LogoGarden was founded in 2011 in order to disrupt the logo design industry, and they literally “invented” DIY logo making. The company, now four years old with 1.5+ million users, hasn’t turned over the market, but they are changing the game with DIY logos. Tom Feary, whom I interviewed below, is the President of LogoGarden.
SEE THE LOGO I DESIGNED IN 4.6 MIN HERE
LogoGarden is not disrupting technology in logo design anymore; Tom Feary says they don’t want to compete, just to serve startups early in the game. He describes their target audience in 42 seconds here:
Don’t reinvent the wheel,” Feary says to all for all tech entrepreneurs.
His advice is valuable, given the fact that he’s taking an already great company, LogoGarden, to the next level. Last year (2014) marked their highest growth year with 60-70k logos made every month. That’s 2,000 logos a day.
I spent some time with Feary talking about disruptive tech and logo design, and he had a great perspective, having been in digital work since the late 90s.
I asked him why he got involved with LogoGarden. He said, “What interested me about LogoGarden was this is a site with a lot of web traffic, there’s a lot of conversions that happen on a daily basis (tens of thousands occurring on a monthly basis), so what excited me about this opportunity was taking it to the next level in terms of revenue growth.”
Here’s three highlights from our interview.
Relode: You say on your website, that you invented DIY logos. How did you do that?
Tom Feary: Listen to how Feary answers that in 34 seconds here.
R: What’s one take-away you would give software startups?
TF: “If I was talking to a group of startup business people today, my number one thing to tell them would be to not reinvent the wheel. The greatest thing about where we are in 2015 is anything you can think about needing for your business it darn well near exists already—somebody’s already built it and developed it. So if you’re a dot com business and you’re building a website and you need some software or you need this or you need that, chances are that those things already exist somewhere as open source technology. So don’t go build it from scratch.
“Figure out what’s core to you, what your biggest value add is—that’s what you want to own. In our case, what’s core to us is our logo builder—that’s where the greatest rates of satisfaction come from in terms of customers utilizing our services and sharing the experience with us. It’s not e-commerce, it’s not analytics, it’s not those types of things, so why should we build those platforms? They exist already. We really want to focus on what’s core to us. So that would be my biggest thing that I would tell startup businesses—don’t reinvent the wheel.”
They decided to partner instead of reinvent the wheel. Focus on core strength and core competency. That gains traction. He said:
“All businesses are doing more things with less. And that’s becoming the norm. You just really have to focus on what is core to you and then go find all the other things that add value to the core. You just can’t go invent everything from scratch.
“If I was making brownies, I’m not going to go invent my stove and figure out a new way to grind flour and go make my own chocolate, my own cocoa! I’m going to come up with how to combine those ingredients to make the best brownie ever, because that’s core to me. I’m gonna buy my flour from a guy that’s got good flour.”
R: I was curious about the logo of LogoGarden—where did that logo come from and what inspired the tree?
TF: “I really like the tree, because we’re focused on growth as a value, as a business. We want to be more performance oriented and growth oriented. Startup businesses just dream of growing and growing, so they can accomplish their other life dreams and ambitions. So I like the tree because of that symbol of stability and growth, integrity and those things. When I look at it, those are the things I see. I don’t know if that was the intent of the design.”