Startups aren't luxury car brands. If you're selling a product or service, I think you establish brand by making happy customers. That first requires a sale.

> You establish brand by making happy customers. That first requires a sale.

In some cases, that may be right, but in general branding begins the first time someone interacts with your product (or even your industry). If I notice your business name on Google SERPS, I am engaging with your brand.

I didn't really use NewRelic for 2 years after I first heard of it, but I did keep seeing them and speaking to them at events, reading blog posts, etc. Eventually, I signed up and paid for the product. What convinced me to do that was the branding work they did before I became a customer.

Even for freemium products, the business builds a brand to encourage people to invest the effort into signing up. Even government services (e.g. in the UK - the BBC, the NHS) do branding work.

Branding doesn't start at the point the customer enters their credit card.

Lovemarks is a good read on branding - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lovemarks-Effect-Winning-Consumer-Re...

And that first requires reputation. I'm not giving your company my credit card number if I've never heard of it.

You should be able to get your first few sales without any brand identity, just based on the merits of your product. I expect the majority of people reading this site who actually have a project in the works are probably boot-strapping. There is no way they'll be able to spend on "building brand" before they start making sales. Whatever Facebook or Lexus or NHS or whomever does has no baring on us, we are fundamentally different beasts.

Also, you're not sending me your credit card number, you're sending it to Stripe, or Amazon, or PayPal. Regardless, I think you severely overestimating how cautious people are with their credit card info.

The bulk of the market are conscious of these issues; the "leading tail" of the market, the early adopters much less so. Obviously the "lagging tail" of the market won't buy without cash and without personally knowing the seller and inspecting the goods in person before buying. Branding however is for the rest of the market.