SAAS Branding by designers - Your Users Are the Heroes of Their Own Stories

This article aims to provide a deeper understanding of the importance of branding in SaaS design. By considering users as the heroes of their own stories, you can create compelling branding messages

GPT-4o is out and now thousands of founders are planning to make or upgrade their SaaS tools to a whole new level with it. MVPs, micro-SaaS, and even enterprise SaaS solutions are being built on a daily basis. Thousands of new products enroll at Product Hunt every day. AI has superbly hit the startup industry, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. The main climax is yet to come. Google Gemini and OpenAI GPT have started a new "Cold War" that will likely push them to provide their fullest to be in the industry. Who knows, they might unleash cough cough the most advanced AI they've been secretly working on.

But in all these progressions, I have seen a deficiency of expertise amongst the new UX designers in the field. The problem is most of the designers who enter into the field at present are so Figma-centric. Very often, it feels like the whole process of UX design lies within Figma and exists nowhere else, missing out on some key skills that a designer should have knowledge of, some of which include UX writing, interaction design, and most importantly, branding.

Now, you could be thinking, hold on, isn't understanding branding the work of other stakeholders like the marketing team or higher management? Well, not quite yet.

"The designing of the branding message should be designed before the designing stage."

Why Designers Should Lead Branding Efforts

What I have seen in my projects is that at the very early stage of a startup, people sometimes ignore the branding message, but that's the most important part. It's fine to design initial UI with very simplistic interactions, but not having a branding message giving the customer a definite understanding of how you are going to help doesn't create an impact. The whole idea might just crumble before even Series A funds. AI will make it a lot easier now to create dream projects, but in this competitive battle royale, a good branding message can stand out very early.

For the initial stages of branding, it should be left to the designers. Don't consider it such a great hassle after all: you're already doing ideation and research. Once you have done ideation and research, you will have an idea of the kind of user you're dealing with. Knowing the branding message will also influence your approach for the visual design. By finalizing the core branding message for each section you will be able to determine: how do I design the section? What kind of illustrations or animations you choose to give a "WOW" effect, and how do I organize my core message. This will also be the reason to set the initial structure of the design.

But creating a brand message is not a walk in the park, for it is a skill that no college or university can teach you. You have to understand some key concepts in order to know how.

One concept the founders and designers must grok together is: "Your Users Are the Heroes of Their Own Stories, Not Your Brand."

Users as Heroes in SaaS Branding

Our society doesn't lack a single story—as seen in movies, books, music, even in religious theology. First a hero arises and gets help from another character, who, without being directly involved in the mission, will offer to the hero their expertise, power, or even cooperation. The hero either wins or loses depending on the situation. Literacy students might have memorized a similar structure from the drama known as "5-act structure."

Whatever it is that you learn or are going to read, you are going to find this structure because we humans know it best. It's the best way to tell stories.

You want to find user problems and provide solutions by making them understand the pain point in their journey. However, in SaaS branding, with your core message, you have to make your user feel like the "hero" of what they're doing, with your product assisting them to reach that goal. Here's how it works:

Users are heroes, and your product is a discovery on their journey. First and foremost in their minds is how they are going to defeat their problems with your aid. Imagine that your brand is analogous to a sword, which is the one to defeat the dragon and save the princess. If they win, they are happy to meet it. If they don't, they will not. As a designer, your main focus on branding must be to create comfort for users about what they are doing, and that it is safe, and a guide or plan of how they are going to meet their end goals. Your product is to be the medium, which is the one users will depend on to their needs and aspirations.

Examples of Effective Branding

For example, productized services business models have boomed over the past few years. A user subscribes to you for a flat monthly fee so that they can get service that is akin to unlimited graphic design or branding. Getting into this business model, you would need tools for monthly payment, including invoicing and even secure payments. Many abandon it at the thought alone, but Stripe is a wonderful payment gateway that helps you, the agency owner, to provide a secure payment customer environment feature, with the function of payment plan models in your app. It instills the confidence in people that yes, you can do it. It has given thousands of people the confidence to go ahead and chase the dreams they have always thought about.

But still, another example is Bonsai, business management software. Starting a freelancing job is awesome, but handling paperwork, scheduling, sending proposals, managing incomes and expenses is a chore. You already have your workload, and now all these tasks have to be done every single morning. Lots of weighty to-do’s like that discourage lots of dreamers from starting something new, but Bonsai helps users manage everything from a dashboard. It helps users become confident while starting something new because Bonsai will take care of the rest.

You want to build a mindset for them, like some kind of fantasy game. Your user should be the hero, and the power-up that will help them beat his or her goals is your product.

The early startup is the most important moment for a company because no one wants to spend huge bucks on starting something, only in the end, not understanding why they lost everything. So, in the early startup, collaboration of a team, although it can be small, it should be highly effective and super important.

To be a really successful designer, you have to be a responsible one, for your best should be exerted to make the business successful. So stop using Lorem Ipsum or other random text prompts. Learn to write a branding message and design things for people in relation to that message.

I highly recommend you read the book “Building a Story Brand” by Donald Miller. It’s an incredibly insightful read for founders, marketers, and designers alike.

In my latter blogs, I am going to talk about branding psychology and also about Bonsai and Stripe. Be on the lookout.

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Hope this insight will be resourceful for you. I am a SaaS product designer elevating multiple products, and in my free time, you might call me a “SaaS enthusiast” and critic who loves to explore what other humans are creating. I will share insights about tools, branding by designers, and more. So, don’t forget to follow me and subscribe to my newsletter to get the latest articles.

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