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Does a logo really matter to the success of your business? We spoke with the founder of logo.com who is also a serial entrepreneur that has built and sold several companies to discuss. His name is Richard Lau.
About Richard:
Richard Lau has generated millions of dollars in revenue in the internet industry. NamesCon, his in-person conference focused on domain names, began as an idea in the fall of 2013 and is now part of the GoDaddy family. Resume.com is an online resume builder for millions of job seekers and is another of Richard’s recent successful exits, this time to Indeed.com. His current project is Logo.com – an AI-powered logo maker that has the ability to design a unique logo for your company in just a few minutes.
Learn more about Richard and his work at > logo.com
We also recommend:
- Kat Luckock: How to Empower Your Social Enterprise & Make Money
- Adam, Amy, & Danielle: Seriously, What’s My Niche?
- Brendan Kane: Getting Your Customers Attention in 3 Seconds or Less
Transcription of Interview
(Transcribed by Otter.ai, there may be errors)
Adam G. Force 00:03
Welcome to the Change Creator podcast where entrepreneurs come to learn how to live their truth, get rich and make a massive difference in the world. I’m your host, Adam force co founder, Change Creator and co creator of the captivate method. Each week we talk to experts about leadership, digital marketing and sales strategies that you can implement in your business and life to go big, visit us at Change Creator comm forward slash go big to grab awesome resources that will help drive your business forward. All right, what’s going on everybody, happy holidays, and welcome to the Change Creator podcast show This is your host enforce. hope everybody’s being safe and had a good Christmas, this is recording after the Christmas holiday. And, you know, we have the new year coming up just around the corner. So hopefully everybody is ready with their 2021 plans and are taking some family time here to enjoy some relaxation, and kind of catch up mentally after a very interesting 2020. You know, a lot of people thrived in 2020. And a lot of people didn’t, because of the unique circumstances. So hopefully, you guys were able to plan ahead and figure things out with your digital businesses so that you can continue growing and helping people. So we’re gonna kick this show off with Richard Lau. So he has a lot of interesting experience. And we’re excited to chat with Richard. So he has, he founded two really interesting companies and sold them. So he’s he’s founded and built and sold multiple companies actually. And so for example, one of them is my domain Comm. And the other is resume.com. And there’s a few others there. You know, he has a really interesting model, like a formula. And it’s it’s interesting to hear him how he kind of is growing these businesses and selling them and how he thinks about them. So this is going to be very valuable as you listen in to his strategies and insights. So aside from that, he also gives back because he is the executive director of water School, which is a charity focused on clean water projects in Uganda. So a lot of interesting experience here as far as business and otherwise. We’re going to dive into that in just a minute. If you missed the last episode, we didn’t do one over the over last week over the Christmas holiday. But we the last episode we did have was with cat leukoc. And she is an she is a lot of experience as a social entrepreneur and helping people create their social enterprises. So we talk about how to empower your social enterprise and make money. And we get into a lot of different details there. So there’s a lot of value in listening to the discussions around money and things like that, because there’s there’s common struggles for social entrepreneurs. Alright, so let’s get into this next episode. Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook, go to our Facebook page, follow us there. And from there, you can also find our button for our Facebook group so you can join a more intimate community, which is called Be Change Creator. Alright guys, that wraps it up. We’re gonna dive into this conversation with Richard. Okay, show me the heat. Hey, Richard, welcome to the Change Creator podcast. How you doing today?
Richard Lau 03:37
I’m doing fine. Adam. It’s really an honor to be here.
Adam G. Force 03:40
Awesome. Yeah, I appreciate you taking the time. I forget where you’re located.
Richard Lau 03:45
I’m up in Vancouver, Canada. So a couple hours north of Seattle.
Adam G. Force 03:49
Oh, Canadian. Yes. Two of my teammates there in Canada. I’ve been there once. No, twice. Maybe twice now. Have I been there twice? I think so.
Richard Lau 03:57
Oh, come back a third time.
Adam G. Force 04:02
Yeah, no it’s fun. It’s fun. I was out in Toronto and Kitchener and Waterloo or something like that.
Richard Lau 04:07
Okay. Yeah, back east. We call it Yeah. West coast is sunnier, more relaxed, you know, more outdoor focused.
Adam G. Force 04:15
Cool, cool. Cool. So, I know you got a lot of interesting projects that you’ve worked on, and that you’re now working on currently, like logo.com that’s a quite a domain that you locked in there
Richard Lau 04:30
I’ve been in the domain name business for over 20 years now.
Adam G. Force 04:33
And so you had that in your back pocket for a while?
Richard Lau 04:37
Yeah, you know, I’ve had a lot of fantastic domain names come across, come across my desk, and, you know, have bought and sold a lot of I’ve represented some, you know, and occasionally you have the opportunity to lock in a fantastic domain and, you know, so I’ve built up a small portfolio of fantastic names that I can see myself or business partner, or even, you know, my kids developing out one day as real businesses and logo.com was one of them. And, you know, we’ve sat on it for a number of years, and then about two years ago started to build it out as a real business. But, you know, we’ve had the idea of what we wanted to do when it percolating for, gosh, six or seven years.
Adam G. Force 05:25
Yeah, as I say, you must have gotten it a while. Because if you try to buy a domain like that, today, you’ll probably spend a million.
Richard Lau 05:32
Yeah, you know, we spent, we spent a lot. It was in the six figures. And but yeah, it’s, you know, yeah, if you were to buy it today, it would be worth it would be worth even more…
Adam G. Force 05:44
Why build a business, you just sell the sell the domain?
Richard Lau 05:49
Yeah, we, we’ve proven that with resume.com, that it is worth building a business around, you know, these category killing domain names. It’s kind of like eat your own dog food, right? I’ve been buying and selling domain names for 20 years. And, you know, the the, what we’re preaching is that it when you have a category defining domain name, it gives you a running start and gives you that extra wind in your sails. And you know, it, we’ve proven it, it does work. Resume calm is an absolute huge, you know, first hand example of taking a premium domain name, super premium domain name, putting building a business around it, office employees, the whole nine yards, and then exiting. Yes, we’re getting a lot more than what the domain name by itself would have would have been. So yeah, you know, we could sell, we could sell logo.com for a million dollars. But you know, why not build a business and sell it for 10? Or 20? Or 50?
Adam G. Force 06:50
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Richard Lau 06:52
And have a lot of fun and help a lot of people along the way.
Adam G. Force 06:54
Cool. Now, you created just to give people a little history, you created a resume.com? And you said you sold that to indeed?
Richard Lau 07:01
Yes.
Adam G. Force 07:02
What was the process? Like? Like? Because here’s what I want to get a little comparison on the evolution of your process. So in a sense, what did you do for resume calm to build that up? You know, the overview there and sell it like the strategy? And then are you doing anything different here based on lessons learned with logo.com?
Richard Lau 07:21
Absolutely. Um, so really, you know, resume was our third, my third exit in in 15 years. So my first exit was an unmitigated disaster. You know, it’s like, you know, how do you become a millionaire, you start with 10 million, you know, you like when you, but we, I had a domain name business, registrar, and it was worth around the neighborhood of $4 million. Long story short, I merged it with another company, private equity. You know, they were doing some Enron accounting, and, you know, I end up with a severance, check my tail between my legs, and I come home, and everyone’s patting me on the back. So you know, you just come back from Silicon Valley. And I’m like, Yeah, do you have some money I can borrow? I’m broke. And so that, that that was the biggest lessons, you know, the the school of hard knocks, then we I built a domain name conference called names con, and that’s now part of the GoDaddy family. And that was, that was also that was a successful exit. And, you know, but it was a it was a fair deal. It wasn’t, you know, wasn’t life changing money by any means? Yeah. And then the resume deal. You know, now that we’re coming up on, you know, exit number three, so, now I’m familiar with, like, due diligence and data, you know, a data bank, and, you know, all the due diligence questions and kind of the process and putting your, you know, the your hat on in terms of like, what is a buyer wanting to see, what are they expecting? You know, there was, it was very little surprises in the, you know, 250 questions that they sent us to say, you know, where’s this? Where’s that? And so, you know, I actually did did a session at a one of my last in person conference, I went to back in January, almost a year ago. Yeah. And it was my, my session was on building for an exit, you know, so it’s like, when you’re building your business, what do you have? Or what thought process have you put in place, right at the beginning, having an exit in mind? Because, man, it can make your life so much simpler when you’re doing the due diligence responses that you were like, Oh, you know what, when I started this, I actually it was anticipating having to answer this question three years later, so you don’t have to go back and recreate or get confirmation letters. And so yeah, it was a good question. Like, what is the process? It’s been a building process of learning what buyers want to know, and preparing for that in advance. So it makes the process so much smoother.
Adam G. Force 10:10
Yeah, that’s interesting. What can you give an example? I don’t know, if you have something off the top of your mind of just the kind of question you might want to be asking yourself up front. So that you’re prepared.
Richard Lau 10:23
Absolutely. So, you know, when we’re building logo.com, you know, we’re obviously looking around where we’ve got it. It’s an automated AI powered logo maker. So basically, you come in, you put in your business name, you put in your slogan and put in a few keyword industry, and we generate hundreds of designs based on that, man. So that’s pulling in templates. It’s pulling in, you know, ai powered conversations of what design will look best, etc. But underpinning all of that are licensing, you know, so you have to have licensing for the fonts, you have to have licensing for any drawings or icons. Yeah. And so we were looking around at our competitors, and we’re like, wow, you know, they’re they’re doing that, and they’re doing that, and you’re like, how are they doing that? Yeah, they actually licensing that font properly, and I dig into it, and no, they’re not, they’re absolutely 100% blatantly copyright infringement. And you’re just like, wow, that’s not good. Because, you know, when they do go to sell, eventually, they are going to have a massive due diligence problem, they are going to, you know, because I can guarantee you that any purchaser, whether it’s a p firm, or it’s a dot design house, or you know, vistaprint or Fiverr, anybody who’s looking at a logo maker, and there’s a number of us online, and they’re looking at at this, they’re going to ask the questions like, have you always, when did you license this font that you’ve always, you know, what was the date of the license, what, you know, what is, what is the your product is sold built on, and they’re going to have a problem, because they’re, they’ve been around for a number of years. And for any customers that they’ve had up to the point that they, you know, corrected it and change their, their font. Yeah, they have a huge liability, because you’ve not sold, you’ve sold the logo to a customer that you didn’t have the fonts licensed for. And so if those customers ever get hit by the font owner, that’s not just the cost of the of the logo, they could hit you for the cost of branding, change of damage to their brand, and, you know, the the cost of, of having to update their website, letterhead, trucks, etc. as well as any damages that they need to pay to the font owner. Yeah, the chances of that happening. Sure, it might be slim. But if you’re a public company, and you’re purchasing a logo maker, and you’re asking them for their licensing agreements, and they’re like, well, we didn’t do any licensing agreements, we just stole fonts off, off offline, you know, that we found online, it’s just like, oh, my goodness, you know? So like, we know this, right. So from day one, before customer one, all of our licensing agreements are in place, you know, we we know what the questions are going to be. So it helps us be a better person, right, as a better entity, a better organized and ethical, because you know, there’s going to be accountability, there’s going to be a judgement day on that when that exit is on the horizon. That’s your judgment day somebody comes in, and they ask you every single tough question, and they look at every single skeletons in your closet. So don’t have any skeletons, you know
Adam G. Force 13:52
Got it, got it. Getting ahead of the game, being smart up front, I mean, all those legal things. You’re right, when you get to that you may coast for a while, but he gets to that exit and those opportunities, and I can see the headache now.
Richard Lau 14:06
Absolutely. And you know, it may not kill the deal, but it sure would, it sure would lower the price.
Adam G. Force 14:11
Yeah. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about I mean, you seem to have this process you’ve kind of created, it’s your own formula, in a sense. It’s like, get a great domain, you know, a great brand story, and a great company does start with that name, right. And it should say something about the business that the business is designed, like the essence, right. And these are obviously just very verbatim, you got logo.com resume, that guy’s like, you can’t really screw it up. You know? And so you get the logo and you are looking to you start with an exit in mind. I’m going to create a killer business. you’re leaning into AI and things like that. I love the formula. And I’m curious though. You’re you are though passionate about branding and things like that. But resume.com it’s not like you were passionate about resumes. So how did that play in for your personal experience?
Richard Lau 15:16
That’s it’s very interesting. And it’s easy to miss, right? It’s easy to say, Okay, well, look, you’re just building a resume builder. Yeah. And, you know, how boring is that? Right, and let’s just, let’s just get to the chase. But really, what, what excited me and got me, you know, just pumped every day, quite frankly, was the, you’re not just building, helping someone build a resume, there are behind every single resume, we had 4 million resumes built on our site shit behind every single resume as a person, and behind every person is a story. And what you’re doing is you’re reaching into this person’s life, and you’re giving them a helping hand. So you’re like, if when someone comes to came to our resume website, we want it to be able to say, Okay, look, by the time they leave, they are leaving as a better person in terms of a better opportunity, or they’re going to have a better chance of getting that job that they’re they’re applying for, you know, where that they’re going to leave whether they pay for our service or not, they’re going to leave better than when they arrived. And the change that we were actually able to see in terms of like high school students coming in, and then being able to have a better resume than if they were just like opening up a Google doc and starting with a blank page. And, you know, we’d see people build a resume when they graduate from high school. And then two years later, they build another resume, because they were at a university, and they were seeking like a TA position. And then again, when they graduated from university, and they’re seeking a professional, so you know, it was so cool to see this, these kids growing up on our platform, and seeing the jobs that they’re adding to the resume that they got, because they were using resume.com. And so it’s, you know, I have this life philosophy, which is basically simple, which is to be helpful, right? It’s just and that covers a whole noun, the whole aspect of positive attitude, you know, beneficial relationships, like how are you benefit being a benefit to your, to your, you know, close knit colleagues, friends, family, as well as to your extended network, as well as to your community, right? Because at the end of the day, it’s, you know, money is a tool, but life is about relationships. So it’s like, what, how are you being helpful in the relationships that you have with your customers? And so that that’s what we did with resume is what we did with the conference. And that’s what we’re doing with logo, you may not buy from us, but at least you’re going to be better, and hopefully have been helped by us when you’re when you come to logo.com.
Adam G. Force 18:08
Yeah, yeah, I checked it out. It’s pretty, pretty cool. I mean, I love the the dive you’re taking into leveraging AI. And I think it’s a really, it’s a great jumpstart for creativity for people. So I mean, I look at something like this, and it’s kind of like, where does someone begin in exploring AI capabilities? There’s got to be a pretty hefty investment in the, I guess, research on on developing that kind of tech.
Richard Lau 18:45
Yeah, Mm hmm. Yeah. And I think, you know, we’re still early days. So for us, it’s, you know, we know, from resume as an example, you know, we rebuilt the platform, gosh, three or four times, and each time, it looks pretty much the same to the to the end user, the you know, they’re coming in, they’re building a resume and, but on the back end, we’re like, starting from scratch, sometimes we were completely changing the entire back end language and then platform. And so with logo, we are able to, you know, we were able to plan it out. Much more in advance. Yeah. So we haven’t had to rewrite the platform, but we it is an ongoing growing entity. And we’re using all onshore developers, either in Canada or the US or the UK. And it’s more expensive for us, but we’re finding that we’re better able to communicate. And, and we’re just having, you know, we operate primarily on slack and Asana. And we’re, we’re able to communicate as a team faster. And it’s so important when there’s so much To learn, because, you know, we’re taking, we’re taking this branding conversation, right? The typical process would be a user needs to a customer needs to design a logo, and they sign up with either a freelancer or an agency. And they have a few dozen conversations back and forth about what it is they’re looking for. And so, you know, the challenge to the team is okay, guys, we these are the predictive conversations that that someone would have over the course of either three days or three weeks, with their designer or with their design team. We need you to put that into algorithmic conversations and have it AI based so that it it can go faster. Right. Yeah, it is like, Okay, tell me what you guys could do. Right? So I’m not an AI expert, but I can point at other things that that other people are doing and say, Look, they’re doing it, they solved it. You guys figure it out
Adam G. Force 21:06
Yeah, figure it out now. Do what they’re doing, but better.
Richard Lau 21:10
But I you know, so we we pose the problem, we can see that people are, are coming up with solutions, whether it’s in the local space or on other AI. problems. But yeah, it is a lot of work. Let me not. I’m not going to sugarcoat that. Oh, yeah, it’s a problem. AI is fun and easy. No, my guess is a lot of work. It’s a lot more work than just pretending and putting in scotch tape and, you know, 100 monkeys. So it’s, it’s, it’s a lot of work. And it’s not easy by any means. And we’re paying for that expertise locally. And yeah…
Adam G. Force 21:51
Yeah, yeah, I did some consulting for a legal team who’s doing some serious AI stuff to shake up and disrupt the legal industries, old, undisturbed ways. And we worked with a few agencies and went through all kinds of storyboards and stuff on the flows and everything I was helping with the branding and user experience of their app, and all that kind of stuff. And, man, once you get into that AI world, because it is, it’s all like the wild, wild west, in my mind, meaning you can really do almost anything, it’s just do you have the team that can figure it out, and like break the rules of what is now right and kind of be on top of all the latest technology or breakthroughs and things like that. And you’re right, it’s labor intensive, lots of meetings, lots of figuring things out, testing, man, it is it’s a lot.
Richard Lau 22:48
Yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s quite amazing. But it’s also amazing, then once you are able to solve some of these problems, you know, the ability to come in is, is going off a little bit off AI, but the ability to come in post the the information in, and then, you know, we were to the end user, it looks like we’ve just pulled all these designs out that we had pre loaded. But what’s happening in the back end is we’re spinning up 300, Amazon Web servers, having you know, you know, each one of these has multi threaded multi processor, they each have a conversation with various different API’s, and then return results. But, you know, really what we should be doing is like, okay, enter your information. Okay. In tomorrow, come back. And we’ll have a bunch of designs, but instead our texture, like, you know what, we can solve it a different way we can make it look instant. And so it is it’s instant, right? You know, we’re generating dozens of dozens and dozens of designs at a time to present to you but in our back end, where we’ve got these servers spinning up, they’re having these conversations to say, Okay, what, what font set? What font matching? What icon? how big should that be? should be on the right, left center? You know, what colors? Yeah, there’s all kinds of crazy stuff that’s going on. But it allows the user to kind of sit back and you know, call it like Tinder for logo design. You’re just like, No, no, no, no, no, I kind of like that one favorite. No, no, no. Yeah. Like that one favorite. No, no, no, no. Right. And then you get it down to your favorites list. And then you take a look and you’re like, you know what, I like that one, but I think the icon should be bigger, okay, with just click on it, make the icon bigger, you know, and so within 20 minutes, you should be able to walk away from logo.com with a logo. And that is like taking a three week process down to 20 minutes. it you know, we we’ve spent the money we spent the 1000s and 1000s of programming hours, that we are confident that people can do that. And
Adam G. Force 24:58
It’s huge, that’s a big impact. I mean, I like what you said about resume calm and how you’re helping people. It’s like, You’re, you’re injecting yourself in part of a process that, you know, like everyone says, right, you gotta find, find the pain point for people. And you really helped me make someone’s life easier by providing this type of solution, faster, save time, save money, all that kind of stuff. And I mentioned before, like, you know, these guys came up with a solution to say, well, we can kind of do it and make it look instantaneous. I love when tech guys have ideas that I never thought you could do that. Ah, yes, I love that. Right.
Richard Lau 25:42
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, no, we, we have a lot of fun. We do give our tech guys a lot of leeway in terms of being expressing their creativity, because this this is, this is a very interesting problem to solve for, right? You we approach it our visitors as if they’re asking us, hey, you know, Adam, can you design a logo? For me? It’s like, okay, yeah, let’s get it out right now. Right. It’s not a back and forth. And so, you know, our texts have to be able to just say, look, this is the problem, you guys figure out how to solve it. Right? We don’t handhold them in terms of like, Okay, well, I want you to program this. And I want you to program that and but it’s just like, what do you guys think? Like, let’s all like it. And we use this amazing service called user testing, calm, you know, no association, no affiliate here, just, and they do screen recordings of users going through your website and running into problems. And we don’t filter that we don’t like, Oh, we got a bunch of user testing. Here’s the report. And this is now text, this is not what we want you to guys to fix. It’s like, No, we all watch it. Because that is like gold, right? Every single person in the in the whole org watches, every single one of those user testing videos, because it’s, it’s important to know exactly what is it the user is experiencing? And it’s important for the text to know what it is that they’re delivering. Yeah. And how are people interacting with what they’re delivering? And it’s, you know, there’s no better way it’s kind of like, you know, was it called the Undercover Boss kind of thing, right? You want your, your your people dealing on the front line, even if they never have that experience? We have text doing jumping into customer service, right? Yeah, yeah, you know, and it’s like, oh, you know, I shouldn’t be in customer service. It’s like, we’re all in customer service. This is all about customer service. Right? So it’s like, it’s, we do things a little differently but as you say, it’s kind of lessons learned from resume and, and and other past businesses we built
Adam G. Force 27:56
cool. Yeah. When I love that kind of testing, you mentioned two Hot Jar does that kind of stuff with their recordings, I love those recordings. And like, oh, man, I could see like, certain, you know, funnel sequences working or not working, where people get stuck or page loads, get hung up and stuff like that. And there’s another one too, you probably get a kick out of I think, I am trying to remember, I might use it in a while. But I used to use it a lot with clients I consulted for, and it’s about a five second test. Okay, on usability hub. So basically, you get in front of all these people, and you can throw up your landing page or whatever webpage you want. And you do a five second test where it helps you optimize your design because you measure the recall and first impressions and what people see and are they getting? Are you getting across what you hope, like, I’m saying, and you can learn if it’s actually making the impression you think it is.
Richard Lau 28:54
Exactly that I mean, that that’s really that’s so relevant to logo design as well, you know, we people come to our site, and sometimes they’re like, Why are logo it’s very simple. I want this, you know, modified to include, you know, a flag and an eagle and a wrench for my, you know, plumbing service. And it was just like, you know, you’re overly complicating it because you’ve really got, you know, a fraction of a second to communicate your name. goodwill trust, professionalism. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, a lot of people, if they go to a freelance designer, and the freelance designer is, you know, just trying to justify their rate, they’re there they over design it and they end up putting in too much stuff and there because the freelancer is looking at it, like my customer is the guy who’s paying my bill. Right? Yeah. Where’s really, what they need to do is like is is say to the guy who’s paying the bill, look, I’m the designer. You You got to remember that what we’re what the end goal here Is to communicate to your customer. So the customer is your customer? Not? Yeah, the the guy just paid the bill. So it’s it, you know, but you know, if you’re paying a freelancer, you know, 50 bucks to design your logo, he’s, he’s just like, I just want to make you happy to move on. He doesn’t really care
Adam G. Force 30:19
That’s it. He’s not trying to Yeah, he’s not trying to, to help you out. And then like, you know, give you all kinds of strategic advice or anything like that. Yeah. So I wanted to talk a little bit, if you don’t mind, before we get, you know, close the end here a little bit about logos and brands with you. So you kind of just started because it’s a segue, you kind of just started talking about keeping it simple, making it clear and understandable. You know, you’re buying domain names for 20 years or more. Tell me a little bit about what people should be looking for in a logo today. Right? Like, where your mind is that as far as a quality logo, because there is a lot of over complication, especially with domain names. For example, a domain name that is a common word, but spelled differently. And like, I always struggle with that, because especially as we get into more voice, you know, like Alexa and Google Home, like, they will confuse those things. Right. Yeah, so that’s, you know, I like to hear your thoughts on what makes a great logo.
Richard Lau 31:30
Um, so yeah, I mean, there’s two, two parts of that puzzle there, there’s what things make a great logo, and then what things make a great name. Yeah. So, you know, talking about logos, you know, if you look at the the trend right now is simple, clean, easy to read logos, you know, you look at canon, Samsung, you know, they’re they’re really just wordmarks, there is no, you know, canon doesn’t have a stylized camera that they’re pushing, they’re pushing canon. And so, you know, on the flip side, if you walk around your neighborhood, take your dog for a walk, or look around at like the the landscaping company, the local plumber, local electrician, you’re going to see overly stylized logos. And now, because as humans, you know, we have that, that mark, sorry, that that book, blink, you, you’re going to make a decision in the in the fraction of a second, when you see a logo, and you’re not going to know exactly why you’re making that decision. You just know it. And, and but if we you know, as a person who just lives and breathes logos, now, we analyze this, what you’re what you’re what’s happening is you’re seeing hundreds, if not 1000s of logos a day, and you are taking and analyzing those logos, and equating them to the size of the company, the longevity of the company, the trustworthiness, the professionalism, basically, goodwill. And so what you’re going to equate to right now is these overly stylized logos are equating to a small company, a, probably a one man show, that that may or may not have been around for very long, whereas the simple wordmark maybe a very simple icon. Those are going to you know, and the simple icon doesn’t have to mean that it’s not customized, but a very simple icon is going to have a an impression of a larger company more professional and that they know what they’re doing. And they’re not so you know, there’s definitely this trend to clean logos and I think that’s because it’s gotten so busy that you only have a half a second to communicate what is my company name that that you that you have to be able to just have the user focus on your name Yeah, not on the eagle and the wrench and the sink. You know?
Adam G. Force 34:17
Yeah, I’ve always been a fan of having the the lockup with like an image but it’s, it’s you’re right like the simplicity unless it makes sense. Like if there’s real rhyme and reason for it to be there. Otherwise, because I mean, there’s uses that are important and I I had a regret where we you know, we created Change Creator magazine, and we use the logo icon as the primary face of the magazine with the name very small. You know, and then I got a call from Shark Tank because Blake Mycoskie was going on there and they’re like, we want to show your magazine cover on the show and I was like, well, it’s amazing. I’m like, shit, I don’t have like my name spread across that thing.
Richard Lau 35:01
Whereas if your name is your logo, like come to logo.com we eat our own dog food.
Adam G. Force 35:05
Yeah,
Richard Lau 35:06
there’s no icon in our logo.com logo. Yeah,
Adam G. Force 35:09
yeah.
Richard Lau 35:10
Right? And, you know, we we put a lot of time and effort and thought into what we what we should have as our logo. Because you know, if you’re, if your logo.com and you have a crappy logo, what are you doing in the business? Right? Yeah. So, you know, if you want to take a look at somebody, or a company that has spent more time than you can ever imagine designing a logo, come to logo.com. And you can see, simplicity is where it’s at.
Adam G. Force 35:39
Yeah, I like simplicity. No, for sure. So, yeah, and what was the other part of that, that we wanted to say? Say the logo, and then the, what the heck was…
Richard Lau 35:49
the naming, naming, so yeah, yeah. So you know, I see this a lot, and especially coming from the domain name business, you know, there’s, there’s things like radio test is that if I say, a brand name to you.com, will you be able to go over to your computer and type that in? Or, you know, if I if I’m saying Okay, yeah, it’s chatter.ai. Right. Yeah. And do I. So now you Am I asking you implicitly to remember two things. Am I asking you to remember that chatter has no e?
Adam G. Force 36:21
And it’s Oh, yeah, yes. So
Richard Lau 36:24
So those are what I call hacks, right? So if it’s an auto.com, it’s a hack. Okay. Well, and it’s not necessarily bad, right? But don’t do two hacks. Right? So if it’s going to be chattered on AI, then have it be the real word. chatter.ai. If it’s going to be chatter with no E, then it better be the.com. Because if you’re saying, hey, it’s chatter, dot.io. And there’s no e the guy’s like, What? Wait, what? Yeah, right. Yeah. And, and you’re gonna lose them. So, so you know, you can have one hack, but don’t have to. So, you know, feel free to drop the E. Lots of people do that. But stick then if you’re doing that stick with the.com
Adam G. Force 37:07
I agree. 100%. I mean, I, if you have to explain to someone, something like that, like, Yeah, when you do it, make sure you spell it this way. Like you you’re already setting yourself up for like a challenge. I’m not saying it’s impossible. There’s great brands out there there have done it, they crushed it, right, but he doesn’t make your life easier, that’s for sure. And, you know, like if I was going to do like, I remember I did a rain forest thing a while back years ago. It’s like an activist and I wanted to do something and I kept it instead of being like, the rain forest initiative bubble or whatever the hell like people do. I just said, I love rain forest calm. It’s like a statement that you believe in, you know, right. Keep it super simple and natural, you know? Yeah.
Richard Lau 37:52
Yeah. You know, there there are a lot of new non coms that are available. And might you know that that’s kind of like a, an open field to go for but you know, so again, if you if you’re going to go for a dot XYZ, don’t go for a three word.
Adam G. Force 38:09
Yeah, right.
Richard Lau 38:09
Don’t go for I heart rainforest dot XYZ, you don’t need to. You don’t need to worry. But you could go for you know, you could go for rain forest on eco. Yeah, right. or rain forest green or rain forest dot life
Adam G. Force 38:21
or logo dot XYZ, right.
Richard Lau 38:26
No, don’t do that.
Adam G. Force 38:26
Don’t do that.
Richard Lau 38:29
No, go for I heart logos all day dot xyz. And there’s E
Adam G. Force 38:34
Yeah.All right. Alright, Richard, I’m gonna let you go here. I really appreciate it. So obviously, people can find you. I know you got logo.com So guys, super easy. Go check it out, play around with it, get some creative ideas, do some business with Richard and team that doing some cool stuff. And also if you’re, you’re you’re listening to this, you’re not looking for a resume. So scrap that. But Richard, is there anywhere else people will find you Where’s logo.com? The best spot?
Richard Lau 39:06
Yeah logo.com. So Richard@logo.com or hit me up on LinkedIn. I’m a big believer in building, building a network in mutual mutually beneficial ways. So I’m richard@logo.com on on LinkedIn, easy to find.
Adam G. Force 39:18
Got it. Got it. All right, Richard. Thanks again. Appreciate your time.
Richard Lau 39:23
Thank you Adam.
Adam G. Force 39:26
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