How Alignwith built a brand which resonates with users

Apr 25, 2024

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Each month, we speak to a team enrolled in PostHog for Startups about the way they work. This time, we caught up with Alignwith, a product management platform for improving communication with go-to-market teams.

As a serial founder, Kenan Akbas has often seen product managers struggle to communicate with or align other teams to their plans. That’s why, with his third startup, he resolved to try and solve the problem once and for all.

“At my old companies we made every mistake you could possibly make,” says Kenan. “And by going through those issue and feeling the pain of scaling we realized how important it was to keep people aligned with our product teams. That led to us creating decks, release notes, training materials, and eventually, the Alignwith platform.”

Through tools such as AI documentation, Alignwith offers a better way for product teams to share their ideas — but the company’s brand is just as impressive and unique as the technology underneath it. So how did Kenan build a brand that users love?

1. You can be anything, so be ~a wolf~ unique

A former artist, musician, and photographer in New York, Kenan says the first step to building anything should be a familiarity with the status quo. Only then can you build something that defies the norm and stands out in a crowded market.

“I think that’s like an artist’s operating system,” says Kenan. “You always want your work to stand out and that means always looking at what everyone else is making so you can get inspired by it or go in different directions.”

With Alignwith, Kenan wanted to stand out against the corporate memphis style seen on many other startup websites. He wanted to defy the idea of small-headed humans in pastel primitives and present something different as an embodiment of the brand: bright, hand-drawn wolves in business suits.

Alignwith mascots

2. Take your time, do it yourself

At a time when AI is everywhere and freelance marketplaces make it easy to find temporary employees, is it still worth recruiting full-time staff? In our experience the answer is yes, absolutely — and Kenan agrees.

“We’ve tried AI tools and we didn’t like the results we got,” says Kenan. “We even tried one where we uploaded our whole design system and, honestly, you couldn’t pay me to implement those ideas.”

“People’s perception of your team and their desire to use your software really pivots on whether it’s a good design. It’s not worth settling for ‘good enough,’ it’s gotta be great enough. For that, you need to find a good designer to work with.”

“My designer is very patient and that’s important because I’m always picking every little thing apart until I think it’s ready.”

3. Bring your brand into your product

It’s not enough to simply design a mascot and apply a color palette, says Kenan. You need to create an entire personality around your brand. Then, ideally, you can extend it into your product so that users touch it whenever they interact with you.

Alignwith does this in multiple ways, with small touches throughout the UI which bring back its wolf-mascot theme and a straightforward design language that unites the website and product.

Alignwith is able to do this because the product and mascot have the same underlying idea, says Kenan.

“Our platform keeps everyone aligned and on the same page, and to us wolves howling at the moon is the ultimate image of that — the whole pack all howling at the moon and focused on the same thing. That’s why we even let our users give themselves wolf names in their settings.”

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