The Right-Sized Brand: An Intentionally Lean Approach to Startup Branding

How to think of your brand as a business lever, not a later problem 

Most early-stage startups treat brand like a cherry on top—something that happens after everything else. We’ll do that after we’ve got product-market fit. We’ll do that after we close our Series A. We’ll do that after we make our first marketing hire.

And it makes sense. Most founders aren’t marketers. All founders have too much to do and not enough time to do it. First principles thinking says you need a product before you can possibly think about how to position, market, and sell that product. But, here’s the problem: your brand already exists, whether you’ve taken the time to build it or not.

Even if you haven’t given a second thought to a color palette, logo, or brand voice—someone is forming an idea of your brand from the moment they land on your website, download your app, or skim your deck. Brand is the impression your company leaves behind. That’s happening now. You can choose to control the story, or let others control it for you.

For most founders, this isn’t a choice. So the question really isn’t when to build a brand. It’s how to build it—without derailing your roadmap or your runway. You need a way to build a brand that’s derisked and right-sized to the inflection point you’re at today.

Sound familiar? It should. It’s the Lean Startup method—but for brand.

Step 1: Build your MVB (Minimum Viable Brand)

You don’t need a 30-page brand book or months of market research. You need just enough structure and execution to launch, test, and learn. That’s your MVB.

At this stage, it’s not about perfect. It’s not even about pretty. It’s about clarity and cohesion.

Here’s what to include in your first brand hypothesis:

• A positioning statement — a concise explanation of what you do and how it’s different.

• A value prop — short enough to memorize, clear enough to pass the “so what?” test.

• A basic visual identity — logo, type, color, high-level graphic elements. Cohesive, not custom.

• A brand voice — a few tone words and sentences to set the vibe.
  

That’s it. Don’t overthink it. The goal is to get something launched, not locked.

Step 2: Test it and Measure it

Your brand is not a vibe check. Your brand is a hypothesis that needs validation. You’re testing for fit: does how we’re presenting ourselves resonate with our most important stakeholders (yes, customers. But don’t forget about investors and employees)? 

Ultimately, your brand is a tool. At this phase, it should help you move faster, connect more deeply, and convert more often.

Here’s how to measure it:

• TALK: Keep it simple. Ask your stakeholders how they’d describe your product. See if it matches your intent.

• TRACK: Choose a North Star brand metric and develop a framework to quantify it. Are (the right) people clicking your Google ads? Downloading your app? Signing up? Opening your emails? (check back for a future blog post about selecting your top brand metric)

• OBSERVE: Join sales calls and onboarding sessions. What language gets repeated? When do you see head-nodding? What gets ignored?

Think of it this phase like UX for your identity. Where are people getting stuck? Where do they need more guidance? Where is there heat? These are the best indicators you can get that you’re on the right track—or that you need to pivot.

Step 3: Learn fast, iterate hard

There’s a cliché in advertising that’s ironically underused in branding: Kill your darlings. 

Once you see what’s working, be brutal about what isn’t. Keep the words, visuals, and examples that land. Kill everything else. Cut the fluff. Expand your visual system as your marketing needs grow. Tighten and tweak the story for each unique audience: investors, users, prospects, employees, partners, etc. Coordinate your brand iterations with your product releases, and continue to test and learn with each new release.

This is how a brand gets built—not in one big (expensive) moment, but through dozens of small decisions. Over time, you get sharper, clearer, more differentiated. 

Brand is not the polish. It’s the foundation.

There is a common misconception that a brand is a precious object that requires constant protection to safeguard it from degradation. But your brand is a living thing. One that is constantly changing as your business—and the world around it—changes. It informs not just how you show up on your website, but how you show up in every communication, every innovation, every pivot. And, like any other element of your business, it benefits from iteration. It requires scrutiny. And demands adaptability. 

When you start treating your brand as a business lever instead of a sacred cow, it stops being a guess and starts becoming an asset. Rather than a cherry on top of your product, your brand becomes a strategic part of your flywheel—helping you attract users, close deals, build culture, and recruit talent.

You don’t need to spend six months and six figures to get there.

Start with your best guess. Get it in front of real humans. Measure data, not vibes. And iterate like your business depends on it. Because it does.

To get started, shoot me an email: molly@mollywaller.com