Of all the moats we've built around our business, the most important—and most underestimated—might be our brand.

At Blaze, we've learned that our brand is often what gets our customers curious to try our product in the first place. We also know that our brand plays a huge role in earning and keeping our customers' trust over time, so they feel comfortable using Blaze to do incredibly personal things like creating and posting content as them.

Today, I want to share why we prioritized brand from day one, how we developed a brand unlike any other software company that resonates deeply with customers, and why we recently gave our brand an overhaul even though it's been tremendously successful. If you want to create or update your brand but don't know where to start, I hope this helps you get going.

Strong brands build trust

The currency we deal in with our customers isn't content output—it's trust. We earn that trust partly through a product that gives our users transparency and control over their growth. But more important, especially for our new customers, is the sense of connection we create with the way our website, ads, and marketing looks, feels, and sounds.

Our customers—largely small business owners and entrepreneurs—are often underserved and undervalued. We think small businesses can be great—they just don't have the same access to capital, tools, or support as big corporations. They're often alone in their work, and most tech companies aren't building for them.

A large part of the trust our customers give us from the very first click into our website comes from the fact that they feel like we see them, understand them, and are building specifically for them. We communicate that love primarily through our brand.

Why most startups don't invest in brand

I'm always surprised that more startups don't invest in brand. Even if you're dealing with enterprise customers, at the end of the day, you're still serving people. But especially if you're selling to consumers, prosumers, or SMBs, your potential customers will decide to try your product not just with their heads but with their hearts.

Emotions are a much stronger factor in how we all make decisions than most people realize. Just look at the most valuable companies in the world: Apple, Nike, Starbucks, or even more functionally-oriented companies like Home Depot or Costco. The most valuable companies almost always have really strong brands.

That's because brands increase the value a company can deliver above function alone. There are other supermarkets you can buy stuff at, but people don't just value Costco for its selection—they love it because it makes them feel (correctly) like they're getting a great deal on high-quality stuff.

Brands create an emotional connection with users, and companies can capture the value of that connection through:

• Product preference: People buy from that brand first

• Price insensitivity: People care less about what they spend

• Organic virality: People talk about the product to their friends, lowering acquisition costs

• Higher engagement: People use the product more deeply

• Longer retention: People stick with the product longer and forgive faults or gaps

Even though it can feel intangible, getting brand right can deliver enormous returns, especially for AI companies like ours that need to build trust from scratch.

How we built the Blaze brand

From the start with Blaze, we realized that if we wanted to become a generational company with household-name recognition, we needed to develop a great brand to get the right customers in the door, protect what we were building, and turn it into something special.

The first step was sharing out our authentic origin story. The best brands aren't posing—they mean something to the team, especially to the founder.

In my case, I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My grandfather started a small insurance agency in New Jersey, my brother runs a cookware startup, and my parents own a small outerwear business in New York City. When I tell this story to investors, customers, or partners, people always smile—it helps them understand why our product needs to exist, and why our team is the right one to build it.

Between the founder story, our company values, and our deep understanding of customers' needs, we then created a brand story that feels authentic and motivating.

For Blaze, we knew we were serving mostly "teams of one"—customers who are resource-constrained and non-technical, caught in a catch-22 where the thing they need most (growth) depends on the thing they struggle with most (marketing). They're often stuck in this gap, feeling trapped by circumstances.

The insight that unlocked our entire brand thesis was simple but powerful: our customers want to see themselves as heroes of their own stories. Blaze gives them superpowers, like the spider that bit Peter Parker. But it's not just about getting magical powers—it's about making it possible to pull yourself up and become successful.

We wanted to make customers feel like we could help them become heroes in their own stories. And because we serve lots of different types of people, we oriented the brand around accessibility rather than exclusivity. Being a hero is something everybody can be.

To capture that message of accessibility visually, we looked to pop culture, especially from historical moments with great changes in technology and social structure. Comics were an obvious first touchpoint because in the post-World War II period, they helped people contextualize rapid evolutions happening in society, technology, and the economy, just like those AI is catalyzing today.

Why we updated the brand

When we launched, our brand was an immediate hit. People told us they stayed for the quality of our product, but they tried Blaze initially because of the brand. They connected with it, identified with it, and figured if a company was this good at their marketing, they should trust us with theirs.

But with success came new challenges. People started saying, "Oh, you're the superhero brand," which wasn't exactly right. The point wasn't superheroes—it was that YOU are the hero of your own story. This distinction matters because we wanted a brand that could flex over time, and we didn't want to be pigeonholed into one narrow aesthetic.

Think about Nike. Nike's marketing features different athletes and stories, but the core idea—that everybody can be an athlete—comes through in all contexts.

We also discovered that some visual elements worked beautifully in one context but didn't translate to others. Our website looked great, but certain elements didn't perform well in emails or ads. As we evolved the brand to be used in different media, what made it great initially started to dilute. Months later, we ended up with a brand that didn't reflect what we wanted to be anymore. It was time for an update.

The brand update process

Joel, our incredible Head of Brand Design, started by taking a step back to identify what feelings people connected with in our original brand. People constantly told us, "You guys are fun and colorful. This doesn't feel like a typical SaaS company."

We had to ensure those feelings would still come through as we evolved. Joel created a "slider of emotions" to measure different brand directions against attributes like "serious vs. fun" or "colorful vs. dull."

After exploring options like 1980s pop culture magazines with vibrant colors, we realized how many potential directions were missing the soul of Blaze—the feeling of being enriched with the ability to do something beyond what you could do before. The superhero direction captured that celebration of everyday heroes in a way that just clicked.

From there, we spent months iterating on the details. How literally should we embrace the comic aesthetic? Should we show product UI alongside illustrated elements? If we put a product screenshot on top of artwork, how much of the brand feeling still comes through?

A key insight was the importance of emotion and dynamism. Our product helps you move quickly, so our visuals needed to communicate that same energy—angles of perspective, people leaping into the air, someone surfing. Nothing should ever feel dull or static.

We focused on connecting the superhero theme back to real life benefits. Yes, you can be empowered by Blaze, but what does that mean for your lifestyle? The answer is you'll be able to spend more time with your family or pursue your passions—things the original brand didn't fully communicate.

How to do it right, beginning to end

Building a brand is hard, but maintaining and refining it is even harder. Like anything valuable, it takes effort, focus, and attention to detail to keep it fresh.

Our update was a three-month process that took lots of iteration and discussion. But it was worth the investment because it sets us up to do higher-quality marketing at scale and support a much bigger company with more sophisticated needs. We make hundreds of ads, emails, and web pages per month—all requiring a brand that is clear, intentional, and flexible.

Even so, we fully expect to do another update in a year or so. A brand is a living thing that needs care and cultivation to keep thriving.

As Joel reminded me this week, the key to successful brand work is staying anchored to the emotions that people connected with in the first place. Every time we reviewed visual iterations, we asked, "Does this evoke the things we want our customers to feel?"

This approach gave us the guardrails to say no to many options that might have been tempting, but weren't true to our brand values.

Blaze's brand gives us the chance to show our customers we love them through the images and emotions we share. And while the amazing product we've built is the critical foundation for our success, investing in the emotional connection with our customers over and over again will be what turns Blaze into the generational company we are quickly becoming.