Where I’ve been (Pt 3) - Building

Building the Brand Operating System

So I had figured out my target audience. The ones I thought were ideal. I had targeted their problem. I needed to try to solve it.

For a while, I had had a good enough business. Not great, but serviceable. People knew me, I had built a reputation, I had grown a network inadvertently. I had traction. But I was only one man, one person. I could only take so much work on at a time. My days were filled with production work. Here and there I could come up for air, do something more creative, more me. And then I would get sucked right back in, to the grind, to the day to day, to the many requests. To the status quo.

But early in the year I was thinking, as I always did, about why people came to me. They did not come because they needed a beautiful logo, even though, sure, they did. They came to me not because they needed a great website. Sure, they needed that. But what they really needed was a brand. A compelling signal that made it easy to do and create and be the things that they wanted to. So I wondered, how do I solve that? How do I make a solution that proves my thesis, and allows growth without me grinding the hours daily? What were the limits, the bounds, the true variables of the actual problem?

For months, obsessively, over and over again, I thought about it, wrote around it, built around it. What were the things a business needed to really run a good brand? How do I identify and codify that, and turn it into a system?

Firstly I thought, you need a way to assess where the brand is today: what it does well, what it doesn't, and where the opportunities are to improve. I figured that you need at least a sense of your business model, because you can have exactly the same tools, services, resources and assets, but if you deploy them in the wrong model they'll cause you more frustration than success.

Because a lot of people don't have the wrong thing. They just have the wrong model. That happens a lot. I've been there a lot.

Then brand clarity: your position, who you are, where you are, who you're going for, what you're trying to do, how you help them, what makes you different.

After that, you would probably need brand strategy: a clear sense of what you'd like to achieve in the next twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six months, and how you'll get there.

Messaging: how you take all that clarity to the market.

Content: The systems you put in place to put things out there. Building your funnel, your brand universe, the whole thing that attracts and nurtures attention.

You have to package offers, make and present the things people would actually buy. An offer is an invitation to participate in a transaction, and you have to design it so it's a no-brainer, so that, as Alex Hormozi would say, they'd feel stupid saying no.

For months, I juggled and bounced around these ideas. Every problem I didn't understand enough, I built something to help me figure it out.

I made brand clarity. Then I made the brand audit, because I knew I needed a lead magnet. Then brand messaging, because I always had this issue: we define the brand, but when a client sits down to make a pitch or a flyer or some promotion, they usually have to just wing it, coming up with whatever comes to mind instead of something rooted in the brand they've defined, if they've defined it in the first place.

How do you do messaging so it's anchored in the clarity of the brand and consistent all the way through? I built that tool.

Then I thought, if you have all of that, you should be able to generate content ideas with AI. So I built that too: the one-to-many framework Dan Koe always talks about, and I'm sure others have too. A system that says: for the next three months we'll run one major idea every week or two, spread across different platforms. You make one anchor piece, a YouTube video, a blog post, an article, a newsletter, and then you atomise it across platforms. Tweets out of it, Facebook, LinkedIn, carousels, spread over the week or two.

Soon enough, it dawned on me that these tools were connected. This was not just a set of modules. This was a platform trying to be born. This was me trying to figure out what needs to be known and set about a brand to actually make it operational. To make it a thing that wasn't so nebulous and fuzzy, but a real thing you could point at and do and measure and track. What happens when I build all of it into one platform, one scaffold, one chrome? By May, I had a platform, a suite of tools that took a client from point A to point B. It became the Brand Operating System.

I did not start out to make a platform. I started with one tool, and allowed curiosity to carry me further. I spent hours and hours and days working on things that nobody asked for, that nobody understood. But the act of building taught me. With each new thing and each new insight, I saw more, I understood more, I built more.

Making ideas infrastructure

In building these tools, I realised something about AI that I think most people miss. This thing, this thinking sand, was really a way to operationalise knowledge, to take ideas and frameworks and encode them into software.

I call it making ideas infrastructure.

Instead of just wrestling with branding as this nebulous idea, I could turn these ideas into software, make it an app I could work with, trained on the methodology I was discovering as I built it. Giving subjective ideas some objective structure.

Not base-level Claude or base-level ChatGPT, but an AI built on my ideas and obsessions, with its own rules and the way it must operate, so it brings out the strongest possible answer. Once you do that, it's easier to work with, to actually extract these ideas, and you can keep iterating and improving. 

That was another big thing I learned about branding this year.

Brands are not supposed to be solved, to be static

People think that when you put out a brand you have to understand it fully from the beginning. You don't. You can understand enough to launch, and then keep iterating, cleaning up, figuring things out, nudging and adding, as long as you have the proper framework and scaffold.

Then you have a way to hold everything in dynamic balance while you figure it out, try things, get feedback from the market and fold it back in. That's how you get a self-learning brand system. I think it's what the greatest brands and companies do implicitly, but I don't know if it has been named as such yet. It probably has and my ignorant ass just doesn't know, but this was an idea I really came to terms with this year. I'm coming to understand, appreciate, experience and put it into practice.

The loop

When I work with a client, I want to give them a brand that resonates with them. It should surface unspoken truths, the things they're too afraid to say or never knew they needed to say. It should speak to the essence of why they created the thing in the first place. Every founder makes a brand for a reason. They have an idea they want to put into the world, a dream, or maybe it's necessity, but there's usually something trying to be let out.

And because building a business is hard, and building a brand is hard, it's very easy for a lot of that to get lost along the way. What I've always believed I do, especially with design and identity, is help unearth that truth and show it in a way that resonates with them.

That starts what I call the loop.

Everything is a loop. So much of our universe works on cycles. In my experience, my work, this is how it functions.

A client comes to me with an idea, and I build a brand for them. Now they have a thing, an external manifestation of their idea. Now they see that brand every day, in their products, in their environment, in their office, wherever. Interacting with it starts a loop.

They see the brand externalised, and it provokes a feeling of recognition. But they don't just see the thing today, they start to see beyond it. The brand tells them what's next. They start to see where it could go and what it could be.

The job of a good brand is to trigger that loop in the founder: to express the truth and the potential of the brand, so they can start imagining beyond it, see the path to get there, and then the path beyond that. That's where it gets exciting.

I have built so many things this year. And as I build things, I understand more. I experience more. I see the connections more. And an incredible thing happened: the more I made the tools and put myself through them, the more I grew and understood. And so I could loop back and make the tools better, which in turn made me better. And so on and so on.

It's the loop again. Back and forth. This way I stumbled onto a virtuous loop, a cycle that made me with every turn.

Right now I'm at the point where, like a scientist, I've defined a theory and designed an experiment. My job for the next while is to operate against it and see what the results are, and to take that into account.

This, whatever this is, is part of that. If I'm right, then I've found a way to understand and operate brands and grow them into something much bigger than they are, scalable assets and valuation multipliers for a business.

But how do you even take that to market?

How do you teach people to want what they don't even know? What you barely understand? 

How do you cross that chasm?