The Ultimate Assets Hack: Design Assets Every Startup Needs

What's good y'all John D. Saunders here! You know the Vibes! 

In today's video, I'm talking about the visual assets or design assets you need for your startup to excel. To precursor this, we've worked with hundreds of startups in this space from SAS, to agencies, to individuals and these are the core things that all of them need to excel, to raise funds, do series A/B, family round. Whatever they're looking to accomplish, these assets are going to help you reach that.

So what I'm going to do is talk over these, give you some visual examples and then you can use this to make a list of items your startup needs. Or if you're an agency like myself that works with startups, what you can offer them that will differentiate you from the competition. This is a really unique selling proposition that you can use to position yourself as a thought leader in the space by giving this option to your clients or potentially for your own company to hit the ground running.

Pitch Deck

First thing you need is a pitch deck. Pitch decks are going to be really crucial to the growth of your startup especially if you're going and pitching companies whether it's virtually through Zoom or in person you need a deck that's 8 to 12 slides that's cohesive that explains the different things that you do within your company. So just a few slides you need include the title slide, which is going to have your company name, logo. The problem slide that clearly describes the issue that you have.

The solution slide which is going to talk about the solution and how you accomplish that. The market opportunity which would include the size and characteristics of the target market. The product or service slide which talks about your product or service in specific detail. The marketing and sales slide which will talk about how you're going to promote this to your audience. The competition slide, if there are any competitors in the space that you'll have to go up against.

I also talk about your unique selling proposition, what keeps you and differentiate you from the competition. Of course financials and then the investment and use of those financials. Now you don't have to go as specific as that, but those are the benchmarks that you want to hit in regards to the slides. In the visual example I provided to you this was one of our clients that came to us for design and visual assets.

We went ahead and developed their slide deck for them and we have this as a template that we can offer to other agencies and other startups that are looking for this type of visual asset. So, that's one, always want to have some type of pitch deck that way people can understand what the startup does, what they do and now you can offer that as an agency to your clients as a unique selling proposition in the space that'll make you different from other agencies.

Branding

The next thing you need and I talked about this in another video you can click that link above is branding. If it's a very simple startup they're trying to hit the ground running they need a few things. They need a logo of course! They need typography which is the font or the visual choices for the website or their brand. You also need iconography, you can find icon sets on amazing websites and I'll break these options down. And that's enough of what you need to be cohesive in regards to the brand.

Branding includes logo, color palette, typography, iconography. You can find a lot of these assets on the website called UI 8.net they have really great icon packs that you can find that are hand drawn that have specific styles and actually gear towards different niches as well as Saas and other product types. So you've got your pitch deck. You've got the branding side which includes the logo and those other visual assets.

Social Media Templates

Another thing that every single startup needs in their visual asset library is social media templates for different platforms. So usually we provide this for like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook depending on which ones the client spends the most time on. We create social media templates that they can use. Usually, it's an image with a text overlay or an example infographic that they can use. But ultimately this helps us bridge the gap between what they're looking for on social media.

What type of content they can post and they can use this library or leverage this library to be able to take these images and use them for their social media. So not only do they have a pitch deck but they also have their visual assets in regards to iconography, logo and all that is accentuated by the social media cohesiveness of their colors, typography and font choice. So this is really helpful for startups that really need to hit the ground running. Those three items will be crucial to the growth of their business. 

Photographic Style Guide

But I have a couple more that I think are really helpful for startups. I would say, a photography style guide. Now there are tons of websites out there like pexels which is p-e-x-e-l-s and Unsplash that have beautiful free imagery, some of it premium at a low cost as well. What I would do is I would pick images that reflect this brand very cohesively.

Meaning you have a diverse set of people, you have a specific type of people, you're gearing towards, maybe you're looking for an older audience, a younger audience, millennial, gen Z, I would compile a list of images in that realm. And then what you can do is you can add your own type of style or visual accent to that. For example if your brand is, one of your brand colors is blue, maybe add a blue tint to a lot of the photos or imagery that you're using.

Now what you're doing is you're creating a repository of images that that client can use for any type of materials that they have. If they're using their pitch deck and they need to switch out an image they can go into that library and grab an image that they need that has a specific tint and edited style that they're looking for to execute on their website or pitch deck.

Brand Guideline Document

And last thing is a brand guideline document this document brings everything together and it's really great for startups and there's two ways you can do this. You can do the Bento Box approach which is really just a one-page brand guideline depending on the client budget. Or you can do a full 30-40 pages guideline that has all the assets you need and in this fashion you can give them a full gamut of all the assets that they can access at any time. 

Style Guide

Lastly and last bonus one I actually have a link to this that you can grab is, a style guide page on their website. Essentially this is a hidden page on their website that could be ABC company.com/design. And it just has examples of their logo, the different assets that they have, their font choice, their icons. It's just a full list that people can go to and grab.

Clients love this, they eat it up because they feel like it's easy access for them and the team, to be able to pull assets that they need. They don't even have to go to Dropbox or Google Drive, they can get everything on that one landing page. You can get that link below, I hope that's helpful as well.

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Y'all thank you for coming through and showing love make sure you drop a comment for anything that you need if you have questions make sure you subscribe I do this every week and I try to drop a video on Wednesday if you have any questions drop them below and I will see y'all next week, peace!