Week 2 - the story of how we created "The NutNook"

Hot take: here’s what you need to survive in e-commerce 😰

1. A clever product (think SharkTank ideas). OR

2. A really good brand.

To build a 10M+ ecom company, you need both.

In my mind, a “brand” is an emotional connection you share with your customer. It’s how they feel when:

• They buy your product.

• They consume/wear/use your product.

• They share your product with others.

Nike - when you buy something from Nike, you feel motivated.

Lululemon - when you buy something from Lulu, you feel luxurious.

Louis Vitton - when you buy something from Louis V, you feel wealthy.

Liquid Death - when you buy Liquid Death, you feel cool.

All of these products have cheap alternatives. But you probably don’t buy them. You crave that emotion that comes with the brand.

I want to show you how we used AI to create a brand that I think people will love.

1. Our goal for our product is to have guys smile and let out a little, “ahh” when they try them for the first time. We want their first thought to be, “wow, this is good. I need to tell my friend about this.”

2. Our goal for our brand is to portray this in a humorous way. We want people to find us and go, “wow, this is hilarious. I need to tell my friend about this.”

AI can only give you ideas for point #1. BUT…

we used AI to create a killer brand for us.

And I will show you exactly how we did it.

How we used AI to create our brand - tl;dr 🤝

• Use ChatGPT to think of your brand name.

• Use ChatGPT to think of our mission statement and slogan.

• Use Coolors to think of your color scheme.

• Use Looka or Brandmark to create your logo.

• That’s it. Done.

What AI tools we used this week & my honest review 👨‍💻

1. ChatGPT: honestly, it has struggled recently. It gets stuck on one format and it’s hard to have it break off that style. When I write these, I go back and do it all over again to help you know the best prompts and path, but this was a struggle. 6.2/10.

2. Coolors (color palette): simple, easy, cool color schemes, free. 9.5/10.

3. Looka (logos): Looka was a little more average than I wanted. Personally, I like logos where there is some uniqueness within the brand name itself (hightide has the wave within the H), and it didn’t give a lot of these. But, the concepts were good inspiration. 7.4/10.

4. Brandmark (logos): I liked the design more on Brandmark. Probably comes down to preference, but both of these are free to start. 8.1/10

5. Bard (Google’s ChatGPT): Honestly, don’t waste your time testing Bard. It was much less creative than ChatGPT. Stick to the OG here. 3.1/10

How we used AI to create our branding (full journey).

Step 1: Use ChatGPT to pick your company name.

Personally, I love the prompt, “You are now a branding expert. You are able to think of company names that are extremely creative. We are selling swim trunks with a pouch for the male anatomy. What questions do you need to ask me to help you think of the perfect name.”

Then, have ChatGPT answer those questions for you because it is the branding expert. That’s a level 100 ChatGPT move right there, folks.

Now it gave us some pretty rough ideas. For some reason, ChatGPT loves combining two words together.

When you find one that you like, ask ChatGPT to give you more like that one.

This step will take some time, but just keep refining your answers.

Step 2: Use Coolors to pick your brand colors.

Don’t overthink this one. It’s a super easy and free tool (Coolors) that allows you to create a color template for your brand in seconds.

p.s. don’t be afraid to also ask ChatGPT what color scheme works best for your brand, based on everything you have told it!

Step 3: Create your logo.

We used a few tools here, but here are the ones we used:

1. Looka - Use Looka's AI-powered platform to design a logo and build a brand you love.

2. Brandmark - This one has a few tools, including a color wheel generator, a logo grading tool based on millions of logos, and an actual logo generator. Probably my favorite of the 3.

3. Logo AI - This one is decent - seems like it’s a better fit for service-based companies. Still, it’s a good option.

You really don’t need to be a design expert to use these tools either. Again, starting up is the easy part.

Here’s how to use Looka, for example.

These are decent. A lot better than me creating one from scratch. However - these are meant to get you inspiration. Take one of the logos and customize it.

The question you need to ask yourself is this: How many designers can create a logo significantly better than these?

Unless you’re willing to drop $1000+ on a really good designer, go with AI.

Step 4: Create your slogan, mission, description, etc.

Again, all of this is done through ChatGPT. Now, I am writing this as OpenAI released custom instructions, which is huge. Now, you can upload your brand overview and your customer persona. This allows ChatGPT to remember specific things about you, like your mission statement, customer persona, tone/voice, etc.

Now create your mission statement FIRST. Remember to give feedback based on what you want from your brand.

Next is your slogan. Again, this will take some time to craft. But ChatGPT will get you one eventually. Keep modifying.

Honestly, ChatGPT has started to struggle with this one. It really struggled to get off its initial concepts. I really didn’t like the ones with commas or colons, but it kept feeding me those.

Once you have that, you can start on the product descriptions. Make sure you ask ChatGPT to make it concise and optimized for SEO. You’ll want to make sure you highlight your value propositions here.

And there you go. From start to finish, everything you need to craft your brand using AI.

I love marketing and branding. What ChatGPT puts out is really solid. Not incredible, but better than most.