How hard can it be to design a logo for a startup?

When you create a wish list for your new business, it’s normal to want the most amazing logo design your money can buy. This is especially true if you’re a self-confessed perfectionist like me who loves everything to be the best it can possibly be.

The problem with that line of thinking is threefold:

(1) Your money is already stretched buying everything else you need for your startup 

With website and software costs, domains and hosting, legal and accounting, insurance, advice, freelance help, phone bills, stationery, consumer surveys, and more, do you really need to break the bank to design a business logo?

(2) You might not need a perfect logo from day one, or ever 

Take PayPal for example. Their logo is incredibly basic, yet I doubt they’ve ever worried about a fancy logo design because PayPal’s revenue is in the billions.

(3) What if you pivot your startup and need to change the name and logo?

Startup pivots are common. In the case of these five famous startups, a pivot proved highly lucrative.

But our startup is not at that stage yet, so despite our love of beautiful logo designs, Richard and I agreed that if we couldn’t agree on a logo designed for around $50, we would have to design it ourselves. I mean, how hard can it be to design a logo for a startup?

Fiverr logo design for our handyman startup

Fiverr is an online global marketplace where you can order jobs from $5, for just about anything. Having used Fiverr before, I was hoping some freelance logo designers on the site would be able to quickly design a logo for our new startup.

Unfortunately, of the 18 startup logo options that came back to us for our $55, Richard and I could agree on none of them.

Would you have chosen any of them?

Richard’s logo design for our handyman startup

Perhaps as a result of seeing my poor attempts at our logo design, Richard diplomatically volunteered to take up our logo challenge.

If you ask me, I think he secretly loved playing in PhotoShop. But that aside, it still stole chunk of his work time, so I was grateful that he took the baton in our race for a logo for our startup.

99 DIY designs later (no kidding), we started wondering whether we should bite the bullet and spend money on crowdsourcing sites such as 99Designs or CrowdSpring. We reasoned that attracting professional designers would help to solve our logo problem. I mean, how could we feel like a legitimate startup if we didn’t even have a logo?

But, when we worked out that we would need to allocate at least $500 to get decent results in these channels, to Richard’s credit, he soldiered on.

 

Then, at last, lightning struck. A simple circle of blue with some simple white text, and both of us were on board. Hoorah! He did it. We had our new logo and we hadn’t gone over budget.

Everything looked rosy.

 

That is, until our startup took a pivot! :0

Richard’s logo design – for our lawn mowing services startup

So, we went from being Odd Jobs (for all types of handymen), to GreenSocks (for handymen and lawn care providers who provide lawn mowing services).

The bad news? After spending weeks trying to sort out our logo, we had to ditch it and send Richard back to the drawing board.

The good news? On only Richard’s second attempt at our new GreenSocks logo, Richard nailed it (on our $0 budget). Phew!

 

Reflections on our GreenSocks logo design

Why was it that it took Richard and I so long to agree on a logo, when we usually agree quite quickly on everything else? Is it possible that the universe knew we were going to pivot our startup before we did?

Thank you Richard for not giving up.

And thank goodness we didn’t spend $500 on our first logo!

 

Got any stories of your own about designing a logo for a startup?