Elon destroyed the concept of hiring brand agencies for millions of dollars

0:00All right, so we're going to talk about how Elon destroyed the whole concept of paying a brand, a branding agency, millions of dollars for a logo. Remember Pepsi when they did the rebrand? Nike, that was done for$20, a little swoosh. I don't think Elon destroyed it. I think 99designs actually destroyed it. Destroyed the concept of it? I don't know about that. 99designs was saying, hey, pay a designer however much you want. The community will just come and create and then go from there. I agree to an extent, but when you have someone like Elon do it, it's more mass scale. It brings more attention to it.

0:39But the reason I say 99designs over Elon is Elon has such a big following in the community. A lot of people think, oh, Elon's doing this. Doesn't mean I can do it. But on the flip side, anyone can do it through 99designs. Yeah, well, okay, here. Look at it this way, right? Before he cut 80 % of formerly Twitter staff, all the tech founders were kind of scared to do it. And then after he did that, it's like, oh, all these people have courage to do it. You know what I mean? They're like, Elon did it. company's still fine, we should do it. They don't really report their numbers publicly. Most people don't want to talk about it.

1:14There's a Twitter thread, and I wish I could share my screen right now, but there was a Twitter thread, and this guy's like, hey, I made a couple of these designs. We're going to go with that one. Maybe that might have just started the whole let's just do the rebrand on Monday or whatever. They move quick. For the size of company that they're at in revenue and scale, and we don't have their numbers, but it's still a multi-billion dollar company. No one's going to deny that from a value perspective. They still move really fast. And it's old, has archaic code, not trying to talk crap. Almost all software companies or tech companies have legacy code, especially once you get over 10 years old.

1:51And they're moving at a really fast pace with way less people. They're shipping a lot faster, so their product cycles are a lot faster. and you could argue that there's I still I enjoy using the new features I can write longer form stuff now there's videos we should be posting podcasts are you using Twitter more or threads or have you really got off the threads bandwagon I'm totally off the threads bandwagon I feel so good it makes me feel better it's like a week later I stopped using it but the engagement has dropped a lot but the point is with Twitter now and we don't want to go too much into this but we should be posting our podcast there.

2:32You can actually increase the playback speed. There's a lot of these things that you can do, right? But going back to the whole idea of branding agencies being destroyed, we're not saying branding agencies are done necessarily, but just the old way of doing things, like this is a new way, like ship fast, ship quickly. And if the logo doesn't work, you can always just change it quickly. I mean, look how quickly he just destroyed Twitter's brand equity. So, and by the way, do you think that he might, there's like an outside chance that he goes back from X to Twitter? I don't know if you'll go back from X to Twitter.

3:06I think you'll keep the push going forward. And I don't know if you'll really remove Twitter altogether. What I mean by that is there's still many elements in there that still has Twitter-related branding. Let's just talk about this. I know you and I... Like tweet. Hey, tweet this. Yeah. Well, no, Houston are going to change it to like X. Yeah, I know, but... Just because you as a company wants to change things doesn't mean users are going to change the way they behave. Let me ask you this. I know we're both frugal people, right? I know historically the way I've ever redesigned logos or redesigned my site, I've always gone down to I'm not going to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for this.

3:48Have you ever? No. How have you done it? So your logo, your website, right? I look for a designer. It's really cheap. And I pay a few of them. and whatever one produces the best one, you then have them tweak it and then you're good to go. Here's how we roll. We go to like dribble.com with three Bs, right? And we look at who's good. It's like, hey, I would like something like this and this. You just say, hey, I like B. We look for who's good in countries where the currency exchange is very favorable to us. And then it's like, I like these other three logos. Make something like this, like combine all the elements and then that's it.

4:22And you might take like two or three iterations and it ends up costing you like$100. Yeah. And then you can take that and you can give it to people on 99 designs, pay a few hundred bucks and you'll get like a hundred people modifying it and you'll be like, cool, here's a better version. And we do the same thing with our site redesigns too. Usually we like elements from like blogs that we like or websites that we like and we say, do something like this. And most of the designers that we work with, I don't know about you, but they're just very good at imitating stuff. Yeah, they're really good at imitating stuff.

4:49Yeah. And so a full site redesign, instead of costing you like 20, 50, 100 grand or whatever, might end up costing you like a thousand,$2 ,000 or so, maybe a little more than that. But that's it. And I'm sure a lot of agencies hate us for saying this, but this is just reality. Our sites convert well. Yeah, our sites convert really well. Yeah. Anyway, key thing here is if you want to win at this, go look for designs, go look for inspiration that you like, and just go find people that are willing to work at a good price. Well, also to go back to conversions, I think also the bigger problem that most companies have is they focus a ton on redesigns and changing everything instead of having some sort of design and over time modifying it, not just based on looks, but what converts better.

5:31Both your and my design, if you look at it, most of our changes over the years hasn't been design changes on what we want. It's been design changes based on what converts better. Yeah, and how we do it now is it's slight modification. So we might just change the homepage or we might reskin the blog, but we don't try to do drastic things. Yes. Because you're on a test and see if I was going to mess up your conversions or help your conversion. There's a prospect. They're like a coffee company that most people here listening would know. And they had... Blue Bottle? No, no. Not that type of coffee, but I'll tell you after.

6:03But they had paid a branding agency and their site looks amazing. The Machine Gun Coffee Company? No. Close. You're getting close. But no, not that one. but they just blew all this money and their conversions tanked. I think it's like half a percent or something when it used to be like above a percent or maybe 1.5%. Oh, that's crazy. So yeah, and the problem is when you do something like you lose an arm and a leg and you spend a lot of time doing it and then the time it takes for you to have to like undo everything, it's just pain. The time is more valuable than the money that you actually spend.

6:32Don't do redesigns if you can help it. Focus on making tweaks and check your conversions every time you make those tweaks. Ideally, A-B test them and whatever converts the best is what you should do. Design isn't about opinion. Design is about data and whatever converts the best and creates the most usable experience based on the data, that is typically what you want to do. All right, so that's it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, five stars, and also hit us on YouTube as well. Goodbye.