A few months ago we introduced a new brand for Journey. Today, we're excited to bring that brand to our www.journey.io website.

We introduced our new brand first to our actual product — we then introduced it to places people could see our brand (such as automated emails and social media) and are now finally introducing it to our marketing site.

We had initially planned to redesign our marketing site first, but Rou said that he felt our brand should come from our product, rather than having a marketing site and brand that now needs to be applied to our product. In hindsight, looking at our brand now, that feels like the right call.

An early brainstorm design of our new site

Does Brand even matter for seed stage startups?

Startup Twitter loves to talk about how pointless brand is for startups — but I do not agree. Brand is a relatively easy way for startups to punch well above their weight. As I've seen time and time again, buyers and decision makers love to stray from the materials you send them and do their own poking around. As such, it isn't like you can ignore your marketing site.

In fact, we tried to ignore our marketing site, but constantly had backchannel comments from decision makers saying "we love your product but that marketing site...."

As such, we decided to make our marketing site something really elegant, fun and clear. (we have lots more to do, obviously)

Was this the most important thing we worked on? No. We collaborated with Implse (they did the Avenue site too) and they did a grand job with minimal direction.

Was it an important thing we worked on? Absolutely!