Company’s Logo or Product Idea, Which Comes First?

Vern Chan
4 min readFeb 22, 2022

The answer is neither.

logo design, not before you complete your Lean Canvas

“Right action, right time.” So true but an advice so hard to follow, especially when we charted into a new territory. We don’t know what we don’t know.

It’s very common nowadays that we would give our product or solution a name well before it’s ready to be tested. Some of us have been trained vocationally as a marketer or grew up as sophisticated consumers, we knew a brand could worth more than what meets the eyes. With url hoarders who registered all the names that you can possibly think of wasn’t helping either.

I‘ve done my lil’ share. It all started with, I’ve to admit, one as a migrant trying to fit into the Australian work culture in my 40’s, and nudged by the inner voice that tells me now it’s the time to do something to fulfil my higher self, it’s time to take the leap to break the ceiling.

Like anyone else who’s contemplating of changing his/her career path, which has been exacerbated by Rona in the last 2 years, I first asked myself what I’ve learned in the last 44 years (2019), what am I good at and what do I enjoy doing! Obviously, my domain expertise like marketing, branding, research, advertising and media planning came to the surface.

What I did next, was to ask myself how the future would look like and therefore what contributions I would like to make, knowing that I’m not getting any younger :)

There’s a trend not that difficult to spot. People are getting tired with capitalism — how most of us are working for the rich who got richer. The Great Resignation trend is real, and we’ll continue to witness more and more knowledge working class either diversify by building a side business (side-hustles) or pivot by pursuing their long lost dream and become an entrepreneur, founder or business owner. This is evident when there’s more searches in how to start a business than how to get a job in 2021, according to Google.

On the other hand, we’ve also seen statistics around high failure rate of small businesses.

So, what’s the opportunity here?

With me doing competitive landscape research for about 2 years for startups and public sectors, seeing how unhelpful some of the advices circling around, free or…

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Vern Chan

A curious mind who writes on various topics that aim to inspire change, or at least, helpful. A certified startup coach tries to improve the odds of success.