Build It When You Need It

Springloaded started out as a numbered company. We had quickly grown beyond the scale of my sole-proprietor freelance business and needed to incorporate. We kicked the can on figuring out any sort of branding. We were growing without a name, logo, or brand, so it didn't seem like an area we needed to invest in.

We knew that period would be short-lived. We were going to need a brand within our first year of business if we wanted to grow. We let the ideas marinate on the back burner while we pushed forward, building a team and expanding our revenue.

Eventually, after many zoom brainstorming sessions, we landed on Springloaded. We renamed our numbered company to Springloaded Inc., but hadn't landed on any sort of brand decisions.

One of our clients was putting together a pitch deck for investors, and needed us to provide an asset they could use on their deck to represent Springloaded. We had about a week or so to slap something together, so Owen and I got to cooking in Figma.

We threw a handful of hours at the problem, and eventually came up with something we were happy enough with, for now.

We knew this wasn't the "forever logo", but it was good enough that we were happy to start using it. We did up some merch, sent everyone on the team a shirt, updated all our social profiles, and updated our website to be a blank page with the logo in the middle. Branding!

We let business needs drive the process here. We could have spent a lot of time upfront on brand after we decided on a name, but it just wasn't a requirement for our business at the time. We had so many other things to focus on that could produce immediate and tangible results — so we focused on those instead. This strategy is core to our approach not just within our business, but in our software and design work as well. We identify and focus on the areas with maximum potential for return.

Sometimes, build it before you need it

By the time we engaged with David Arias to design our logo and develop our brand a year later in March 2023, we were a full time team of 5 developers with a website consisting entirely of a logo on an otherwise blank page.

We were sailing on smooth seas and had time and budget to invest into the company itself. We chose to take full advantage of that and upgrade our makeshift logo into something we could really be proud of. We knew that would be a prerequisite to building our online presence.

David did an amazing job! We couldn't be happier with how the logo and branding work turned out. Can we correlate the logo to a distinct outcome or tangible return? Definitely not immediately. Unless you count the joy I felt every time I sipped out of my custom Yeti mug with our logo on it.

Not too long after we shipped our new logo, we brought on our first full-time designer, Thomas Crecq. We had a three-day gap between hiring Thomas and the kickoff for a major product build that would occupy him for the next 6-8 months. We chose to seize that opportunity again, and have Thomas whip up our website in a mere 48 hours.

Thomas crushed it. Even for a one-page website, two days is a wild turnaround time. We gave him very little work with, and he gave us some beautiful designs in return. No wonder our clients love working with him so much! I got to work slicing and dicing his Figma file, and before you know it, we finally had a website.

We didn't build the website based on an immediate need — we built it because we had a great opportunity to build something that we'd need in the near future. We grew from a team of one to six before we spent any time on a website, which is a pretty wild to think about in hindsight. During that time we spent all of our energy on the things that we felt would deliver the highest return: building a talented team, and delivering exceptional results for the clients we already had.

Now, we're entering a new phase here at Springloaded. We're still working with those same amazing clients that got us here, and we're ready to start developing more of those partnerships. We want to share more about our strategies for building products, our approach to solving problems, and our pragmatic approaches that allow us to grow our company.

We're going to be filling up this space with info about how we work, technical deep dives, case studies, and any other valuable knowledge we can help share with the communities and clients that support us.

Thanks for reading, and we're looking forward to sharing more!