The First 90 Days of Building a Brand from Scratch (A Roadmap)
- Kwik Branding
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Most founders rush to launch. The best ones pause to listen.
Great brands don’t start with logos. They start with language. The first 90 days aren’t about launch—they’re about learning.
📖 Contents
The Launch Illusion
Let’s be honest — “launch” is one of the most overhyped words in business.
The internet’s made it look like brands are born on launch day: the site goes live, the campaign drops, and the founder posts a dramatic caption that reads like a birth announcement.
But that’s the illusion. Most brands aren’t born at launch. They’re born months earlier — in half-formed Google Docs, group chats, and late-night notes that sound more like therapy than strategy.
That’s what made Kusha Kapila’s launch of Underneat feel so refreshing. It didn’t look like a “rollout.” It looked like a revelation.
It wasn’t a product-first brand. It was a point-of-view-first brand.It didn’t shout for attention. It whispered, “You feel this too, right?”
And that’s where most founders stumble — mistaking performance for purpose.
From Personality to Philosophy
When Kusha Kapila—best known for her internet wit and unapologetic realness—announced Underneat, it could’ve easily become another influencer-led vanity brand. Instead, it became a study in strategic narrative clarity.
Even the name was a thesis: Underneat — the parts of us we edit out, but still carry.
That’s what modern branding looks like: less positioning, more peeling back.
Kusha didn’t build a brand around perfection. She built it around permission — to be raw, contradictory, and real.And paradoxically, that made the brand stronger.
If you watch closely, you’ll see the genius playbook:
She didn’t announce; she articulated.
She didn’t perform; she processed.
She didn’t define her audience; she invited them to define themselves.
That’s not marketing. That’s meaning management.
What the First 90 Days Really Look Like
Let’s decode how a launch like Underneat’s becomes a blueprint for the modern brand.
Phase 1: Start with Clarity, Not Color Palettes (Days 1–30)
The first 30 days of a brand aren’t about visual identity—they’re about verbal identity.
Before Underneat’s product even dropped, the tone was set. The brand voice was clear: vulnerable yet confident, personal yet purposeful. Even the name “Underneat” functions like a thesis statement—it’s conversational, emotionally charged, and layered with metaphor.
That kind of clarity doesn’t happen by accident. It’s communication design.
Kusha’s team likely spent weeks articulating the emotional “why” behind the brand: What gap are we really addressing? What belief are we challenging? What feeling do we want to leave behind?
And this matters more than any moodboard because meaning precedes momentum.
Key thought: Before you pick colors, pick a conversation.
Phase 2: Build Story Systems, Not Campaigns (Days 31–60)
Once the story is clear, the next phase is about scaling it—without losing its soul.
Most founders treat brand storytelling as a campaign exercise. Underneat treated it like cultural architecture.
Instead of one grand announcement, Kusha created a series of breadcrumbs. Thoughtful drops. Emotion-led visuals. Captions that sounded like journal entries, not press releases. The brand’s tone didn’t scream “look at us!”—it whispered, “you feel this too?”
That subtle narrative consistency is what modern consumers call “authentic.” But behind that authenticity is structure. There’s a framework defining tone, vocabulary, and emotional range. That’s what allows a founder’s personal voice to evolve into a scalable brand voice.
For founders in their first 60 days, this is the hidden work:
Draft your brand thesis in one sentence.
Create a shared language doc that defines your tone.
Design your story arcs before your ad campaigns.
The result? A narrative that can breathe across content, community, and commerce—without losing coherence.
Phase 3: Launch as a Dialogue (Days 61–90)
Most brands use their launch to announce. Underneat used it to ask.
The pre-launch teasers weren’t traditional hype—they were conversation starters. “What’s under your surface?” wasn’t just a tagline; it was a participatory question.
That framing did something subtle but powerful: it shifted the focus from Kusha’s story to the audience’s reflection of it.
In modern branding, that’s called reciprocal narrative building—a process where your audience co-creates your brand meaning by sharing their interpretations of your story.
Underneat’s early success proves the launch isn’t the final act—it’s the first feedback loop. The story evolves as the community engages.
The smartest founders treat the first 90 days like a story pilot. You write the first episode, the audience tells you if they want season two.
Lesson: If your audience can’t repeat your message, it’s not clear enough to remember.
What Leaders Can Learn from Underneat
What makes Underneat a strong case study isn’t just its aesthetics or timing—it’s the clarity.
It’s the perfect example of how leadership communication builds brand credibility.
Kusha’s transparency, both as a creator and as a founder, didn’t dilute professionalism; it amplified trust.
Modern leadership isn’t about delivering flawless strategies—it’s about articulating evolving ones. The leaders who win aren’t the loudest; they’re the clearest.
If you zoom out, Underneat is a masterclass in CEO storytelling:
A defined voice before a defined visual identity.
Emotional coherence across platforms.
A founder-led narrative that scales without ego.
This is what we mean when we say, “The smartest leaders scale their voice through systems, not schedules.” Kusha’s voice doesn’t appear everywhere—it appears intentionally, translated through design, copy, and experience.
Practical Takeaways
Clarity > Consistency: You can’t be consistent until you’re clear.
Story > Strategy: The first 90 days are less about doing and more about defining.
Dialogue > Debut: The best launch isn’t a reveal—it’s a relationship.
The Closing Thought
The first 90 days of a brand are never really about building a business—they’re about building belief architecture.
Underneat didn’t succeed because it had celebrity power. It worked because it had clarity power. Every message, design, and word reflected a truth people could feel: that realness is the new relevance.
The takeaway for leaders?You don’t need a perfect brand to start—you need a coherent one.
Or as we’d put on a whiteboard: Your story doesn’t start when you launch. It starts when you decide what you mean.
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