R&R #10: Small Founder Things 1 - Company Identity Creation
The first in a series of posts on the under appreciated steps and consideration involved in starting up
Startup founders gravitate, almost universally, towards other company founders. An aspect of that is shared interests, and a mutual understanding stemming from the unique experience. But maybe more importantly, running an early-stage company is a process both unequivocally bespoke and generally shrouded in mystery. By the time you can answer for yourself the question "what is it exactly that a founder needs to focus on and do at this stage?", you will likely already be moving on to the next stage.
This is one of the reasons first-time founders are at a disadvantage. However, I think it could be easier - there's a lot of things that are not mindnumbingly confusing yet are very non-obvious. Why don't we talk and write more about these?
Thus, one new type of blog post I plan to write is simply an overview of how I've dealt with some of these small things.
In this post I'll speak about:
1) Deciding the name - A small but disproportionately stressful initial requirement for the company
2) Deciding the logo and branding - The second step to company identity somewhat similar to the first
3) How you will design your website initially - The pros and cons of building-it-yourself vs contracting, and halfway options
4) Setting up email - A seemingly straightforward action with lasting consequences
Name, logo and branding
I am honestly not lying when I say that that coming up with the name for Lento Bio was among the top 3 most stressful things I've had to do. The permanence of giving a name to a company which is essentially your baby is weighing, as names rarely can be changed after the fact. If your company comes into this world as a boy named Sue, I assure you the extra fighting you will have to do for money will not be as much of a growth opportunity as Johnny Cash would have hoped. On the flipside, most names are okay and you are probably overthinking it. But, the desire for poetic perfection is also a draw for founders who tend to be detail oriented and Type A to some extent.
There's a few options to go with (that I considered at least):
1) Go super basic and just use the english language description of what you are doing. May be less inspiring yet easy to remember. This is a less common strategy I feel. Sometimes it may just be done with a more creative spelling.
2) Choose a relevant word from a different language, likely historic like latin or sanskrit for example (ideally one either relevant to you personally via experience or background, or to your company). Or similar would be some proper noun from mythology.
3) Play on words. This is a pretty common strategy and very broad.
In our case I wanted a word with metaphorical or double meaning such as in choice two, thus Lento. Lento means to bend or flex under pressure in latin (exactly what a healthy lens is supposed to do) and sounds like lens. It also means slow, not really as meaningful but we're slowing (or reversing) the aging of the lens.
However, the actual process involved coming up with perhaps 6-8 words with the help of my wife and pitching them to everyone who I like, with opinions varied just about as much as is possible. I felt very strongly about one, but she rejected it (I'm glad in retrospect). I also won't say which of us decided on Lento but I'll just say that it wasn't me...
Regarding the first point, I'd say this is actually a great option to use AI. LLMs were more new in early 2022 so I didn't utilize them, but now I would probably go straight to openrouter and ask ChatGPT, Mistral, Llama 3 and Claude 3 all at once what they thought a cool name was given the company mission and my choice of methods from those listed above. AI is great at giving many clever thoughts even if it’s not so good at filtering the good from the bad.
Regarding the whittling down and selecting though, I do honestly think a wider survey is the best option. And not just of people who are directly involved. People point out issues you wouldn't think of. In the end I felt content, fairly abruptly. There is a moment where it clicks that you found the name, I think it was worth the stress to get there too.
Logo and Branding
This was similarly difficult, with the added difficulty that designing a logo takes actual art skills. It's also equally important and long-lasting - logos are permanent more or less, and often as memorable and subconsciously attractive as a good name. If I ask you to think of one shoe company instantly, there's probably a higher chance that you choose Nike than Reebok or Adidas despite the latter two being similarly successful. There's only one for which there's a logo that instantly comes to your head (at least for me).
On top of this, your logo will be on all the schwag you get for investors - mouse pads, shirts, jackets, coffee mugs, etc. In fact, it will be THE unique thing on these gifts for your investors. If you get your investor a high-end north face with your awesome looking logo, they will wear it around, and they will think about you. If your logo is boring, it will dampen the magic of the gifts.
The first part was different here. Getting a list requires a good description and vision (your contribution) and an artist. Unless you are good with digital art to begin with, I strongly suggest Fiverr, a service you will likely be utilizing regularly as a startup CEO. You can contract work from designers around the globe with fast turnaround and great prices there, easily cheap enough that I could get 6 designs to choose paying out of pocket since I didn't have a company bank account yet. Keep in mind that the vision must be yours though - you will not get anything great without a good description as the artist you are paying doesn't share your vision by default.
Regarding the process of choosing from the finalists, it's more or less the same as with names. Get a broad survey, and make sure there's nothing that you miss. Subtle things are seen in art, either in a good way or bad. If nothing clicks after 6, go for 12 if you need - remember this will still be there if you are a billion dollar company 10 years later.
Branding is relatively easy after the symbol. Many people who design symbols on Fiverr also design branding guidelines (company colors, fonts, etc). Colors will come from the symbol and fonts in my honest opinion are fairly arbitrary and mostly will be okay (some people will aggressively disagree here I know). There's a good chance you won't even stick to the font rule off of the website and other branded material such as business cards, but it's nice to have this anyways.
Make sure to get logos in vector format as well (you almost inevitably will) as you will likely scale it up later for things like conference booths.
Website
Your website is more well accepted as crucial. It's the world's window into your company available at their fingertips, so I won't explain the "why" too deep here. But the "how" is actually something that may be unclear to people. Is website building hard enough that you should leave it to experts, or something you can do on your own? My experience is mixed.
On one hand, sites like Squarespace and Wordpress really make it possible for an average person with no knowledge of HTML to put together a website that looks good. That is of course provided that you are obsessive and detail-oriented enough, which is distinctly possible if you are founding a company. I made mine initially completely by myself, as a "managed wordpress" after buying a domain name on GoDaddy.
Making your own website enables you to both learn what the important core elements for a good site are, gives you ample time to conceptualize what should go into the website for maximum effect, and sets you up to make small edits fairly regularly by yourself. Overall it is also very satisfying knowing that you have created and controlled your companies public face.
On the flipside, making websites is very very time consuming for mere hobbyists. I want to say that I spent somewhere in the 50-100 hour range making my initial 5 page website with 3 videos, which I was happy to do since at the time Lento's operations hadn't started but now would be a lot to handle. Changing one thing here breaks one thing there, etc., and you need a strong stomach for perpetual troubleshooting.
Maybe more importantly, specialists simply are better at making a website look good, and many freelance website developers exist including on Fiverr for example. They will know how to deal with critical yet mundane things like SEO, factors affecting page loading time, etc.
In my case, I hired a consultant specialized in website design 1.5 years into Lento's operations and the website was significantly further enhanced. But I still update it myself regularly. So my recommendation is to put together the first version if you have the time and then have someone else finish making it great. But it's really up to the individual.
Also, critically, reserve the domain name before you incorporate. There are groups across the world that will comb public records for company incorporations and then buy the associated domain names so that they can charge $10k+ fees for them. Definitely something to avoid.
Regarding email, which is of course linked to your website via the domain name, there are two critical things to consider I wish I knew when I founded the company.
The first is to have a dedicated email for all commercial cases, and then a separate one for all interactions with your team, investors and prospective investors, collaborators, and individual consultants. And then NEVER EVER use it on a commercial site or share it publicly on a LinkedIn, your website, etc. Why? Because the minute you do any of these things it's only a matter of time before a data broker gets ahold of it and includes it in a mass-marketing "lead" list that allows companies that you've never spoken before to spam you relentlessly. And I mean relentless, often in excess of 10 per day getting through the spam filter and 2-3x that not getting through. And they will almost all be irrelevant to you. Things I get commonly include:
-Services to increase sales (we have no sales as we're making a drug)
-Software development (totally irrelevant to an early-stage biotech)
-Random lists of "leads", which may include physicians that are totally unrelated to what you are doing or attendee lists for conferences you are definitely not attending.
-My absolute favorite, "You've been voted Top 10 xx of 2024". Always with a mere $5000 fee, with 4 follow-up offers dropping down to $750. I literally got one declaring me one of the "Top 10 Women Leaders of 2023" owing perhaps to my androgynous first name. This is how automated these lists are.
I would also recommend not responding to any email lists that you get with your "private" company email (if your email is firstinitial+lastname@mycompany.com, some spammers will guess correctly). They may well be phishing for email addresses to sell to a data broker.
Lastly on this note, don't use your personal phone number as your company number on public sites. It's tempting as you probably don't have a separate work phone, but you will get random calls for equally useless things every few days, and while they are less frequent they are much more annoying. If you need to publicly list a phone number, use a VOIP second-phone number app on your phone so you can disable it at least. Most people in biotech in particular can just privately give their phone number to collaborators if needed though.
The additional, more minor thing I wish I had known when I first got my website and email is, GoDaddy is run by Microsoft and thus if you use the on-site GoDaddy email option you are forced to use Microsoft Exchange indefinitely. This may be optimal if you prefer Outlook, or especially if you use Teams/Microsoft 365 daily. But, if you use other email apps it may be preferable to use your website address as a custom domain directly on there (just requires inputting some DNS info).
I use Protonmail on MacOS so this was not optimal for me. While I did end up cancelling the Microsoft Exchange subscription through GoDaddy and switching over well into operations it was unnecessarily stressful. I had to do it on a Sunday evening since it meant my email was temporarily not operational.
These things in the end don't directly hurt operations and thus may seem inconsequential, but as a founder your attention span is as important as money, and is constantly taxed. Thus, the less distractions and random software problems the better.
Conclusion
These 4 things represented the main things that I needed to do before Lento Bio's operations started such that in our first day of public existence the world had a good window into us and we had the opportunity to communicate with the world. Next article like this I'll talk more about subtleties of finance and accounting which will come into play at a similar time.