There is a moment I have seen many times with founders. The product has been built. Early users are using it. Some are even paying. But something is not sitting right. The messaging on the website does not quite match what the product actually does. The Instagram captions sound like they belong to a different business. When the founder tries to describe what they do at a networking event, the explanation changes every single time depending on who is in the room. The founder knows something is wrong. They just cannot name it yet.
That moment, right there, is not when they should have hired a brand strategist. It is when most of them call me. But the right time was earlier, and understanding the difference matters more than people realise.
The Argument for Hiring Before You Launch
The strongest argument for hiring a brand strategist before your product goes public is that impressions are very difficult to undo. The Lagos market in particular does not give you many second chances at a first impression. Once people have formed an idea of what your brand is, or is not, changing that idea requires significantly more work than getting it right from the start.
Before launch, you have the freedom to build the brand correctly. You can define your positioning without having to fight against existing perceptions. You can develop a voice without having to reconcile it with months of inconsistent communication. You can identify your primary audience clearly before the market has decided for you who your audience is.
Most founders underestimate how much the first few months of public existence shape the long-term identity of a brand. The early posts, the early messaging, the early conversations that happen about you in rooms you are not in, all of that compounds. Getting the foundation right before it compounds is considerably cheaper than rebuilding it after.
When Exactly Is the Right Time?
The right time is when the product exists in a clear enough form that you can describe what it does and who it is for, but before you have started speaking publicly about it in any consistent way.
If you have a working prototype and a sense of who your early users will be, you are ready for strategy work. You do not need a finished product. You do not need funding. You do not need a team. You need enough clarity about what you are building that the strategic questions have real answers to draw from.
The founders who get the most out of brand strategy engagements are the ones who come in at this stage. They leave with something that fits the actual product, because the product is still being shaped and the brand can be shaped alongside it.
Is It Too Late If You Have Already Launched?
No. But it is more complicated.
If you have already launched and you are experiencing the symptoms I described at the beginning, inconsistent messaging, unclear positioning, a brand voice that shifts depending on the day, then strategy work is still valuable. It is just not a foundation anymore. It is a rebuild, and rebuilds are messier than foundations.
The work is the same. You still need to answer the positioning questions, define the voice, clarify the competitive differentiation, and build the architecture that everything else communicates from. But you also have to reckon with what already exists. With what your existing audience already believes about you. With the design assets and copy that may need to change. With the mental adjustment of taking something that felt finished and taking it apart to rebuild it more deliberately.
None of that is impossible. I have done it with brands that had been operating for years. But founders who come in before launch spend less, move faster, and end up with brands that hold together more cleanly over time.
The Short Answer
If you are asking the question, the answer is probably now. Not because you are in crisis, but because brand strategy is infrastructure, and infrastructure should be built before you need it, not while you are already operating without it.
If your product is real, your audience is identifiable, and you are getting ready to talk about what you are building to more than just the people closest to you, the time for strategy work is before that conversation starts, not after it has already shaped what people think of you.