How To Start An Online Business Project
Posted on March 06th 2022
Our second episode of our ongoing YouTube format The Avatar Creator Devlog has aired.
This time it is all about the story of how a simple student project resulted into the founding of our team and how we started developing our own brand and corporate identity.
A Student Project
Everything began in January of 2020. At that time, Chris was living in Stuttgart and he was on his seventh and at the same time last semester of his media and communication design studies. Besides his bachelor thesis, one of his practical exams for this semester was to create a business plan idea for his Entrepreneurship Class. As usual, he was a bit late and really had no clue what to do, so he called Philipp, who is always up for great spontaneous ideas. Together in a desperate but nevertheless historical brainstorming session the two guys came up with the idea of revolutionizing the avatar creator web scene, and after making some sketches and simple mockups, Chris presented the last-minute idea to his class and to is lecturers.
For his pitch paper, Chris had to include the so-called business model canvas which is generally used to structure a business concept and also some kind of SWOT analysis. In case you are wondering where this awesome Rick Sanchez avatar you see in the image below comes from, the guy is acually reused from another project of Chris, where he created a lip-synced Rick and Morty animation.
Looking at this whole presentation today is very funny because we were so optimistic about the amount of time and effort, we thought everything would take. Chris´ lecturers weren´t that convinced by the whole concept either, he got like 10 out of 15 points for his rushed presentation, but nevertheless, one guy who was convinced right from the start was the last member of our crew, Domi. Let´s have a look at how our whole team was actually founded:
Team Founding
It was roughly the same time of Chris´ before mentioned lecturing presentation in February when Philipp and Chris were really hooked of the idea of actually realizing their idea. Domi who was a fresh-made computer science student these days already had in his mind to create something together with Chris because merging his IT with Chris´ design skills together to create something wonderful always sounded very fitting to them. So our first choice was then obviously asking Domi whether he would like to join the team and he just said: “Yes you little codfish-boys, I am totally in!”. So together with Philipp´s business and marketing skills we quickly became a versatile and jolly team!.
What may be interesting for you is that in the first couple of months, all our team meetings were done via Discord because at that time Chris still lived in Stuttgart. But that really was no problem and is definitely nothing that should hold you back as well, when you consider founding a start-up with crewmembers who are separated around the world. So, love goes out to Discord, TeamSpeak and Co!
Next to the communication, one of our first issues we came up to, was the creation of a fitting name and generally a corporate identity of our business:
Finding Our Corporate Identity
In case you don´t know, the corporate identity of a company consists mainly of the name, the general design of the logo, the website, and all public services, and overall, of the key values and goals a company wants to achieve which separates them from its competitors.
The first thing we wanted to clarify as soon as possible was the name. What really helped us in this process was the usage of some brainstorming techniques Chris has learned during his studies. What we basically did, we made a whole Word document together and just wrote down every naming idea that came into our minds and the winner was obviously the best company name ever, Avatary!
Designing the logo was our next working step. Chris took the main inspiration of it from the already mentioned sketches for his entrepreneurship presentation. In case you are interested, our design process is always kinda the same:
- First we are googling other designs we like
- Then we start sketching some ideas
- Then we just make as many iterations as it needs to until we are finally happy with one
When you are German, you maybe see some similarities between the Avatary and the official employment agency logo what really is more of a funny coincidence and has nothing to do with the fact that Chris was looking for a new job these days.
That was basically the story, how we found our company. After the name and the logo was set, we quickly created our own Instagram site and posted our first few posts because we were so proud of our start-up. It really was a happy and enthusiastic start!
We hope you have liked this entry of our Avatar Creator Devlog series. You should definitely let us know what you think of all this in the comment section of our new channel. We certainly want to listen to your feedback and try to implement it in our future plans. Don´t hesitate to subscribe and even push that bell button when you don´t want to miss the newest videos of this series.
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