Let’s get one thing clear, we aren’t a brand agency.  Yes, we do brand work, but just not for everyone.

We've entered into a new world, where products aren't just complimentary tools to businesses — they often are the business. For the past decade, clients are starting to come to this realization, however, all too often, brand is the piece that gets forgotten. 

So MetaLab does offer branding services, but only for product-led startups.

These clients understand that brand can’t be created in isolation from the product. This is where we step in and help build the brand and product experience from the ground up. 

We’re sitting down with our Brand Director, Matt to hear a little more about MetaLab’s unique approach to brand. ‍

What makes your approach to brand different from what’s already out there?

We work at the juncture of brand + product 

This is what makes our approach to brand different. 

Oftentimes, brand and product are tackled separately with large branding agencies creating without the product user experience in mind. 

Treating any brand as a skin for product is an outdated approach. We’ve had clients come to us after spending huge dollars with a branding agency, only for the work to fall short in key product experiences. 

By simultaneously building brand and product, we’re able to develop something cohesive that tells a deeper story and addresses the critical solve for the user. ‍

We create brands that are usable, scalable, and full of potential 

Our product-led philosophy means that we create brands that can evolve based on the application. We’re able to balance the daily, utilitarian product experience design with rich and immersive brand moments. 

The team has a solid understanding of how a brand needs to roll out beyond product so they think big when it comes to building a bold visual language, while still balancing the product experience. 

Our designers have experience in all areas of branding development including print, digital and out-of-home, so we are set up to help clients launch their brand in a powerful, cross-channel way. 

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What’s your brand ethos?

The brand must connect to a human truth

Brands are so more than simply a veneer, a pretty logo, a typeface, and some colours. 

Great brands tell compelling and real stories, and those stories connect to a fundamental human truth and emotion. Our goal is always to build brands that have hearts and connect to the people who interact with them. 

Luckily we get to work on the ground floor with many of our partners. Founders come to us with an idea and a solution to a real need that’s out there in the world. Then we work with them to uncover their core DNA.‍

Brands must flex and evolve over time 

Startups go through an incredible journey in the first few years. They have to find a market fit while getting to know their voice, their product, and their users. It’s a time of constant evolution. 

We always take this into account when developing brands. 

Rather than building something that attempts to capture what the startup should look and sound like 5-10 years from now, we keep things lean and focused. Product is always prioritized first, as we know that this is what will drive business and success in the early days. 

That being said, certain things remain constant such as the core DNA, mission, and vision. 

Our brand systems stay true to these pillars while also allowing for extensibility and adaptation. In doing so, we develop brands that can transcend time and trends. ‍

Brands must be backed by research

A brand's look and feel have to emotionally connect with the user, rather than the whims and tastes of the founder. That’s why all of our brand work is supported by research gathered directly from users. 

To steer away from subjectivity, which is inherent to brand, we ensure we are well versed in what makes customers tick: ‍

What do they need? What do they like? What do they not like? What makes them happy? What fundamental human truth resonates with them? ‍

This data along with competitive analysis and stakeholder insights inform every brand decision and act as our north star throughout the entire building process. ‍

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What does your process look like?

We always start with the core brand DNA

To get to the heart of the brand, we hold an extensive workshop at the beginning of each project. 

There we go deep with the client to understand why they exist, what problems they solve, their vision, and their mission. 

These learnings are then distilled into an overarching narrative that represents a fundamental human truth. Then we validate our narrative through user testing to make sure it connects with the user.

This narrative is a constant hook we come back to throughout the brand-building process that allows us not to get bogged down in subjectivity, and ensure we are always prioritizing the user experience.‍

We work like a product team 

Many of our brand designers, including myself, have experience in product so product design is second nature to the team. 

We work in weekly sprints and validate our ideas through user research — operating very similar to a product design team. 

For tools, we work in a mix of product tools like Figma and traditional branding applications like Photoshop or Illustrator.

Cross-functionality is very important to us and we keep in close sync with product developers and engineers. We’ll also leverage specialists like illustrators or videographers at different stages of a project. 

We work fast, typically building a brand from the ground up within 6-8 weeks. ‍

We’re clear and collaborative 

We’re not the type to condescend, speak in jargon, or work for months in isolation to present a rigorous 150-page brand deck. 

Instead, we establish a collaborative relationship with clients from the get-go and bring them along on the journey. 

Weekly check-ins are a part of our process, allowing clients to provide real-time feedback, and learn more about the branding process. We’re not afraid to show work in progress but always come with a perspective and rationale. ‍

We’re never not learning 

While we’ve naturally been doing brand this way for a long time, we didn't think it was special. In fact, we downplayed it and felt our brand offering was of less value than what the other big players in the branding scene were doing. 

What we’ve come to realize is that our approach is exactly what most startups need. 

We come in at the right time of the founder's journey to support them in creating a product-informed brand that appeals to authentic human emotions and needs. 

As more of our clients have been asking for our support with brand, we’ve been growing our team with intention and purpose. Our small but mighty team is made up of humble designers with a range of specialties and aesthetics. 

The celebrated MetaLab approach to product inspires how we do brand, and we are never afraid to try something new, fail, iterate, and try again.

At the end of the day, the aim is to create moments of delight and emotional resonance with users.‍

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What are some of your favourite brands MetaLab helped create?

I love them all for different reasons but out of the ones we can talk about right now, Rain, Heroic, and of course Slack stand out.

Rain

Rain is a cryptocurrency company based in the Middle East. Their core narrative centres around giving people the freedom they need to succeed as they build their wealth. 

My favourite thing about Rain is how different it feels from other crypto apps out there. We achieved this by paying homage to the legacy and history of the users it serves. 

Just as travellers once crossed thousands of miles to trade goods and exchange coins, cryptocurrency offers a seismic shift equally as big.

Heroic‍

Heroic is a training platform that blends ancient wisdom with modern science to help you become the best, most heroic, version of yourself.

The brand is big and bold and unapologetically iconoclastic. It knows who it is and who its core users are.

We're helping Heroic build their product now. We're excited to see this one come to life.

Slack

The OG. Although Slack was before my time at MetaLab, it’s the perfect example of product-led growth with just enough brand.

Our work with Slack pioneered our approach to brand, even if we didn’t know it at the time.

We've got a bunch of new brands in the works that I'm so excited to share soon. Stay tuned.

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We’re always down to share more so send your own question for AMA to answersplz@metalab.co.

Now that you have a strategy and your differentiators in place, it’s time to draft the entire product experience into a single document. This is a key step in the product lifecycle called product definition. 

One of the key deliverables that comes out of the product definition is the product blueprint. Your product blueprint allows you to visualize the entire product service on one page. This helps manage its complexity, including the actions and touchpoints of all the actors, key features, technical dependencies, and operational requirements.

Behind the scenes, there are several key assets that power this product blueprint: 

This view helps to ensure your team is aligned on the critical pieces of success.

That being said, it’s easy to go overboard with product blueprints, so don’t boil the ocean! Focus on the few critical features and components that will make a big impact for your customers.

Remember to trust in yourself and the research that has been done. Your customers don't always know what the right solution is for their wants and needs. That's why it's your job to consider their needs in the context of your product's potential and develop an appropriate blueprint that can scale in the future.

We saw earlier that you’re going to be spending the majority of your time in the product definition/design, testing, and build phases, which means you need a talented team of skilled makers. 

This may seem obvious, but when building the right team with the right chemistry within your budget, there are a lot of factors to consider. How long will it take for the team to gel? Do you stick with who you have? When should you contract vs. hire?

Too often, we see companies spend big budgets hiring a ton of great developers and designers. They throw them onto a project expecting the product will be delivered fast only to find the team isn’t hitting their milestones. Why? 

Teams typically struggle to get going immediately because of differing working styles, personalities, mindsets, and honestly… sometimes ego. That’s why you shouldn’t focus on individual hires but on the team as a whole.

If you have time, budget, and desire to invest in the future culture of your company, you have to invest time to build the team dynamics. We find that it typically takes 4-5 sprints for a team to find its groove — approximately four months, or more.

If you are an early stage startup, and don’t have a lot of time (six months or less), but still want to get a product out there quickly, we recommend hiring a pre-built team of skilled makers who have launched several products together. 

The key takeaway is to not waste all of your time and money hiring. Building a successful team takes time and cycles of members working together to hit their stride. When necessary, augment with experts to help your team grow, add a skill, or just simply to outsource a function. It ultimately comes down to how you want to allocate your resources.

Don’t reinvent the wheel… and don’t build everything from scratch! Accelerators are existing tools and technologies you can leverage or integrate into your product.

Some of the tools that we use to help accelerate the design process to create and test out designs, concepts, and prototypes with users include Figma, Framer.io, and even Typeform.

For development, we use many different tools and platforms on our projects to help accelerate the product development lifecycle and build products that can scale to meet customer demand.  Several of the most popular and impactful integrations and platforms used by our teams include:

AI is everywhere these days for a reason. It’s powering brand new ways to get work done and being incorporated into almost every tool we already use to make workflows easier. From content creation to scheduling, we are seeing tools popping up for everything. Here are a few that can help accelerate product development:

There are important considerations to keep in mind when using any AI tool in a responsible way. Sensitivity of data uploaded into any of these systems and the originality of the content is a big one.

Policies and regulation with AI are still being figured out, so it’s wise to exercise caution when setting guidelines for your product teams. Leverage these tools as inspiration or starting points for copy, as pieces of a larger composite for images, or to get as specific as possible with prompts in order to generate something unique.

Product development succeeds when teams develop a culture of continuous learning. This is fueled by rigorous testing, analytics, and strategic iteration during key phases of the product lifecycle.

In the discovery phase, we immerse ourselves in understanding our potential early adopters' needs and motivations (see #validators). Alongside this, we work with clients to think through solid analytics strategies. This step instills a data-centric culture from the start, setting the stage for ongoing learning and adaptation. 

By aligning qualitative user insights with a framework for quantitative data capture, we ensure the product strategy we craft will continually evolve to meet user needs.

As we pivot to the alpha and beta stages, the emphasis turns to iterative improvement. We engage early adopters in testing programs. Their first-hand experiences provides invaluable feedback to detect bugs and potential enhancements. 

This feedback, bolstered by real-time analytics data, drives our evidence-based refinement process, prepping the product to be market-fit.

By investing in this cycle of continuous learning — persistent testing, data-informed analytics, and strategic iteration — we embrace a user-centric ethos in product development. This equips our clients to not just navigate, but also thrive.

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When Ravi Mehta (former CPO at Tinder/Product Director at Facebook) was working on the first iteration of his personalized coaching product, he validated it quickly with a paid offering he pieced together with a number of low-code tools.

Leveraging learnings from a community of early adopters, he partnered with MetaLab to help enhance, refine, and evolve the product into the Outpace app.

Outpace launched earlier this year. It provides guided programs for personalized career development designed to level up with the support of a one-on-one AI coach.

We are in a post-WeWork/Theranos era of founders promising growth without showing any profit. You need to ask yourself "What do we need to show investors?" Users are great, but how is this actually going to make money?

You have to show real numbers and an actionable monetization strategy. This means outlining your marketing and growth strategies — and the mechanisms that will bring in not only revenue but profit.

Revenue strategies can vary greatly, but the following are a few of the most common buckets of digital product monetization mechanisms:

There are many ways to monetize a product, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. The right way is the one that will resonate with your audience, so feel free to experiment and be flexible when choosing a strategy.

We’ve been supporting Modular with the release of their new AI platform and product offerings. Early in our engagement, they asked us to design a marketing site to help them grow and segment their sales pipeline. This allowed them better understand, and target, existing and potential users. We took those early learnings to ensure the product landed with their audience and supported their revenue targets.

The product lifecycle doesn’t end with a launch, it goes far beyond. Once you begin to get a better understanding of your customers and their purchase behaviours, it’s vital to adapt, being flexible with pricing, monetization strategies, and identifying unexpected revenue drivers. 

For example, you may see that your primary offering for your SaaS tool is slowly gaining traction, but over and over customers are requesting access to an API for a specific data flow. You may be sitting on a large additional untapped revenue stream and there could be more. Meet your customers where they are!

It helps to consult the people who’ve been there before. There are a million people on LinkedIn who are trying to sell you a service or product that you may not need. There are critical steps that could cost you if you miss them. There are shortcuts you may not even know exist. Trusted advisors can help you navigate this and more. There is just no substitute for experience.

Find seasoned product leaders, designers, or engineers who have launched products in the past and will be familiar with the nitty-gritty details. They will have the perspective to help you find the forest through the trees. You want people on your side who can make sure you are spending your time, efforts, and money on the right things.

These are the Product Survival Kit items that we recommend to anyone who is creating and launching a product in today's climate. It's a mix of techniques, processes, people, actions and tools that we've seen provide success to many of our clients, colleagues and partners out there. But remember — each product is different, so find the mix that worst best for you. 

It may seem daunting but it is possible to successfully bring your idea or product concept to life today.  This may even be the right moment to go after it. Companies who launch useful and impactful products during economic downturns have a history of surviving and thriving. The next one could be you.