Why did we wait three years to create a brand? Shouldn't that be the first thing you do when you start a business? Probably not! It's not what we did, and there are valid reasons for that. Because for years, we proved again and again that we could sell our product - even if it was ugly. Want to know what this is all about? Let's find out! SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS: (5:33) Why we finally decided to create a brand.(9:29) Why you should NOT create a brand as soon as you start your business. (11:10) How we started Email Marketing Heroes.(14:58) Focus on your offer first.(19:57) Fix what doesn't work before making it pretty.(21:26) The four things you need to focus on to make your business work.(23:40) Launching 'ugly' businesses.(27:47) Creating our brand - why now?(29:39) Why create a brand for our products and audience. (33:25) Subject line of the week.Why we finally decided to create a brandYou may have noticed that a couple of months ago we finally decided to create a brand - we overhauled our entire branding. Our colours and fonts look different, and we've even had our first professional photo shoot together. Why? Because our previous branding looked significantly uglier than it does now. Over the years of being in business, we've definitely seen people around us producing graphics that looked way better than ours did. But the problem is that neither of us has an eye for things like that. We’re good at communication, but we’re not designers. When we first launched our business, branding wasn't our priority. We just wanted to get off the starting blocks - not to create a brand that looked nice. So when we launched Email Marketing Heroes all we had was a logo. We ran a contest, and the person who submitted the best logo also came on board to work with us. She's an amazing designer, but she's not a branding expert. And as a result, over the last few years, we’ve been producing graphics that looked inconsistent. They were nice in isolation but didn’t fit with anything else. All the different elements of our business had a different vibe, and we felt our branding was disjointed and was getting worse with time. Why you should NOT create a brand as soon as you start your businessUnfortunately, over the years we've also seen businesses with amazing branding go out of business. Why? Because they focused on the things that looked good or what they found naturally interesting, enjoyable, and easy for them - rather than what needed to be done to run a business and to keep it going. Because we all have to make sales. We have to show up and give value to people. And we need to put out offers that are so interesting and valuable that people are willing to invest in them, so we can stay in business and help more people.And there’s one really uncomfortable piece of advice we find ourselves dishing out a lot to our clients, which is to stop doing the thing you’re doing because it’s the wrong activity for you to be doing in your business right now. Your problem above and beyond anything else is to figure out how to make money. Once you have that nailed, then you can build around it.How we started Email Marketing HeroesWhen we started our business, we wanted to find out whether people would pay us to teach them email marketing and buy our campaigns. When we launched our membership The League, we didn’t know if