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Side Hustle

A New Logo

Gregg Blanchard    

NOTE: This is an entry I actually published publicly on the SendView blog today.

I’ve built a handful of apps over the years. And one of the dumbest mistakes I made with virtually all of my early projects was spending waaaay too much time designing logos and brands and landing pages instead of actually building the product.

When I built the first iteration of SendView, I vowed to not overthink it.

So I took our default font – Lato – and combined it with a generic icon – the now ubiquitous paper airplane – chose a nice little shade of red and that was it.

That quick design has served us really, really well.

But when you fast forward to 2020, you see a SendView that isn’t the random side project it once was.

  • Our users and revenue are growing steadily
  • The app itself has gone from handy to really powerful
  • Users have gone from random marketers to mainstream brands
  • We’re starting to catch the eye of more and more potential partners

We’re still small and we’re still a side-hustle, but our business and service is miles away from where it used to be. Yet our logo? Still the same generic text with a generic icon now used by dozens, if not hundreds, of other email-related services.

In other words, I felt it was time for a new, more polished look. It was time for something that was all our own.


In the end, this is a small change.

  • It doesn’t magically make our product any more awesome.
  • It doesn’t change our revenue.
  • It doesn’t increase our traffic.
  • It doesn’t instantly double our retention.

But it represents a milestone for us as a company and service. It means we have the awesomeness, the revenue, the traffic, and the retention worthy of a stronger brand.

It means we’re in a place where we have enough of a reason to care about stuff like that.

And, man, that’s a fun place to be.

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