Developing a Brand Voice for Startups
Chosen theme: Developing a Brand Voice for Startups. Start strong with a voice that feels unmistakably yours—clear, consistent, and confident—so your earliest users instantly recognize, trust, and root for what you are building. Join the conversation and subscribe for practical prompts and templates tailored to founders.
Defining Your Audience and Tone Spectrum
Empathy Interviews That Reveal Language
Record user interviews and highlight phrases customers repeat when describing pains or wins. Those sticky phrases become your lexicon. A founder once noticed prospects always said peace of mind, reshaping headlines and onboarding prompts overnight.
Tone Spectrum, Not a Cage
Define a voice baseline and a flexible tone spectrum for different contexts: cheerful for launches, steady for outages, direct for pricing pages. Guardrails prevent drift while leaving space for authentic human responses in real moments.
Voice Persona Worksheet
Create a simple persona that embodies your brand voice, including traits, phrases they love, phrases they avoid, and sample responses. Subscribe to receive a starter worksheet and share which traits you chose in the comments.
Onboarding Your Team to the Voice
Create a lightweight, living style guide with principles, tone spectrum, examples, and a glossary of preferred terms. Store it where work happens. Add a quick-start checklist teams can follow under pressure and update together monthly.
Evolving Your Voice as You Scale
As stakes rise, adjust tone from scrappy to assured while keeping the same principles. Add depth to explanations and tighten claims. Your voice should grow up without losing its warmth, courage, or practical helpfulness.
Evolving Your Voice as You Scale
When localizing, translate intent, not just words. Provide country-specific examples, prohibited phrases, and cultural notes. Encourage regional teams to propose improvements while preserving core principles so the voice remains unmistakably yours worldwide.
