, sarah@company.com
Who else needs to approve or sign off on this work?
Co-founders, investors, advisors, or internal stakeholders who will have strong opinions at reveal stage. Better to know now than in week four.
e.g. My co-founder Alex reviews everything. Our lead investor gets a final look before public launch.
What is your target completion date, and is there a real deadline behind it?
Helps us plan the work and manage momentum. A real deadline — a funding announcement, a launch, an event — is useful context even if it’s ambitious.
e.g. End of March. We’re announcing our Series A on 10 April and want the new brand live by then.
What existing brand assets do you have, and where do they live?
Logos, guidelines, old decks, previous identity work. Anything we should see before we start.
e.g. Old logo in Figma, basic guidelines PDF from 2022, pitch deck on Google Drive. Links to come.
Can we use your final brand work in our case studies, portfolio, and on social media?
We love showing our work. If there are any confidentiality constraints — a stealth product or sensitive client — let us know.
Tell us about the company.
Basic context that grounds the strategy in your real situation.
What is your company or brand name?
This establishes the subject of the strategy and how the brand will be referred to.
e.g. Notion — or describe your situation if the name is TBC.
What is your website?
Helps understand current positioning and messaging.
e.g. notion.so — or write “pre-launch” if not live yet.
How large is your team today?
Team size provides context for scale, culture, and strategic ambition.
e.g. 12 people — include founders, employees, and core collaborators.
What is your current annual recurring revenue?
Revenue stage influences how bold or focused the strategy should be.
e.g. $1.2M ARR — or write “pre-revenue”.
What stage is the company at today?
Brand strategy should reflect the company’s stage and growth trajectory.
e.g. Seed funded with an early product and 500 active users.
Where did this come from?
The founding story often contains the most powerful brand material. Take your time here.
Why did this company need to exist?
Often reveals the deeper purpose and conviction behind the business.
e.g. Design teams could not collaborate effectively across different tools.
What felt broken or unfair before this company existed?
Great brands often emerge from challenging something broken.
e.g. Design files were constantly emailed instead of shared live.
If the company succeeds, what positive change will exist because of it?
Helps define the brand’s long-term impact and vision.
e.g. Teams will collaborate on product design as easily as editing a shared document.
What would feel personally disappointing if this company failed?
Reveals founder motivation and emotional commitment.
e.g. If design collaboration remained fragmented and teams kept working in silos.
Where are you headed?
Strategy should serve real business goals, not abstract ones.
In 10 years, what would you love the company to be known for?
Defines the brand’s long-term reputation and sense of purpose.
e.g. The platform that redefined collaborative product design.
What is the single metric or outcome this brand should be judged on in the next 12 months?
Keeps strategy connected to real business pressure rather than abstract goals.
e.g. 10,000 active users, £500k ARR, or partnerships with three major design teams.
Who are you building this for?
Positioning becomes clear when the audience is precisely defined. Vague audiences produce vague brands.
Who is your primary customer today?
Positioning becomes clear when the audience is clearly defined.
e.g. Product designers working in fast-growing SaaS companies of 50 to 200 people.
What pressure are they under right now? What’s keeping them up at night?
Strategy should be anchored around real customer pressure, not demographics.
e.g. Their team is growing fast but design reviews are bottlenecking shipping.
What keeps them stuck or dissatisfied today?
Identifies the tension your brand must resolve.
e.g. Too many disconnected tools, all promising to solve the same problem.
If your product worked perfectly, what would change in their world?
Helps define the ultimate value the brand promises.
e.g. Design collaboration would happen in real time without status meetings.
Who is this brand deliberately not for?
Strong positioning comes from clear exclusion. The brands that try to be for everyone end up meaningful to no one.
e.g. Not for enterprise design teams needing heavy governance. Not for solo freelancers who work in isolation.
How do you stand apart?
Differentiation only means something relative to what already exists. Be honest about the landscape.
What do people do today instead of using your product?
Your real competition is often existing habits, not named competitors.
e.g. Using Google Docs and Slack together to manage design feedback.
What makes customers hesitate before choosing something like yours?
Reveals barriers the brand must overcome.
e.g. Migrating existing work feels risky. Hard to get the whole team to adopt a new tool.
Why do customers choose you over alternatives?
Helps identify perceived advantages from the customer’s perspective.
e.g. Our tool enables real-time collaboration without disrupting existing workflows.
What do you genuinely do better than competitors?
This often becomes the brand’s strategic focus.
e.g. Speed and simplicity of onboarding. No training required.
What would be hardest for a competitor to copy?
Identifies sustainable advantages worth building the brand around.
e.g. Our proprietary collaboration architecture and community of early adopters.
What do competitors in your space do that feels lazy, dishonest, or frustrating to you?
The things you refuse to do often define the brand more sharply than the things you choose to do.
e.g. Overpromising AI capabilities. Buying their way onto review sites. Jargon-heavy messaging that says nothing.
What game are you playing?
Category shapes how customers think about you before they even look at your product.
What category do you believe you are in today?
Category context shapes positioning and competitive comparisons.
e.g. Collaborative design software.
Is there a category you want to redefine or lead?
Some brands win by creating a new category rather than competing in an existing one.
e.g. Real-time design collaboration platforms.
What evidence exists?
Positioning without proof is just a claim. What you can already demonstrate shapes what the brand can credibly say.
What signals suggest your approach is already working?
Evidence strengthens credibility and feeds proof points in the final strategy.
e.g. Users spend several hours a day in the product. 40% of trials convert to paid. Three unsolicited referrals in the last month.
How does this brand behave?
Behaviour under pressure defines a brand more than personality descriptors do. These questions are about how you act, not how you describe yourself.
How should this brand handle it when something goes wrong for a customer?
Behaviour under pressure defines a brand more than personality descriptors do.
e.g. Own it quickly and publicly, explain what happened, fix it in days not weeks, never blame the customer.
How should this brand talk about competitors, without being dismissive or disrespectful?
How a brand handles rivals reveals its confidence and maturity.
e.g. Acknowledge what they do well, be honest about where we differ, never badmouth publicly.
How should this brand sell, without being pushy or salesy?
Sales behaviour is where most brands leak their real values.
e.g. Educate first, only recommend when there’s a genuine fit, never use scarcity tactics or fake urgency.
What will this brand refuse to do, even if it would win business?
The refusals are often more defining than the commitments. If nothing obvious comes to mind, leave blank — that is useful information too.
e.g. Refuse to work with fossil fuel clients. Refuse to use dark patterns. Refuse to overcharge early-stage founders.
Choose 5 paired adjectives that best describe how this brand should feel.
Each pair contains a tension that forces real design and tone decisions. Try to pick from at least three different territories.
Select exactly 5. If you have selected 5, deselect one before choosing another.
How should your brand sound when communicating?
A sanity check against the adjectives above — your voice should feel consistent with the character you just described.
e.g. Expert but approachable. Direct without being blunt. Warm but not overly familiar.
Are there words, clichés, or claims you want this brand to avoid?
Prevents generic messaging and protects the voice from drifting into category noise.
e.g. “Game-changing”, “disruptive”, “revolutionary”, any language that overclaims.
What do customers actually say?
Customer language almost always beats internal language. The exact words people use to describe you are often the best copy you will ever write.
What real words have customers used to describe your brand, product, or experience?
Paste actual quotes if you have them, even rough ones from sales calls, support tickets, or reviews. Polished is not required.
e.g. “It just gets out of my way.” “Feels like working with a small team even though we’re 200 people.” “I stopped feeling stupid.”
What does the brand do inside the company?
A strong brand guides internal decisions as much as external ones.
What should the brand help your team do better?
Brands also guide internal decisions — hiring, culture, alignment, and story.
e.g. Help us hire people who value craftsmanship. Give sales a clearer story to tell.
Where does the current brand feel unclear or misaligned?
Highlights the specific problems the strategy should fix.
e.g. Our messaging does not clearly explain the product to non-technical buyers.
What do you love and what do you hate?
Visual and tonal references are some of the most useful inputs we get. The things you hate are often as useful as the things you love.
Share links to brands, websites, or products that inspire you.
Provides visual and tonal references for the brand direction.
e.g. stripe.com — clarity and developer-focused communication. linear.app — precision and craft.
Share links to brands you actively dislike or want to avoid.
Helps avoid stylistic or tonal directions that feel wrong — often more useful than the inspiration list.
e.g. Over-hyped crypto marketing sites. Generic SaaS landing pages with stock photography.
Proof and investor pressure.
These questions pressure-test the positioning against the evidence you have and the questions you will face.
What proof does this brand still need to build over the next 12 to 24 months?
Positioning without proof is marketing. Knowing what to build next turns positioning into strategy.
e.g. A category-defining customer case study. Published research on collaboration patterns. A signature annual event.
What is the hardest question an investor has asked you, and the one you are nervous they will ask next?
The positioning needs to survive the investor conversation. Knowing the hardest questions is how we pressure-test it.
e.g. Hardest asked: why won’t Figma just build this? Nervous about: how defensible is this long term?
Category intelligence.
These questions push into the dynamics, assumptions, and frustrations of the category your brand operates in.
What major trends are shaping your category?
Strategy must align with industry shifts to remain relevant.
e.g. AI tools transforming how software teams work. Remote-first teams becoming the default.
What assumptions does the industry take for granted?
Challenging assumptions is where differentiation is often found.
e.g. Developers must manually write production code. Design reviews require synchronous meetings.
What frustrates customers about the current category?
Category-level frustrations reveal opportunities for disruption beyond your own product.
e.g. Every tool promises collaboration but none of them actually reduce the number of meetings.
What competing pressures does your customer face?
Great positioning often resolves a tension the customer is already feeling.
e.g. Move fast versus build for maintainability. Standardise versus stay flexible.
Category worldview.
The strongest brands do not just compete in categories — they challenge them. These questions explore the worldview your brand brings.
What change do you believe needs to happen in this category?
Defines the broader mission the brand can own beyond the product.
e.g. Design tools should eliminate status meetings, not just reduce them.
What outdated thinking should disappear?
Strong brands often win by opposing a status quo that others in the category defend.
e.g. That design is a final step in the process rather than something that runs through all of it.
Where does your approach challenge conventional thinking?
Reveals the brand’s strategic edge and the narrative it can credibly lead.
e.g. We believe design should happen at the speed of conversation, not the speed of a review cycle.
What uncomfortable truth about the category do you believe is real?
Strong positioning insights often come from uncomfortable truths the rest of the category ignores.
e.g. Most design tools create more collaboration theatre than actual collaboration.
Future and risk.
The final questions test where your positioning is strongest, where it could be copied, and where it could grow.
If your company succeeds completely, how will the industry look different?
Helps define the brand’s largest possible worldview and the category it could eventually lead.
e.g. Developers will focus on solving problems rather than writing boilerplate code.
Where do you think your positioning is most fragile or most likely to be copied?
Strategy must plan for competitive response, not just the current landscape.
e.g. Larger incumbents could ship our core collaboration features within 18 months.
What adjacent category or opportunity could this brand grow into within three years?
Creates future optionality without stretching the brand beyond what it can credibly own today.
e.g. Team collaboration beyond design. Education for emerging designers. Tooling for design leaders.
Thanks so much for submitting.
We can’t wait to get stuck in with you.
