A minimum viable brand (MVB) in under 30 minutes

How to get a 95% awesome logo for 1% of the effort and cost

In 2012 I was hired as the first employee of a new agriculture startup. One of my first jobs was to change our logo.

I spent days brainstorming ideas. We sketched logos made of farming fields, bar charts, farming fields inside bar charts, tractors, ears of corn, and every other farm cliche. After a week of ideas and drawing, none of our ideas felt good enough to actually use.

Until one day, when my CEO showed me a font he noticed online and thought would be good for the logo. I downloaded it, typed the name of the company with the font, and put it on a green background.

That’s been the company’s logo ever since.

It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s better than any of our other ideas. More importantly, it got us focused on the real work of building a startup: building products, testing them in the market, and managing a growing team.

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In 2012 I was hired as the first employee of a new agriculture startup. One of my first jobs was to change our logo.

I spent days brainstorming ideas. We sketched logos made of farming fields, bar charts, farming fields inside bar charts, tractors, ears of corn, and every other farm cliche. After a week of ideas and drawing, none of our ideas felt good enough to actually use.

Until one day, when my CEO showed me a font he noticed online and thought would be good for the logo. I downloaded it, typed the name of the company with the font, and put it on a green background.

That’s been the company’s logo ever since.

It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s better than any of our other ideas. More importantly, it got us focused on the real work of building a startup: building products, testing them in the market, and managing a growing team.

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